I didn't know about the language thing. My main contact with people in India is call centres and the accents are so strong and hard to understand I just assumed it was the engish-is-a-second-language thing. It never occurred to me that it was most likely simply an accent. I guess I should get out more.
Could it be that they learn English with a more British influence? India has more British influence than most other Asian countries.
My mum is a teacher in an area with lots of south Asian ancestry children, and several of them have set up companies in India providing elocution lessons in English. The result is their accent is influenced by the British city my mum teaches in. I've twice had Indian call centre staff tell me I'm very easy to understand.
In London the concern was the public transport would be too full with Londoners and normal tourists for there to be space for the Olympic spectators, so there was a similar big campaign -- flexible working hours, working from home, cycling instead of using the train, etc.
Special lanes were also made for athlete's buses, and "official vehicles", i.e. any vehicle carrying someone with lots of money.
The result was trains emptier during the day than on a normal evening or night, and various "important" people using trains rather than their official luxury vehicles, as they were faster and more reliable. Also, no normal tourists came to London, no Londoners did touristy things in their own city, and the economy suffered greatly because no one went shopping. There was a last-minute advertising campaign to Londoners telling them (us) not to stay at home after all.
I don't know the rules for Paris, but have a vague idea of what the rules are here in London.
I think the choice is between paying a huge fine/charge (£100 or £200) if you really must use a decades-old dirty vehicle, which I suppose could be worthwhile for some very specialist equipment (a crane?), or using a newer vehicle.
In either case, I think deliveries outside peak times are strongly encouraged, in different ways (parking restrictions, road access restrictions etc -- this is all quite local government stuff). Construction is often restricted unless waste and deliveries are done in the best possible way, which means by barge or rail if at all possible, major road otherwise, and non-major road as a last resort. (The latter is more about road safety, particularly of children, than pollution.)
The rubbish and recycling collected from my house in central London is taken a short distance, and stuck on a barge (rubbish) or train (recycling) for the rest of the trip.
I visited London in 1985. After just one day, my snot was black from all the soot. Was disconcerting to blow my nose and see a white tissue turn black. I hear that today, London is much cleaner.
That can happen if you take the Underground a lot in one day, as there's a lot of dust in the tunnels. Supposedly (I read the research, but don't care to try and find it again right now) it's safe, since the particles are mostly iron oxides from the steel wheels rubbing the steel rails, and are big enough that your nose filters them.
I wasn't born in 1985, and moved to London in 2004, so what I think is "bad" might be nothing compared to what it was. Certainly the pollution in London is less of a problem than in most large American cities I've visited, but worse than all other western/northern European cities.
I posted my comment in response to "the way dates are usually spoken", which you didn't qualify with a region.
If the problem is the extra "the" and "of" I suggest adopting a Yorkshire accent/dialect, where "the" has no syllables: "I'm working down t'pit". "T'eighteenth 'f December".
Also, I think "Nobody except voice-overs in movies use your preferred format in speech. "2005... February 14th" is wrong -- in Chinese and Japanese dates are spoken and written year-month-day.
I can only search in German, but that shows a German child can only get a prepaid 'credit' card, exactly the same as a British child.
That isn't a credit contract though. Can you get that in Germany if you're under 18 (or 16)? I don't think you can in the UK (under 18), and I don't think you can get a loan either.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
I do. It's much more relevant now than any other time.
Criminals don't abide by the laws, but with good enforcement and harsh sentencing for criminals using a gun the chance they'll carry one (and use it) decreases.
Britain has harsh gun laws: it's pretty much an automatic minimum-five-year jail sentence if you handle a gun without a license. Shootings are rare, mass-shootings + suicide far rarer, and accidents (child getting gun, etc) very rare too. Knife crime is possibly more common that the US (I haven't checked), but I prefer it that way.
Some criminals have guns, but they're careful with them. They're kept hidden somewhere (hidden in a relative's house, and carried to and from the scene by a young gang member in an attempt to avoid the penalty for possessing a gun).
For example, 12 years for possessing a firearm, ammunition and knives with intent.
Or 18 months for a 13-year-old holding a gun for an older gang member.
The house I rented in London for a couple of years (moved out a few months ago) had a residents' association. It was worth about the same, about £600k, but being London was tiny.
