I'm also a leftist (please note, that's *self-described*, not like some a*hole on Faux News calling say, former Pres. Jimmy Carter "on the left"), and I've seen a lot of that, too.
On the other hand, over the last four or so years, I've been hearing less and less from them. My take is that the neofascist "neocons" have been using most of their language for a dozen and more years, and people they voted for have resulted in the invasion of Iraq, the "Real ID" law, and on, and on, while corporations take on the powers of government[1,2]. Sort of like whe a ktten wants to bite my finger, and I give them more of it, they change their mind.
Wish that it was that little damage, rather than the destruction of international law, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a far more dangerous world. Oh, and the destruction of the US actual base of production[3], shipping it all overseas for cheap labor.
Perhaps they see themselves as "lone and self-reliant, like Those That Built America[4]. Or they're identifying with the wealthy, thinking that they're going to be wealthy Any Minute Now[5]. Meanwhile, *I* look at their "enlightened self-interest", and see a 180 degree disconnect with reality[6].
Maybe they'll wake up someday, instead of just keeping a lower profile.
1] For example, the "competition" becomes the growth of monopolies, who *own* the governemnt in the US. 2] The first fascist dictator, Mussolini, one of those who invented fascism, used to like to quote that "fascism is more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power". 3] Most of everything from our steel our silicon can't be made in the US - no factories anymore. Meanwhile, I get irritated every time I hear some a*hole bank or insurance company talking about 'products", as though they actually made something tangible, rather than providing financial *services*. 4] Which is a complete crock. Immigrants came over here and built *communities*, and the loaners where the ones who couldn't make it. 5] So they've allowed the destruction of unions, and diss unions, while they work at jobs that cheerfully say "whatever it takes", and leaves them with no life, and no time to spend what they make, and, if you add up their actual hours (for the salaried) with what they make, they're making *way* less per hour. 6] For example, they should *want* a good public education system, since the costs are spread over a lot of people, and it isn't *only* out of their personal pockets. The same for college... but then, that whole system shouldn't be funded by property taxes, but much more by income taxes. And before anyone responds to that, note that according to the IRS Website (irs.gov), half the households in the US live on *less* than $30k/yr. Buy a house? Healthcare? Hah. Hah. Hah.
I got one of the cards, too, the other day. I was going to get the CD anyway, having relocated too many times. They first made noises that it was going to be subscription only, then this.
*sigh*
I'll miss 'em, esp. since I am now a Published Author, having two articles published in SysAdmin in the last year (Egoless Documentation, Sept, 06, and Upgrading Linux, June, 07, I think).
Then there was the recent quirkyness that I really liked - Codysseus.
Lessee, the Administration and the Republicans (and Faux News) say that criticising Bush and the War are one step from terrorism, and now they're watching you (and if you happen to like to play with hardware...), so tell me, how is this not one step from Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's fascism?
"How are they going to keep hijackers off the planes?" some coward whines, forgetting that the locking or fixed-blade box cutters that the 9/11 hijackers used were ALREADY ILLEGAL, and supposed to not be allowed, and that the hardened cockpit doors and more air marshalls were the actual recommended answers.
Wait, wait, someone will be accused of soaking their clothes in nitric acid, and the fabric turned into guncotton, and we'll all be flying naked!
My wife, an engineer who worked for 17 years at the Cape, on both Station and Shuttle, and is *very* familiar with the tiles, says that she thinks they should stick some stuff in there. What worries her is that it's at the joint.
When my son was 14/15, I upgraded my own system, and got my son to help. A couple of months later, I got tired of fighting over who got to be on the computer, we went out and got parts, and this time he put it together, with my support.
The result? It was *his* system, not a toy his daddy got him. (A year or so later, he earned money for upgrading computers for a teacher, and the friend of a teacher, and...and now, years later, he's working on his A+.)
So, hell, yes: everyone should do it. Keep 'em from being scared of hardware.
who literally know *zip*. I just dipped my toes in the article, and lines like "procedural programming is... object oriented..." snapped any suspenders of belief I had in the article.
Of course, it'll be smaller and faster than Objectionably-oriented software....
Every decade, we hear "the mainframe is dead", and a year or two later, IBM announces record sales....
And for those that have no long term memory from watching too many videos and commercials that are cut for the attention span of a three-year-old, let me remind y'all that it was four or five years ago that they maxed out a mainframe running 48,000 virtual machines (using VM) on one mainframe, and easily ran 32,000.
Twoenty-odd years ago, I got an office funny - one of those papers passed around, that have mostly been replaced with emails - entitled "Comments considered harmful", talking about all the fumes from the laswer printers....
For the clue-resistant, IT WAS A JOKE!!! Comment your goddamned code!
