Slashdot Mirror


User: oatworm

oatworm's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
649
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 649

  1. Re:Linux on the user desktop success on Is OS/2 Coming Back? · · Score: 1

    Yup. You're absolutely right. Everywhere I go, I hear ordinary people asking me, "How do I run my favorite OS/2 programs in this day and age? How can I edit my IBM Works documents now?" The instant IBM provides a Linux-based answer is the day that this teeming multitude will drop Windows like the red headed stepchild that it is and embrace the goodness and wholeness of Linux.

  2. Re:OS/2 never went away on Is OS/2 Coming Back? · · Score: 1

    The average Windows admin would say that about Windows, except for the "surprisingly stable and did exactly the job it was intended to do" part. ;-)

  3. Re:Choice paralysis on Is OS/2 Coming Back? · · Score: 1

    I hate to burst your bubble, but you have more than one manufacturer-provided API in each of the choices you listed above. For example:

    Windows: .NET (pick a version) and WinAPI would be the two main ones, though there's also DirectX if you need to do serious graphics crunching. Heck, you can even compile against POSIX using Interix.
    Mac OS: Cocoa, Carbon or Classic? Of course, Classic was deprecated ages ago and Apple just recently announced that they're not porting Carbon over to 64-bit. Like Microsoft, Mac OS X also includes a POSIX-compatible API you can compile against, as well as X11, if you're into that sort of thing. Realistically, this is probably about as close to "one API" as you're going to get.

    I will also note that each of these platforms comes with several third-party APIs that tie into various subsystems.

    As for *nix GUI APIs, there are really only two these days that you absolutely should care about, and those are GTK for Gnome and Xfce, and QT for KDE. Though I'm sure the people behind OpenStep would be thrilled if someone actually wrote code for their API, hitting the two big targets there will take care of 90% of the people you want to deal with. Of course, you could also abandon all hope and just embrace Mono, but don't tell anyone here you did that - it's a "four letter word" in these parts.

  4. Re:WPS on Is OS/2 Coming Back? · · Score: 1

    Yes, well, my mom is 50 - she'll be excited to learn that in computing time she's still in her mid-20s.

  5. Re:Doubt it will ever get made on Joss Whedon To Direct The Avengers · · Score: 1

    I remember that episode! Yes, that was a fantastic line right there. I also loved the Roswell episode where Quark said (having to paraphrase) something to the effect of, "Take away their replicators and their toys and you'll find Humans are as fierce and primitive as any Klingon."

  6. Re:Seriously, this is a casting nightmare on Joss Whedon To Direct The Avengers · · Score: 1

    It's true - the current one is about to get term limited out of office. /ducks

  7. Re:Seriously, this is a casting nightmare on Joss Whedon To Direct The Avengers · · Score: 1

    Well, the audience would either fail to relate to the guy or they'd try to elect him as Governor of their state. Either way, there's not much in-between.

  8. Re:Doubt it will ever get made on Joss Whedon To Direct The Avengers · · Score: 1

    I'll note that having an actual, competent, comparatively risk-averse commander in charge of a sci-fi ship gets boring really fast. Heck, that's why many people don't like ST:TNG - Picard was just too competent. He didn't try to screw every female in the quadrant. He actually cared about the lives of his crew. He consistently followed the spirit and letter of the rules that the Federation imposed upon him, instead of "creatively interpreting" them as Kirk was prone to do whenever it was more convenient to do so. He also expected and demanded the same level of boring professionalism from the rest of his crew. The result was a ton of "We could fix this, but that would break the Prime Directive" episodes, which got boring fast.

    Dramatic tension should occur between characters, not between a character and a law book (or law PADD, for that matter). Heck, a lot of the reason people prefer DS9 over TNG is because people actually started to break the rules and got away with it. The Federation's legal system was no longer inviolate - you had Starfleet officers staging military coups, numerous "we're at war so the ethics are getting murky" moments, Dr. Khan Noonian Bashir, the Defiant (a warship employed by a nominally peace-oriented organization - imagine NOAA having a battleship), Quark's semi-legal activities, fallen-from-grace Cardassian spies... heck, Sisko was considered a religious figure by the Bajorans and the Federation was tacitly okay with that. Was any of it realistic? I don't know, but it was certainly much more interesting.