The fee was £35 a year, which paid for the private access roads to be maintained and secured, signs that claimed there was CCTV (I don't think there was), and flowers for some of the public green bits.
From when Google Maps launched? I don't care to look.
But the service wasn't instantly good worldwide, and even here in the UK I preferred to use Multimap.co.uk and Streetmap.co.uk for a while, as did many people.
The nearest case now is somewhere like Bosnia; as you can see they only have major roads. Five years ago the country was probably blank, like North Korea is now (although for lack of data, rather than politics).
(Although in the case of Bosnia, if there's a local mapping provider I can't find it with a cursory search.)
I've only used Ubuntu in it, but a colleague set up something with RedHat. I think he made the base box himself, rather than using something publicly available. That is, he made an extremely minimal install of RedHat, then followed the instructions on what's required -- adding a specific username with an SSH key and adding VirtualBox guest tools so it can mount a directory from the host. (Possibly removing certain temporary files -- I think Ubuntu caches the network card MAC address, so that file needs removing.) Vagrant can then package that up.
There's also a list of community-made ones here: http://www.vagrantbox.es/ (I've not used any of these.)
You might find Veewee useful if you want to generate a base.box yourself. The colleague got this working, I think quite easily, but we don't really need it so I didn't look myself.
it looks like you just told someone how to do something that you have never done yourself.
Yes, but hopefully it's enough to lead him towards the solution, and I think the response to this article has established that/. readers (commenters?) don't need handholding.
I've never installed the Oracle database, but there's usually a command-line option on commercial installers, even if it's not properly documented. Try running with -help, --help, -h, etc and see if it will tell you.
No remote desktop in linux? Oh teh noes might have to use SSH like a big boy.
That's not the best bit. From the fine^W fucking article:
This is very handy if you don’t like the terminal file editor Vi (or Vim), as WinSCP provides an easier way to edit config files.
and this:
I started on PCs back in the pre-Windows days when DOS command line was the only game in town, but honestly, trying to navigate around a directory tree from a command line is a bit tedious! With WinSCP, it becomes easier as you get a higher-level view of the folder structure.
This bit's odd:
Interestingly, the Linux VPS seems about 10 times faster than the same spec Windows VPS.
(I don't mind the guy having his blog, and everyone starts learning somewhere. There's just no way it belongs on/., let alone the front page! I wonder if chose to write it, thinking it was useful, or was told to write it for Dice?)
I'll try and make the first useful comment of the discussion (so, it has nothing to do with the article).
I've been using Vagrant to manage development VMs. It automates using VirtualBox. There's an example on that homepage: $ vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box $ vagrant init $ vagrant up which leaves you will a running Ubuntu lucid install. Apart from the once-only download of the base image, it takes about 15 seconds to do this.
I've customised the vagrant configuration and added Puppet scripts, so it takes about 30 seconds to bring up my base box (which includes Apache, Tomcat, etc), download the software I've written from a Maven repository, and deploy it to Tomcat. My colleagues have a clone of the base box I produced
The operations team are in the process of producing a set of Puppet scripts for the production (UAT, etc) servers. Once they've done that, I'll make my Vagrant VM a reasonable derivation of the live environment.
Another tool, veewee, automates producing Vagrant boxes. I've not had time to look at this myself, but as far as I can see it automates setting up a VM (configuring discs, network, etc) and installing an OS, then exporting the resulting drive. I don't need many different host environments, but if you were testing some software against many different Linuxes or otherwise frequently installing Linux on VMs it could be useful.
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is conversation view, where it groups messages together in conversations, so instead of a ton of disparate emails, they're grouped together in a single line and can be seen in sequential order. Back when I switched over to Gmail, it was the only thing that had this feature, and now I find it indispensable
Not quite -- the mail client integrated into Opera had this.
It also had the idea of labelling messages rather than sorting them (the same message could appear in more than one "folder").
I have to use Outlook at work, and have similar problems. The worst thing is that I can't easily hide a message but not delete it -- everything clutters up the inbox, basically forever. My GMail inbox just has messages I've yet to deal with (about 50, the oldest is over a year old, but still relevant).
(You probably know all this, but it might be interesting to someone. One of the sysadmins at work could do with reading it...)
I practically never write scripts for Windows machines, hence never having a genuine use for that VB feature, but on Linux (etc) there's a close-enough equivalent for getting things done; and for shell scripts the default is to continue in case of error. The -e flag to the interpreter prevents this.
#!/bin/sh cd/put/archives/here tar cjvf archive-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2/files/to/archive/* rm -f/files/to/archive/* echo "files archived in archive-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2"
The cd failing (network down? Disc had errors and wasn't mounted? someone moved the directory?) and the tar failing (filesystem suddenly read-only?) won't stop the rm happening, but "#!/bin/sh -e" would.
(Alternatively, tar has a --remove-files option, which would prevent removing a file created since tar was executed, but you could still end up with the archive being put in the wrong place.)
You can let a command fail by using ||, for example:
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know about the language thing. My main contact with people in India is call centres and the accents are so strong and hard to understand I just assumed it was the engish-is-a-second-language thing. It never occurred to me that it was most likely simply an accent. I guess I should get out more.
Could it be that they learn English with a more British influence? India has more British influence than most other Asian countries.
My mum is a teacher in an area with lots of south Asian ancestry children, and several of them have set up companies in India providing elocution lessons in English. The result is their accent is influenced by the British city my mum teaches in. I've twice had Indian call centre staff tell me I'm very easy to understand.
In London the concern was the public transport would be too full with Londoners and normal tourists for there to be space for the Olympic spectators, so there was a similar big campaign -- flexible working hours, working from home, cycling instead of using the train, etc.
Special lanes were also made for athlete's buses, and "official vehicles", i.e. any vehicle carrying someone with lots of money.
The result was trains emptier during the day than on a normal evening or night, and various "important" people using trains rather than their official luxury vehicles, as they were faster and more reliable. Also, no normal tourists came to London, no Londoners did touristy things in their own city, and the economy suffered greatly because no one went shopping. There was a last-minute advertising campaign to Londoners telling them (us) not to stay at home after all.
I don't know the rules for Paris, but have a vague idea of what the rules are here in London.
I think the choice is between paying a huge fine/charge (£100 or £200) if you really must use a decades-old dirty vehicle, which I suppose could be worthwhile for some very specialist equipment (a crane?), or using a newer vehicle.
In either case, I think deliveries outside peak times are strongly encouraged, in different ways (parking restrictions, road access restrictions etc -- this is all quite local government stuff). Construction is often restricted unless waste and deliveries are done in the best possible way, which means by barge or rail if at all possible, major road otherwise, and non-major road as a last resort. (The latter is more about road safety, particularly of children, than pollution.)
The rubbish and recycling collected from my house in central London is taken a short distance, and stuck on a barge (rubbish) or train (recycling) for the rest of the trip.
I visited London in 1985. After just one day, my snot was black from all the soot. Was disconcerting to blow my nose and see a white tissue turn black. I hear that today, London is much cleaner.
That can happen if you take the Underground a lot in one day, as there's a lot of dust in the tunnels. Supposedly (I read the research, but don't care to try and find it again right now) it's safe, since the particles are mostly iron oxides from the steel wheels rubbing the steel rails, and are big enough that your nose filters them.
I wasn't born in 1985, and moved to London in 2004, so what I think is "bad" might be nothing compared to what it was. Certainly the pollution in London is less of a problem than in most large American cities I've visited, but worse than all other western/northern European cities.
See: http://www.airqualitynow.eu/comparing_home.php and http://airnow.gov/
In Beijing I felt sick because of the pollution, and it stung my throat. See http://bjair.info/
(Last time I checked I concluded that all these sites used the same numeric index, but the EU one's colours are different.)
I posted my comment in response to "the way dates are usually spoken", which you didn't qualify with a region.
If the problem is the extra "the" and "of" I suggest adopting a Yorkshire accent/dialect, where "the" has no syllables: "I'm working down t'pit". "T'eighteenth 'f December".
Also, I think "Nobody except voice-overs in movies use your preferred format in speech. "2005... February 14th" is wrong -- in Chinese and Japanese dates are spoken and written year-month-day.
Essentially all of non-UK Europe.
I can only search in German, but that shows a German child can only get a prepaid 'credit' card, exactly the same as a British child.
That isn't a credit contract though. Can you get that in Germany if you're under 18 (or 16)? I don't think you can in the UK (under 18), and I don't think you can get a loan either.
Its the 18th of December, as usually spoken in Britain. Most - maybe all - European languages follow the same pattern.
It's T-3 hours from a tragic killing of 18 kids and you're already throwing politics into this discussion?
Why else was it posted to Slashdot? It's hardly news for nerds, and was reported on the normal news hours ago.
This system works and take out the crackpots.
What probably helps too is that we take more care of the "crackpots" here. Free (ish, depending) medical care, including mental health care.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
I do. It's much more relevant now than any other time.
Criminals don't abide by the laws, but with good enforcement and harsh sentencing for criminals using a gun the chance they'll carry one (and use it) decreases.
Britain has harsh gun laws: it's pretty much an automatic minimum-five-year jail sentence if you handle a gun without a license. Shootings are rare, mass-shootings + suicide far rarer, and accidents (child getting gun, etc) very rare too. Knife crime is possibly more common that the US (I haven't checked), but I prefer it that way.
Some criminals have guns, but they're careful with them. They're kept hidden somewhere (hidden in a relative's house, and carried to and from the scene by a young gang member in an attempt to avoid the penalty for possessing a gun).
For example, 12 years for possessing a firearm, ammunition and knives with intent.
Or 18 months for a 13-year-old holding a gun for an older gang member.
Aren't there laws in the UK that allow holding 'suspected terrorists' for as long as they want? So not getting charged may not mean much.
No. For "terrorism" it's 14 days, after a reduction from 28, and an attempt by the government to increase it to 42. See https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/terrorism/extended-pre-charge-detention/index.php
See http://www.yourrights.org.uk/yourrights/the-rights-of-suspects/police-powers-of-arrest/police-detention.html for the case for normal offences (24 hours, possibly extension to 36).
The house I rented in London for a couple of years (moved out a few months ago) had a residents' association. It was worth about the same, about £600k, but being London was tiny.
The fee was £35 a year, which paid for the private access roads to be maintained and secured, signs that claimed there was CCTV (I don't think there was), and flowers for some of the public green bits.
So if he's not getting extradited, and there are no charges in the UK, is McKinnon a free man?
Yes, I think so. That's what not being charged generally means (if that sounds sarcastic it's not supposed to be -- simply IANAL.)
"... will not face charges in the UK, bringing to an end a 10-year legal battle."
"Janis Sharp, Mr McKinnon's mother, said the news was "amazing" and she was grateful the case was "all over now".
From when Google Maps launched? I don't care to look.
But the service wasn't instantly good worldwide, and even here in the UK I preferred to use Multimap.co.uk and Streetmap.co.uk for a while, as did many people.
The nearest case now is somewhere like Bosnia; as you can see they only have major roads. Five years ago the country was probably blank, like North Korea is now (although for lack of data, rather than politics).
(Although in the case of Bosnia, if there's a local mapping provider I can't find it with a cursory search.)
The UK is much the same ; EU law forces
The UK began metrication way before joining the EU. Don't read the Daily Mail so much.
I've only used Ubuntu in it, but a colleague set up something with RedHat. I think he made the base box himself, rather than using something publicly available. That is, he made an extremely minimal install of RedHat, then followed the instructions on what's required -- adding a specific username with an SSH key and adding VirtualBox guest tools so it can mount a directory from the host. (Possibly removing certain temporary files -- I think Ubuntu caches the network card MAC address, so that file needs removing.) Vagrant can then package that up.
There's also a list of community-made ones here: http://www.vagrantbox.es/ (I've not used any of these.)
You might find Veewee useful if you want to generate a base .box yourself. The colleague got this working, I think quite easily, but we don't really need it so I didn't look myself.
it looks like you just told someone how to do something that you have never done yourself.
Yes, but hopefully it's enough to lead him towards the solution, and I think the response to this article has established that /. readers (commenters?) don't need handholding.
The first Google result is this: https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=833167
I've never installed the Oracle database, but there's usually a command-line option on commercial installers, even if it's not properly documented. Try running with -help, --help, -h, etc and see if it will tell you.
Slashdot is dead, and this is its rotting corpse.
Where shall we all go, then?
WTF, I see why Taco left.
No remote desktop in linux? Oh teh noes might have to use SSH like a big boy.
That's not the best bit. From the fine^W fucking article:
This is very handy if you don’t like the terminal file editor Vi (or Vim), as WinSCP provides an easier way to edit config files.
and this:
I started on PCs back in the pre-Windows days when DOS command line was the only game in town, but honestly, trying to navigate around a directory tree from a command line is a bit tedious! With WinSCP, it becomes easier as you get a higher-level view of the folder structure.
This bit's odd:
Interestingly, the Linux VPS seems about 10 times faster than the same spec Windows VPS.
(I don't mind the guy having his blog, and everyone starts learning somewhere. There's just no way it belongs on /., let alone the front page! I wonder if chose to write it, thinking it was useful, or was told to write it for Dice?)
I'll try and make the first useful comment of the discussion (so, it has nothing to do with the article).
I've been using Vagrant to manage development VMs. It automates using VirtualBox. There's an example on that homepage:
$ vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
$ vagrant init
$ vagrant up
which leaves you will a running Ubuntu lucid install. Apart from the once-only download of the base image, it takes about 15 seconds to do this.
I've customised the vagrant configuration and added Puppet scripts, so it takes about 30 seconds to bring up my base box (which includes Apache, Tomcat, etc), download the software I've written from a Maven repository, and deploy it to Tomcat. My colleagues have a clone of the base box I produced
The operations team are in the process of producing a set of Puppet scripts for the production (UAT, etc) servers. Once they've done that, I'll make my Vagrant VM a reasonable derivation of the live environment.
Another tool, veewee, automates producing Vagrant boxes. I've not had time to look at this myself, but as far as I can see it automates setting up a VM (configuring discs, network, etc) and installing an OS, then exporting the resulting drive. I don't need many different host environments, but if you were testing some software against many different Linuxes or otherwise frequently installing Linux on VMs it could be useful.
Because it's from Dice: http://news.dice.com/2012/12/10/linux-virtual-private-server/
(The company that bought Slashdot.)
Wasn't Apple using Open Street Maps?
The article notes that Apple used various data sources, but explains that there's no reason to think the data sources are at fault here.
Open Street Map correctly locates Mildura: http://osm.org/go/uHcWMmj-?m
Oh. You want "Sort by --> Threaded". Even simpler.
It doesn't (last time I tried -- I'm not at work so I can't test) include messages *I* sent in that view, which is the critical part.
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is conversation view, where it groups messages together in conversations, so instead of a ton of disparate emails, they're grouped together in a single line and can be seen in sequential order. Back when I switched over to Gmail, it was the only thing that had this feature, and now I find it indispensable
Not quite -- the mail client integrated into Opera had this.
It also had the idea of labelling messages rather than sorting them (the same message could appear in more than one "folder").
I have to use Outlook at work, and have similar problems. The worst thing is that I can't easily hide a message but not delete it -- everything clutters up the inbox, basically forever. My GMail inbox just has messages I've yet to deal with (about 50, the oldest is over a year old, but still relevant).
(You probably know all this, but it might be interesting to someone. One of the sysadmins at work could do with reading it...)
I practically never write scripts for Windows machines, hence never having a genuine use for that VB feature, but on Linux (etc) there's a close-enough equivalent for getting things done; and for shell scripts the default is to continue in case of error. The -e flag to the interpreter prevents this.
#!/bin/sh /put/archives/here /files/to/archive/* /files/to/archive/*
cd
tar cjvf archive-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2
rm -f
echo "files archived in archive-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2"
The cd failing (network down? Disc had errors and wasn't mounted? someone moved the directory?) and the tar failing (filesystem suddenly read-only?) won't stop the rm happening, but "#!/bin/sh -e" would.
(Alternatively, tar has a --remove-files option, which would prevent removing a file created since tar was executed, but you could still end up with the archive being put in the wrong place.)
You can let a command fail by using ||, for example:
#!/bin/sh -e /put/archives/here /files/to/archive/* --remove-files
cd
tar cvf archive-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar
xz --best archive-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar || echo "Compression failed"