Just like the self-assurance of the supremely arrogant./. is sounding more like Digg every day...sigh.
On to my point...
Fine -- so a slight negative buoyancy is augmented by some flying with the dive planes. Nevertheless, a submarine, unlike an airplane is *not* dependent upon forward motion to rise to the surface. A submarine, unlike an airplane, primarily uses ballast and or air to at least approximate the buoyancy of an equal volume of water. Whether or not it *augments* this equilibrium with forward motion and lift from the dive planes does not change the fact that a sub is still essentially a zeppelin rather than an airplane. As you state yourself, if the reactor stops, they still blow the tanks to surface -- something that is not possible in an airplane.
Mediocre idea: 100% liquid "atmosphere." Good from a structural point of view, but terrible from a biological point of view, since you're pretty much guaranteed to breath everyone's pee.
Not really. "Flying" requires using aerodynamic or hydrodynamic properties to provide lift or buoyancy. Submarines use ballast to sink, then expel the ballast to surface. Both airplanes and submarines use similar structures for controllability, but a submarine doesn't fly any more than a zeppelin does.
If you think about for a minute, you will see why a heavier-than-water submarine that flies is a really bad idea. However, I have seen designs for positive buoyancy submersibles that fly down, and would therefore surface if the engine were to fail.
I agree with your point in...what is it? Great grandparent post? Claiming that Jacobsen was being greedy is simply absurd. However, having said that, Jacobsen did *not* give up the ability to make money off of his software by licensing it under the GPL, since the GPL does, in fact, allow you to charge for software. The most that can be said is that he did give up the ability to *require* that *all* other users to pay him a licensing fee to use his code.
It's greedy to want to be able to give away for free code that you developed yourself so that others may use and modify it as they wish?!?! That's patently absurd.
How do you know what Jacobsen's motivations were? He *might* have wanted to develop the code so that people would admire his l337 c0d!ng skillz, but he might simply have seen a need and wanted to fill it. By standing up to Katzer, he may have been standing up for all of the others who were using his code under the terms of the open source license he used. That is most certainly not greedy but rather altruistic. It boggles the mind that you could possibly claim that something which is a community effort is greedy.
The fact that PP was modded troll just shows how much of a double standard there is on/. If filesharers aren't "stealing" music and movies then how could Katzer have "stolen" the code from Jacobsen, unless they physically removed copies of the code from his possession? If Katzer "stole" the code from Jacobsen, then how can you seriously maintain that filesharers aren't "stealing" from musicians and record companies?
What Katzer did was despicable and unethical, but it's no more stealing than downloading music from TPB -- it's a violation of license agreements.
The closest thing to theft that occurred in this case is when Katzer tried to charge Jacobsen for the code that he wrote, but I would say that is more akin to extortion than theft ("We have deeper pockets so we can afford better lawyers. Pay us now, or we'll take you to court and bankrupt you.")...but take all of this with a healthy dose of NaCl, since IANAL, etc.
Exactly. I haven't used any of the Ubuntu variants (yet) so YMMV, but I have Slack running on a 700MHz Celeron desktop at home. KDE and Gnome were very slow, so I installed BlackBox and have been very happy ever since.
I don't break out/usr/local to a separate partition (although I can see why it can be both a good and bad idea to do so), but I definitely break out/var/log. If I have a log file get unusually large (/var/log/syslog due to iptables logging, for example), I don't want to fill / .
However, I always break out/home into a separate partition for the same reason you do:)
Don't be stupid. The school district didn't have either the time or the knowledge to troubleshoot the device. His wife didn't *know* if it was working or not, but since the school district was going to dispose of the projector anyway, she was allowed to take it home to see if she could get it working. How exactly is that a scam???
Now if she had been in charge of repairing broken equipment, she had investigated the projector and found that it had a minor problem that could easily be fixed and then told the school district that it was not economically repairable so that she could take it home, that would be another story. However nothing in PP leads me to believe that was the case.
In some cases, there are laws that mandate retention of electronic communications in and out of a business (SOX, HIPPA, etc.). If your employees are connecting to any and every IM service imaginable and you are following the required retention policies, the company can end up in a lot of hot water. In other cases, companies are simply worried about proprietary or confidential information leaking out. Finally, any network service or client could potentially be a vector for malware.
