Outside of insular, slow-changing corporate environments you'll probably never see one anymore.
Until, that is, you have a HD crash, you have to reinstall Windows and since your disks are SCSI you need a SCSI driver during install. And since Windows is shit cubed, it requires that the driver be on a floppy -- no CDs or USB sticks accepted.
As evidence, I present Brennus, the Gaul invader who yelled "Vae Victis" at the Romans. I think any reasonable person will agree that "Way Wictis!" is far too ridiculous sounding,
Wow! A french guy saying something that sounds ridiculous.
What is the world coming to?
and therefore the Romans must have pronounced Vs like we do.
This must be the first time that I've seen the way the french pronounce non-french words caled upon as evidence for the way native speakers pronounce them.
(Hint: we know a lot about the way people including the Romans pronounced things from the way they mis-spelled them. Future archaeologists will know how "you're" was pronounced from the number of people who spell it "your".)
The most that this data proves is a correlation between higher reported coffee consumption and reduced cirrhosis-- and there are a ton of other reasons why that might be the case. Maybe heavy drinkers of alcohol tend to under-report their consumption of other harmful substances (like caffeine) out of guilt. Maybe higher caffeine consumption makes heavy drinkers drink a little less. Maybe coffee-drinking indicates a more white-collar lifestyle, which in turn might indicate better education and healthier life habits, any of which might itself be responsible for the diminished cirrhosis. As usual, the pop-sci treatment jumps to an easy causal conclusion that's far from being warranted by the facts.
Exactly!! There's a tousand more possibilities: propensity for cirrhosis is regulated by the same gene as taste for bitter foods. People who's livers are stressed from alcohol will instinctively avoid other liver-heavy foods (like coffee). etc etc etc
Could everybody please tattoo this on their penis so they'd be seeing it a couple times a day: "correlation does not imply, suggest, hint at causation in any way, shape or form".
OTOH, If you came across a really smart person, who you really thought wow, (s)he's the best. And they'd made mistakes, even boneheaded ones, you might still want to hire them.
But at that point you're talking a pretty special case that has little to do with the average hiring situation. Of course Taco Bell isn't going to scrutinize your background terribly much.
In the real world, I have three jobs to fill and two hundred resumes on my table. The first hundred are weeded out by cursory inspection of the cover letter. Another fifty or so with a somewhat closer reading of the precise background, ambitions, qualifications. That leaves me ffity or so perfectly qualified folks - and I'm not going to interview that many people. With three open positions, I'm gonna interview, say, ten or twelve. I start calling people to get a better grasp on them and throw out another bunch. And then? How do I eliminate another factor of two or three of otherwise all perfectly fine-looking folks?
At that point I might well be tempted to poke around the 'net a little. I wouldn't start at myspace or facebook, but if that's where I end up -- hey, it's all voluntarily shared information. So this guy says he was on the track team. Star athlete or mascot dummy? Does his school's paper have a mention of his name. Ah, yes, here it is with a picture: "joe bloe blowing off steam after an excruciating defeat in the such-n-such competition. Oh, well, no problem. Oh and they give a link to his myspace page. Humm... seems to be blowing off a whole lot of steam, me thinks. Whoa: '...smokin the phat ones daily since I was 15...' maybe not this one after all..."
If I make these decisions on limited information people are calling me biased. But if I try to gather as much information as I can, people tell me that what they're saying about themselves should not enter into the decision.
How should I make this decision? Isn't it desirable when hiring decisions aren't narrowly focussed on GPA and publication record? I can do that but then people tell me that there's more to an employee than the narrow academics. That I should look for a more three-dimensional picture. But if the third dimensions of some people looks good, of some people neutral and of some people looks ugly...
It looks like ghostscript might be useful for this? Has anyone tried it?
Yup -- I've been using gv to read PDFs in linux. It's fast, it's practically everywhere and I hapen to be familiar with the interface from over a decade of noodling with PostScript.
It ain't much to write home about, I'd say (no such thing as 'search for a keyword' etc) but for the usual reading of a normal document it's sure adequate. I like that I can mark particular pages and then print or save only those pages. Handy feature, that.
As long as I'm going to be inundated with advertising, I see no reason to complain if it is at least advertising for stuff I actually care about. [shrug]
On Snow's site, any member of the general public could access the site by merely registering with a username and password and clicking on the words "I Agree to these terms." Such an easily surmountable barrier to access is, according to the court, insufficient to make a site not "readily acessible to the general public."
Now I'd like to know where that leaves sites that require you be over 18 to enter. Obviously it is not enough to click on "yes, I'm over 18".
