We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government [...]
The framers believed that change up to and including revolution against your government is a fundamental right. If you truly believe that the state of this Union is as bad as you suggest, exercise your unalienable rights. Or leave the nation.
"But the armed forces..."
Will be just as divided as the citizens are. During the last Civil War, the leadership of the Armed Forces divided almost evenly between the North and the South. I can name 5 generals who would not follow Mr. Bush, although they still might remain loyal.
Believe it or not, the moderate majority is beginning to get upset with our government. 70% of the nation now disagrees or is unsure of our leadership. Historically speaking, a President with less than 65% approval is considered ineffective. Mr. Bush is at 30%. Do you think the people don't see the unending corruption in the Legislature by big business and special interests? That they don't see the repeated illegal acts of the Executive and his officers, and his failure to lead the military effectively?
Irrelevant. No law supercedes the Constitution, which guarantees every citizen's right to privacy and the right to a due process warrant for search and seizure. It doesn't say "unless the President thinks it's a national security matter". The national security clause would have to be in the Constitution to be able to override this kind of suspension of Civil Rights.
Unless the Prisident is going to try to claim that he secretly declared martial law, there is no law in the land that will stop this from progressing. The best they can realistically hope for is a closed courtroom and sealed documents.
I'll second the Ironport appliance. We were able to free up a couple Win2k3 servers when we switched from Trend Micro to a single IronPort appliance. I'm a fan of Trend, too, so it took a lot for IronPort to impress me. I don't admin the box myself, but I'm told it is very easy to administer.
We had a fairly extensive Citrix farm at my last job. There were several reasons for an application to be made available on Citrix:
The application required WinNT 4 and would not run on Win2k or WinXP.
The application conflicted with other, more critical applications that were required to exist on the same network.
Liscensing. Some applications were cheaper to run from a Citrix server.
Access to the application was required off-site, and Citrix works over the web.
Configuration of the application was so difficult and fragile that it was easier to admin the Citrix server rather than the clients. This was typically web applications that required you to set your IE security settings to "rape me".
The one thing I noticed again and again: the applications that we wanted most onm Citrix were those that did not do the job we wanted them to do. They were old, poorly coded, intended for different environments, or simply did not do what we required them to do. It was common knowledge that analysts would go out and buy software and then hand it to use and tell use to make it work, even when it was clear to us that the software was never designed to do what we wanted it to even before we put the CD in the tray.
This accounting software you have seems exactly like the same kind of situation. You're being asked to wedge an application into a role it was neither designed nor intended to perform. Consequently, you might wish to consider looking at a different accounting app instead of a different remote app server.
True enough, but the point of a sport isn't to compete for profit or prize. The only goal is victory. Consider that players get banned from playing professional sports if they bet on their games. Even if they bet on themselves.
Gambling certainly qualifies as a competition, but, as I think I said, it is a metagame. It is an entirely different competition layered on top of the sport.
Poker is about the only sport where gambling is allowed, and that's only because gambling is the point of the game. You ever tried to play poker without betting? It's pretty dumb.
I've said this elsewhere, too: The dictionary is a poor document to refer to to determine the meaning of a message.
How to know when your e-peen is getting too big: You only want to play Starcraft for pink slips.
True competition is a test of skill in a fair and balanced situation, not a means of throwing money around to back up your testosterone. Unless you're playing poker. Betting, gambling, etc only makes things "interesting" because it's a metagame. You get to play two games instead of just the one. However, it's irrelevant to your skill as a player, and therefore not a judge of player quality. Frankly, if you're the type of person who gets excited just because you're betting, it would probably be wiser not to bet at all.
The only difference it that it appears to use a single explosive projectile to defeat the incoming munitions rather than the "wall of lead" approach the phalanx system uses.
Oh no the system is destroyed and displaying random DLL error messages when I try to load task manager, regedt32, control panel, windows defender or my virus scanning software because the latest virus/worm/etc managed to get through the most recent patches and up-to-date virus checker and circumvent the system at the knees because there is insufficient permission protection of system files.
Yeah, use Linux. It's not like there's ever any library conflicts or missing dependencies in that, right? And even if there are it's no worse than Windows. And Linux runs at non-root so you can't mess anything up. Because that's only been possible to do on a Windows box since 2000. It's been up to the user to make the choice to do so. But that's Microsoft's fault, right? Just like it's their fault that third party developers design ther software to run in admin level environments. How about we also blame the Samba team because the Mozilla suite is bloated?