I've worked at places that have done this as well. IMHO, it is an excellent compromise between IT's need for security on the internal network and the employee's wish to use personal devices or unapproved software.
This is all about the lazy self-serving gits making their own jobs easier at the expense of making my job more difficult.
That's very easy to say when you aren't the IT admin getting the phone call at 9:30 on Friday evening when a virus is running rampant on the network because some self-proclaimed computer expert thought he knew more about computer security than IT did. You aren't the guy getting called on the carpet when the network is down for two days while you clean up the mess.
If it was up to the admins where I work now, everyone would be using a Linux machine with *no* anti-virus software, and we'd all be FOSS nerdvana. Unfortunately, business requirements often mean we have to use Windows, and consequently, you have to run A/V (although I would never, ever recommend anything from Symantec).
No, but an intelligent approach to risk management is.
What magamiako1 advocates is exactly right -- you can't filter for every threat, but you can take reasonable precautions to protect your network, servers and desktops from malware. One layer of protection is a firewall between your LAN and the Internet. Another layer of protection is anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Yet another layer or protection is access control and logging. Finally, don't let devices that you don't control onto your network. This isn't "unreasonable cowardice"; it's taking reasonable precautions against foreseeable risks. Anything else is being negligent.
Incidentally, where I work, we locked down Internet Explorer and required Firefox for exactly the reasons you state.
Yea, try locking down the computer in a software RND department.
I hate to sound elitist, but there *is* a difference between the physical plant guy or the customer service rep and an IT employee. Give the employees the tools and access they need to do their jobs. An employee who needs a computer just to receive corporate e-mail, visit the intranet and open/close service tickets might not (in fact, probably doesn't) need admin rights or the right to install and delete software.
On the other hand, a developer, a sys admin or a help desk tech probably does.
Other than influenza or rhino virus, slide rules aren't known to be vectors for viruses, worms, trojans, malware, spambots, etc. Even if you run anti-virus and anti-spyware, you can't guarantee that nothing will slip past the filters. Therefore, the first line of security on the networks I manage is if I (well, the company) doesn't own it, you don't get to attach it to the network.
It's not all about employee productivity though. We started blocking web sites where I work when the senior execs started knocking on our doors because they couldn't get their jobs done (okay, they were probably just surfing the web too, but I digress) due to lack of bandwidth. Buying more bandwidth wasn't a possibility due to budget and the location of the office in question. So...we built a proxy and set up fairly relaxed filtering, but nixed anything that we saw as a potential bandwidth hog.
Besides, any software that DOES require admin rights to execute was poorly coded, and should be replaced as soon as posisble.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
For every piece of business software you can find that requires admin rights to run, I'll find you five that doesn't. There might be a cost difference, but the admin labor savings and improved security will outweight that several times over.
But here's the rub: you and I might understand that, but try explaining it to the beancounter PHB. Some get it, some won't. Many look at the bottom-line up-front cost and don't worry about the what could happen in the future.
There are two sides to every opinion, and you do a good job of explaining the working stiff's side of IT policies.
However, having been on both sides of the fence, here is the IT side.
When Joe User installs software on his computer that introduces a virus in the network after you've told him over and over again to stop installing crapware on his machine, you get a little frustrated and wish he would just find employment elsewhere. After rebuilding Jane User's computer for the third time this month after she mucked around with policy settings that she didn't understand (again) and her supervisor insists (again) that she absolutely must have admin access to do her job, you begin to consider giving her an etch-a-sketch instead of another laptop. I've had employees wonder why they can't e-mail a 150MB autocad file to another employee in a remote location, and that's why IT puts caps on outgoing e-mail size. I worked with one guy in particular who constantly badmouthed IT because he thought he knew more than the senior admin (he didn't) and he was hoping to get enough people griping to force IT to do things the way he wanted (we didn't).
However, you are, of course, correct. There are some real dumb***** in IT who aren't qualified to work a cash register at Best Buy (no offense to Best Buy cashiers intended), and they often make some really boneheaded rules. There *are* IT admins who are on a power trip and enjoy keeping non-IT staff under their thumbs. But there are *also* very competent IT administrators who simply want to provide a stable and reasonably secure network.
