Why in the world would there be a DNS entry for every workstation?

And you want to reconfigure (or, more likely, reimage) the machine if it gets moved anyway. Renaming it is not a difficult thing to add in at that point.

I agree about the database-record-ID point, but the inconvenience of having to do a database lookup (or equivalent) every time you want to figure out "okay, which machine is this?" (or the reverse) outweighs the inconveniences of having to update the workstation name on the comparatively rare occasions when the machine gets moved. Include the unique ID (and I agree that the asset tag is a good choice) in the name, yes, but include the location there too.

Not to mention things like remote-control sessions for helpdesk purposes, and assigning images for "on next reboot", and associating applications for installation, and so forth. Being able to easily tell from the name which machines are which can be very helpful indeed.

I don't advocate naming the computer after the user, though - at least not when there's a more useful "location" to provide. For laptops, which get carried around from place to place, sometimes the name of the assigned user is the most helpful location information you can be certain of.

At my previous employer, we kept three pieces of information in the workstation name (we never used them as hostnames):

* The facility/complex/campus/whatever-you-call-it to which the machine was assigned, in the form of a two-digit ID number.
* Where at that facility to look for the machine, in the form of either the username of the assigned user (in the case of non-generic laptops) or a mostly-freeform string which was left up to the discretion of the tech assigned to that facility.
* The barcode number which constituted the asset tag for that particular computer.

All three of these were useful to be able to see at a glance. There were some issues with the "location" part not being updated, but since by and large only techs were allowed to move the equipment from room to room, and since laptops had to be turned in to the tech when the assignee left, there really weren't that many of them; the convenience of being able to know immediately from a computer name where it was located, or from a computer's location what its name would be, far outweighed any such problems.

I don't know if I'd necessarily use that exact system if designing a naming scheme for an organization of my own, but I would very likely use something similar, for the reasons cited above. It's certainly far better than most of the others I've seen suggested so far, at least for an "organizational deployment" sort of environment. (A home network, or a group of servers, could be very much another story.)

This is an example of why using (or, at least, relying on - which in practice is the same thing) actual data as primary keys is a bad idea. Even if there data contains something which is supposed to be guaranteed unique and is theoretically never supposed to change, you should generate an arbitrary unique key and use that as the primary ID; that avoids so many potential pitfalls from use cases, such as this one, which weren't thought of in advance.

Yes, exactly.

The entire point of the GPL is to make sure that people can edit the software they use (refer back to the semi-famous "RMS and a bad printer driver" story), or more particularly, to guarantee them some basic freedoms about what they can do with that software. If, after editing, they can't use it anymore, then that's a problem.

What those edits involve has absolutely no bearing on that central point.

If TiVo didn't want to have people able to edit the code running on the TiVo unit, they shouldn't have released it under the GPL - including, if necessary, not re-using already-GPLed code from other people. They discovered a loophole by which they could fulfill the letter of the GPL but not its intent or spirit - allow people to edit the code, but not run it. RMS quite naturally wanted to close that loophole, to prevent them or others from doing the same thing in the future; the GPLv3 was his way of doing so.

(And no, "but you *can* edit it, you just can't run it afterwards" doesn't fly - because at that point, you're no longer editing the code you *are* running, you're editing code you *aren't* running and never will be able to run.)

According to the NYT article which is the (real) FA, the mouse-over text will appear in fine print in place of the traditional print comic's "copyright someone-or-another YYYY-MM-DD" string.

This does, apparently, also mean that the book itself is being released without copyright, though exact details weren't provided.

Not necessarily.

In order for someone to realize that that has happened, they need to both see the story on the blog and see the story attributed to the AP. I don't find it particularly implausible that many or most people reading such a blog might not read the AP directly; I'm not positive I've ever read a story directly from the AP, as opposed to a citation of an AP story by someone else. (A case where their prominence works against them; many people (and more news organizations) cite AP reports in their own stories, but few people - other than those doing the citing - seem to feel the need to read the originals.)

If most people see the story in only one place, then most people won't realize that the story is being copied wholesale. If the one place where they see the story is the AP and they don't visit the blogs, that's fine; if the one place where they see the story is the blog and they don't visit the AP, then that's not so fine. The argument would be that the latter is what is happening.

According to TFA, the blue tint disappeared within a week, and the regained mobility didn't manifest till the sixth week (at which point they killed the rat to dissect it) - so I doubt that this will be a long-term problem.

They did mention that they were surprised, upon dissection, to find out that the spinal cord was still blue even at the six-week mark. I imagine that even that would go away with time, though.

But as far as I've ever seen, PowerShell doesn't come "set up and ready to go" on a new Windows install; you have to go out and get (and install) it yourself. (Thus, "Windows doesn't ... come with" it.)

Combined with the near total lack of publicity and marketing for PowerShell, that means the vast majority of normal users will never even realize it exists, much less make use of it. It also means that people writing scripts to run on Windows can't rely on its being available for any given machine, whereas they can be quite certain that a POSIX-compatible shell (and, very probably, bash itself) will be available on any *nix machine.

Combined, these two points mean PowerShell verges on being useless for most purposes. If it were near-universally installed, that would be different; however, since it isn't, it might as well not exist.

Interesting you should mention that on this particular story.

I no longer use Gmail's Web interface, but last I heard, they had pretty much ignored the concept of folders/directories per se, choosing instead to present "views" (not their term, IIRC) based on user-defined searches. (This leads to annoyances such as their refusal to store more than one copy of a message, as determined by Message-ID, but that's another topic.) I remember having also been able to tag messages explicitly as one thing or another, and do so in an automatic fashion based on pattern-matching rules; having done so, you can then define a "view" for all messages with that tag.

I don't like Gmail's interface, for various reasons, but this underlying idea is interesting; it looks like much the same type of thing you're asking for, and I think it's the first "live" implementation of something like that I've ever come across.

I don't know if they've implemented this same kind of taggability and "view"ability for Google Apps documents (I don't use that service at all), but it wouldn't surprise me if it were possible.

Furthermore, given the recently-reported upcoming "Chrome OS", it's not impossible that you'll see something resembling a filesystem with this capability before terribly long...

Depends on what file-selection widget the program is using.

The default GTK (and, therefore, Gnome) widget couldn't do that last I looked, no.

It's rarely been something I even notice, however, given that almost all file interaction is done on the command line; I can only think of twice I've even wanted to do this under Linux.

If you think it's that important, however, I doubt it would be that difficult to add... (Assuming you could grok GTK well enough, of course, which is far from a given.)

I don't have any toys, you insensitive clod!

...are you saying that MySQL doesn't support foreign key constraints?

News to me; I created a database with about as many of them as I have tables just a couple of months ago, and mysql 5.0.3.2 accepted that just fine.

If that's not what you're saying, I'm not sure what you are trying to get at.

No.

Eh? By my assessment back when I subscribed to Giganews - after Comcast dropped their Usenet access, which itself was subcontracted through Giganews - they're actually quite cheap, especially for what you get. (Even the bottommost price tier includes full binaries access under a bandwidth cap high enough to be completely ignored for casual use, and all tiers have retention so high as to be ridiculous - I believe there were literally three years of old posts in the text groups when I went to clear out the backlog to catch up again to where I had been.)

I'll admit that that's only if you want binaries access. If text-only is fine for you, then there are much cheaper providers out there. Even for text, however, I doubt that anything out there (except arguably Google Groups, which should be disqualified for other reasons) comes remotely close to Giganews on retention time.