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Unix

Submission + - RIP Dennis Ritchie (google.com) 3

An anonymous reader writes: (via Rob Pike) The creator of C and Unix, Dennis Ritchie or dmr as he is popularly known died over the weekend.

Submission + - Dennis Ritchie, the father of C and Unix passed aw

o0Ops writes: According to one of Rob Pike's recent Google+ status Dennis Ritchie, a computer science pioneer well known for developing the C programming language and Unix, died at home last weekend. The influence of C and Unix is fundamental and phenomenal. This is another sad news in computer science following Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs's death last week.

Comment Seriously? (Score 1) 456

In comparison to Google +, Twitter is open.

I use Twitter both as what it was designed for, and as a central point for dispatching to other services.
If I post to my blog (mostly, but not entirely photos taken from my phone) it posts into twitter. In turn, posts from my twitter feed are reposted into Facebook. I dislike that conversations growing from postings remain trapped in whichever site they happen to be in, but no one seems to care. I do like that people who have never met (due to being in different parts of the world, and in different social circles inside) can effectively have discussions inside shared facebook comments/links etc.

I told Google+ about my twitter account, and it did nothing about it.

I'm far from convinced Google+ will last, far from making twitter obsolete.

Comment I have *some* skeptcism... (Score 1) 807

I have several problems with Climate Change science as it's seen in the popular press and addressed by politicians.
  • Carbon dioxide is *not* Carbon. Carbon includes coal, graphite, diamond. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. There are others, methane for example, that some studies think has more effect than CO2
  • Carbon-offsets are bullshit. Worried about CO2? Use less, don't try to buy a penance from someone else (who is no doubt making a profit)
  • Cutting down on oil dependency is a good idea, even without climate considerations - there simply isn't an unlimited supply.
  • By definition, we're still in an ice age (ie permanent year round ice exists). I'm not trying to claim it isn't shrinking, or that we aren't accelerating that shrinkage, but this is a long term process that we shouldn't take all the credit for.
  • Habitats are shrinking. Species are going extinct. But to be honest, we don't even know all we have yet. And having watched the local transport people clear and bulldoze areas beside train tracks, I feel that even micro-habitats might help. Looking untidy doesn't mean it doesn't help.
  • Evidence exists that at times in the recent (ie 500-1000 years) past that the climate *was* several degrees hotter.

Be totally honest here - slight (5-10 celcius) changes won't result in the end of humanity - civilisation maybe - but humans are more adaptive than that.

The reason I don't speak out on it more as that the idiots are doing at least partially the right things, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Comment No employer == my current and past employers! (Score 1) 569

no employer on earth will offer you more than you asked for.

Actually, the last two jobs I've been offered more than I asked. For the record, I'm a LAMP (Perl) developer - although in this case the M is an O, and sometimes the A has morphed into Cron or Postfix.

First one I had been without a job for 1 1/4 years, and just wanted to work. I gave a low figure, and was offered 25% more than that. Second job was not quite as bad, but I optimistically asked for a 10% rise as a result of moving - and got 10% *on top of what I asked for*

Seriously, if you're being hired via a recruiter, ask their advice, before the interview stages . Because they're getting paid a cut of your salary, they'll generally recommend something that's feasible, while being as large as the feel you can get away with.

A good recruiter is your friend. Bad recruiters a: should be shot, and b: are everywhere.

Comment Young whippersnappers! (Score 1) 369

Library? I remember that, back when I was a kid. Do they still have those?

Seriously, I stopped going to *public* libraries when I started work full time, in favour of Book Stores.
If I hadn't moved countries during the Dot-Com bubble bursting I'd probably have a room in my house housing my own, private library.
All done in in the best possible taste, naturally.

Comment Pacific atolls (Score 1) 1397

The company I work for provides services based around the TLD of a small pacific island nation. So naturally we have machines named for the individual atolls of their groups.

This is alternately good and bad - some are short - in one case only one syllable (vao), but some or more (one is called utuaoteolopuka). Thing is there seems to be a nearly endless supply of names, some of which seem very similar to each other.

I know the boss has a reason for doing this, but that won't make me like it any more.

