Not sure where you took your "poetical exegesis" class, but you should ask for a refund.
The narrator as "vain, shallow individual" is entirely a character pulled out of your hindquarters, as there is nothing in the text of the poem to lead to that conclusion.
The poem is simply a reflection on how we, as individuals, make choices in life. Some of us choose to take the direction taken by most of those around us. That might be university, family, job, retirement in FL. Some of us choose to turn aside from that direction and try another path. Programming a PDP to play "Space Travel," for example. Or writing an operating system "just for fun."
Frost's suggestion is that these choices of path may seem insignificant at the time -- both paths being nearly the same; but that, as "way leads on to way," there's no going back and thus we may find ourselves down a path that leads to unexpected places. When Linus Torvalds wrote linux, he could not know that "the path less traveled" would lead to fame and fortune, literally. The college kids who created Slashdot could not know it would make them rich.
In fact, the point of the poem is exactly that it does matter which path you take. But that you don't always know how your choice is going to turn out. Frost himself might have continued his career as a teacher, a stable and certain means of supporting his family. Instead, he chose to focus on his poetry. He took a chance. And it worked well for him.
doesn't Debian only distribute the software, and therefore doesn't really have anything to do with the Sender-ID and the possible patents it depends on ? Or is Debian plainly boycotting any program from distribution that uses Sender-ID ?
The way Debian works, only "free" software is recognized as a standard part of the distribution. They used to have a separate section called "nonfree" or something like that, into which they would dump everything that didn't meet their spec for "free."
Debian zealots have been trying to some time to get rid of the "nonfree" contrib section altogether. They recently voted to get rid of all documentation that doesn't meet their spec -- specifically, pretty much everything from the FSF. (Doesn't that brighten your light -- installing the GNU C compiler with no documentation? If you think that is a good idea, install Debian.)
The recent announcement is just meant to advise developers that anything they develop that includes SID won't be distributed in the standard distribution section. It would go into the "nonfree" section until they get rid of that, as well.
Somehow, I don't think the prospect of not being in the Debian distribution will have much effect on those who would deploy the SID, anyway.
Let me get this straight, then. The US wanted to sanction Yugoslavia to put the pressure on. So Bobby Fischer comes into the country and walks out with several million dollars worth of Yugoslav wealth, and the US considers that a bad thing? The guy just removed several million dollars from the Yugoslav economy.
not exactly. i think the prize money was put up by some local millionaire. i believe it was basically a propaganda move on his part (they could have gone a few miles down the road and been in italy, if they had wanted to). but the crux of the biscuit was that fischer & a host of others (fellow chessplayers, chess groupies, journalists) spent a lot of money there -- hotels, meals, travel and so forth. so, it was a propaganda poke-in-the-eye for the US, as well as somewhat of an economic gain for the local economy.
remember that the whole boycott/embargo was controversial at the time, and not honored by the europeans. spassky, for example, took home something around a million $$ as the loser, and he just went back to his chateau in france. fischer went to hungary and then i think to south america. i dropped out of the chess scene years ago, and haven't followed any of that news since.
mp
Re:am I reading this straight?
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 2, Informative
The UN forbade people from playing chess in Yugoslavia?
the match had a multimillion-dollar purse. fischer walked off with several million dollars from the win. that's why it was considered a violation of the "economic" boycott instituted by the US at the time. his opponent, boris spassky, lived in france, and so had no issues.
also, to get there (because the US would not issue him a visa), fischer flew somewhere else (i forget where) and then bought another ticket into the match site. he was warned before he left, both
privately and publicly, that the gov't would arrest him if he went there and then came back to the US.
evidently, he's fallen on hard times. the last i heard, he was living in hungary with his girlfriend. i can't imagine what would take him to japan.
just for laughs, i checked out the adti web site and lo... it's hosted by geocities! which is owned/operated by yahoo! which runs on freebsd... hmm, i wonder what web server they're using.
c:\src\perl>geturl -h -d http://www.adti.net HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 19:56:02 GMT Location: http://geocities.yahoo.com Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
what a hoot. a guy using a web hosting service from one of the biggest users of open source to distribute broadsides condemning open source.
the irony of this article is that mccullagh argues that we would be "protected" from media monopolies by the anti-trust laws. yet, in the past he has argued that anti-trust laws are bad. he opposed the anti-trust suit against micro$haft, for example. libertarians (like mccullagh) are camp followers of monopoly capitalism. so, any time you see one of them making an argument on the basis of a gov't regulation, your b.s. meter should hit the red zone.
for purposes of argument, he'd like you to forget that, i don't doubt. but his agenda is not "more competition," it's more power and more money to those who already have power and money. he's a libertarian. after the fcc is gone -- surprise, let's get rid of anti-trust laws.
and while we're at it, since all gov't regulation of business is bad, let's get rid of environmental protection, worker safety rules, medical safety rules, anti-discrimination laws, as well. the libertarian premise is that if you die in an accident at work, your family can sue. that's the libertarian ideal of "protection" -- not that you have a right to live or to be protected from vicious and unscrupulous bosses, but that someone should have the right to a monetary profit from your death.
it's manifest that the fcc operates on the basis of what is best for large corporations. because the current operation of the fcc is bad does not mean that gov't regulation is bad -- that's a false argument. it means we need to rewrite the rules to keep the fcc from wasting our taxes on "content management." we need to return to the Constitutional concept of the "general welfare" of the citizenry. and the only way to do that is to kick out the republicans and other closet libertarians that currently control the rule-writing process in congress and the white house.