Since I wasn't willing to have sacrificed half my HDD space and first born for the windows system backup to chew up my resources in the background as it methodically dissolves my free space one Gbyte at a time. I am left to reinstall windows or dodge various install options (press f8 to agree to the terms, press L to select this volume... what an awesome textual installer!) to reach the examine-repair mode.
I'd argue it's better than using Linux's fdisk. I still like how the Anaconda installers still just MORE the text of the list of parition types to the screen for you, and you have to remember the arbitrary number associated with the partition type you want. That's so much more intuitive that Window's installer.
If you can't do a repair install of Windows because it's too confusing... I cry for you.
I also remember a time, not long ago, when you had to manually configure the partitions for any distro you picked. There was no default. The first step in this process was determining what Linux was going to call your hard disk: hda? hdb? You had no idea, because the order it picks (primary master, secondary master, primary slave, secondary slave) is so non-intuitive. Not to mention Windows doesn't care where your HD is as long as a big enough drive exists. I remember specifically disconnecting hard drives from my system because it was so unclear which device was which. Yeah, that's easy to use.
Now you have to pick how your partitions go. Swap is easy enough to understand, but when you go online and see five partitioning guides all recommend different things and none of them explain why they do what they do it is incredibly frustrating just getting to the point of picking which packages to install.
Complaining that Windows is arcane and difficult to use when Linux was restricted to use by it's own developers and Unix admins because nobody else could understand how to even install it makes you look rather stupid. Linux has a learning curve like the cliffs of dover. Seriously. Download a copy of Red Hat 6 or Slackware 3 and install it. Now ask yourself: if I knew nothing about computers besides Windows, how could I do this?
Huh? Francis Bacon? Didn't Aristotle claim he created logic in his Prior Analytics? With his four types of statements (A is true about all X; A is false about all X; A is true about this X; A is false about this X) and the basic logical syllogism? The whole point of logic is to preserve truth so you can synthesize new knowledge.
Actually, I was looking only at area, not population density. You can set up one tower and give the whole of Monaco WiFi and cell service. It's less than a square mile in area. The only thing smaller is Vatican City.
Japan is about the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, or about one tenth the size of the continental US. Since the US is also less densely populated than Japan and also has more total population (about double), even if you want to maximize the coverage by population density you still have to build far more infrastructure than you would in Japan.
Additionally, no matter what country you're in, citizens expect their services to cover the whole of their country, or at least the whole of their state or region. People in the US simply travel farther because their country is larger and less densely populated, so the minimum amount of infrastructure to have a functional network for consumers is also increased.
Geographic and social conditions in this country make Japan more economically feasable. The continental US has ten times the area, but only twice the population. So it would cost you up to ten times as much to build your infrastructure for only double the number of customers. And Japanese tend to be early adopters, so you're likely to get return on invenstment quicker.
The thing is, Computer Science is a horrible major. It's not slanted to any post graduation career. Colleges I see offer these degrees now:
Computer Science (either a B.S. or B.A.)
Software Engineering (about 30% of schools)
Information Technology (about 30% of schools)
MIS (about 60-75% of schools)
Computer Engineering (any school with a full College of Engineering)
CS as a mahor is pretty useless when you look at it. It's like majoring in Physics and expecting to get a job as a Mechanical Engineer, or expecting a degree in Math to get you a job in Accounting.
CS should move back the the Liberal Arts colleges where it deals with concepts and theories of computing, whereas IT, MIS, SE, and CE should be left in the practical science colleges.
CS in the 1980's was a great degree. CS is too general, now. It's impossible to learn enough in 4 years to be really useful in any field. Assuming your school isn't using Computer Science as a misnomer for Software Engineering, which many are.
I was recently denied a promotion and a ~25% salary increase because I did not have a Bachelor's Degree (I have an Associates and ~4 years experience). This was for a vacant position whose responsibilities I had already been doing for about 8 months (with much more success than the previous two occupants had).
After 4 more months of searching with no luck, they hired a fresh college graduate who met the requirements. He proceeded to bollocks up every project he was assigned, except for the two that I helped with that went off flawlessly.
But it's all good. I don't work there anymore. And, I know how not to do IT.
Aye, it goes deeper than that. Very few people know how to use a pen with an inkwell, and use blot paper. Even fewer how to find and sharpen a quill.