Comment Re:Aged badly (Score 2, Interesting) 298

That said, I have to agree with GPP - It aged badly. When I go back to watch the episodes over, it's rare that I watch anything beyond the ship being reconstructed. It was still fun, but lacked a lot of the charm that the early episodes had.

Not a matter of aging imho. Something weird happened after season 6. I still deeply love seasons 1-6.

This is something I really don't agree with.
Some things can be said to age or go downhill, others simply change.

Believe it or not (and I hope you would, given the demographic of the SD crowd), people don't like doing the same stuff all the time. They like change. They like to be challenged. They like to learn new things.

Sometimes, new things aren't quite the same as the old. Some better, some worse. You have to allow for possible failure if you want the good stuff.

Early Dwarf was primarily an odd-couple comedy, the inter-relation between diametrically opposed characters in a confined environment. After a while (series 3?) it became an ensemble piece. Then it veered in another difference for a while.

Seriously, if Rob + Doug had wanted to do the same thing, they'd be writing for soaps.

Yech, I sound like some of my old teachers.

Portables

Submission + - Hands On: The $100 Laptop

Paul Stamatiou writes: "I got my hands on the second release of the $100 One Laptop per Child laptop and wrote a review complete with pictures. It runs a custom version of Fedora Core 6 complete with an Xulrunner-based browser and an impressive 7.5-inch LCD sporting a resolution of 1200×900 with the ability to go monochromatic in sunlight. Other hardware features include a VGA webcam, 802.11b/g wireless, 512MB flash storage, 128MB DDR266 system RAM and a 366MHz AMD Geode CPU."
Books

Submission + - Mandriva Linux 2007 for Home Users

squidsuk writes: "Released January 1st, now finalised

Mandriva Linux 2007 for Home Users
by Wim Coulier

FREE Download
Colour edition: http://www.lulu.com/content/603439
Black and white edition: http://www.lulu.com/content/605126

What might a Linux distribution such as Mandriva Linux 2007 be to a Windows user?

Is it a valuable alternative, or do you have to be a real computer nerd to risk the move? Why would an average PC user make the effort to change over to Linux? Admittedly, not necessarily everyone will benefit from such a move — but it could be a lot more interesting than you may suspect. Many discussions around this topic lead to considerable debate, and in this article we do not pretend to own the truth or to be complete. This article just sums up our own experiences after several years of use of both Microsoft Windows and Mandriva Linux.

We wrote with our Mandriva experiences in mind; however most modern Linux distributions offer similar benefits.

Complete with 30 illustration figures!

Publisher: John Barron
© 2007 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/"
Security

Submission + - US Army blocking Apache.org as "Hostile Conten

OTDR writes: Despite slowly growing endorsement within the US Government (and DoD) for the use of FOSS ( see eGovOS for a good starting point), the US Army's cognizant authority governing the connection of its internal networks to the outside world, CONUS-TNOSC, has chosen to block access to the Apache Foundation's domain, labeling the site as "hostile content". Official rationale has not been disclosed, nor is it likely to ever be, but growing trends have been observed (in the name of security) to block sites not only hosting specificly-objectionable content (blogs deemed inappropriate, web content deemed offensive, pirate P2P aggregators, etc...) but also sites merely providing software development tools, software resources, and support discussion forums for the use of such technologies — all without consideration as to whether the technologies have been demonstrated (even by other Government agnecies) to have beneficial, legitimate uses.

Oddly enough, given that these measures are taken in the name of security, the US Army and much of DoD remains heavily entrenched in Exchange and IIS. Given that Apache still leads IIS in marketshare (see Netcraft for current standings), can anyone provide references/links to REAL comparitive data contrasting and comparing the relative security of these two contending servers? I realize servers in general are only as secure as a good administrator, and I realize a well-trained IIS manager can harden a box quite impressively. I'm mainly interested in finding reputable published data comparing types and numbers of genuine design flaws & weaknesses and fix/release schedules. Earnest responses only — I'm neither trolling here nor looking to start a flame war, just trying to understand and evaluate the rationale driving the block.

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