Yes, of course Debian Developers are principled people who care passionately about things other than software, and if you stick a thousand of them in a mailing list together there is bound to be fire! And hell, some of us are geeks without social skill. Cry me a river.
if you care more about your software than you do about your userbase, your software is DOA. and, indeed, that appears to be the case here. shipping software without documentation, requiring users to "go find" firmware to make their video cards work -- you couldn't look me in the face and tell me that you really care about your users. the whole point of debian is "purity" -- if you don't want to be a monk, don't pick up that disc. but the reality is, most of us install an OS on a computer in order to do work, not to make a social statement.
if this situation remains, two years from now, only debian developers will be using debian. you will have demonstrated your "purity" and accomplished nothing useful.
the reality is, when you are on the job, they own you. deal with it.
every company has its issues, and the best you can do is try to find one whose issues mesh with your workplace comfort.
the shotgun approach typified in your company's new policy is not unusual. basically, what happened was, someone in power saw/heard/felt through The Force that workers were abusing their time at work using personal cell phones. instead of dealing with the abusive individual, the new policy was instituted. you, quite naturally, are insulted, as the company has clearly taken the position that you cannot be trusted to handle personal communication devices otj.
but, these kinds of rules actually exist all over the corporate environment. for example, in order to get reimbursed for my business usage of my personal cell phone, i have to submit my entire, original cell bill. a copy, or any other kind of listing of actual business calls, is not acceptable.
i felt strongly that this was an invasion of my privacy -- who i call with my phone on non-business-related calls is none of their business. so, until i quit using that phone for personal calls, i did not submit any reimbursement requests for that phone. that was an expensive decision, dollar-wise, since i travel nationwide and use that phone extensively. and, every month i got the lecture from my "accountant" -- aka my wife -- about that expense.
you have to make those decisions. personally, i'd reconcile myself to the new program. you have an office phone, so anyone who needs to reach you in an emergency can do so there. if that's not acceptable, many alternatives have been offered. if monitoring devices is actually part of your job -- i.e., not just something you volunteer yourself to do -- then they will either provide you with the means to do it or move the responsibility to someone else. you send the appropriate person an email, informing him/her that you used to do that monitoring on your cell and, since that option is no longer available, they'll have to set up some other arrangement. remember that your goal is to be/appear cooperative. i guarantee you that being obstructionist is a behavior that will yield only poisonous fruit.
in the meantime, try not to take it too personally. gratuitously insulting behavior and demeaning of employees is part and parcel of corporate management's pattern. when you find one that is not that way, you'll probably look around and find yourself saying hello to st. peter.
the one thing i don't seem to be seeing is the question, "why drink alcohol?"
as a "reformed" drinker -- i haven't used alcohol or any other "mind-altering" drugs since 1992 -- my stance on this issue is fairly simple: don't drink. period. if you "have to have" caffeine to get going in the morning and/or booze to unwind at night, there's something wrong with the way you're living. instead of getting a fix of your "needed" drug, fix your life.
you'll find that you can celebrate the good times and get through the bad times, and even pull an all-nighter to finish that project, without resort to chemicals boosters. you'll feel better, work better, be more clearheaded and, yes, even enjoy yourself more. and isn't that what it's all about?
of course, i'm sure i'll get flamed for airing these heretical views.;-)
Perhaps so, but I believe that if you're running a business that is THAT big, you can afford to toss a little more resources at the problem and do it _right_ rather than to make a huge mess of things.
well, of course, they're not making a mess of things from the organizational standpoint. the shotgun approach is quite effective, actually. they block zip files or.js or.exe files, et viola, there's no problem. or rather, the burden has been transferred to the individual user who needs to send one of those types of files.
i find it annoying, especially because i'm a consultant for a software company and i quite frequently have to send and receive those kinds of files that are blocked by our exchange server. heh-heh, i'm not in a decisionmaking capacity in this regard, however.
it could be worse. i just sent a zip file to a customer yesterday, whose corporate mail system quarantines all file attachments until they can be scanned. scanning is done once a day, at 11 a.m. so, if you send him a zip after 11 a.m., he has to wait until the following morning to get it! yikes!
This is one of those cases where I think it might be useful to have the filtering software actually content-check zip files and only block them when they're not CRC OK zips. This would, of course, fail all non-zip files.
yes, there are all kinds of possibilities, all of which add complexity (and cost) to the project. in a corporate environment, it's not a trivial enterprise. i think a lot of the comments i've seen here come from people who aren't familiar with or haven't though about the complexity of maintaining a unified mail system for a thousand+ users nationwide or worldwide. you don't just throw in spamassassin and call it good.
i just rename the files when necessary. annoying but effective.
You're going to ban all compressed files, eh? (MyDoom comes through as a ZIP file.) That's a great move! I'm sure you'll save the company a lot of money on bandwidth by forcing people to send huge documents around without compression.
actually, this just happened to me yesterday. tried to send a client a zip file 3 times and then he informed me that zip files were being blocked. i renamed it to.bin to get it through.
it may not be about huge documents, it can be about multiple items archived together. in this case, a modified directory from a software install that needed to be inserted in his installation.
and it is annoying. but it's not exactly new, either. you have never been able to send me a.exe or a.js at work. exchange strips them off.
the other item that may be worth mentioning is, if people are getting bounces from this stuff at work, it likely is because they have used their work email address inappropriately, so that it has shown up somewhere publicly.
i have never received a spam or a virus on my work address. if you need to buy something, sell something or sign up for something, use your home email address. since i have unlimited email addresses from my ISP, i just use something that allows me to identify where it came from, should the address show up in a spam. otherwise, use "+" addressing, it works just as well.
just because you own a keyboard doesn't mean you're required to type on it.