When man evolved to the point that he no longer needed a tail, did our ancestors bemoan the fact that our tail-wagging communication skills were becoming lost? While I certainly would agree that much of man knowledge has become largely or completely lost -- ancient shipbuilding, much of smithing of all types (black, white, weapon, armor), almost all of western fighting styles (only wrestling, boxing, and fencing remain), horsemanship (particularly war-trained horses), archery, woodsmanship, use of the slide rule, the piston steam engine, etc. The list of obsoleted technology goes on and on and on. Why do you think we don't entirely know how the Egyptians built the pyramids, or the pre-historic Britons built Stonehenge. The knowledge was not preserved and is now lost. Even something as mundane as how to use a simple plow and thresh wheat are not well developed skills. Think: do you even know how to darn a sock properly or knit a sweater?
That's the point of natural selection, really. A given species, or a given art, or a given technology is the pinnacle of creation for only so long. Eventually, it is surpassed by something greater, and the lesser is discarded out-of-hand. Compasses will be discarded for GPS. Slide rules for calculators. Telegraphs by telephones by cell phones. Scribes by printing presses by digital content. Record players for cassette players for CD players for digital media players.
There will always be those who, wisely, wish to preserve older technology and older knowledge for future generations (as well as luddites who decry the new systems). Particularly for knowledge of an artistic nature, which is difficult to empart into a fixed medium like written word, or video, or audio. Old knowledge is not bad knowledge. It is just no longer significantly userful. Kind of like... how to use a number line from primary school.
The only problems I have with the patent system are:
1) Software patents. In order for software patents to not grossly stiffle innovation, they need to have a maximum lifespan of 2 years. 100 years ago,
2) Inappropriate patents. Only significantly innovative products should receive patents. Alternately, a "lesser" patent should exist for minor derivative changes with a 1-2 year duration.
The USPTO is over 200 years old (first patent was in 1790). At that time, a 10 to 20 year monopoly on a novel invention was not a bad idea, since a single invention could often go a hundred years and have no derivative works. Shortly after the end of the second world war, it became common to see derivative works withing 5 years. The patent system, intended to promote innovation through guaranteed profit, now has a 70 year history of stiffling it.
Wow. That's a big change, too. I remember when they changed lisencing so that it was per installation in addition to being per CPU (probably 8-10 months ago) which obviously made virtualization less appealing.
Yeah, I'd say they're looking to make VMWare into the new Netscape.
Well, the key is that only an idiot would use MS VS to run Linux. Everybody knows that. Your implementation would have to be so obscure and arcane so as to be irrelevant to the whole.
So, if you don't run Linux on MS VS, what do you run? That's right, you run MS Windows. So now you have one big server running three copies of MS Server:
Number of CPUs: 2
MS Server 2k3/w VS
1. MS Server 2k3
2. MS Server 2k3/w MS SQL 2k
3. MS Server 2k3/w MS SQL 2k
So, on 2 CPUs, you are running four copies of MS Server and two installationf of MS SQL sevrer. How many licenses must you buy? Four for Win2k3, 2 for MS SQL.
I have played Munchkin, and that was a great game. I moved recently, but once I find a new FLGS I'll probably buy that. Ogre looks cool, too, but haven't played it yet.
I think it ends up being the same problem everyone has. A good GM tells the story and lets you play the game. You don't worry about the rules so much has trying to roll big numbers and have fun. A good GM does all the number mods in the background.
My GURPS GM ran with all kinds of mods, and you had to remember to ask about every little bonus or mention that you did something in a certain way or you'd always fail. So the game was dumb. My D&D GM's just ran the stupid game to make sure the players had fun. Ultimately, the rules should never interfere with your ability to have fun.
Slashdot Mirror
"But the armed forces..."
Will be just as divided as the citizens are. During the last Civil War, the leadership of the Armed Forces divided almost evenly between the North and the South. I can name 5 generals who would not follow Mr. Bush, although they still might remain loyal.
Believe it or not, the moderate majority is beginning to get upset with our government. 70% of the nation now disagrees or is unsure of our leadership. Historically speaking, a President with less than 65% approval is considered ineffective. Mr. Bush is at 30%. Do you think the people don't see the unending corruption in the Legislature by big business and special interests? That they don't see the repeated illegal acts of the Executive and his officers, and his failure to lead the military effectively?
