See, I knew if I said it was hard to get self-contained downloads, a bunch of people would let me know if I was wrong:-).
Having just had a look, it does seem to be easier now than the last couple of times I installed 2k. Before I always seemed to get given the option of ordering a CD - but not for you non-US people, and then got bounced around the collection of stale links that is the MS UK web site.
Nice to see it's a bit better now, and thanks for the slipstreaming tip. Half the time the battle is knowing what word or phrase to search for...
And part of me immediately wants to ask: if there were many more core developers for the Perl language, do you think Perl would necessarily be the better for it?
If I were Nicholas Clark, I'd be keeping quiet about it:)
Some people tell me I should set up an old PC to run Linux and configure that as a router, but they don't seem to understand that:
* That requires significant effort on my part * My router is small (paperback book size) * It doesn't make loads of noise and consume loads of power. * When I occasionally get problems with my connection (about once every 2 months), whatever the problem, it's usually solved by toggling the router power switch, and takes a few seconds.
Well, that's a little cocky:-). Here's a story - I had a Win2k machine that I used for ICS a year or so ago. It got hacked because I hadn't installed a firewall on it.
Learning my lesson, I vaped the machine, then installed Win2k from a CD. Then I installed the ADSL modem drivers, and went to ZoneAlarm's website and installed Zone Alarm. Then I ran Windows Update, and got all the latest patches.
Finally I installed Norton Anti-Virus. It told me I had already been infected by a trojan (a different one to the one I had previously been hit by).
Basically, if you aint got all the patches on CD/HD, you can be hit quite easily during an install. It depends on the network you're using - on BT ADSL I used to get scanned all the time - I've moved to another provider, and I don't get anything like the number of attacks. My Dad is on dial-up, and he gets port-scanned about once every 30 seconds, sometimes more often.
Yes, this is 2k, not XP, but I believe it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that a similar thing could happen with XP. It's good news that MS is (thinking of) enabling the firewall by default in XP SP2 - but again, that's a service pack, that you have to download:)
And yes, you can have it downloaded, but by God, MS usually manage to make it as difficult as possible to just download the whole patch as one file that you can install later/on other PCs. Grr.
Agree with that - it certainly gets hammered home to me when I interview developers (I'm a developer).
Looking for C++ programmers, what eventually came to be my benchmark question was "What is a virtual function?"
i.e. I wanted them to tell me how it was different to a normal function. Most C++ developers (80+%) couldn't answer me. Even to the point where I made it easy, and said, "Ok, what are the criteria that make you actually decide to type the keyword 'virtual' into your editor?", they still couldn't answer. Quite a few people just said "I usually make most functions virtual." - these are the people who didn't know what 'virtual' meant, remember.
When I first added that question to my interview list, I imagined people explaining vtables, etc.
How I laugh to look back at that naive assumption now.
I guess what I'm trying to say is a variation of Sturgeon's Law - 80+% of developers aren't very good.
But 80+% of sysadmins aren't very good either.
Or, as a friend and colleague is fond of putting it, "Most people are crap at their job."
Re:Not that it's not true...
on
Who Is An ISP?
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· Score: 1
Or, to quote Bill Cosby, "Saying it loud don't make it right!"
Yeah, it would have been a good putdown, except for...
ignroamous
nomral
dissasemble
deffinition
others
I mean, feel free to correct someone for using words incorrectly, but people really shouldn't do it with such a hostile and smug attitude, if at the same time they're going to make it clear that they're not that good at it either.
How about if there were no gaps in the walls, and all the doors had locks, but the plumber had picked a lock to get in?
Come to that, even if I left my back door open, I'd be pretty pissed off if someone I didn't know thought it was ok to stroll in and start messing about with my stuff.
On the subject of wording in ads, one thing I noticed while in the US was an advert for a painkiller (for some reason, painkillers are advertised much more heavily on TV in the US than the UK - no idea why) - they said something like "In laboratory tests, no other pain killer was more effective than (our product)".
You'll notice they didn't say "(our product) is more effective than any other pain killer", because it wasn't. i.e. they were all the same, because they're all just aspirin, paracetamol, codeine, ibuprofen, etc.