That's a dismissive ad-hominem attack that's designed to suggest my opinions aren't relevant, while at the same not requiring you to present any evidence of that or counter-argument to my opinions.
as a matter of fact, it is rather a suggestion that you think first and then post. being accused of writing a "smirking slam" by a guy who had just posted a 30-line smirking slam against rob malda is, well, laughable.
i've been active in probably 1/2 dozen political movements and your holier-than-though chest-thumping makes you a poster boy for reasons not to join another one. that, sadly, is another point you don't get.
it's easy enough to tell people to "do without" when you're not the one who has to follow through. i'm sure you're more than willing to tell your wife "no, we're not having any tv in the house because directv is the only provider available" or, "i'm not doing business with sbc, so the phone has to go," or even, "i'm not having anything made in china by slave labor, so this computer is out the door." and then, of course, you don't use a dvd player, don't buy any music cd's from members of riaa, don't rent movies from blockbuster or hollywood, don't have a computer with ms-windows on it... and so on and so forth.
And people wonder why "Your Rights Online" keep getting trampled under by Big Corporations and Big Brother -- because even a so-called "geek leader" prefers sitting on his ass as a comfortable couch potato to standing up for a principle.
well, everybody has their hobby horse. i'll bet if i look at your credit card statements, i'll see a raft of purchases from amazon.com, one of the more morally corrupt net establishments. probably, some payouts or receipts from ebay, too. ditto for that group. you probably have a closet full of clothes made in china because they're cheap and you aren't too concerned about how they got that way.
i once went two years without a phone because i had a tiff with the phone company. all that did was make it hard for people to reach me. it's more important to pick your fights and win them than it is to go around thumping your chest and proclaiming your own "purity." i don't give a damn whether you're pure if you're a jerk -- i don't want to know you and neither does anyone else.
that's why, for example, the quakers are a religious body known the world over, even though they comprise a tiny fraction of the christian population. and that's why the eff doesn't pick up every case that comes along. they won't waste effort on a case they don't think they can win. there are plenty of moral causes that invite attention -- go to GreenPeace if you can't think of any. DirecTV isn't even on my radar.
just because you own a keyboard doesn't mean you're required to type on it.
there are two ways to do it. i quit years ago, in an unpleasant situation at work. we had a lot of immigrants -- mostly mexican & vietnamese -- and the office workers (all white) used to make a big stink about them drinking the coffee and using "too much" sugar. finally, they made a rule that the immigrants weren't allowed to make coffee if the pot was empty. that pissed me off so i quit drinking it. and since 99% of my coffee drinking was at work, the rest was easy. the moral is, you have to be motivated.
then, a little over a year ago, i moved from oregon to connecticut and during the drive across country, i started on coffee again. i drank it up until the week before this recent thanksgiving, when i got really sick and was laid out for 2.5 weeks. that was 2.5 weeks of no caffeine. when i got back on my feet, i just figured i might as well stay caffeine-free again.
so, yeah, you could get sick for a couple weeks. but my recommendation would be, put yourself in a situation where no caffeinated beverages are (readily) available. you could do it on vacation or you could just lock yourself up in the house for a few days.
motivation is the key, though. it has to be something you want to do, not something you think you should do. in the latter case, it probably won't happen but in the former case, you can just keep trying it. just because you dropped it and started again a few days later doesn't mean you "can't" do it. it means you have to try again and just keep working at it.
my personal motivator is that i don't like being addicted to anything. booze, cigarettes, coffee, anything that makes me feel like i don't have control over my actions -- i don't like it. you may need something similar to get clean.
Your "horse-opera plot" reference is "unknown" to me.
then why don't you look it up? in less than 60 seconds on google... wait, you probably don't know how to use a search engine, either. sorry. not only are the youth of today ignorant, but willfully so -- they can't be bothered to find answers. it's so much easier to just be snide, isn't it? horse opera
Yes lo-res by today's standards but for TV at that time it was cool
my first response is, "so what?" that may be interesting from a sociological standpoint but it's irrelevant from the standpoint of creating -- or recreating -- a movie based on the galactica premise. watching the reruns is a mix of boredom, embarrassment and laughter. my second response is, the show was a flop when it ran originally and, in retrospect, it's easy to see why. evidently, it wasn't all that "cool" in its own time zone, either.
it should be noted that most sci-fi over the last 50 years (sometimes sarcastically referred to as "space opera") is, in fact, very much akin to the "horse opera" genre. that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing -- good writing generally makes for good reading or good watching. (there've been a zillion rewrites of the "lost patrol" theme, from "duel at diablo," "valdez is coming," "the steel helmet" -- but "alien" was still a great movie.) but the "wagon train in space" theme is shopworn. it'll be tough for sci-fi channel to refresh it.
why would i want to watch an "updated" version of the original? what does that mean, exactly, "updated"?
i've watched a couple of the originals on sci-fi this week. c'mon people, it was a lame show with low-res special effects and horse-opera plots. it was "wagon train" in outer space! some of it was so badly done, it was "cover-your-eyes" embarrassing.
how do you update that? apparently, the complainers want the producers to give them the same tired plots with the same tired characters but in different uniforms with "hi-res" special effects. how boring.
i don't know if the new version is any good, of course, as i haven't yet seen it. but it's for sure that it should be allowed to stand or fall on its own merits. "is it a good movie?" is the only question that needs answering. it is not the original -- thank goodness. we already know that one was a clunker.
just my opinion, of course, but it is nowhere nearly as effective as spambouncer and requires a lot more maintenance and setup.
i installed spamassassin last april (v. 2.53) and spent quite a while "configuring" it, trying to get it to reject some quite obvious spams, such as the barrage of mails from e-gold.com. in the latter case, i finally gave up, spamassassin just kept delivering them to my inbox so i put a recipe in my.procmailrc to get rid of them. or, the case of a daily newsletter that i received that SA consistently labelled spam, in spite of my having added it to my whitelist more than 1/2 dozen times (and not even an html newsletter, plain text!). again, i finally had to resort to procmail to get it into my inbox.