Unless the Prisident is going to try to claim that he secretly declared martial law, there is no law in the land that will stop this from progressing. The best they can realistically hope for is a closed courtroom and sealed documents.
I'll second the Ironport appliance. We were able to free up a couple Win2k3 servers when we switched from Trend Micro to a single IronPort appliance. I'm a fan of Trend, too, so it took a lot for IronPort to impress me. I don't admin the box myself, but I'm told it is very easy to administer.
The overpriced hardware vendor buys the overpriced software vendor! Brilliant!
So... I can completely denial-of-service communication just be intercepting key transmissions?
The one thing I noticed again and again: the applications that we wanted most onm Citrix were those that did not do the job we wanted them to do. They were old, poorly coded, intended for different environments, or simply did not do what we required them to do. It was common knowledge that analysts would go out and buy software and then hand it to use and tell use to make it work, even when it was clear to us that the software was never designed to do what we wanted it to even before we put the CD in the tray.
This accounting software you have seems exactly like the same kind of situation. You're being asked to wedge an application into a role it was neither designed nor intended to perform. Consequently, you might wish to consider looking at a different accounting app instead of a different remote app server.
Gambling certainly qualifies as a competition, but, as I think I said, it is a metagame. It is an entirely different competition layered on top of the sport.
Poker is about the only sport where gambling is allowed, and that's only because gambling is the point of the game. You ever tried to play poker without betting? It's pretty dumb.
I've said this elsewhere, too: The dictionary is a poor document to refer to to determine the meaning of a message.
How to know when your e-peen is getting too big:
You only want to play Starcraft for pink slips.
True competition is a test of skill in a fair and balanced situation, not a means of throwing money around to back up your testosterone. Unless you're playing poker. Betting, gambling, etc only makes things "interesting" because it's a metagame. You get to play two games instead of just the one. However, it's irrelevant to your skill as a player, and therefore not a judge of player quality. Frankly, if you're the type of person who gets excited just because you're betting, it would probably be wiser not to bet at all.
The only difference it that it appears to use a single explosive projectile to defeat the incoming munitions rather than the "wall of lead" approach the phalanx system uses.
They've mounted a mini Patriot on a tank.
If you can't do a repair install of Windows because it's too confusing... I cry for you.
I also remember a time, not long ago, when you had to manually configure the partitions for any distro you picked. There was no default. The first step in this process was determining what Linux was going to call your hard disk: hda? hdb? You had no idea, because the order it picks (primary master, secondary master, primary slave, secondary slave) is so non-intuitive. Not to mention Windows doesn't care where your HD is as long as a big enough drive exists. I remember specifically disconnecting hard drives from my system because it was so unclear which device was which. Yeah, that's easy to use.
Now you have to pick how your partitions go. Swap is easy enough to understand, but when you go online and see five partitioning guides all recommend different things and none of them explain why they do what they do it is incredibly frustrating just getting to the point of picking which packages to install.
Complaining that Windows is arcane and difficult to use when Linux was restricted to use by it's own developers and Unix admins because nobody else could understand how to even install it makes you look rather stupid. Linux has a learning curve like the cliffs of dover. Seriously. Download a copy of Red Hat 6 or Slackware 3 and install it. Now ask yourself: if I knew nothing about computers besides Windows, how could I do this?
True enough, but Mr. Bacon's statement was 400 years old. 19th century logic, while much more advanced than simple syllogisms, is entirely out.
Huh? Francis Bacon? Didn't Aristotle claim he created logic in his Prior Analytics? With his four types of statements (A is true about all X; A is false about all X; A is true about this X; A is false about this X) and the basic logical syllogism? The whole point of logic is to preserve truth so you can synthesize new knowledge.
Japan is about the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, or about one tenth the size of the continental US. Since the US is also less densely populated than Japan and also has more total population (about double), even if you want to maximize the coverage by population density you still have to build far more infrastructure than you would in Japan.
Additionally, no matter what country you're in, citizens expect their services to cover the whole of their country, or at least the whole of their state or region. People in the US simply travel farther because their country is larger and less densely populated, so the minimum amount of infrastructure to have a functional network for consumers is also increased.
Geographic and social conditions in this country make Japan more economically feasable. The continental US has ten times the area, but only twice the population. So it would cost you up to ten times as much to build your infrastructure for only double the number of customers. And Japanese tend to be early adopters, so you're likely to get return on invenstment quicker.