But then, it always makes me laugh that people buy 'brand name' pain-killers at something like 5-10x the price of no-name brands. What do they think - that they're buying *famous* paracetamol molecules or something?:)
Oh, this is a major pet peeve of mine about both iTunes and QuickTime. I reserve my system tray for truly essential TSR's (it's called the system tray for a reason, if you ask me) and don't want it cluttered up with a lot of junk.
Well, actually, as Microsoft will tell you, it's called the 'Notification Area'. Only naughty developers call it the system tray:-)
So of course, the first thing iTunes does is install a tray icon for itself and one for QuickTime, all without asking me. It's trivial to remove the QuickTime icon (not sure how to remove the iTunes one when it's running), but I need to do it every single time this program gets upgraded, which seems to be quite a lot.
if they were smart enough to have an RFID reader at the front entrance
Hmmm...that raises an interesting point. I thought RFIDs were designed to be persistent - i.e. they still work when you leave the store (prompting visions of dystopian customer tracking etc). If that is the case, they couldn't have an RFID reader at the front entrance that did anything particularly useful (e.g. set off alarms), because it would be going off all the time.
Similarly for an RFID reader at the exit, interestingly, which is more likely where they would want to put one. Maybe they do have a 'kill' function that has the same effect as when stores disable those metal tags they use at the moment for CDs, etc.
Anyway, my point was that it was just an idle thought, poorly conceived and thought through.
When I was at Uni, the library had tags in all the book spines that were 'neutralised' when you checked out a book. If you tried to walk out of the library with a book you weren't supposed to, the turnstiles would notice, and lock.
Fair enough - a good system. Except, students being students thought up a joke which I'm sure has been tried everywhere in the world such schemes exist - you rip the tag out of a book and drop it in the bag of your 'friend' when they're not looking.
Then when they stroll out through the turnstiles, they double up over the now locked turnstile and have to turn out their bag for the guy on the gates.
Now, given these RFID tags are so small and unobtrusive, and as one of the sellers in that article notes that no-one has called to ask what the tags are doing in their razor blades, I wonder how stores would cope with RFID DOS raids - customers go in and start slipping RFIDs into boxes, etc, to screw up the store's processes, hassle the wrong people, etc.
I mean, if you don't want the stores to use them, make it a disadvantage for them to use them:)
I do like the implied assumption in most of these comments that clearly all slashdot posters are geniuses, and the various offers of advice for how you can avoid losing your genius should this nightmare scenario transpire. Some of them even read like "This is how I plan to avoid losing my towering genius."
Methinks the word genius is over-used. Genius is not a synonym for geek:-)
And why does that legislation exist in the US, I wonder? I'm guessing it is because it costs the telemarketers nothing to make the call, but the hapless cellphone user on the other end has to pay for being disturbed..?
Now imagine that you pay when you make a call, not when you receive it? (e.g. like Europe) How many calls do you think you'll get from telemarketers then..? We're back where we started:-)
In the UK you could have a phone where you pay nothing to receive calls for around $40 a year (yes, a year).
Or even, like I do, pay nothing for around $0 a year. I can receive calls for free on my mobile, and I have no monthly/annual fee. I just pay for the calls I make.
You fool! Never complicate a Mac zealot's ranting with facts!:-)
Otherwise you'll have to point out that Apple only added the graphite colour scheme to OS X after all the graphics guys (correctly) whined about not being able to have a neutral desktop environment.
Don't get me wrong - in general I hate XP's default look, but I just choose the 'classic' theme, and I'm back to muted greys, just how I like it. About as hard as doing the equivalent on a Mac.
I did actually persevere for a couple of months with the Fisher Price UI scheme on XP when I first got it, but then I switched to the classic view (which basically looks like Win2k et al), and found it was like banging your head against a brick wall - it's nice when you stop:-)
Slashdot Mirror
See, I knew if I said it was hard to get self-contained downloads, a bunch of people would let me know if I was wrong :-).