i'm about to ditch "SA" and go back to spambouncer, possibly during my vacation this week. i just don't have the time to spend here, every night, adding dozens of new spams to the blacklist. installing SA was kind of supposed to get me out of that position.
my experience with SA is that it is overrated, while it has been getting a large number of the mails, when the failure rate puts 15-20 or more spams in my inbox every day, that is not an acceptable performance. that represents a substantial investment of effort to update the software... and even then, the update process doesn't always work.
i started with my company in december 2000 as a level-one tech support engineer. in 2 years, i had two promotions and have gone from that position to on-site consultant and i just got another "promotion" -- really an adjustment of my job description that enables me to be guaranteed travel only monday through wednesday. which is nice when you're used to being gone whenever and wherever they need you, week in and week out.
anyway, the new job description for the level-one tech position i originally held is below. not only did i not meet these qualifications then, i don't meet them now... in fact, the manager of tech support, who came up through the ranks, doesn't meet them either! (although, he does have a degree in music... so, he's got the BA part, anyway.) they want not only BA/BS, but MCSE, too! and then two years tech support experience on top of that. i wouldn't even get an interview for this job, yet, if i may say so, i have turned out to be an excellent investment from the company's point of view.
companies who put these kinds of strict requirements on a position like level-one tech support, put too much emphasis on technical skills and not enough emphasis on ability or desire. that's the real joke here.
it's not about the money, you can always get that. it's about getting the job you want, doing the things you want to do. people who meet these requirements are overqualified for this job and they don't stay. doh! i've been watching it happen... you'd think management would figure it out.
Required Skills
BS/BA degree is required
Minimum 2 years Technical support or IT experience
Must be a team player
Working knowledge of Microsoft Office is required
Proficiency in one or more of the following operating systems:
Windows NT/2000, UNIX, Linux, Sun Solaris, AIX
Knowledge of Networking Fundamentals is required
RDBMS Fundamentals is required
Understanding of Internet technologies is required
You are free to believe that but it doesn't make it true.
yes, that applies to you, too.
Me too. I even contribute code to Emacs. Do you?
no. do you have a point?
As I said earlier, I doubt that will happen.
it will happen because the people leading this circus don't care if anyone besides themselves uses debian. they care only about being "pure." it occurs to me that debian is kind of the linux equivalent of freebsd -- its biggest liability is its user group. the sad fact is, the debian group had the opportunity to "spread the gospel" of free software by making a distribution which would highlight its advantages. instead, it chose to concentrate its energies on divisive and largely irrelevant political and religious issues like the GNU documentation license. it's almost like "new user" is a cuss word in the debian language. whatever the outcome of this squabble, one fact is incontestable: not a single addition debian user will be added as a result of that outcome. the debian group has left the resolution of core usability issues to the non-free and even proprietary software interests. in so doing, it has done far more damage to the cause of free software that will ever be gained by a "victory" in this dispute.
before i would embark on a religious crusade, i would ask whether the world would be a better place as the result of my effort. in this case, the answer is clearly "no." this discussion is irrelevant except in the context of what will happen to debian when its leaders decide to remove the "offending" documentation. although you claim it "won't happen" (shade of frank zappa lurking in the shadows), that's just a way of avoiding the question. when one sets out on a course of action, the prudent measure is to consider all outcomes. it seems apparent that you, at least, have not considered the outcome, should the FSF refuse to change the license to meet your demands.
my own belief is that you are not the FSF and that you have an agenda which is not necessarily compatible with the agenda of the FSF. i would prefer that outside organizations, like debian, not dictate the agenda of the FSF. the next step in the debian crusade toward "purity" appears to be removing contrib. after that, i suspect the LGPL will come under fire. you are all free to go your own way (so to speak). i prefer you not reduce the FSF to a sideline organization as ineffective in defense of free software as debian is in its propagation.
Ask yourself why the FSF is documenting GPL'ed applications under a license that is non GPL compatible? That makes it impossible for anyone but them to cut & paste doc strings between an application and it's documentation, inhibiting forks.
why don't you ask them? they've answered the question, you just stopped up your ears. you read a bunch of propaganda by some debianites & accepted it uncritically. perhaps, you should consider asking yourself, what is the agenda of those complainers?
some of them, i believe, from having read their posts to debian mail lists, are motivated by personal dislike of rms. if he said the sun was yellow, they'd immediately get up a vote to declare it blue.
worst of all, you propagate a probably widely spread misconception. you can cut & paste all you want, you just can't alter or remove the invariant sections. none of which, as far as i have seen, are actually product documentation, they are things like the manifesto. if you're offended by the fact that you can't remove the manifesto from the emacs documentation, don't use emacs. i think you're silly.
i intend to keep using emacs, keep supporting the FSF and keep installing software that has the documentation included with it. the latter item, apparently, precludes anything from debian.
they are going to remove "non-free" documentation from debian... so, you can install debian but you won't have documentation for gcc, textutils, fileutils &c. good idea.
somebody ought to take those people behind the woodshed and beat them with a clue stick. all they really have done, at th end of the day, is make their distribution less usable (but anyone who actually installed and used debian knows "usability" is a cuss word at that outfit).
if they follow through to these absurd lengths, they've just relegated their distribution to the dustbin. even technically sophisticated people, who know what they are doing, are not going to use a system that requires them to go out to separate resources and download and install documentation for software already installed. it will be irritating and it will be seen as an unnecessary irritation.
if you want to be pure (as in "puritan"), install debian. if you want to get work done, install slackware. if you want a pretty desktop, install redhat. life is full of choices. i chose door number two.