    This is why Mal and Kirk are loved so much by so many. Yes, in the real world, they'd be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Thing is, TV isn't supposed to be realistic - it's supposed to be aspirational. All things being equal, would you prefer to live in a world where you have to thoughtfully weigh your actions against the consequences, where you have to consider the feelings and lives of others, where you're bound by the rules imposed upon you by society and the rule of law? Or, would you prefer to live in a world where your rules and ethics are the only ones that are inviolate and everyone else just has to deal with that because you're just that awesome?

    Personally, I know I'm not that awesome, but, man, wouldn't it be sweet if I was?

  9. Re:i need an example on Please Do Not Change Your Password · · Score: 1

    Keepass is awesome and I have it installed everywhere. Now, if only I could remember what my Keepass password is...

  10. Re:Password aging isn't in touch with the real wor on Please Do Not Change Your Password · · Score: 1

    Me too, but I haven't figured out how to operate human nature's repository manager. I keep telling people to "apt-get a clue", but they just stare at me funny.

  11. Re:Password aging isn't in touch with the real wor on Please Do Not Change Your Password · · Score: 1

    That's where draconian corporate IT policies can dispose of the trash for you. Tell your boss to institute a new policy - if a user asks for more than X requests from the IT department within Y time frame, they are to be disciplined for "wasting valuable department time" or some such corporate-speak. Tell your boss that you need this policy in place to weed out a "small minority" of users that repeatedly "monopolize" your time. Then, once it's put into place, show your boss who's in charge by requiring them to call you X-1 times (fiddling with their patch cable, applying the "Keyboard layout defaults to Dvorak" GPO to their user account, etc.), then telling them that if they even think about changing the policy, you'll be sure they have to make that one last call.

  12. Re:Resumes in Word not hard for Java/Unix people.. on How To Find Bad Programmers · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Fair enough - there's definitely value in having clear shop standards, so I can certainly understand wanting to weed out those that are too inflexible in their own ways to work properly with a team. Personally, I keep my resume' in a variety of formats so I can "play along" anyway, so it's not a huge deal; that said, I'll have to remember to create a Times New Roman vanilla formatting version one for companies like yours.

    This being Slashdot and all, though, I will note that binary Word docs are neither simple, clear, nor standard, even among versions of Word, much less non-MS products. I'll also note that allowing Word docs as your only standard opens the door to a ton of undesirable and unintended flexibility, such as using complex sectioning, versioning, and incompatible fonts, which might freeze up your OCR systems. Given what you've stated thus far, a far more simple and clear test of shop standard adherence would be just requiring plain-text resumes, which I've seen many places do quite successfully.

  13. Re:Resumes in Word not hard for Java/Unix people.. on How To Find Bad Programmers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem isn't about whether it's hard or not for those that don't wish to use proprietary software to open Word docs. The problem is that Word docs are not platform neutral - the font that you used on your resume' might not line up with the fonts that I have installed on my system and vice-versa. Plus, the version you're using might not be the same as the version I'm using and might get rendered differently if you use any sort of fancy-ish formatting (tables, columns, sections, etc.). This would be an issue whether the person on the other end wanted a Word doc, an ODF file, or any other non-trivial word processing document. Realistically, if you want to submit your resume' and have it look as good as possible, you want to know that the person on the other end will be able to see the same thing that you see when you created it; if they're making that functionally impossible by requiring it in a non-print safe non-vendor neutral format, it shows they don't understand such issues, which hints strongly at how well they pay attention to such issues with the rest of their work.

    Put another way, imagine working for an employer whose corporate culture can be summed up as "Works for me", then imagine how much fun it would be to fix the consequences of such an ethos when a major customer or the CEO finds something is broken.

  14. Re:Some guesstimate? on Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I know - I just thought it was a good excuse to learn something new, that's all.

  15. Re:Yeah thats right. on Man-Made Atomic Clocks the Best In the Universe · · Score: 1

    With a really big telescope. Plus, the universe is round, so you just kind of loop around anyway. Works great!

  16. Re:Ubuntu user on Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid · · Score: 1

    Okay, first off, if you want to go full CLI, you can always install Ubuntu Server, which does not come with a GUI by default. It does come with Byobu, though, which just kicks ass; it isn't enabled by default, though. Second, the other options for desktop use are also "GUI-fied toy distros" - OpenSUSE, for example, is known for its excellent KDE support (definitely not a CLI), and Fedora Core comes with GNOME by default (if I remember correctly - I probably don't), just like Ubuntu.

    So, why would someone use a GUI on Linux? Well, the same reason everyone else uses a GUI - for one-off tasks that you don't already know how to do, GUIs are far more intuitive than CLIs. It's a lot easier to look at an option screen with a bunch of radio buttons and check boxes that enumerate possible value combinations than it is to remember which flag combination does what, especially when working with a command that you're not particularly familiar with. Plus, GUIs can show a wealth of information on the screen simultaneously; unless you use something like Byobu or you really know what you're doing with Screen, showing the same level of information on a CLI can be a bit of a challenge. Of course, GUIs don't scale up particularly well, but, then again, CLIs don't scale down particularly well, either, so it all works out.

  17. Re:Lies, damn lies and statistics... on Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid · · Score: 1

    People that get excited about Ubuntu Server's Eucalyptus-based EC2-compatible cloud server support, I imagine. Not a huge niche, mind you, but still a niche.

  18. Re:Some guesstimate? on Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid · · Score: 1

    Actually, I ran into a similar issue myself with an external USB DVD drive, though I still have no idea what caused it or what the issue was. The problem was persistent among other versions of Linux, too, at least to a point (OpenSUSE 11.1 had the issue, but 10 didn't; Debian 5 did). It wasn't all bad, though; thanks to Ubuntu's failure to properly handle it, I learned how to set up a PXE boot server (computer I was installing on didn't have a built-in optical drive). If I really felt like it, I could probably isolate the kernel version that nuked it, but I'm not feeling anywhere near that motivated.

  19. Re:from the article; she cracked his pw on Son Sues Mother Over Facebook Posts · · Score: 1

    Thank you. It doesn't matter how easy it is for you to reach out and grab something, if it's not yours, it's not yours and you have no right to touch it without permission. Good grief.

  20. Re:No contact. on Son Sues Mother Over Facebook Posts · · Score: 1

    Perhaps so, but humans aren't deterministic state machines. We're way too complicated to lump into a stimulus-response pattern, or even a "if person A experiences this with genes from B and C and experiences circumstance D in the meantime, person A will do E" pattern. Humans are, at best, mildly probabilistic; many people might do E, but some will do something wildly different, if only to be willfully contrary, or perhaps because they didn't even notice D or interpreted A is something completely different.

    Granted, probabilistically, it's safe to say that, if somebody was raised in an abusive household, there is a greater chance that the person will be abusive as well. However, that chance is nowhere near guaranteed; there's also a chance that the person might fly to the other extreme, or just be pretty normal overall. Even if that weren't the case, and even if people were truly deterministic, it doesn't change the fact that being abusive does have clearly delineated legal consequences, in no small part because we, as a society, have decided that there is a vested interest in breaking generational chains of abusive behavior. These legal consequences cannot take into account prior background because, if they did, the law would be pointless - we'd just decide that the abusive person came from an abusive background and is therefore not responsible for their actions; this, of course, would give the abuser the freedom to continue the abuse. That doesn't help anybody. So, we introduce a circumstance L - if you abuse somebody, the law will come down on you like a pile of bricks.

    Of course, humans aren't deterministic nor perfectly rational, so many people will continue to ignore circumstance L or misinterpret it wildly and continue abusing, which is why we're having this discussion in the first place.

  21. Re:16 years old, no legal rights against parents. on Son Sues Mother Over Facebook Posts · · Score: 1

    I found one! It's not exactly "high quality", though.

  22. Re:Hasbro and Mattel on Scrabble To Allow Proper Nouns · · Score: 1

    What?! Everybody knows that Scrabble is a mixture of pork scrap broth and cornmeal! Only an illiterate European would dare suggest otherwise! Now go take your spotted dick, your groaty dick, your faggots and peas, your toad in the hole, and your jellied eels somewhere else, you ne'er-do-well Tory-worshiping anarcho-monarchist! Yeah!

  23. Re:Sounds about right on Compliance Is Wasted Money, Study Finds · · Score: 1

    Who "identifies and defines" who has access to what?

    Depends on how your organization is structured. It might be IT, but, whether it is or not, somebody is going to need to talk to the salespeople and their bosses to find out how they work and what they really need to get their jobs done. Generally, there's going to be some give and take - sales will want as much access as humanly possible but other departments (finance, accounting, etc.) will want to curtail that. Somebody will ultimately have to be responsible for finding the right balance between what sales wants, what sales needs, and what everybody needs to protect. That somebody might be you, or it might be your boss, or it might be an outside auditor. It really doesn't matter.

    You've just moved the problem.

    Not really. Security is a constantly evolving process and, in the end, somebody (or something) has to ultimately be responsible for how that process evolves within an organization. Part of the problem, as you seem to intuitively understand, is that security can frequently get in the way of people's jobs; when that happens, people will do everything they can to circumvent those obstructions so they can get their work done. Keep in mind that the most secure computing system in the planet is one that's unplugged and encased in a concrete and steel bunker; it's also not going to be particularly useful. If there's something you need to keep from a group of people that the group needs to get their jobs done, you either need to change their job descriptions so they don't need that bit of information anymore or you need to rethink the problem - maybe you don't (or can't) keep the information from them, so you'll instead have to settle for knowing when and how they're accessing it and what they're doing with it.

  24. Re:Sounds about right on Compliance Is Wasted Money, Study Finds · · Score: 1

    Easy. First, define what parts of the customer database they absolutely need access to and what kind of access they need. Does every salesperson need all of the information about every customer, or can you just hand them the customer records that they absolutely need? Are there certain records in the database that you don't want them overwriting (pricing/financial/etc.) that they do need write access to? Are there certain records that they absolutely do not need to be able to read?

    Then, once you've identified and defined what parts of the database they need access to and the minimum level of access they need to those parts to get work done, you then audit everything they're allowed to touch. Who edited this record when? When did Bob Salesguy last view this record? When did Jill Salesgirl create this customer record? Who updated the contact name and address on Fabrikam Northwinds, Inc.?

    Of course, once you've defined what kind of access you want to provide and how much of an audit trail you need, the next step is to see if your existing infrastructure can support that. Are there parts missing (parts of the audit trail, etc.)? Is it technically impossible or really difficult with what you're currently using (database is in an Access DB that can be carried on a USB stick)?

    Ultimately, it all comes down to least privilege. You want to give them the least amount of access possible that lets them do their jobs, and not a whit more. Define how to do that and you've defined a security process.

  25. Re:Sounds about right on Compliance Is Wasted Money, Study Finds · · Score: 1

    Use the usual suspects - auditing and access controls. Make sure nobody that shouldn't or needn't have access to it does and keep track of when/where/what/how/why those that do are accessing it. Many of the security regulations deal with the "what" part (PCI-DSS says you normally don't get to keep your customer's credit card number, no matter how profitable it might be for you to keep it lying around in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere) and the "how" part (no, you don't get to access your medical network through an unsecured, unencrypted wireless LAN).