Even more interesting, where does it leave companies who inquire about people's name/address but only if the user is over 13 (for otherwise it would be illegal, but apparently it is not sufficient to rely on the user's self-reported age for that screening).
Wow -- there's so much fun to be had with this precedence...
Why jump into a different editor that is just as easy to use as emacs in seperate window mode (or even just XEmacs) when you get all this with the integrated debugger, split windows, indenting, etc?
Well, nobody ever denied that emacs is a great operating system. But in order to compete with Linux or the *BSDs, it needs a decent editor.
Probably not, because the typical default access for a linux user is unpriveleged (I've been working intensively in the linux environment, and I'll bet I've not been logged in as a priveleged user (i.e., root) more than two or three times a year during that span). But, an extremely significant percentage (I'll bet it's over 80%) of Windows users continue to be logged in with administrative priveleges -- most without knowing and understanding what that even means.
Disclaimer: My experience is with VAX and Unix boxes in the eighties, my first Linux kernel was 0.9something but I have used Windows only since 98SE. I never really got to "learn" windows and am much less clear on the internals. On the "how is this supposed to work".
With more than two decades of serious computing behind me, I still do not understand what "Administrative privileges" really means in Windows. Or what it is good for. In U*X everything is a file and thus those magical "privileges" simply boil down to what you can do with a file (including files in/dev,/proc, directories in general, etc). There's a layer of abstraction where I understand that access to this 644 means that I can only read it, but the owner can write to it as well. That's easy.
In windows, it has never been terribly clear to me -- there appears to be some nod in the direction of file permissions, but all I've ever seen of them is that sometimes I have trouble messing with something the wife has been working on -- that kind of thing. Sometimes there's no problem. Sometimes logging in as admin solves some problem that I have but I hesitate to do so since I nevere really know what Windows does behind the scenes that might become a problem if I were to be logged in as Admin.
In the end, the preferred way to do something that I can't do as user is to fire up cygwin and do it from the linux prompt.
And ours is the rare enlightened case where someone took the trouble of setting up user accounts at install time. It was certainly not in the least obvious when and where to set up this kind of thing. I cannot fathom why I would've bothered with it if I hadn't had a Linux backgroud. It's not like XP pops up a screen during install explaining what an Admin is and how he is distinguished from a normal user.
I still see people on older machines where they haven't even bothered to configure users for their older Windows machines... and don't have the slightest concept of partitioned separate logins for distinct different users.
Of course not - why would they? This is my computer, I'm the only one using it, if the kid gets old enough to want to diddle with it I'll buy him his own computer. Why would I be setting up different "users"? I doesn't make sense in the Windows model.
U*X (and VMS and...) was developed in a networked multi-user context of universities and research labls. Windows was developed to make one computer do one thing for one user. "Multi-user" is an afterthought. Network security is an afterthought. The entire computer-as-an-appliance model of how a computer should behave in Windows just doesn't lend itself to the notion of a "privileged account". You don't have a privileged account in your toaster or your microwave, do you?
Now it gets hairy: If I grant for a moment that there's no such thing as absolute computer security, then all these unsecured windows boxes out there are just the low-hanging fruit. Viruses and worms are only as smart as they need to be to pick those. This is fine with me as it means I merely have to have my fruit hanging higher than everybody else's. My house doesn't have to be absolutely burglar-proof -- just harder to break into than my neighbors. I'll never be perfectly termite-safe, but as long as I'm more termite-safe than my neighbors, they will attract all the termites. You get the picture.
If geeks succeede in training the masses in making their machines "more secure" it only means that the malwa
I'm not missing any point. $100,000 is peanuts for finding their "Killer app", they're wasting the "losers" time no matter how good the apps they develop are, and they stand to make a lot more for the developer's time than the developer. The developer is going to put hundreds -- if not thousands -- of manhours into the project with about as much chance of winning the lottery.
What point did I miss?
The point that this is all very good. You keep posting about it as if it were a bad thing, but you have yet to name one single thing that should persuade Sun NOT to do this. They get something very valuable for peanuts. You realize that. The people contributing have a high chance of getting screwed, one or two might possible have a faint chance of breaking even. Great. If I was Sun, that's exactly what I'd do.
It's redundant to note that the losers are going to get screwed -- that's what makes them losers. But it is not like Sun is going out proclaiming some people to be losers -- the losers are entirely self-selected. Just like the Lottery, as you note yourself.
Where exactly is there anything wrong with a tax on stupidity?