We tried Trac at work for a ticketing system, and it was ludicrously hard to install. The upshot was neither I, nor the other sysadmin, could get it going acceptably. Mantis was an easy install (except for having to tell MySQL to use pre-4.1 (?) passwords), and Mantis is what we've continued to use.
Well, yes - 20-yr-old marketing "geniuses" seem to think that the rest of us want to surf the Web on a 1.5"x2" screen; that we want to text message everyone due to being afraid to talk to people, and play games on a screen smaller than a pack of cards.
On the other hand, it's allegedly the 21st Century: why do we have *exactly* the same frequency response on phone microphones and speakers that our parents had 60 years ago? Why can't we get more than 400 to 2000 or so Hz?
I will *NOT* buy a cell phone that is *not* a flip phone.
a) I don't want my keys to dial Moldavia in the FSSU; b) No, I do *not* want to remember and punch in an unlocking code, when I
just heard the damn thing ring, and c) I want a microphone near my mouth; I do *not* care to "impress" everyone
within 30 feet with my Important or K00l conversation.
On the other hand, what *MORON* 23-yr-old marketdroid (like Stefe from userfriendly) wants to read email or surf the Web on a 1.5"x2" screen?
mark "a plane vanilla flip phone, please. And Mr. Scot, please beam
us up - there's NO intellegent life here."
mark
Eighty is plenty. email. as someone noted, usually wraps at 72, though I might set it to 76 or so. I hate it when I'm working on code, and have to make my window wider.... Sorry, but *my* screen real estate is valuable, and the whole *point* of windowing interface is to have multiple windows visible at the same time, not to have more than one fullscreened app.... (let's not get started on Websites that do that....)
I cannot *believe* some slashdotters, saying this isn't help protect against id theft, etc. Where are all the libertarians, who ranted for so many years? Leaving it to us leftists to applaud NH, and decry the idea of national identity papers...?
Really? Ever heard the word kamikaze? How about the phrase, "volunteer for a suicide mission"?
This is bullshit. There is very little polygamy these days, which throws out this argument. I'll also note that there's no consideration of, say, anywhere from a 50% to 90% UNEMPLOYMENT RATE in the most violent areas, and no reasonable expectation of it getting any better soon. But violent areas, and no reasonable expectation of it getting any better soon.
The thing that irritates me most are the sites that have 5,478 *different* links. Even on broadband, they take tens of seconds, sometimes over a minute, to load. I'd like one *standard* test to be that they try surfing, like 50% of the US public does, on dialup.
I won't even start on the idiots who have no compression on their cameras, and put jpgs up on their Websites that are over a meg....
I have noted that there almost seems more negative reviews of Sicko than positive showing up on google news. But then, I've started wondering about whether google was biasing themsemselves, or whether it was being googlehacked. For example, some truly obscure sites keep showing up for long periods of time (hours or, in some cases, days) - I mean, really, how many people are reading a news site out of Bismark, ND?
With grain harvesters, there is significant wastage - stuff that the machines miss. A figure of 10% drifts out of my memory, but I could be wrong. I have trouble imagining less than that, and maybe twice that, as machines try to pick from the irregularly-placed fruit on trees, and ditto on bushes.
As if the price of fuel, and not buying locally-grown food, hasn't jacked up our grocery bills by at least 25% in the last year or so.
So, what part of "this bill is legal tender for all debts, public and private" doesn't the university get?
But we've seen this before. Back in the mid-seventies, a friend had just gotten into the Merchant Marine. He and a friend came ashore in Galveston, and wanted to rent a car to drive back home to Philly. Car rental place refused to accept cash. They offered to put their entire paychecks as a deposit - something like $5,000 in mid-1970's dollars - and the car company refused.
Bout 10 years later, the car companies were grudgingly accepting money....
Yeah, well, I just relocated from FL to Chi, and I've got a major beef with ToadRunner: no RR's convenient around here, and I'm on the local cable co's broadband. However, unlike *any* ISP I've ever dealt with, RoadRunner absolutely *refuses* to put a permanent mail forwarding on a closed account. "Pay or die" seems to be their attitude.
So, no more forwarding from my accounts from the accounts I closed 4.5 years ago (another ISP's *real* service, which I appreciated).
Slashdot Mirror
And it came on two 5.25" floppies.
mark "one of these days, I ought to see if I can run it under WINE"
With enough flags?
mark
I'm also a leftist (please note, that's *self-described*, not like some a*hole on Faux News calling say, former Pres. Jimmy Carter "on the left"), and I've seen a lot of that, too.