i travel almost every week and i use mapquest but that is more out of inertia than anything else. their directions out of airports are frequently unusable, your best bet is still, ask the guy at the rental car gate.
their updating is unreliable. last week, i had to go to an address in columbus ohio that wasn't in mapquest, but was in yahoo maps. the "unknown" street in question had been in place more than a year. this happens to me pretty regularly with mapquest.
the last time it happened, i tried to find a way to report it, but my recollection is, they don't make it easy to point out holes in their data.
i haven't done a comparison, except in the sense that i go somewhere else about once a month -- that implies a failure rate of about 25%.
like any other service, it makes sense to examine the results critically. in many areas, their freeway exit numbers are outdated or wrong. last night was a good example, when the mapquest directions said take a certain exit number to go toward my destination, but they had the exit numbers reversed (the map said "20A to Akron" but in the real world, it was "20A to Cleveland", "20B to Akron"). they also haven't caught up with the renumbering scheme on interstates.
all in all, there are problems and you shouldn't rely on mapquest if you are going someplace unfamiliar. use the local resources to double-check your information.
Exactly. You visit att.com to pay your bill, and receive a cookie which will be sent back in future requests to att.com. Next, you visit the do-not-call list site, which includes an image from att.com. Your browser includes the cookie in the HTTP request for this image.
although that is true in particular cases, this is not one of them. (and, in addition, i don't think you can demonstrate that it is at all "common." i travel the country working on medium to large scale web sites and i have yet to see this technique being used.) it's important to stick with the facts in evidence when making decisions about how to behave in given circumstances.
first, the cookie set was not from att.com, it was from aens.net. second, as you should have seen had you read the entire comment and followed the links, the cookie was a session cookie -- it expired when the visitor session ended.
therefore, all the "what might have been" scenarios are not relevant. i am not big on conspiracy theories and generally want some evidence before concluding that something wrongful is occurring. the only thing that was wrongful in this case was some lurid opinionating masquerading as journalism.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure where you took your "poetical exegesis" class, but you should ask for a refund.
The narrator as "vain, shallow individual" is entirely a character pulled out of your hindquarters, as there is nothing in the text of the poem to lead to that conclusion.
The poem is simply a reflection on how we, as individuals, make choices in life. Some of us choose to take the direction taken by most of those around us. That might be university, family, job, retirement in FL. Some of us choose to turn aside from that direction and try another path. Programming a PDP to play "Space Travel," for example. Or writing an operating system "just for fun."
Frost's suggestion is that these choices of path may seem insignificant at the time -- both paths being nearly the same; but that, as "way leads on to way," there's no going back and thus we may find ourselves down a path that leads to unexpected places. When Linus Torvalds wrote linux, he could not know that "the path less traveled" would lead to fame and fortune, literally. The college kids who created Slashdot could not know it would make them rich.
In fact, the point of the poem is exactly that it does matter which path you take. But that you don't always know how your choice is going to turn out. Frost himself might have continued his career as a teacher, a stable and certain means of supporting his family. Instead, he chose to focus on his poetry. He took a chance. And it worked well for him.
mp
The way Debian works, only "free" software is recognized as a standard part of the distribution. They used to have a separate section called "nonfree" or something like that, into which they would dump everything that didn't meet their spec for "free."
Debian zealots have been trying to some time to get rid of the "nonfree" contrib section altogether. They recently voted to get rid of all documentation that doesn't meet their spec -- specifically, pretty much everything from the FSF. (Doesn't that brighten your light -- installing the GNU C compiler with no documentation? If you think that is a good idea, install Debian.)
The recent announcement is just meant to advise developers that anything they develop that includes SID won't be distributed in the standard distribution section. It would go into the "nonfree" section until they get rid of that, as well.
Somehow, I don't think the prospect of not being in the Debian distribution will have much effect on those who would deploy the SID, anyway.
mp
not exactly. i think the prize money was put up by some local millionaire. i believe it was basically a propaganda move on his part (they could have gone a few miles down the road and been in italy, if they had wanted to). but the crux of the biscuit was that fischer & a host of others (fellow chessplayers, chess groupies, journalists) spent a lot of money there -- hotels, meals, travel and so forth. so, it was a propaganda poke-in-the-eye for the US, as well as somewhat of an economic gain for the local economy.
remember that the whole boycott/embargo was controversial at the time, and not honored by the europeans. spassky, for example, took home something around a million $$ as the loser, and he just went back to his chateau in france. fischer went to hungary and then i think to south america. i dropped out of the chess scene years ago, and haven't followed any of that news since.
mp
the match had a multimillion-dollar purse. fischer walked off with several million dollars from the win. that's why it was considered a violation of the "economic" boycott instituted by the US at the time. his opponent, boris spassky, lived in france, and so had no issues.
also, to get there (because the US would not issue him a visa), fischer flew somewhere else (i forget where) and then bought another ticket into the match site. he was warned before he left, both privately and publicly, that the gov't would arrest him if he went there and then came back to the US.
evidently, he's fallen on hard times. the last i heard, he was living in hungary with his girlfriend. i can't imagine what would take him to japan.
mp
what a hoot. a guy using a web hosting service from one of the biggest users of open source to distribute broadsides condemning open source.
mp
for purposes of argument, he'd like you to forget that, i don't doubt. but his agenda is not "more competition," it's more power and more money to those who already have power and money. he's a libertarian. after the fcc is gone -- surprise, let's get rid of anti-trust laws.
and while we're at it, since all gov't regulation of business is bad, let's get rid of environmental protection, worker safety rules, medical safety rules, anti-discrimination laws, as well. the libertarian premise is that if you die in an accident at work, your family can sue. that's the libertarian ideal of "protection" -- not that you have a right to live or to be protected from vicious and unscrupulous bosses, but that someone should have the right to a monetary profit from your death.
it's manifest that the fcc operates on the basis of what is best for large corporations. because the current operation of the fcc is bad does not mean that gov't regulation is bad -- that's a false argument. it means we need to rewrite the rules to keep the fcc from wasting our taxes on "content management." we need to return to the Constitutional concept of the "general welfare" of the citizenry. and the only way to do that is to kick out the republicans and other closet libertarians that currently control the rule-writing process in congress and the white house.
mp
if you care more about your software than you do about your userbase, your software is DOA. and, indeed, that appears to be the case here. shipping software without documentation, requiring users to "go find" firmware to make their video cards work -- you couldn't look me in the face and tell me that you really care about your users. the whole point of debian is "purity" -- if you don't want to be a monk, don't pick up that disc. but the reality is, most of us install an OS on a computer in order to do work, not to make a social statement.
if this situation remains, two years from now, only debian developers will be using debian. you will have demonstrated your "purity" and accomplished nothing useful.
mp,"still a slackware user after all these years"
every company has its issues, and the best you can do is try to find one whose issues mesh with your workplace comfort.
the shotgun approach typified in your company's new policy is not unusual. basically, what happened was, someone in power saw/heard/felt through The Force that workers were abusing their time at work using personal cell phones. instead of dealing with the abusive individual, the new policy was instituted. you, quite naturally, are insulted, as the company has clearly taken the position that you cannot be trusted to handle personal communication devices otj.
but, these kinds of rules actually exist all over the corporate environment. for example, in order to get reimbursed for my business usage of my personal cell phone, i have to submit my entire, original cell bill. a copy, or any other kind of listing of actual business calls, is not acceptable.
i felt strongly that this was an invasion of my privacy -- who i call with my phone on non-business-related calls is none of their business. so, until i quit using that phone for personal calls, i did not submit any reimbursement requests for that phone. that was an expensive decision, dollar-wise, since i travel nationwide and use that phone extensively. and, every month i got the lecture from my "accountant" -- aka my wife -- about that expense.
you have to make those decisions. personally, i'd reconcile myself to the new program. you have an office phone, so anyone who needs to reach you in an emergency can do so there. if that's not acceptable, many alternatives have been offered. if monitoring devices is actually part of your job -- i.e., not just something you volunteer yourself to do -- then they will either provide you with the means to do it or move the responsibility to someone else. you send the appropriate person an email, informing him/her that you used to do that monitoring on your cell and, since that option is no longer available, they'll have to set up some other arrangement. remember that your goal is to be/appear cooperative. i guarantee you that being obstructionist is a behavior that will yield only poisonous fruit.
in the meantime, try not to take it too personally. gratuitously insulting behavior and demeaning of employees is part and parcel of corporate management's pattern. when you find one that is not that way, you'll probably look around and find yourself saying hello to st. peter.
mp
as a "reformed" drinker -- i haven't used alcohol or any other "mind-altering" drugs since 1992 -- my stance on this issue is fairly simple: don't drink. period. if you "have to have" caffeine to get going in the morning and/or booze to unwind at night, there's something wrong with the way you're living. instead of getting a fix of your "needed" drug, fix your life.
you'll find that you can celebrate the good times and get through the bad times, and even pull an all-nighter to finish that project, without resort to chemicals boosters. you'll feel better, work better, be more clearheaded and, yes, even enjoy yourself more. and isn't that what it's all about?
of course, i'm sure i'll get flamed for airing these heretical views. ;-)
mp
Rain?
actually, it rains a lot more in seattle than in pdx. 36" avg annual rainfall in seattle, 28" avg annual rainfall in portland.
mp
well, of course, they're not making a mess of things from the organizational standpoint. the shotgun approach is quite effective, actually. they block zip files or .js or .exe files, et viola, there's no problem. or rather, the burden has been transferred to the individual user who needs to send one of those types of files.
i find it annoying, especially because i'm a consultant for a software company and i quite frequently have to send and receive those kinds of files that are blocked by our exchange server. heh-heh, i'm not in a decisionmaking capacity in this regard, however.
it could be worse. i just sent a zip file to a customer yesterday, whose corporate mail system quarantines all file attachments until they can be scanned. scanning is done once a day, at 11 a.m. so, if you send him a zip after 11 a.m., he has to wait until the following morning to get it! yikes!
mp
yes, there are all kinds of possibilities, all of which add complexity (and cost) to the project. in a corporate environment, it's not a trivial enterprise. i think a lot of the comments i've seen here come from people who aren't familiar with or haven't though about the complexity of maintaining a unified mail system for a thousand+ users nationwide or worldwide. you don't just throw in spamassassin and call it good.
i just rename the files when necessary. annoying but effective.
mp
actually, this just happened to me yesterday. tried to send a client a zip file 3 times and then he informed me that zip files were being blocked. i renamed it to .bin to get it through.
it may not be about huge documents, it can be about multiple items archived together. in this case, a modified directory from a software install that needed to be inserted in his installation.
and it is annoying. but it's not exactly new, either. you have never been able to send me a .exe or a .js at work. exchange strips them off.
the other item that may be worth mentioning is, if people are getting bounces from this stuff at work, it likely is because they have used their work email address inappropriately, so that it has shown up somewhere publicly.
i have never received a spam or a virus on my work address. if you need to buy something, sell something or sign up for something, use your home email address. since i have unlimited email addresses from my ISP, i just use something that allows me to identify where it came from, should the address show up in a spam. otherwise, use "+" addressing, it works just as well.
mp
That's a dismissive ad-hominem attack that's designed to suggest my opinions aren't relevant, while at the same not requiring you to present any evidence of that or counter-argument to my opinions.
as a matter of fact, it is rather a suggestion that you think first and then post. being accused of writing a "smirking slam" by a guy who had just posted a 30-line smirking slam against rob malda is, well, laughable.
i've been active in probably 1/2 dozen political movements and your holier-than-though chest-thumping makes you a poster boy for reasons not to join another one. that, sadly, is another point you don't get.
it's easy enough to tell people to "do without" when you're not the one who has to follow through. i'm sure you're more than willing to tell your wife "no, we're not having any tv in the house because directv is the only provider available" or, "i'm not doing business with sbc, so the phone has to go," or even, "i'm not having anything made in china by slave labor, so this computer is out the door." and then, of course, you don't use a dvd player, don't buy any music cd's from members of riaa, don't rent movies from blockbuster or hollywood, don't have a computer with ms-windows on it ... and so on and so forth.
like i wrote, everybody has a hobby horse.
mp
well, everybody has their hobby horse. i'll bet if i look at your credit card statements, i'll see a raft of purchases from amazon.com, one of the more morally corrupt net establishments. probably, some payouts or receipts from ebay, too. ditto for that group. you probably have a closet full of clothes made in china because they're cheap and you aren't too concerned about how they got that way.
i once went two years without a phone because i had a tiff with the phone company. all that did was make it hard for people to reach me. it's more important to pick your fights and win them than it is to go around thumping your chest and proclaiming your own "purity." i don't give a damn whether you're pure if you're a jerk -- i don't want to know you and neither does anyone else.
that's why, for example, the quakers are a religious body known the world over, even though they comprise a tiny fraction of the christian population. and that's why the eff doesn't pick up every case that comes along. they won't waste effort on a case they don't think they can win. there are plenty of moral causes that invite attention -- go to GreenPeace if you can't think of any. DirecTV isn't even on my radar.
just because you own a keyboard doesn't mean you're required to type on it.
mp
then, a little over a year ago, i moved from oregon to connecticut and during the drive across country, i started on coffee again. i drank it up until the week before this recent thanksgiving, when i got really sick and was laid out for 2.5 weeks. that was 2.5 weeks of no caffeine. when i got back on my feet, i just figured i might as well stay caffeine-free again.
so, yeah, you could get sick for a couple weeks. but my recommendation would be, put yourself in a situation where no caffeinated beverages are (readily) available. you could do it on vacation or you could just lock yourself up in the house for a few days.
motivation is the key, though. it has to be something you want to do, not something you think you should do. in the latter case, it probably won't happen but in the former case, you can just keep trying it. just because you dropped it and started again a few days later doesn't mean you "can't" do it. it means you have to try again and just keep working at it.
my personal motivator is that i don't like being addicted to anything. booze, cigarettes, coffee, anything that makes me feel like i don't have control over my actions -- i don't like it. you may need something similar to get clean.
mp
then why don't you look it up? in less than 60 seconds on google ... wait, you probably don't know how to use a search engine, either. sorry. not only are the youth of today ignorant, but willfully so -- they can't be bothered to find answers. it's so much easier to just be snide, isn't it? horse opera
Yes lo-res by today's standards but for TV at that time it was cool
my first response is, "so what?" that may be interesting from a sociological standpoint but it's irrelevant from the standpoint of creating -- or recreating -- a movie based on the galactica premise. watching the reruns is a mix of boredom, embarrassment and laughter. my second response is, the show was a flop when it ran originally and, in retrospect, it's easy to see why. evidently, it wasn't all that "cool" in its own time zone, either.
it should be noted that most sci-fi over the last 50 years (sometimes sarcastically referred to as "space opera") is, in fact, very much akin to the "horse opera" genre. that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing -- good writing generally makes for good reading or good watching. (there've been a zillion rewrites of the "lost patrol" theme, from "duel at diablo," "valdez is coming," "the steel helmet" -- but "alien" was still a great movie.) but the "wagon train in space" theme is shopworn. it'll be tough for sci-fi channel to refresh it.
mp
i've watched a couple of the originals on sci-fi this week. c'mon people, it was a lame show with low-res special effects and horse-opera plots. it was "wagon train" in outer space! some of it was so badly done, it was "cover-your-eyes" embarrassing.
how do you update that? apparently, the complainers want the producers to give them the same tired plots with the same tired characters but in different uniforms with "hi-res" special effects. how boring.
i don't know if the new version is any good, of course, as i haven't yet seen it. but it's for sure that it should be allowed to stand or fall on its own merits. "is it a good movie?" is the only question that needs answering. it is not the original -- thank goodness. we already know that one was a clunker.
mp
i installed spamassassin last april (v. 2.53) and spent quite a while "configuring" it, trying to get it to reject some quite obvious spams, such as the barrage of mails from e-gold.com. in the latter case, i finally gave up, spamassassin just kept delivering them to my inbox so i put a recipe in my .procmailrc to get rid of them. or, the case of a daily newsletter that i received that SA consistently labelled spam, in spite of my having added it to my whitelist more than 1/2 dozen times (and not even an html newsletter, plain text!). again, i finally had to resort to procmail to get it into my inbox.
i'm about to ditch "SA" and go back to spambouncer, possibly during my vacation this week. i just don't have the time to spend here, every night, adding dozens of new spams to the blacklist. installing SA was kind of supposed to get me out of that position.
my experience with SA is that it is overrated, while it has been getting a large number of the mails, when the failure rate puts 15-20 or more spams in my inbox every day, that is not an acceptable performance. that represents a substantial investment of effort to update the software ... and even then, the update process doesn't always work.
mp
anyway, the new job description for the level-one tech position i originally held is below. not only did i not meet these qualifications then, i don't meet them now ... in fact, the manager of tech support, who came up through the ranks, doesn't meet them either! (although, he does have a degree in music ... so, he's got the BA part, anyway.) they want not only BA/BS, but MCSE, too! and then two years tech support experience on top of that. i wouldn't even get an interview for this job, yet, if i may say so, i have turned out to be an excellent investment from the company's point of view.
companies who put these kinds of strict requirements on a position like level-one tech support, put too much emphasis on technical skills and not enough emphasis on ability or desire. that's the real joke here.
it's not about the money, you can always get that. it's about getting the job you want, doing the things you want to do. people who meet these requirements are overqualified for this job and they don't stay. doh! i've been watching it happen ... you'd think management would figure it out.
Required Skills
yes, that applies to you, too.
Me too. I even contribute code to Emacs. Do you?
no. do you have a point?
As I said earlier, I doubt that will happen.
it will happen because the people leading this circus don't care if anyone besides themselves uses debian. they care only about being "pure." it occurs to me that debian is kind of the linux equivalent of freebsd -- its biggest liability is its user group. the sad fact is, the debian group had the opportunity to "spread the gospel" of free software by making a distribution which would highlight its advantages. instead, it chose to concentrate its energies on divisive and largely irrelevant political and religious issues like the GNU documentation license. it's almost like "new user" is a cuss word in the debian language. whatever the outcome of this squabble, one fact is incontestable: not a single addition debian user will be added as a result of that outcome. the debian group has left the resolution of core usability issues to the non-free and even proprietary software interests. in so doing, it has done far more damage to the cause of free software that will ever be gained by a "victory" in this dispute.
before i would embark on a religious crusade, i would ask whether the world would be a better place as the result of my effort. in this case, the answer is clearly "no." this discussion is irrelevant except in the context of what will happen to debian when its leaders decide to remove the "offending" documentation. although you claim it "won't happen" (shade of frank zappa lurking in the shadows), that's just a way of avoiding the question. when one sets out on a course of action, the prudent measure is to consider all outcomes. it seems apparent that you, at least, have not considered the outcome, should the FSF refuse to change the license to meet your demands.
my own belief is that you are not the FSF and that you have an agenda which is not necessarily compatible with the agenda of the FSF. i would prefer that outside organizations, like debian, not dictate the agenda of the FSF. the next step in the debian crusade toward "purity" appears to be removing contrib. after that, i suspect the LGPL will come under fire. you are all free to go your own way (so to speak). i prefer you not reduce the FSF to a sideline organization as ineffective in defense of free software as debian is in its propagation.
mp
why don't you ask them? they've answered the question, you just stopped up your ears. you read a bunch of propaganda by some debianites & accepted it uncritically. perhaps, you should consider asking yourself, what is the agenda of those complainers?
some of them, i believe, from having read their posts to debian mail lists, are motivated by personal dislike of rms. if he said the sun was yellow, they'd immediately get up a vote to declare it blue.
worst of all, you propagate a probably widely spread misconception. you can cut & paste all you want, you just can't alter or remove the invariant sections. none of which, as far as i have seen, are actually product documentation, they are things like the manifesto. if you're offended by the fact that you can't remove the manifesto from the emacs documentation, don't use emacs. i think you're silly.
i intend to keep using emacs, keep supporting the FSF and keep installing software that has the documentation included with it. the latter item, apparently, precludes anything from debian.
mp
somebody ought to take those people behind the woodshed and beat them with a clue stick. all they really have done, at th end of the day, is make their distribution less usable (but anyone who actually installed and used debian knows "usability" is a cuss word at that outfit).
if they follow through to these absurd lengths, they've just relegated their distribution to the dustbin. even technically sophisticated people, who know what they are doing, are not going to use a system that requires them to go out to separate resources and download and install documentation for software already installed. it will be irritating and it will be seen as an unnecessary irritation.
if you want to be pure (as in "puritan"), install debian. if you want to get work done, install slackware. if you want a pretty desktop, install redhat. life is full of choices. i chose door number two.
mp
their updating is unreliable. last week, i had to go to an address in columbus ohio that wasn't in mapquest, but was in yahoo maps. the "unknown" street in question had been in place more than a year. this happens to me pretty regularly with mapquest.
the last time it happened, i tried to find a way to report it, but my recollection is, they don't make it easy to point out holes in their data.
i haven't done a comparison, except in the sense that i go somewhere else about once a month -- that implies a failure rate of about 25%.
like any other service, it makes sense to examine the results critically. in many areas, their freeway exit numbers are outdated or wrong. last night was a good example, when the mapquest directions said take a certain exit number to go toward my destination, but they had the exit numbers reversed (the map said "20A to Akron" but in the real world, it was "20A to Cleveland", "20B to Akron"). they also haven't caught up with the renumbering scheme on interstates.
all in all, there are problems and you shouldn't rely on mapquest if you are going someplace unfamiliar. use the local resources to double-check your information.
mp
although that is true in particular cases, this is not one of them. (and, in addition, i don't think you can demonstrate that it is at all "common." i travel the country working on medium to large scale web sites and i have yet to see this technique being used.) it's important to stick with the facts in evidence when making decisions about how to behave in given circumstances.
first, the cookie set was not from att.com, it was from aens.net. second, as you should have seen had you read the entire comment and followed the links, the cookie was a session cookie -- it expired when the visitor session ended.
therefore, all the "what might have been" scenarios are not relevant. i am not big on conspiracy theories and generally want some evidence before concluding that something wrongful is occurring. the only thing that was wrongful in this case was some lurid opinionating masquerading as journalism.
mp