(Please excuse my obsucre reference to a probably-not-very-well-known Polish comedy "How I started the Second World War" - I just had to do that... To explain a bit: that's how one of the main characters responded to a Gestapo officer asking him a question, because he didn't know German at all.)
Because I don't want a Mac? I don't like the way OS X acts. I like the way it is laid out. Mind you, not the way it looks, the way it is laid out - that's a different thing. Ignore the icons, I've set them to OS X theme years ago and just didn't bother to change them, they're good enough. The widget theme is standard KDE, the window decorations are standard too. What is important to me is the placement of window buttons - they're much better on the left side of the window, as that's the side I'm generally focused on, you know, left-to-right writing and all; and the menu bar, K menu button and tray on the upper panel - that's because of the "infinite button" effect, it works and is especially noticeable when using a trackpoint (TP X60). Oh, and the upper panel is quite thin, so it can be there all the time, with the tray and clock visible (actually, the effective workspace inside an application is the same, the menu bar would be there anyway, just less useful), while the lower one has autohiding turned on, so it doesn't waste space when not needed. Effectively, I've copied the parts of OS X I like but I'm still using an enviroment and applications I like much better. And I'm damn tired of explaining it every time someone starts a "get a Mac" talk without trying to think about it for a minute first.
If you have a few minutes, could you please take a look at my 3.5 desktop and check if it's possible to configure 4.x this way now? I'm using my desktop configuration for a few years now and I'm quite used to it, but last I checked it was impossible to get it on 4.0, especially the top panel.
And I don't mean "free as in speech", I mean "free as in he's wearing out his keyboard but nothing of meaning comes out". There's no problem stated, as a result there's no conclusions, there's only a badly disguised attempt at trolling, which I even doubt is fully intentional and conscious.
You have to consider, which would people think more likely - that someone created a belch/fart single, made it the same size and name of a popular song, and distributed it, *or* someone who was caught infringing copyright created a file to match its characteristics in order to get off on a technicality.
Create a valid MP3 file with 5 minutes of belching that matches this MD5 signature: 5f2380575360148589ac86572e4ca36a - I'll be really impressed, as will be every cryptography expert. I don't say it's impossible, but unless RIAA ends up suing Donald Knuth, this scenario is not very likely.
That gave me an idea... What if someone recorded a few minutes of belching and farting, named it after some song RIAA seeks, clipped it to the lenght and packed with some white noise in the background so that the file size roughly matched and put it up on BT? You see, P2P clients publish a checksum of every file and every expert appointed by the court will admit that an MD5 or SHA checksum is a sufficient proof of the file spotted by RIAA being the same as the file promptly presented to the court by the defendant, with a claim of copyright over it as well (that is, if a few minutes of belching and farting can be deemed creative to be copyrighted at all). Wouldn't that show quite well, how baseless RIAA's "evidence" is?
Maybe think about technology research?
on
Disillusioned With IT?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From what you said, I guess you have quite a lot of first-hand experience and knowledge in a broad set of technical subjects. That means you probably have good reasoning and logical thinking abilities, which in turn makes you quite a good candidate for a more research-oriented job, instead of maintenance, which indeed can get boring after some time. In fact, people with you experience are very valuable in research teams, as those who use the current technologies routinely have the best knowledge of their shortcomings and pitfalls and can give the most valuable input into improving them - sometimes many times more valuable than people who created them. Additionally, research gives much more satisfaction - instead of just creating something useful, you create something better and more powerful as well, probably easing the work of all those you worked with before, who still do their daily administration routine. And be assured, there's no shortage of jobs in the network technology research field - fiber optics, high-speed wireless, large-scale routing, extreme load-resistant and distributed systems, and many more.
I've been trying it out since it became usable at all in the relevant git trees, with Intel driver of course - and it works wonders. Probably one of the best inventions after sliced bread. Well, seriously, it will definitely help the authors of graphics drivers, providing a unified framework for all modesetting kludges and simplify the actual drivers, especially direct rendering. AFAIK all the new Radeon drivers (those made with the specifications AMD released) will be using it, as well as DRI2, so not only Intel GMA users will benefit very soon.
Am I the only one left who doesn't get it and certainly won't benefit from such a contorted way of searching for information?
I have mailing lists for discussing particular activities or fields of knowledge, good, 'ol full-text search aided with a bix of context for searching on the web and a group of actual friends for socialising, not a list of other peoples' accounts that someone labeled "friends" for no good reason when making the UI.
Is there actually anything this all "social networking" is good for?
"and the gold plating actually decreases conductivity" no it doesn't. It doesn't add any either.