On the other hand, over the last four or so years, I've been hearing less and less from them. My take is that the neofascist "neocons" have been using most of their language for a dozen and more years, and people they voted for have resulted in the invasion of Iraq, the "Real ID" law, and on, and on, while corporations take on the powers of government[1,2]. Sort of like whe a ktten wants to bite my finger, and I give them more of it, they change their mind.
Wish that it was that little damage, rather than the destruction of international law, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a far more dangerous world. Oh, and the destruction of the US actual base of production[3], shipping it all overseas for cheap labor.
Perhaps they see themselves as "lone and self-reliant, like Those That Built America[4]. Or they're identifying with the wealthy, thinking that they're going to be wealthy Any Minute Now[5]. Meanwhile, *I* look at their "enlightened self-interest", and see a 180 degree disconnect with reality[6].
Maybe they'll wake up someday, instead of just keeping a lower profile.
1] For example, the "competition" becomes the growth of monopolies, who *own* the governemnt in the US.
2] The first fascist dictator, Mussolini, one of those who invented fascism, used to like to quote that "fascism is more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power".
3] Most of everything from our steel our silicon can't be made in the US - no factories anymore. Meanwhile, I get irritated every time I hear some a*hole bank or insurance company talking about 'products", as though they actually made something tangible, rather than providing financial *services*.
4] Which is a complete crock. Immigrants came over here and built *communities*, and the loaners where the ones who couldn't make it.
5] So they've allowed the destruction of unions, and diss unions, while they work at jobs that cheerfully say "whatever it takes", and leaves them with no life, and no time to spend what they make, and, if you add up their actual hours (for the salaried) with what they make, they're making *way* less per hour.
6] For example, they should *want* a good public education system, since the costs are spread over a lot of people, and it isn't *only* out of their personal pockets. The same for college... but then, that whole system shouldn't be funded by property taxes, but much more by income taxes. And before anyone responds to that, note that according to the IRS Website (irs.gov), half the households in the US live on *less* than $30k/yr. Buy a house? Healthcare? Hah. Hah. Hah.
mark
The Evil Empire, having captured Luke, will send his weapon away?
Some Jedis y'all are.
mark "bad Jedi! Trying! No lightsaber!
I got one of the cards, too, the other day. I was going to get the CD anyway, having relocated too many times. They first made noises that it was going to be subscription only, then this.
*sigh*
I'll miss 'em, esp. since I am now a Published Author, having two articles published in SysAdmin in the last year (Egoless Documentation, Sept, 06, and Upgrading Linux, June, 07, I think).
Then there was the recent quirkyness that I really liked - Codysseus.
Yeah, I'll miss 'em.
mark
Lessee, the Administration and the Republicans (and Faux News) say that criticising Bush and the War are one step from terrorism, and now they're watching you (and if you happen to like to play with hardware...), so tell me, how is this not one step from Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's fascism?
"How are they going to keep hijackers off the planes?" some coward whines, forgetting that the locking or fixed-blade box cutters that the 9/11 hijackers used were ALREADY ILLEGAL, and supposed to not be allowed, and that the hardened cockpit doors and more air marshalls were the actual recommended answers.
Wait, wait, someone will be accused of soaking their clothes in nitric acid, and the fabric turned into guncotton, and we'll all be flying naked!
mark
Was it Pretty Boy Floyd who, when asked why he robbed banks, replied, "that's where the money is"?
mark
My wife, an engineer who worked for 17 years at the Cape, on both Station and Shuttle, and is *very* familiar with the tiles, says that she thinks they should stick some stuff in there. What worries her is that it's at the joint.
mark
You're joking, right? You mean that the cops haven't been using common sense* for the last century or two, and doing that all along?
mark
* There is no such thing as common sense. The only thing that's common is stupidity - (c) whitroth, 1970-2007
When my son was 14/15, I upgraded my own system, and got my son to help. A couple of months later, I got tired of fighting over who got to be on the computer, we went out and got parts, and this time he put it together, with my support.
...and now, years later, he's working on his A+.)
The result? It was *his* system, not a toy his daddy got him. (A year or so later, he earned money for upgrading computers for a teacher, and the friend of a teacher, and
So, hell, yes: everyone should do it. Keep 'em from being scared of hardware.
mark
who literally know *zip*. I just dipped my toes in the article, and lines like "procedural programming is ... object oriented..." snapped any suspenders of belief I had in the article.
Of course, it'll be smaller and faster than Objectionably-oriented software....
mark
Every decade, we hear "the mainframe is dead", and a year or two later, IBM announces record sales....
And for those that have no long term memory from watching too many videos and commercials that are cut for the attention span of a three-year-old, let me remind y'all that it was four or five years ago that they maxed out a mainframe running 48,000 virtual machines (using VM) on one mainframe, and easily ran 32,000.
mark
Twoenty-odd years ago, I got an office funny - one of those papers passed around, that have mostly been replaced with emails - entitled "Comments considered harmful", talking about all the fumes from the laswer printers....
For the clue-resistant, IT WAS A JOKE!!! Comment your goddamned code!
mark
We tried Trac at work for a ticketing system, and it was ludicrously hard to install. The upshot was neither I, nor the other sysadmin, could get it going acceptably. Mantis was an easy install (except for having to tell MySQL to use pre-4.1 (?) passwords), and Mantis is what we've continued to use.
mark
Well, yes - 20-yr-old marketing "geniuses" seem to think that the rest of us want to surf the Web on a 1.5"x2" screen; that we want to text message everyone due to being afraid to talk to people, and play games on a screen smaller than a pack of cards.
On the other hand, it's allegedly the 21st Century: why do we have *exactly* the same frequency response on phone microphones and speakers that our parents had 60 years ago? Why can't we get more than 400 to 2000 or so Hz?
mark
I *loathe* tree rats, and here's another reason....
mark "like I really believe they've trained them"
I will *NOT* buy a cell phone that is *not* a flip phone.
a) I don't want my keys to dial Moldavia in the FSSU;
b) No, I do *not* want to remember and punch in an unlocking code, when I
just heard the damn thing ring, and
c) I want a microphone near my mouth; I do *not* care to "impress" everyone
within 30 feet with my Important or K00l conversation.
On the other hand, what *MORON* 23-yr-old marketdroid (like Stefe from userfriendly) wants to read email or surf the Web on a 1.5"x2" screen?
mark "a plane vanilla flip phone, please. And Mr. Scot, please beam
us up - there's NO intellegent life here."
mark
Eighty is plenty. email. as someone noted, usually wraps at 72, though I might set it to 76 or so. I hate it when I'm working on code, and have to make my window wider.... Sorry, but *my* screen real estate is valuable, and the whole *point* of windowing interface is to have multiple windows visible at the same time, not to have more than one fullscreened app.... (let's not get started on Websites that do that....)
mark
I cannot *believe* some slashdotters, saying this isn't help protect against id theft, etc. Where are all the libertarians, who ranted for so many years? Leaving it to us leftists to applaud NH, and decry the idea of national identity papers...?
mark "your internal travel documents, please"
Really? Ever heard the word kamikaze? How about the phrase, "volunteer for a suicide mission"?
This is bullshit. There is very little polygamy these days, which throws out this argument. I'll also note that there's no consideration of, say, anywhere from a 50% to 90% UNEMPLOYMENT RATE in the most violent areas, and no reasonable expectation of it getting any better soon. But violent areas, and no reasonable expectation of it getting any better soon.
mark
The thing that irritates me most are the sites that have 5,478 *different* links. Even on broadband, they take tens of seconds, sometimes over a minute, to load. I'd like one *standard* test to be that they try surfing, like 50% of the US public does, on dialup.
I won't even start on the idiots who have no compression on their cameras, and put jpgs up on their Websites that are over a meg....
mark
I have noted that there almost seems more negative reviews of Sicko than positive showing up on google news. But then, I've started wondering about whether google was biasing themsemselves, or whether it was being googlehacked. For example, some truly obscure sites keep showing up for long periods of time (hours or, in some cases, days) - I mean, really, how many people are reading a news site out of Bismark, ND?
mark
With grain harvesters, there is significant wastage - stuff that the machines miss. A figure of 10% drifts out of my memory, but I could be wrong. I have trouble imagining less than that, and maybe twice that, as machines try to pick from the irregularly-placed fruit on trees, and ditto on bushes.
As if the price of fuel, and not buying locally-grown food, hasn't jacked up our grocery bills by at least 25% in the last year or so.
mark
So, what part of "this bill is legal tender for all debts, public and private" doesn't the university get?
But we've seen this before. Back in the mid-seventies, a friend had just gotten into the Merchant Marine. He and a friend came ashore in Galveston, and wanted to rent a car to drive back home to Philly. Car rental place refused to accept cash. They offered to put their entire paychecks as a deposit - something like $5,000 in mid-1970's dollars - and the car company refused.
Bout 10 years later, the car companies were grudgingly accepting money....
mark
Yeah, well, I just relocated from FL to Chi, and I've got a major beef with ToadRunner: no RR's convenient around here, and I'm on the local cable co's broadband. However, unlike *any* ISP I've ever dealt with, RoadRunner absolutely *refuses* to put a permanent mail forwarding on a closed account. "Pay or die" seems to be their attitude.
So, no more forwarding from my accounts from the accounts I closed 4.5 years ago (another ISP's *real* service, which I appreciated).
mark