Having just had a look, it does seem to be easier now than the last couple of times I installed 2k. Before I always seemed to get given the option of ordering a CD - but not for you non-US people, and then got bounced around the collection of stale links that is the MS UK web site.
Nice to see it's a bit better now, and thanks for the slipstreaming tip. Half the time the battle is knowing what word or phrase to search for...
Wow, you have spare licensed XP CDs just lying around? You must be loaded :-)
If I were Nicholas Clark, I'd be keeping quiet about it :)
I have a router now - see, I can learn :)
Some people tell me I should set up an old PC to run Linux and configure that as a router, but they don't seem to understand that:
* That requires significant effort on my part
* My router is small (paperback book size)
* It doesn't make loads of noise and consume loads of power.
* When I occasionally get problems with my connection (about once every 2 months), whatever the problem, it's usually solved by toggling the router power switch, and takes a few seconds.
But you can't tell some people...
Well, that's a little cocky :-). Here's a story - I had a Win2k machine that I used for ICS a year or so ago. It got hacked because I hadn't installed a firewall on it.
Learning my lesson, I vaped the machine, then installed Win2k from a CD. Then I installed the ADSL modem drivers, and went to ZoneAlarm's website and installed Zone Alarm. Then I ran Windows Update, and got all the latest patches.
Finally I installed Norton Anti-Virus. It told me I had already been infected by a trojan (a different one to the one I had previously been hit by).
Basically, if you aint got all the patches on CD/HD, you can be hit quite easily during an install. It depends on the network you're using - on BT ADSL I used to get scanned all the time - I've moved to another provider, and I don't get anything like the number of attacks. My Dad is on dial-up, and he gets port-scanned about once every 30 seconds, sometimes more often.
Yes, this is 2k, not XP, but I believe it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that a similar thing could happen with XP. It's good news that MS is (thinking of) enabling the firewall by default in XP SP2 - but again, that's a service pack, that you have to download :)
And yes, you can have it downloaded, but by God, MS usually manage to make it as difficult as possible to just download the whole patch as one file that you can install later/on other PCs. Grr.
You see, there was this film, and it was called 'XXX'. And the star was a guy called Vin Diesel.
Get it? Everyone on the same page now?
Agree with that - it certainly gets hammered home to me when I interview developers (I'm a developer).
Looking for C++ programmers, what eventually came to be my benchmark question was "What is a virtual function?"
i.e. I wanted them to tell me how it was different to a normal function. Most C++ developers (80+%) couldn't answer me. Even to the point where I made it easy, and said, "Ok, what are the criteria that make you actually decide to type the keyword 'virtual' into your editor?", they still couldn't answer. Quite a few people just said "I usually make most functions virtual." - these are the people who didn't know what 'virtual' meant, remember.
When I first added that question to my interview list, I imagined people explaining vtables, etc.
How I laugh to look back at that naive assumption now.
I guess what I'm trying to say is a variation of Sturgeon's Law - 80+% of developers aren't very good.
But 80+% of sysadmins aren't very good either.
Or, as a friend and colleague is fond of putting it, "Most people are crap at their job."
Or, to quote Bill Cosby, "Saying it loud don't make it right!"
I mean, feel free to correct someone for using words incorrectly, but people really shouldn't do it with such a hostile and smug attitude, if at the same time they're going to make it clear that they're not that good at it either.
How about if there were no gaps in the walls, and all the doors had locks, but the plumber had picked a lock to get in?
Come to that, even if I left my back door open, I'd be pretty pissed off if someone I didn't know thought it was ok to stroll in and start messing about with my stuff.
Maybe it's just me.
Yeah, keep that one in a high cupboard though :-)
On the subject of wording in ads, one thing I noticed while in the US was an advert for a painkiller (for some reason, painkillers are advertised much more heavily on TV in the US than the UK - no idea why) - they said something like "In laboratory tests, no other pain killer was more effective than (our product)".
:)
You'll notice they didn't say "(our product) is more effective than any other pain killer", because it wasn't. i.e. they were all the same, because they're all just aspirin, paracetamol, codeine, ibuprofen, etc.