The point of gold plating is mostly corrosion. In most cases it's a non-issue. Well, it is an issue. The electronegativity difference between gold and tin is 0.58, between gold and copper about 0.64. That's enough to form a parasitic cell, given enough humidity, corroding the tin or copper side of the connection. And since it's usually the $100-bazillion plasma side, not the cable side, well, you're screwed. By the very problem a gold cable was meant to prevent, according to the sales rep who insisted on buying them. Well, yeah, the cable is fine, because gold is corrosion-resistant, but that's not the point, is it?
Well, with a camera it's quite easy for the operator to tell that it was taped or pointed in another direction and anyone who did that was recorded anyway. With motion sesnors, how do you know that the sensor is actually sensing no motion or was just taped?
Oh, I forgot to mention that it even IS called "campfire" - the whole website is themed as a medieval village, with the campfire outside the gates as a place to chat even for unregistered newcomers.
Campfire was released on 16 February 2006, while we had this on a website I'm an admin at since mid-2001. PHP and some JS. It works to this day and looks the same, although it was rewritten several times throughout the years to use AJAX instead of a reloaded frame.
No, I'm not giving you an URL - I wish I could, to prove my words, but the server load is high enough without the/. crowd trying the thing out...
It's quite lightweight indeed - I'm using it as a VMware guest OS for cross-compilations, testing and such when I'm doing something that needs to be cross-platform. But I don't think I would be able to change my habits when it comes to administering servers - I need a good CLI for that, I just find the idea of clicking to do something on a server the most awkward thing since the company-name-sorted Programs menu, which is an abomination of its own category. Besides, isn't remote desktop or how they call it a little bit unsuitable for the extreme kind of emergency situations, such as logging in from your cellphone in the middle of your holidays to fix something that broke and no one on site is able to cope with? (Been there, done that, it worked.)
What about a policy like "store whatever you want - but on YOUR pendrive"? Of course, to prevent any kind of automatical copying, rip the "My Music" folder out of the system entirely (it can be done, especially if you manage the computers yourself as the company's IT guy), together with the WMP. Problem gone, everyone's happy.
I don't know any numbers, but I think I can safely guess that the computer processor business is just a fraction of the whole silicon chip manufacturing business - maybe not a small fraction, but still. And the rest of the industry doesn't need extreme speeds - there are microcontrollers, integrated buffers, logic gates, comparators, operational amplifiers and loads of other $0.05 crap you got in your toaster oven, blender, wirst watch, remote-controlled toy car, printer, Hi-Fi, etc., etc. And there is an obvious priority for those: cheap and reliable. So the silicon is not going anywhere.
Every time I search for a description of some IC chip, especially an old, rare or highly specialized one, there are THOUSANDS of fake chinese cover-up distribution companies' websites with autogenerated part indexes. No, those aren't parts they actually have. Those are all pages generated using a list of bazillion different chip names, some of them nonexistent and generated just in case such a version could exist in the future, to catch any attempt to search for actual information. No matter what you click, you get an "availability inquiry form" with the part name pre-filled and that's all. Maybe they think this will make someone buy from them, but they make finding anything close to impossible. Some even go as far as autogenerating "search" pages with different part names "submitted" (really a crapload of invisible HTTP GET links in footers of other pages), but of course no results or links to inquiry forms. Others link datasheets for EVERYTHING - to a ".pdf" file redirecting to a "Sorry, we don't have this" page with 200 OK status, or an empty PDF. There goes your chance to find datasheets for anything less popular than a MAX232.
I'm all for shooting them, running them over with an 18-wheeler and hanging from a tree as a warning.
That means you are dependent on a big, clunky IDE for writing your code. Not everyone uses them even for big projects - for example, KDE's Kate is sophisticated enough to handle those, yet still lightweight. Even worse if you are writing an API for a library: you are forcing everyone using it to memorize where the references were or use a big, clunky IDE. And even if you use an IDE, you sometimes need to read a piece of code and see such things without retyping the paren to force a dumb IDE to display the prototype or even hovering the mouse over each function for a smart IDE to give a hint.
I'd disagree on pointers and references. If you pass something in by reference, you need to know it goes in there by reference, it's not visible in the calling code. If something's not visible - well, that's a bug just waiting to crawl in there. If you pass something by pointer, the calling code shows it clearly and you know that whatever was passed is likely to be changed by the called function. That's the rationale used by Trolltech and it is quite convincing to me.
Besides, using char * is a must sometimes, when using C libraries that accept, modify and return strings or just some chunks of arbitrary data as char *.
Slashdot Mirror
Ja, ja, Volkswagen!
(Please excuse my obsucre reference to a probably-not-very-well-known Polish comedy "How I started the Second World War" - I just had to do that... To explain a bit: that's how one of the main characters responded to a Gestapo officer asking him a question, because he didn't know German at all.)
Thanks, that's one of the things I wanted to know. I guess I'll take a look at Bugzilla and request that too.
Because I don't want a Mac? I don't like the way OS X acts. I like the way it is laid out. Mind you, not the way it looks, the way it is laid out - that's a different thing. Ignore the icons, I've set them to OS X theme years ago and just didn't bother to change them, they're good enough. The widget theme is standard KDE, the window decorations are standard too. What is important to me is the placement of window buttons - they're much better on the left side of the window, as that's the side I'm generally focused on, you know, left-to-right writing and all; and the menu bar, K menu button and tray on the upper panel - that's because of the "infinite button" effect, it works and is especially noticeable when using a trackpoint (TP X60). Oh, and the upper panel is quite thin, so it can be there all the time, with the tray and clock visible (actually, the effective workspace inside an application is the same, the menu bar would be there anyway, just less useful), while the lower one has autohiding turned on, so it doesn't waste space when not needed. Effectively, I've copied the parts of OS X I like but I'm still using an enviroment and applications I like much better. And I'm damn tired of explaining it every time someone starts a "get a Mac" talk without trying to think about it for a minute first.
If you have a few minutes, could you please take a look at my 3.5 desktop and check if it's possible to configure 4.x this way now? I'm using my desktop configuration for a few years now and I'm quite used to it, but last I checked it was impossible to get it on 4.0, especially the top panel.
And I don't mean "free as in speech", I mean "free as in he's wearing out his keyboard but nothing of meaning comes out". There's no problem stated, as a result there's no conclusions, there's only a badly disguised attempt at trolling, which I even doubt is fully intentional and conscious.
You have to consider, which would people think more likely - that someone created a belch/fart single, made it the same size and name of a popular song, and distributed it, *or* someone who was caught infringing copyright created a file to match its characteristics in order to get off on a technicality.
Create a valid MP3 file with 5 minutes of belching that matches this MD5 signature:5f2380575360148589ac86572e4ca36a - I'll be really impressed, as will be every cryptography expert. I don't say it's impossible, but unless RIAA ends up suing Donald Knuth, this scenario is not very likely.
That gave me an idea... What if someone recorded a few minutes of belching and farting, named it after some song RIAA seeks, clipped it to the lenght and packed with some white noise in the background so that the file size roughly matched and put it up on BT? You see, P2P clients publish a checksum of every file and every expert appointed by the court will admit that an MD5 or SHA checksum is a sufficient proof of the file spotted by RIAA being the same as the file promptly presented to the court by the defendant, with a claim of copyright over it as well (that is, if a few minutes of belching and farting can be deemed creative to be copyrighted at all). Wouldn't that show quite well, how baseless RIAA's "evidence" is?
From what you said, I guess you have quite a lot of first-hand experience and knowledge in a broad set of technical subjects. That means you probably have good reasoning and logical thinking abilities, which in turn makes you quite a good candidate for a more research-oriented job, instead of maintenance, which indeed can get boring after some time.
In fact, people with you experience are very valuable in research teams, as those who use the current technologies routinely have the best knowledge of their shortcomings and pitfalls and can give the most valuable input into improving them - sometimes many times more valuable than people who created them.
Additionally, research gives much more satisfaction - instead of just creating something useful, you create something better and more powerful as well, probably easing the work of all those you worked with before, who still do their daily administration routine.
And be assured, there's no shortage of jobs in the network technology research field - fiber optics, high-speed wireless, large-scale routing, extreme load-resistant and distributed systems, and many more.
Unless he meant something else by "fire". You know, a cannon or something. With a god aim, you could save some ammo on the step 2.
I've been trying it out since it became usable at all in the relevant git trees, with Intel driver of course - and it works wonders. Probably one of the best inventions after sliced bread. Well, seriously, it will definitely help the authors of graphics drivers, providing a unified framework for all modesetting kludges and simplify the actual drivers, especially direct rendering. AFAIK all the new Radeon drivers (those made with the specifications AMD released) will be using it, as well as DRI2, so not only Intel GMA users will benefit very soon.
"Stop breaking into my server, ya' scurvy dog, or ya'll walk the plank! Arrrr!", right?
Am I the only one left who doesn't get it and certainly won't benefit from such a contorted way of searching for information?
I have mailing lists for discussing particular activities or fields of knowledge, good, 'ol full-text search aided with a bix of context for searching on the web and a group of actual friends for socialising, not a list of other peoples' accounts that someone labeled "friends" for no good reason when making the UI.
Is there actually anything this all "social networking" is good for?
The point of gold plating is mostly corrosion. In most cases it's a non-issue. Well, it is an issue. The electronegativity difference between gold and tin is 0.58, between gold and copper about 0.64. That's enough to form a parasitic cell, given enough humidity, corroding the tin or copper side of the connection. And since it's usually the $100-bazillion plasma side, not the cable side, well, you're screwed. By the very problem a gold cable was meant to prevent, according to the sales rep who insisted on buying them. Well, yeah, the cable is fine, because gold is corrosion-resistant, but that's not the point, is it?
Well, with a camera it's quite easy for the operator to tell that it was taped or pointed in another direction and anyone who did that was recorded anyway. With motion sesnors, how do you know that the sensor is actually sensing no motion or was just taped?
http://osada.heroes.net.pl/ognisko/ - here you go.
Oh, I forgot to mention that it even IS called "campfire" - the whole website is themed as a medieval village, with the campfire outside the gates as a place to chat even for unregistered newcomers.
Campfire was released on 16 February 2006, while we had this on a website I'm an admin at since mid-2001. PHP and some JS. It works to this day and looks the same, although it was rewritten several times throughout the years to use AJAX instead of a reloaded frame.
/. crowd trying the thing out...
No, I'm not giving you an URL - I wish I could, to prove my words, but the server load is high enough without the
Out of curiosity - do they offer something like the 2003's 180-day trial? Sounds quite nice, would be even nicer to try it.
It's quite lightweight indeed - I'm using it as a VMware guest OS for cross-compilations, testing and such when I'm doing something that needs to be cross-platform. But I don't think I would be able to change my habits when it comes to administering servers - I need a good CLI for that, I just find the idea of clicking to do something on a server the most awkward thing since the company-name-sorted Programs menu, which is an abomination of its own category. Besides, isn't remote desktop or how they call it a little bit unsuitable for the extreme kind of emergency situations, such as logging in from your cellphone in the middle of your holidays to fix something that broke and no one on site is able to cope with? (Been there, done that, it worked.)
What about a policy like "store whatever you want - but on YOUR pendrive"? Of course, to prevent any kind of automatical copying, rip the "My Music" folder out of the system entirely (it can be done, especially if you manage the computers yourself as the company's IT guy), together with the WMP. Problem gone, everyone's happy.
Or just fire the idiot...
I don't know any numbers, but I think I can safely guess that the computer processor business is just a fraction of the whole silicon chip manufacturing business - maybe not a small fraction, but still. And the rest of the industry doesn't need extreme speeds - there are microcontrollers, integrated buffers, logic gates, comparators, operational amplifiers and loads of other $0.05 crap you got in your toaster oven, blender, wirst watch, remote-controlled toy car, printer, Hi-Fi, etc., etc. And there is an obvious priority for those: cheap and reliable. So the silicon is not going anywhere.
Every time I search for a description of some IC chip, especially an old, rare or highly specialized one, there are THOUSANDS of fake chinese cover-up distribution companies' websites with autogenerated part indexes. No, those aren't parts they actually have. Those are all pages generated using a list of bazillion different chip names, some of them nonexistent and generated just in case such a version could exist in the future, to catch any attempt to search for actual information. No matter what you click, you get an "availability inquiry form" with the part name pre-filled and that's all. Maybe they think this will make someone buy from them, but they make finding anything close to impossible. Some even go as far as autogenerating "search" pages with different part names "submitted" (really a crapload of invisible HTTP GET links in footers of other pages), but of course no results or links to inquiry forms. Others link datasheets for EVERYTHING - to a ".pdf" file redirecting to a "Sorry, we don't have this" page with 200 OK status, or an empty PDF. There goes your chance to find datasheets for anything less popular than a MAX232.
I'm all for shooting them, running them over with an 18-wheeler and hanging from a tree as a warning.
WHOOOOOSH!
Wow, that was a big one! Did you see it?
That means you are dependent on a big, clunky IDE for writing your code. Not everyone uses them even for big projects - for example, KDE's Kate is sophisticated enough to handle those, yet still lightweight. Even worse if you are writing an API for a library: you are forcing everyone using it to memorize where the references were or use a big, clunky IDE. And even if you use an IDE, you sometimes need to read a piece of code and see such things without retyping the paren to force a dumb IDE to display the prototype or even hovering the mouse over each function for a smart IDE to give a hint.
I'd disagree on pointers and references. If you pass something in by reference, you need to know it goes in there by reference, it's not visible in the calling code. If something's not visible - well, that's a bug just waiting to crawl in there. If you pass something by pointer, the calling code shows it clearly and you know that whatever was passed is likely to be changed by the called function. That's the rationale used by Trolltech and it is quite convincing to me.
Besides, using char * is a must sometimes, when using C libraries that accept, modify and return strings or just some chunks of arbitrary data as char *.