Don't like it? Move to Monaco!
Computer Science (either a B.S. or B.A.)
Software Engineering (about 30% of schools)
Information Technology (about 30% of schools)
MIS (about 60-75% of schools)
Computer Engineering (any school with a full College of Engineering)
CS as a mahor is pretty useless when you look at it. It's like majoring in Physics and expecting to get a job as a Mechanical Engineer, or expecting a degree in Math to get you a job in Accounting.
CS should move back the the Liberal Arts colleges where it deals with concepts and theories of computing, whereas IT, MIS, SE, and CE should be left in the practical science colleges.
CS in the 1980's was a great degree. CS is too general, now. It's impossible to learn enough in 4 years to be really useful in any field. Assuming your school isn't using Computer Science as a misnomer for Software Engineering, which many are.
After 4 more months of searching with no luck, they hired a fresh college graduate who met the requirements. He proceeded to bollocks up every project he was assigned, except for the two that I helped with that went off flawlessly.
But it's all good. I don't work there anymore. And, I know how not to do IT.
When man evolved to the point that he no longer needed a tail, did our ancestors bemoan the fact that our tail-wagging communication skills were becoming lost? While I certainly would agree that much of man knowledge has become largely or completely lost -- ancient shipbuilding, much of smithing of all types (black, white, weapon, armor), almost all of western fighting styles (only wrestling, boxing, and fencing remain), horsemanship (particularly war-trained horses), archery, woodsmanship, use of the slide rule, the piston steam engine, etc. The list of obsoleted technology goes on and on and on. Why do you think we don't entirely know how the Egyptians built the pyramids, or the pre-historic Britons built Stonehenge. The knowledge was not preserved and is now lost. Even something as mundane as how to use a simple plow and thresh wheat are not well developed skills. Think: do you even know how to darn a sock properly or knit a sweater?
That's the point of natural selection, really. A given species, or a given art, or a given technology is the pinnacle of creation for only so long. Eventually, it is surpassed by something greater, and the lesser is discarded out-of-hand. Compasses will be discarded for GPS. Slide rules for calculators. Telegraphs by telephones by cell phones. Scribes by printing presses by digital content. Record players for cassette players for CD players for digital media players.
There will always be those who, wisely, wish to preserve older technology and older knowledge for future generations (as well as luddites who decry the new systems). Particularly for knowledge of an artistic nature, which is difficult to empart into a fixed medium like written word, or video, or audio. Old knowledge is not bad knowledge. It is just no longer significantly userful. Kind of like... how to use a number line from primary school.
Yeah, it's also not about the bottom line, but about making the world a better place.
1) Software patents. In order for software patents to not grossly stiffle innovation, they need to have a maximum lifespan of 2 years. 100 years ago,
2) Inappropriate patents. Only significantly innovative products should receive patents. Alternately, a "lesser" patent should exist for minor derivative changes with a 1-2 year duration.
The USPTO is over 200 years old (first patent was in 1790). At that time, a 10 to 20 year monopoly on a novel invention was not a bad idea, since a single invention could often go a hundred years and have no derivative works. Shortly after the end of the second world war, it became common to see derivative works withing 5 years. The patent system, intended to promote innovation through guaranteed profit, now has a 70 year history of stiffling it.
Yeah, I'd say they're looking to make VMWare into the new Netscape.
"Requires MS SQL Server 2000"
Or do you prefer ignoring your vendor's requirements and still expecting them to support you?
So, if you don't run Linux on MS VS, what do you run? That's right, you run MS Windows. So now you have one big server running three copies of MS Server:
Number of CPUs: 2
MS Server 2k3 /w VS
/w MS SQL 2k
/w MS SQL 2k
1. MS Server 2k3
2. MS Server 2k3
3. MS Server 2k3
So, on 2 CPUs, you are running four copies of MS Server and two installationf of MS SQL sevrer. How many licenses must you buy? Four for Win2k3, 2 for MS SQL.
No wonder they're giving it away.
I have played Munchkin, and that was a great game. I moved recently, but once I find a new FLGS I'll probably buy that. Ogre looks cool, too, but haven't played it yet.
My GURPS GM ran with all kinds of mods, and you had to remember to ask about every little bonus or mention that you did something in a certain way or you'd always fail. So the game was dumb. My D&D GM's just ran the stupid game to make sure the players had fun. Ultimately, the rules should never interfere with your ability to have fun.