As has been mentioned many, many times above, the computer equipment is important, but it's the *data* on said equipment that contains the real value. Did they replace the data as well as the computer, or did they just provide him with a new computer? No matter how nice the machine, I for one would still be extremely pissed if all the photos of my family, the music I have written and recorded, ten years' worth of programming work, etc. were suddenly taken away and not replaced.
As for everyone screaming "make backups!!!", that may not be sufficient. For example, I *do* make backups but they are on a second hard drive inside my desktop computer. Some of the data is also backed up to a second computer sitting about three feet from my desktop, but did anyone think that perhaps the police took *every* computer in this guy's house -- not just one? Not everyone -- and this is especially true for those who don't work with computers for a living -- has access to off-site backup computers.
Possibly, but at a previous job, I noticed that the company was far more likely to hire sys admins from outside the company -- or at least from other departments within the company -- than from their own Tech Support group. I thought this was rather bizarre because the Tech Support staff had some very bright people, and because many of the Tech Support people understood how those particular systems worked, by virtue of having spent a year or two (or more) troubleshooting them on the phone with customers.
Not that I was complaining, mind you -- I got hired directly into the sys admin staff even if there were people in Tech Support who probably would not have had the learning curve I had at first...
Wish I had mod points -- I'd shatter your expectations:) In other words, I agree with you, but then again, I tend to lean libertarian to conservative myself (I hate to say "Republican" any more, in light of the last eight years).
The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
Maybe. Or maybe the programmer was just really anal retentive, like me.
I don't really consider myself a programmer, but I do write a fair share of CGI scripts. In my scripts, I detaint the user inputs and provide appropriate error codes for user inputs that fail the detaint. The error trapping almost always leads to one (or more) of some finite set of possibilities, but I *always* include a catch-all along the lines of...
1) Didn't match valid input;
2) Didn't match expected error #1;
...
n) Didn't match expected error #n;
n+1) Catch-all (just on the off chance that I failed to account for a possible error).
For the catch-all case, I include an error message similar to "This error message shouldn't be possible. Please send an e-mail to tell me how you got here."
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Just like the self-assurance of the supremely arrogant. /. is sounding more like Digg every day...sigh.
On to my point...
Fine -- so a slight negative buoyancy is augmented by some flying with the dive planes. Nevertheless, a submarine, unlike an airplane is *not* dependent upon forward motion to rise to the surface. A submarine, unlike an airplane, primarily uses ballast and or air to at least approximate the buoyancy of an equal volume of water. Whether or not it *augments* this equilibrium with forward motion and lift from the dive planes does not change the fact that a sub is still essentially a zeppelin rather than an airplane. As you state yourself, if the reactor stops, they still blow the tanks to surface -- something that is not possible in an airplane.
What about Soundexchange trying to collect royalties, even on "behalf" of artists they don't represent?
Mediocre idea: 100% liquid "atmosphere." Good from a structural point of view, but terrible from a biological point of view, since you're pretty much guaranteed to breath everyone's pee.
Oh...you mean the way fish do, here on earth?
Not really. "Flying" requires using aerodynamic or hydrodynamic properties to provide lift or buoyancy. Submarines use ballast to sink, then expel the ballast to surface. Both airplanes and submarines use similar structures for controllability, but a submarine doesn't fly any more than a zeppelin does.
If you think about for a minute, you will see why a heavier-than-water submarine that flies is a really bad idea. However, I have seen designs for positive buoyancy submersibles that fly down, and would therefore surface if the engine were to fail.
Cool.
I agree with your point in...what is it? Great grandparent post? Claiming that Jacobsen was being greedy is simply absurd. However, having said that, Jacobsen did *not* give up the ability to make money off of his software by licensing it under the GPL, since the GPL does, in fact, allow you to charge for software. The most that can be said is that he did give up the ability to *require* that *all* other users to pay him a licensing fee to use his code.
Was this project licensed under GPL or another open source license (Creative Commons Non-Commercial, perhaps)? TFA doesn't say...
It's greedy to want to be able to give away for free code that you developed yourself so that others may use and modify it as they wish?!?! That's patently absurd.
How do you know what Jacobsen's motivations were? He *might* have wanted to develop the code so that people would admire his l337 c0d!ng skillz, but he might simply have seen a need and wanted to fill it. By standing up to Katzer, he may have been standing up for all of the others who were using his code under the terms of the open source license he used. That is most certainly not greedy but rather altruistic. It boggles the mind that you could possibly claim that something which is a community effort is greedy.
The fact that PP was modded troll just shows how much of a double standard there is on
What Katzer did was despicable and unethical, but it's no more stealing than downloading music from TPB -- it's a violation of license agreements.
The closest thing to theft that occurred in this case is when Katzer tried to charge Jacobsen for the code that he wrote, but I would say that is more akin to extortion than theft ("We have deeper pockets so we can afford better lawyers. Pay us now, or we'll take you to court and bankrupt you.")...but take all of this with a healthy dose of NaCl, since IANAL, etc.
Exactly. I haven't used any of the Ubuntu variants (yet) so YMMV, but I have Slack running on a 700MHz Celeron desktop at home. KDE and Gnome were very slow, so I installed BlackBox and have been very happy ever since.
I don't break out /usr/local to a separate partition (although I can see why it can be both a good and bad idea to do so), but I definitely break out /var/log. If I have a log file get unusually large (/var/log/syslog due to iptables logging, for example), I don't want to fill / .
/home into a separate partition for the same reason you do :)
However, I always break out
Don't be stupid. The school district didn't have either the time or the knowledge to troubleshoot the device. His wife didn't *know* if it was working or not, but since the school district was going to dispose of the projector anyway, she was allowed to take it home to see if she could get it working. How exactly is that a scam???
Now if she had been in charge of repairing broken equipment, she had investigated the projector and found that it had a minor problem that could easily be fixed and then told the school district that it was not economically repairable so that she could take it home, that would be another story. However nothing in PP leads me to believe that was the case.
However, whats the hatred of IM services?
In some cases, there are laws that mandate retention of electronic communications in and out of a business (SOX, HIPPA, etc.). If your employees are connecting to any and every IM service imaginable and you are following the required retention policies, the company can end up in a lot of hot water. In other cases, companies are simply worried about proprietary or confidential information leaking out. Finally, any network service or client could potentially be a vector for malware.
I've worked at places that have done this as well. IMHO, it is an excellent compromise between IT's need for security on the internal network and the employee's wish to use personal devices or unapproved software.
This is all about the lazy self-serving gits making their own jobs easier at the expense of making my job more difficult.
That's very easy to say when you aren't the IT admin getting the phone call at 9:30 on Friday evening when a virus is running rampant on the network because some self-proclaimed computer expert thought he knew more about computer security than IT did. You aren't the guy getting called on the carpet when the network is down for two days while you clean up the mess.
If it was up to the admins where I work now, everyone would be using a Linux machine with *no* anti-virus software, and we'd all be FOSS nerdvana. Unfortunately, business requirements often mean we have to use Windows, and consequently, you have to run A/V (although I would never, ever recommend anything from Symantec).
Unreasonable cowardice is not a virtue.
No, but an intelligent approach to risk management is.
What magamiako1 advocates is exactly right -- you can't filter for every threat, but you can take reasonable precautions to protect your network, servers and desktops from malware. One layer of protection is a firewall between your LAN and the Internet. Another layer of protection is anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Yet another layer or protection is access control and logging. Finally, don't let devices that you don't control onto your network. This isn't "unreasonable cowardice"; it's taking reasonable precautions against foreseeable risks. Anything else is being negligent.
Incidentally, where I work, we locked down Internet Explorer and required Firefox for exactly the reasons you state.
Yea, try locking down the computer in a software RND department.
I hate to sound elitist, but there *is* a difference between the physical plant guy or the customer service rep and an IT employee. Give the employees the tools and access they need to do their jobs. An employee who needs a computer just to receive corporate e-mail, visit the intranet and open/close service tickets might not (in fact, probably doesn't) need admin rights or the right to install and delete software.
On the other hand, a developer, a sys admin or a help desk tech probably does.
Other than influenza or rhino virus, slide rules aren't known to be vectors for viruses, worms, trojans, malware, spambots, etc. Even if you run anti-virus and anti-spyware, you can't guarantee that nothing will slip past the filters. Therefore, the first line of security on the networks I manage is if I (well, the company) doesn't own it, you don't get to attach it to the network.
It's not all about employee productivity though. We started blocking web sites where I work when the senior execs started knocking on our doors because they couldn't get their jobs done (okay, they were probably just surfing the web too, but I digress) due to lack of bandwidth. Buying more bandwidth wasn't a possibility due to budget and the location of the office in question. So...we built a proxy and set up fairly relaxed filtering, but nixed anything that we saw as a potential bandwidth hog.
Besides, any software that DOES require admin rights to execute was poorly coded, and should be replaced as soon as posisble.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
For every piece of business software you can find that requires admin rights to run, I'll find you five that doesn't. There might be a cost difference, but the admin labor savings and improved security will outweight that several times over.
But here's the rub: you and I might understand that, but try explaining it to the beancounter PHB. Some get it, some won't. Many look at the bottom-line up-front cost and don't worry about the what could happen in the future.
There are two sides to every opinion, and you do a good job of explaining the working stiff's side of IT policies.
However, having been on both sides of the fence, here is the IT side.
When Joe User installs software on his computer that introduces a virus in the network after you've told him over and over again to stop installing crapware on his machine, you get a little frustrated and wish he would just find employment elsewhere. After rebuilding Jane User's computer for the third time this month after she mucked around with policy settings that she didn't understand (again) and her supervisor insists (again) that she absolutely must have admin access to do her job, you begin to consider giving her an etch-a-sketch instead of another laptop. I've had employees wonder why they can't e-mail a 150MB autocad file to another employee in a remote location, and that's why IT puts caps on outgoing e-mail size. I worked with one guy in particular who constantly badmouthed IT because he thought he knew more than the senior admin (he didn't) and he was hoping to get enough people griping to force IT to do things the way he wanted (we didn't).
However, you are, of course, correct. There are some real dumb***** in IT who aren't qualified to work a cash register at Best Buy (no offense to Best Buy cashiers intended), and they often make some really boneheaded rules. There *are* IT admins who are on a power trip and enjoy keeping non-IT staff under their thumbs. But there are *also* very competent IT administrators who simply want to provide a stable and reasonably secure network.
As has been mentioned many, many times above, the computer equipment is important, but it's the *data* on said equipment that contains the real value. Did they replace the data as well as the computer, or did they just provide him with a new computer? No matter how nice the machine, I for one would still be extremely pissed if all the photos of my family, the music I have written and recorded, ten years' worth of programming work, etc. were suddenly taken away and not replaced.
As for everyone screaming "make backups!!!", that may not be sufficient. For example, I *do* make backups but they are on a second hard drive inside my desktop computer. Some of the data is also backed up to a second computer sitting about three feet from my desktop, but did anyone think that perhaps the police took *every* computer in this guy's house -- not just one? Not everyone -- and this is especially true for those who don't work with computers for a living -- has access to off-site backup computers.
Who said anything about taunting a TLA? I don't even know what that is.
Three Letter Acronym. You know, FBI, NSA, CIA. <pedantic>I suppose MI6 works, although technically, it's not an acronym</pedantic>
Possibly, but at a previous job, I noticed that the company was far more likely to hire sys admins from outside the company -- or at least from other departments within the company -- than from their own Tech Support group. I thought this was rather bizarre because the Tech Support staff had some very bright people, and because many of the Tech Support people understood how those particular systems worked, by virtue of having spent a year or two (or more) troubleshooting them on the phone with customers.
Not that I was complaining, mind you -- I got hired directly into the sys admin staff even if there were people in Tech Support who probably would not have had the learning curve I had at first...
Wish I had mod points -- I'd shatter your expectations :) In other words, I agree with you, but then again, I tend to lean libertarian to conservative myself (I hate to say "Republican" any more, in light of the last eight years).
The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
Maybe. Or maybe the programmer was just really anal retentive, like me.
I don't really consider myself a programmer, but I do write a fair share of CGI scripts. In my scripts, I detaint the user inputs and provide appropriate error codes for user inputs that fail the detaint. The error trapping almost always leads to one (or more) of some finite set of possibilities, but I *always* include a catch-all along the lines of...
1) Didn't match valid input;
2) Didn't match expected error #1;
...
n) Didn't match expected error #n;
n+1) Catch-all (just on the off chance that I failed to account for a possible error).
For the catch-all case, I include an error message similar to "This error message shouldn't be possible. Please send an e-mail to tell me how you got here."