Admittedly for smaller servers a removable HDD may prove far better given the usage vs. cost, but for large installations it's near impossible to beat the fact that your backup is turned into a physically removable and storable object which can be handled automatically.
Actually it's a (fairly narrow) sweet-spot. Once the volume increases sufficiently that you need to install some kind of robot to handle the tapes, you might want to re-compute the dollars per byte you're spending.
And with network capacities being what they are, there's really no reason to send hardware (disks, tapes whatever) around the globe when it would be cheaper in the long run to run an optical fiber and just send bits.
Where I work we generate a lot of data. In the region of 100GB on a good day. We "back up" by having a redundant server off-site to which we copy all HD-contents. By the time you've figured out how to back up a 50TB-rack and figured out the infrastructure for tape storage and how to keep track of the actual tape that contains the piece of data you're looking for, you might as well go out and buy another 50TB-rack and simply copy your data over. And when you need some item it's right there. When they're turned off, harddisks are actually not so bad life-time wise either.
I'd like to see you select the correct jpeg out of a directory of 500 without an icon preview.
One may be possible, but try to copy those images from the 500 you took on vacation that had the dog in them. Hah. I'm very much a console-guy myself, but there's definitely tasks where a gui pays.
I've read that command line users often think they are being quicker than GUI users, but acutally aren't because of the way the brain senses time.
Simple really: the more you're concentrating on doing something, the less you notice the passing of time. Same thing for car drivers (who always underestimate how long it takes to go from one place to another) vs. users of public transit (who have nothing to do during the transit and routinely overestimate how long a trip takes). That's been well-studied since the sixties at least (i.e. since before computers were a routine tool).
A decent aerospace engineer must cost a business around 120 grand or so for a year of work,
It's a little dangerous to post concrete numbers in a field that you don't actually know anything about. I consider myself "a decent aerospace egineer" and I cost my employer something like 1/4 million per yer. And I have single-digit years of seniority - there's much more expensive folks out there. There's also cheaper people, of course. But when you include things like benefits, $120k p.a. is barely going to buy you an entry level technician.
...to try and get a guy like Paul Allen to dump far more into it then he'll ever get back.
You're making the mistake of underestimating a good businessman. With all the paid lectures and tours and broadcasting rights, Paul Allen definitely made his money back. The couple million X-prize were just the icing -- on the day of the flight and the days right after, a couple seconds of footage commanded six figures. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but it is an open secret in the aerospace community that Allen definitely didn't lose any money in the operation...
I'm probably missing something here somewhere -- but why would someone who draws a picture give a rat's ass about the color representation used by the printer? Illiad delivers an image in some format -- psd? maybe even just jpg? and from there it is the printer's job to do whatever color separation is necessary for their print process, no? You think folks who do their comics in ink and colored pen submit pre-separated?
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Actually, if you wrap some duct tape around it you can jam a lot of stuff into guinea pigs...
Really: anybody who makes reference to this rag is decidedly not interested in science, reality, or truth.
I know that this isn't what you're looking for, but the answer to your question is "$22.50" : http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp_Q_pn_E_30 72375
...or otherwise you may find your job outsourced...
Until, that is, you have a HD crash, you have to reinstall Windows and since your disks are SCSI you need a SCSI driver during install. And since Windows is shit cubed, it requires that the driver be on a floppy -- no CDs or USB sticks accepted.
Wow! A french guy saying something that sounds ridiculous.
What is the world coming to?
and therefore the Romans must have pronounced Vs like we do.
This must be the first time that I've seen the way the french pronounce non-french words caled upon as evidence for the way native speakers pronounce them.
(Hint: we know a lot about the way people including the Romans pronounced things from the way they mis-spelled them. Future archaeologists will know how "you're" was pronounced from the number of people who spell it "your".)
And, does it work?
The most that this data proves is a correlation between higher reported coffee consumption and reduced cirrhosis-- and there are a ton of other reasons why that might be the case. Maybe heavy drinkers of alcohol tend to under-report their consumption of other harmful substances (like caffeine) out of guilt. Maybe higher caffeine consumption makes heavy drinkers drink a little less. Maybe coffee-drinking indicates a more white-collar lifestyle, which in turn might indicate better education and healthier life habits, any of which might itself be responsible for the diminished cirrhosis. As usual, the pop-sci treatment jumps to an easy causal conclusion that's far from being warranted by the facts.
Exactly!! There's a tousand more possibilities: propensity for cirrhosis is regulated by the same gene as taste for bitter foods. People who's livers are stressed from alcohol will instinctively avoid other liver-heavy foods (like coffee). etc etc etc
Could everybody please tattoo this on their penis so they'd be seeing it a couple times a day: "correlation does not imply, suggest, hint at causation in any way, shape or form".
But at that point you're talking a pretty special case that has little to do with the average hiring situation. Of course Taco Bell isn't going to scrutinize your background terribly much.
In the real world, I have three jobs to fill and two hundred resumes on my table. The first hundred are weeded out by cursory inspection of the cover letter. Another fifty or so with a somewhat closer reading of the precise background, ambitions, qualifications. That leaves me ffity or so perfectly qualified folks - and I'm not going to interview that many people. With three open positions, I'm gonna interview, say, ten or twelve. I start calling people to get a better grasp on them and throw out another bunch. And then? How do I eliminate another factor of two or three of otherwise all perfectly fine-looking folks?
At that point I might well be tempted to poke around the 'net a little. I wouldn't start at myspace or facebook, but if that's where I end up -- hey, it's all voluntarily shared information. So this guy says he was on the track team. Star athlete or mascot dummy? Does his school's paper have a mention of his name. Ah, yes, here it is with a picture: "joe bloe blowing off steam after an excruciating defeat in the such-n-such competition. Oh, well, no problem. Oh and they give a link to his myspace page. Humm ... seems to be blowing off a whole lot of steam, me thinks. Whoa: '...smokin the phat ones daily since I was 15...' maybe not this one after all..."
If I make these decisions on limited information people are calling me biased. But if I try to gather as much information as I can, people tell me that what they're saying about themselves should not enter into the decision.
How should I make this decision? Isn't it desirable when hiring decisions aren't narrowly focussed on GPA and publication record? I can do that but then people tell me that there's more to an employee than the narrow academics. That I should look for a more three-dimensional picture. But if the third dimensions of some people looks good, of some people neutral and of some people looks ugly...
"Is sex dirty?" "Only if you do it right." -- Woody Allen
Yup -- I've been using gv to read PDFs in linux. It's fast, it's practically everywhere and I hapen to be familiar with the interface from over a decade of noodling with PostScript.
It ain't much to write home about, I'd say (no such thing as 'search for a keyword' etc) but for the usual reading of a normal document it's sure adequate. I like that I can mark particular pages and then print or save only those pages. Handy feature, that.
It is well known in aerospace engineering that
1) given enough thrust, pigs fly just fine.
2) However this is not neccessarily a good idea.
As long as I'm going to be inundated with advertising, I see no reason to complain if it is at least advertising for stuff I actually care about. [shrug]
12 minutes or so. Funny.
Now I'd like to know where that leaves sites that require you be over 18 to enter. Obviously it is not enough to click on "yes, I'm over 18".
Even more interesting, where does it leave companies who inquire about people's name/address but only if the user is over 13 (for otherwise it would be illegal, but apparently it is not sufficient to rely on the user's self-reported age for that screening).
Wow -- there's so much fun to be had with this precedence...
Well, nobody ever denied that emacs is a great operating system. But in order to compete with Linux or the *BSDs, it needs a decent editor.
Disclaimer: My experience is with VAX and Unix boxes in the eighties, my first Linux kernel was 0.9something but I have used Windows only since 98SE. I never really got to "learn" windows and am much less clear on the internals. On the "how is this supposed to work".
With more than two decades of serious computing behind me, I still do not understand what "Administrative privileges" really means in Windows. Or what it is good for. In U*X everything is a file and thus those magical "privileges" simply boil down to what you can do with a file (including files in /dev, /proc, directories in general, etc). There's a layer of abstraction where I understand that access to this 644 means that I can only read it, but the owner can write to it as well. That's easy.
In windows, it has never been terribly clear to me -- there appears to be some nod in the direction of file permissions, but all I've ever seen of them is that sometimes I have trouble messing with something the wife has been working on -- that kind of thing. Sometimes there's no problem. Sometimes logging in as admin solves some problem that I have but I hesitate to do so since I nevere really know what Windows does behind the scenes that might become a problem if I were to be logged in as Admin.
In the end, the preferred way to do something that I can't do as user is to fire up cygwin and do it from the linux prompt.
And ours is the rare enlightened case where someone took the trouble of setting up user accounts at install time. It was certainly not in the least obvious when and where to set up this kind of thing. I cannot fathom why I would've bothered with it if I hadn't had a Linux backgroud. It's not like XP pops up a screen during install explaining what an Admin is and how he is distinguished from a normal user.
I still see people on older machines where they haven't even bothered to configure users for their older Windows machines... and don't have the slightest concept of partitioned separate logins for distinct different users.
Of course not - why would they? This is my computer, I'm the only one using it, if the kid gets old enough to want to diddle with it I'll buy him his own computer. Why would I be setting up different "users"? I doesn't make sense in the Windows model.
U*X (and VMS and ...) was developed in a networked multi-user context of universities and research labls. Windows was developed to make one computer do one thing for one user. "Multi-user" is an afterthought. Network security is an afterthought. The entire computer-as-an-appliance model of how a computer should behave in Windows just doesn't lend itself to the notion of a "privileged account". You don't have a privileged account in your toaster or your microwave, do you?
Now it gets hairy: If I grant for a moment that there's no such thing as absolute computer security, then all these unsecured windows boxes out there are just the low-hanging fruit. Viruses and worms are only as smart as they need to be to pick those. This is fine with me as it means I merely have to have my fruit hanging higher than everybody else's. My house doesn't have to be absolutely burglar-proof -- just harder to break into than my neighbors. I'll never be perfectly termite-safe, but as long as I'm more termite-safe than my neighbors, they will attract all the termites. You get the picture.
If geeks succeede in training the masses in making their machines "more secure" it only means that the malwa
So you're telling me that there's something wrong with masturbation? Right here on slashdot of all places?
Oh, and I was wondering why I couldn't get it to compile; I didn't know it had to be exactly 60 characters. I thought is was "at least" 60 characters.
Thanks.
In other words, Pune, India
What point did I miss?
The point that this is all very good. You keep posting about it as if it were a bad thing, but you have yet to name one single thing that should persuade Sun NOT to do this. They get something very valuable for peanuts. You realize that. The people contributing have a high chance of getting screwed, one or two might possible have a faint chance of breaking even. Great. If I was Sun, that's exactly what I'd do.
It's redundant to note that the losers are going to get screwed -- that's what makes them losers. But it is not like Sun is going out proclaiming some people to be losers -- the losers are entirely self-selected. Just like the Lottery, as you note yourself.
Where exactly is there anything wrong with a tax on stupidity?
Actually it's a (fairly narrow) sweet-spot. Once the volume increases sufficiently that you need to install some kind of robot to handle the tapes, you might want to re-compute the dollars per byte you're spending.
And with network capacities being what they are, there's really no reason to send hardware (disks, tapes whatever) around the globe when it would be cheaper in the long run to run an optical fiber and just send bits.
Where I work we generate a lot of data. In the region of 100GB on a good day. We "back up" by having a redundant server off-site to which we copy all HD-contents. By the time you've figured out how to back up a 50TB-rack and figured out the infrastructure for tape storage and how to keep track of the actual tape that contains the piece of data you're looking for, you might as well go out and buy another 50TB-rack and simply copy your data over. And when you need some item it's right there. When they're turned off, harddisks are actually not so bad life-time wise either.
One may be possible, but try to copy those images from the 500 you took on vacation that had the dog in them. Hah. I'm very much a console-guy myself, but there's definitely tasks where a gui pays.
I've read that command line users often think they are being quicker than GUI users, but acutally aren't because of the way the brain senses time.
Simple really: the more you're concentrating on doing something, the less you notice the passing of time. Same thing for car drivers (who always underestimate how long it takes to go from one place to another) vs. users of public transit (who have nothing to do during the transit and routinely overestimate how long a trip takes). That's been well-studied since the sixties at least (i.e. since before computers were a routine tool).
It's a little dangerous to post concrete numbers in a field that you don't actually know anything about. I consider myself "a decent aerospace egineer" and I cost my employer something like 1/4 million per yer. And I have single-digit years of seniority - there's much more expensive folks out there. There's also cheaper people, of course. But when you include things like benefits, $120k p.a. is barely going to buy you an entry level technician.
You're making the mistake of underestimating a good businessman. With all the paid lectures and tours and broadcasting rights, Paul Allen definitely made his money back. The couple million X-prize were just the icing -- on the day of the flight and the days right after, a couple seconds of footage commanded six figures. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but it is an open secret in the aerospace community that Allen definitely didn't lose any money in the operation...
I'm probably missing something here somewhere -- but why would someone who draws a picture give a rat's ass about the color representation used by the printer? Illiad delivers an image in some format -- psd? maybe even just jpg? and from there it is the printer's job to do whatever color separation is necessary for their print process, no? You think folks who do their comics in ink and colored pen submit pre-separated?