But then, it always makes me laugh that people buy 'brand name' pain-killers at something like 5-10x the price of no-name brands. What do they think - that they're buying *famous* paracetamol molecules or something?
Not all of the 8 hrs/day is spent working. Some of it is spent on /.
And you think that makes you special? :-)
When you say look at Apple, do you mean the Pippin? :-)
Well, actually, as Microsoft will tell you, it's called the 'Notification Area'. Only naughty developers call it the system tray :-)
So of course, the first thing iTunes does is install a tray icon for itself and one for QuickTime, all without asking me. It's trivial to remove the QuickTime icon (not sure how to remove the iTunes one when it's running), but I need to do it every single time this program gets upgraded, which seems to be quite a lot.
You might be interested in this program then.
Two words: Time Zones
Hmmm...that raises an interesting point. I thought RFIDs were designed to be persistent - i.e. they still work when you leave the store (prompting visions of dystopian customer tracking etc). If that is the case, they couldn't have an RFID reader at the front entrance that did anything particularly useful (e.g. set off alarms), because it would be going off all the time.
Similarly for an RFID reader at the exit, interestingly, which is more likely where they would want to put one. Maybe they do have a 'kill' function that has the same effect as when stores disable those metal tags they use at the moment for CDs, etc.
Anyway, my point was that it was just an idle thought, poorly conceived and thought through.
You're new here, aren't you? :-)
When I was at Uni, the library had tags in all the book spines that were 'neutralised' when you checked out a book. If you tried to walk out of the library with a book you weren't supposed to, the turnstiles would notice, and lock.
:)
Fair enough - a good system. Except, students being students thought up a joke which I'm sure has been tried everywhere in the world such schemes exist - you rip the tag out of a book and drop it in the bag of your 'friend' when they're not looking.
Then when they stroll out through the turnstiles, they double up over the now locked turnstile and have to turn out their bag for the guy on the gates.
Now, given these RFID tags are so small and unobtrusive, and as one of the sellers in that article notes that no-one has called to ask what the tags are doing in their razor blades, I wonder how stores would cope with RFID DOS raids - customers go in and start slipping RFIDs into boxes, etc, to screw up the store's processes, hassle the wrong people, etc.
I mean, if you don't want the stores to use them, make it a disadvantage for them to use them
Just an idle thought.
I do like the implied assumption in most of these comments that clearly all slashdot posters are geniuses, and the various offers of advice for how you can avoid losing your genius should this nightmare scenario transpire. Some of them even read like "This is how I plan to avoid losing my towering genius."
:-)
Methinks the word genius is over-used. Genius is not a synonym for geek
Yeah, when you see those delegates at the UN asking questions via human translators, I reckon 85% of the time they're asking "A/S/L?" ;-)
So you believe that the caller gains no advantage at all from being able to contact (aka disturb) someone wherever they are? Interesting...
And why does that legislation exist in the US, I wonder? I'm guessing it is because it costs the telemarketers nothing to make the call, but the hapless cellphone user on the other end has to pay for being disturbed..?
:-)
Now imagine that you pay when you make a call, not when you receive it? (e.g. like Europe) How many calls do you think you'll get from telemarketers then..? We're back where we started
Or even, like I do, pay nothing for around $0 a year. I can receive calls for free on my mobile, and I have no monthly/annual fee. I just pay for the calls I make.
You fool! Never complicate a Mac zealot's ranting with facts! :-)
:-)
Otherwise you'll have to point out that Apple only added the graphite colour scheme to OS X after all the graphics guys (correctly) whined about not being able to have a neutral desktop environment.
Don't get me wrong - in general I hate XP's default look, but I just choose the 'classic' theme, and I'm back to muted greys, just how I like it. About as hard as doing the equivalent on a Mac.
I did actually persevere for a couple of months with the Fisher Price UI scheme on XP when I first got it, but then I switched to the classic view (which basically looks like Win2k et al), and found it was like banging your head against a brick wall - it's nice when you stop
My favourite perspective on this is something John Lennon once said: "Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted."