a) I agree, a lot of the Boomers are sellouts. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of us were *NOT* hippies and protestors - as one who was both, let me assure you that if you actually went to the library, and looked at microfilms of the papers of the times, it was only *sightly* more liberal than now, and the majority were busy keeping a low profile, and the courage of any convistions they may have had were about as stiff as lime Jello.
The biggest difference was that the media was not as conglomerized as it is now, nor was it owned, heart, soul, and balls, by the extreme right with their Christian funnnymentalist brownshirts. The result of *that* was that those of us on the left did not feel so isolated, since protests and movents *were* more likely to be reported in the media.
Finally, WWII and the war against fascism was a lot closer, and more in peoples' minds. These days, merely using the "f" word people back away from you as a wacko... though that's gotten less so, the last three years or so.*
mark
* "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is
the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini (Now let me say, Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Someone who *isn't* on the latest, hottest machine that either their company, their college, or their parents with lots of disposible income would buy them.
We've seen WAAAAYYYY too much of the emacs-environment mindset in the industry, from #1, Bill the Gates, on down to the idiot who I tried to contact, a few years ago, who had four or five 1.5M-2M jpegs on *one* page on his Website. Far too few folks in management ever look at someone on dialup, or on the two or three generations old computers that most home users have. And if you doubt that, slashdotters, try asking your *NON* computer friends what they, or their kids, are running on, or what they have in city public schools, or....
So, would robots, like the old SF story Valentina, incorporate to get rights, such as the right to not have their computer that they're running on turned off?
Bow about voting right? And how would you prevent either companies, or the AIs themselves, from cloning themselves, and outvoting all of the rest of us?
Simple answer: pass a law stating that articicial persons have *NO* political rights - not speech, not money.
mark "gee, that would get corporations out of politics...oops,
I shouldn't have said that, someoen will tell the CEOs...."
Well, for decades, you've been screaming about liberties. Why aren't EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU calling the White House, and your Congresscritters, and DEMANDING that the White House stop censorship?
I see, because every one of you are hypocrites and liars, and meant "no censorship for anything that hurts anyone on the left", but it's Not OK if it hurts the right.
And for the guy who said, "why don't you let it go",
a) becuase the son of a bitch is still in power, and stealing
hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, and
b) we'll let it go when you apologize for EVERYTHING YOU'VE
EVER SAID ABOUT CLINTON, and swear on a stack of
Linux kernel source code to NEVER say anything
negative about Clinton ever again.
Matter falling into the black hole, before it reaches the event horizon, gains an immense amount of energy in the falling in, and reradiates some of it. Also, black holes do evaporate through quantum tunneling (which is why there aren't any small ones around - they go BOOM that way).
I know from an ex-wife, a librarian, that librarians have been doing searches for fifteen or twenty years using such constuctions as NEAR . None of the popular search engines, from google on down, do this. It would *certainly* make my life easier, and result in relevant hits, rather than 100k hits because some asshole advertisers have thrown a laundry list into their META tag.
I learned C from K& R (and Turbo C). But... it's written as "you're a programmer, here's a new lanuguage and how to use it", for professionals, and maybe CS students. There should *absolutely* be 75 copies in the library for students.
On the other hand, it has not "moved on". When I started in CIS, I had two terms of assembly, which they don't get now, by default. That, alone, has helped me debug any number of times: I don't need to know the assembly language of the specific machine, but to know *how* code works and is actually executed. Besides, when it comes down to it, it's one instruction at a time, and C is fundamental to so much of all systems and code. (Quick - what language is PHP written in?)
And, yes, all the objectionably-oriented programming is nothing more than an attempt to enforce 25 years of good programming style by compiler.
Really? My wife is tutoring, at the moment. She showed a third grader a couple of things on the computer at the library, and the girl was off and running. There's also the kids-tell-kids.
Maintenance? When my son was 15, when I got tired of fighting over who got to be on the computer, we went to a computer fair, and I got the parts for a computer. He'd watched me upgrade mine, and helped some, a few months before; this time, I watched and assisted as *he* put it together. I almost never had to to *anything* for him again - it was *his* system, not a toy his daddy got him. Does anyone here think that there aren't millions of kids around the world who'd do the same for their friends, once they got that "training"?
So, training? Hah! Try and *stop* them. I'm sorry, but the original idea was the cost of the computer, alone, and it's still $100.
I may have posted this before, but it bears repeating. An acquaintance of mine teachers in colleges around the country, and one of the classes he teaches is "science for non-science majors". He's talked about the food chain of students he gets, and works his way down to:
- next to the bottom are the business majors, who don't get it, but don't
let that worry them, and
- on the bottom are the communications majors - the folks who go to
Hollywood, and "journalism", and "broadcasting", and ad agencies,
who not only don't get it, they don't *know* that they don't get it.
And you expect people like these to have a clue in the stories the film?
mark "don't forget, producers IQs are also the same as their shoe size"
First, every form you fill out before starting asks if you have a criminal background, and states that you can be fired for lying. The background check for an ordinary job is "guilty until proven innocent". The piss test is more so, and an invasion of Fourth Amendment rights, and I make *sure* that my statement to that effect goes into my personnel records.
Second, though most job applications say that a previous conviction will not completely rule you out, I know, from the experiences of someone close to me, that it overwhelmingly *DOES*. Let's see, so they should rehabilitate themselves by getting jobs as burger flippers, regardless of their advance degrees and years of experience, right? And this won't encourage recidivism, either.
(Doonesbury, many years ago:
Dealer: you want me to give up dealing, and bringing down $50k/month, and
get a job flipping burgers, right?
WoD person: That's right.
Dealer: Can't do it. I'm allergic to grease fumes.
WoD: We have a program to help you with that.)
Finally, WHAT THE FUCK IS MANAGEMENT DOING? They hire somebody, there's no q/a, there's no actual code review, and then "oh, he fooled everyone, so we need to check everyone, so that we managers don't have to know what the people under us are doing".
Oh, and hadn't the rest of you noticed that, in the last few years, all of a sudden, every job wants to do a credit check on you?
Welcome to the new [state|city|company]. Papers, please, mein herr|damen
It's amazing the number of slashdot posters who are *sure* that they're going to be almost as rich as Bill Gates shortly, and so identify with the ultra-wealthy. Another case of the victim identifying with the victimizer.
But then, they're the ones who've voted Reptilian "pro-business" year after year, while the people they vote for change the tax structure to put less tax on the wealthy "in order to create jobs"... which they do... in Third World countries. Meanwhile, the US can't manufacter even all the parts for our space program, or national defense: we have to import things.
Meaanwhile, adjusted for inflation, if they're not just out of school, their own real wealth and purchasing power have *dropped* every year (except during Clinton's presidency) since the late seventies. (Go look at the IRS site.)
Y'know, it's considered a sign of neurosis, at least, if not psychosis, to do the same thing over and over, and expect a different result each time.
Thanks so much, guys, for keeping my income *flat*... no, lower, than it was ten years ago (adjusted for inflation).
What would I do? Start by going back to the tax structure in the US of 1972, and roll *ALL* "capital gains" back into straight income.
mark "ah, the screams of the middle-income who think they'll win
the lottery...."
Down to, say, the peanuts they hand out on planes. All of 'em, as I like to say, "sealed for our lawyers' protection", not for anyone's convenience or protection.
You don't say what state or commonwealth you're in. I gather there is a state-related medical insurance in MA. The rest of the country, you're pretty much ool. Further, the insurance companies will target you to be screwed.
Lest you think this is all ideological, let me give a specific instance that affected hundreds of thousands: in FL, the state's "insurance regulators", in late 2003 allowed a ->35%45%- increase. If you do the math, this makes a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT INCREASE. (My premiums went from $373 to $525 to what would have been $755, had I not dropped with the last increase.)
Save *any* kind of corporate or organizational insurance you can.
mark "or sit in at your Congresscum's office until they start
pushing and voting for single payer, like the rest of
the first and second world"
Now, let me start out by saying I'm fully behind the F/OSS movement, and use it whenever I can. I'm working for a very large company, and we're using Linux boxes primarily. For that matter, I released a F/OSS package last year (WebFaceDB, available on SourceForge). But this is the first time I've been building and supporting as a straight sysadmin, not as a developer/sysadmin, and I've got to say that there's a *lot* of amateur, in the bad sense of the word, software out there.
Let's starts with how much I *loathe* OpenLDAP, and the literally weeks I spent getting it working, and have yet to have it work with autofs, and I'm fighting it, right now, with Samba. I tried to find a GUI editor. The one that seemed best for my situation installed from an rpm... and had *no* useful sample configuration files, and even when I managed, using google, to set up some, it gave errors.
PHP4 (we have our reasons for not going to 5 yet) is a royal pain, and a *mess*. I mean, php.ini in */lib?!, and not in */etc? Why? Why scatter files all hither and yon? Oh, and then there's where I have to hand-edit the Makefile to add/usr/kereros/include, since even the --includedir doesn't do that.
On the other hand, Webmin was a literal no-brainer, and Nagios was only a bit harder. AND it came with working minimal configuration files. Even setting up virtual hosts with Apache were not *that* big a deal.
The amateurism covers things like inadequate testing, absolute requirements of a specific library (and not allowing a *later* version of the library), and not having an easy uninstall method.
It seems to me that a lot of folks push the envelope ->on their own system-, and don't try to meet standards that might run on nearly *everyone's* system. It doesn't have to be tested on *everything*, just follow standards. And to look at commonly-accepted practice, if not best practice.
mark, with more than two dozen years of software development experience, and half a
dozen with sysadmin
For those who actually READ THE DAMN BOOKS, he completely trashed the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, and if Faramir was a real person, he could sue Jackson for slander and win in a walk.
Jackson, go write your own movies, and be an "auteur" with them, and stop fucking up other people's good tales.
And, btw, The Hobbit came out in the late thirties, but the LotR is copyright 1965. And authors have always had the right to renew copyright (back from when it was only for 17 years). But then, there's the coporate media's DCMA, but let's not get into that here.
I skimmed through the first dozen or two posts "at or above my level of interest", and frankly, I'm appalled. After all the years of screaming and yelling about DCMA, the RIAA, and firmware copy protection, to see this "it's not legal", and "we'll find out about Bev".
Perhaps all these folks are new to slashdot, and have ignored everything that's been out there for years about rigged voting black box machines, including reports from Ari Rubin to Clint Curtis in Brevard co, FL.
PERHAPS THOSE OF YOU BEING OFFENDED BY THIS POST WHO LIVE IN THE US SHOULD LEAVE, AND MOVE TO AN OPEN DICTATORSHIP, SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO VOTE.
First, that's what libraries are all about. But then, that's also why compilers have become gigantic they're trying to write every possible function that will ever be needed into the libraries.
Of course, companies have their own functions, but almost *never* have a company librarian, or standards that hand you, as a programmer, these functions - it's always "go see if it's out there, if anyone knows".
But then code, properly written, is easily usable like this. The ultimate example is, of course, *Nix (grep blah filename | awk 'NR > 5 && NF > 0 && ! ($1 in myarray) { myarray[$1] = $2;}END{ for (i in myarray) { print i, myarray[1]}' | sort |etc |etc.
Lessee, unless I'm misinformed, de-acronyizing that resultts in "binary binary large object". So, what's the alternative, an ASCII binary large object?
Slashdot Mirror
a) I agree, a lot of the Boomers are sellouts. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of us were *NOT* hippies and protestors - as one who was both, let me assure you that if you actually went to the library, and looked at microfilms of the papers of the times, it was only *sightly* more liberal than now, and the majority were busy keeping a low profile, and the courage of any convistions they may have had were about as stiff as lime Jello.
The biggest difference was that the media was not as conglomerized as it is now, nor was it owned, heart, soul, and balls, by the extreme right with their Christian funnnymentalist brownshirts. The result of *that* was that those of us on the left did not feel so isolated, since protests and movents *were* more likely to be reported in the media.
Finally, WWII and the war against fascism was a lot closer, and more in peoples' minds. These days, merely using the "f" word people back away from you as a wacko... though that's gotten less so, the last three years or so.*
mark
* "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is
the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini (Now let me say, Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Someone who *isn't* on the latest, hottest machine that either their company, their college, or their parents with lots of disposible income would buy them.
We've seen WAAAAYYYY too much of the emacs-environment mindset in the industry, from #1, Bill the Gates, on down to the idiot who I tried to contact, a few years ago, who had four or five 1.5M-2M jpegs on *one* page on his Website. Far too few folks in management ever look at someone on dialup, or on the two or three generations old computers that most home users have. And if you doubt that, slashdotters, try asking your *NON* computer friends what they, or their kids, are running on, or what they have in city public schools, or....
mark
Now, I use vi, but you could run that would-be o/s emacs, and just fill it up with macros....
mark
So, will KDE 4 be:
- smaller than 3?
- lighter weight, with fewer programs running in the background just to *run*
the damn thing?
- faster?
mark, who went to IceWM years ago, since *it* comes up in under 20 seconds, as opposed to a minute or more for KDE.
So, would robots, like the old SF story Valentina, incorporate to get rights, such as the right to not have their computer that they're running on turned off?
Bow about voting right? And how would you prevent either companies, or the AIs themselves, from cloning themselves, and outvoting all of the rest of us?
Simple answer: pass a law stating that articicial persons have *NO* political rights - not speech, not money.
mark "gee, that would get corporations out of politics...oops,
I shouldn't have said that, someoen will tell the CEOs...."
Well, for decades, you've been screaming about liberties. Why aren't EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU calling the White House, and your Congresscritters, and DEMANDING that the White House stop censorship?
I see, because every one of you are hypocrites and liars, and meant "no censorship for anything that hurts anyone on the left", but it's Not OK if it hurts the right.
And for the guy who said, "why don't you let it go",
a) becuase the son of a bitch is still in power, and stealing
hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, and
b) we'll let it go when you apologize for EVERYTHING YOU'VE
EVER SAID ABOUT CLINTON, and swear on a stack of
Linux kernel source code to NEVER say anything
negative about Clinton ever again.
mark
Matter falling into the black hole, before it reaches the event horizon, gains an immense amount of energy in the falling in, and reradiates some of it. Also, black holes do evaporate through quantum tunneling (which is why there aren't any small ones around - they go BOOM that way).
mark
I know from an ex-wife, a librarian, that librarians have been doing searches for fifteen or twenty years using such constuctions as NEAR . None of the popular search engines, from google on down, do this. It would *certainly* make my life easier, and result in relevant hits, rather than 100k hits because some asshole advertisers have thrown a laundry list into their META tag.
mark
I learned C from K& R (and Turbo C). But... it's written as "you're a programmer, here's a new lanuguage and how to use it", for professionals, and maybe CS students. There should *absolutely* be 75 copies in the library for students.
On the other hand, it has not "moved on". When I started in CIS, I had two terms of assembly, which they don't get now, by default. That, alone, has helped me debug any number of times: I don't need to know the assembly language of the specific machine, but to know *how* code works and is actually executed. Besides, when it comes down to it, it's one instruction at a time, and C is fundamental to so much of all systems and code. (Quick - what language is PHP written in?)
And, yes, all the objectionably-oriented programming is nothing more than an attempt to enforce 25 years of good programming style by compiler.
mark
$970?
Really? My wife is tutoring, at the moment. She showed a third grader a couple of things on the computer at the library, and the girl was off and running. There's also the kids-tell-kids.
Maintenance? When my son was 15, when I got tired of fighting over who got to be on the computer, we went to a computer fair, and I got the parts for a computer. He'd watched me upgrade mine, and helped some, a few months before; this time, I watched and assisted as *he* put it together. I almost never had to to *anything* for him again - it was *his* system, not a toy his daddy got him. Does anyone here think that there aren't millions of kids around the world who'd do the same for their friends, once they got that "training"?
So, training? Hah! Try and *stop* them. I'm sorry, but the original idea was the cost of the computer, alone, and it's still $100.
mark "Dell 610, $350, eBay"
I may have posted this before, but it bears repeating. An acquaintance of mine teachers in colleges around the country, and one of the classes he teaches is "science for non-science majors". He's talked about the food chain of students he gets, and works his way down to:
- next to the bottom are the business majors, who don't get it, but don't
let that worry them, and
- on the bottom are the communications majors - the folks who go to
Hollywood, and "journalism", and "broadcasting", and ad agencies,
who not only don't get it, they don't *know* that they don't get it.
And you expect people like these to have a clue in the stories the film?
mark "don't forget, producers IQs are also the same as their shoe size"
First, every form you fill out before starting asks if you have a criminal background, and states that you can be fired for lying. The background check for an ordinary job is "guilty until proven innocent". The piss test is more so, and an invasion of Fourth Amendment rights, and I make *sure* that my statement to that effect goes into my personnel records.
Second, though most job applications say that a previous conviction will not completely rule you out, I know, from the experiences of someone close to me, that it overwhelmingly *DOES*. Let's see, so they should rehabilitate themselves by getting jobs as burger flippers, regardless of their advance degrees and years of experience, right? And this won't encourage recidivism, either.
(Doonesbury, many years ago:
Dealer: you want me to give up dealing, and bringing down $50k/month, and
get a job flipping burgers, right?
WoD person: That's right.
Dealer: Can't do it. I'm allergic to grease fumes.
WoD: We have a program to help you with that.)
Finally, WHAT THE FUCK IS MANAGEMENT DOING? They hire somebody, there's no q/a, there's no actual code review, and then "oh, he fooled everyone, so we need to check everyone, so that we managers don't have to know what the people under us are doing".
Oh, and hadn't the rest of you noticed that, in the last few years, all of a sudden, every job wants to do a credit check on you?
Welcome to the new [state|city|company]. Papers, please, mein herr|damen
mark
It's amazing the number of slashdot posters who are *sure* that they're going to be almost as rich as Bill Gates shortly, and so identify with the ultra-wealthy. Another case of the victim identifying with the victimizer.
But then, they're the ones who've voted Reptilian "pro-business" year after year, while the people they vote for change the tax structure to put less tax on the wealthy "in order to create jobs"... which they do... in Third World countries. Meanwhile, the US can't manufacter even all the parts for our space program, or national defense: we have to import things.
Meaanwhile, adjusted for inflation, if they're not just out of school, their own real wealth and purchasing power have *dropped* every year (except during Clinton's presidency) since the late seventies. (Go look at the IRS site.)
Y'know, it's considered a sign of neurosis, at least, if not psychosis, to do the same thing over and over, and expect a different result each time.
Thanks so much, guys, for keeping my income *flat*... no, lower, than it was ten years ago (adjusted for inflation).
What would I do? Start by going back to the tax structure in the US of 1972, and roll *ALL* "capital gains" back into straight income.
mark "ah, the screams of the middle-income who think they'll win
the lottery...."
Down to, say, the peanuts they hand out on planes. All of 'em, as I like to say, "sealed for our lawyers' protection", not for anyone's convenience or protection.
mark
You don't say what state or commonwealth you're in. I gather there is a state-related medical insurance in MA. The rest of the country, you're pretty much ool. Further, the insurance companies will target you to be screwed.
Lest you think this is all ideological, let me give a specific instance that affected hundreds of thousands: in FL, the state's "insurance regulators", in late 2003 allowed a ->35%45%- increase. If you do the math, this makes a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT INCREASE. (My premiums went from $373 to $525 to what would have been $755, had I not dropped with the last increase.)
Save *any* kind of corporate or organizational insurance you can.
mark "or sit in at your Congresscum's office until they start
pushing and voting for single payer, like the rest of
the first and second world"
Now, let me start out by saying I'm fully behind the F/OSS movement, and use it whenever I can. I'm working for a very large company, and we're using Linux boxes primarily. For that matter, I released a F/OSS package last year (WebFaceDB, available on SourceForge). But this is the first time I've been building and supporting as a straight sysadmin, not as a developer/sysadmin, and I've got to say that there's a *lot* of amateur, in the bad sense of the word, software out there.
/usr/kereros/include, since even the --includedir doesn't do that.
Let's starts with how much I *loathe* OpenLDAP, and the literally weeks I spent getting it working, and have yet to have it work with autofs, and I'm fighting it, right now, with Samba. I tried to find a GUI editor. The one that seemed best for my situation installed from an rpm... and had *no* useful sample configuration files, and even when I managed, using google, to set up some, it gave errors.
PHP4 (we have our reasons for not going to 5 yet) is a royal pain, and a *mess*. I mean, php.ini in */lib?!, and not in */etc? Why? Why scatter files all hither and yon? Oh, and then there's where I have to hand-edit the Makefile to add
On the other hand, Webmin was a literal no-brainer, and Nagios was only a bit harder. AND it came with working minimal configuration files. Even setting up virtual hosts with Apache were not *that* big a deal.
The amateurism covers things like inadequate testing, absolute requirements of a specific library (and not allowing a *later* version of the library), and not having an easy uninstall method.
It seems to me that a lot of folks push the envelope ->on their own system-, and don't try to meet standards that might run on nearly *everyone's* system. It doesn't have to be tested on *everything*, just follow standards. And to look at commonly-accepted practice, if not best practice.
mark, with more than two dozen years of software development experience, and half a
dozen with sysadmin
Please, NO MORE PETER FUCKING JACKSON!!!
For those who actually READ THE DAMN BOOKS, he completely trashed the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, and if Faramir was a real person, he could sue Jackson for slander and win in a walk.
Jackson, go write your own movies, and be an "auteur" with them, and stop fucking up other people's good tales.
And, btw, The Hobbit came out in the late thirties, but the LotR is copyright 1965. And authors have always had the right to renew copyright (back from when it was only for 17 years). But then, there's the coporate media's DCMA, but let's not get into that here.
mark
plutonium wasn't discovered for years after Mme. Curie died. If anything, she'd have walked around with radium.
For a tech site, this is a pretty damn ignorant mistake.
mark
So, maybe we can hope that the movie actually FOLLOWS THE BOOK!
"Auteurs" should not make movies of books.
mark
Or are y'all too young to remember that 8-track had no record - which, of course, is why I never bought into it, and stuck with cassettes.
mark
I skimmed through the first dozen or two posts "at or above my level of interest", and frankly, I'm appalled. After all the years of screaming and yelling about DCMA, the RIAA, and firmware copy protection, to see this "it's not legal", and "we'll find out about Bev".
Perhaps all these folks are new to slashdot, and have ignored everything that's been out there for years about rigged voting black box machines, including reports from Ari Rubin to Clint Curtis in Brevard co, FL.
PERHAPS THOSE OF YOU BEING OFFENDED BY THIS POST WHO LIVE IN THE US SHOULD LEAVE, AND MOVE TO AN OPEN DICTATORSHIP, SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO VOTE.
mark
First, that's what libraries are all about. But then, that's also why compilers have become gigantic they're trying to write every possible function that will ever be needed into the libraries.
Of course, companies have their own functions, but almost *never* have a company librarian, or standards that hand you, as a programmer, these functions - it's always "go see if it's out there, if anyone knows".
But then code, properly written, is easily usable like this. The ultimate example is, of course, *Nix (grep blah filename | awk 'NR > 5 && NF > 0 && ! ($1 in myarray) { myarray[$1] = $2;}END{ for (i in myarray) { print i, myarray[1]}' | sort |etc |etc.
mark
... I think it'll be suckers, er, Republican voters, and the rest of us. The former, of course, being a mostly non-viable species.
mark
... green and glowing?
mark "Clark, come in and do your homework!"
Lessee, unless I'm misinformed, de-acronyizing that resultts in "binary binary large object". So, what's the alternative, an ASCII binary large object?
mark "still speaks English"