What person thinks this is OK?

Every single non-technical person in the company, who have no clue whatsoever about the implications of this, don't care about all your "paranoid theories", and "just want the damned thing to work!"

The same people who give their email address to every popup ad that asks for it and then bitch to IT about all the spam they get. And then bitch about all the still-spam-but-of-interest-to-them they stop getting when you turn up the filters on their account. And then bitch about having to remember yet another password when you give them access to manage their own spam filter settings and can't you just be a dear and go in every morning and manually delete the spam they don't want but let the spam they do want through?

They hated it because it laid the blame squarely where it belonged, at the foot of a very difficult problem to resolve, unless you made automatic local replicas of LDAP subtrees.

A shortsighted and arbitrary kernel limitation does not really count as the fault of the downstream devs who get to suffer for it. As you point out, your "solution" actively encouraged your devs to make a completely wasteful userspace cache of something the kernel should just provide transparently; since you already know this solution, and apparently had access to the kernel code - Why didn''t you either fix the limitation, or if not possible, just build the damned cache yourself and serve high-latency requests from it, rather than getting into a blame-game with people who (reasonably) just expect LDAP to work as advertised?


Yeah, this spackles over a herd of issues that should actually be resolved

No one except the network admin gives the least damn about "why" it happens. They want email (or more accurately, they want MSN and Fox Sports) back up, and they want it back up NOW. Telling the CIO that you knew about an instant likely "fix" but chose to leave the company crippled for half an hour will generally get you escorted to your car.


Overall, I agree, TFA reads like "we rock because..." self-congratulatory masturbation. But some of your responses (except the last one, interestingly) make it sound like you work for a company with a near-infinite IT budget and a sane CIO. Those count as an extreme rarity in the real world, never forget that.

Woosh! (or you meant to respond to the GP).

So a child's life is less important to you then a few minutes of missing sleep?

"Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child becomes missing or is abducted".

Let me know when sleep becomes more important to you than every single one of those childrens' lives, so I can laugh heartily at you.

These sound like valid concerns, If it's not in writing, it's not going to happen - any city that's worked with a developer knows that the developer will promise the world "Oh yes, we'll build a park on every street corner and a paved jogging/biking trail around the perimeter of the development, trust us", but when funds run short, the development ends up with a patch of dirt called a "park", and fifty feet of paved trail that goes nowhere.

While true, take a look at the rest of Florida - You want suburban sprawl? They wrote the friggin' book on it. Mile after mile of endless (and currently massively underpopulated) yuppy/retiree housing developments stretching from one coast to the other.

Whether or not Destiny fell short of its goal, I don't see how it could have done any worse than the default situation there. And given the stated intent of that community, even if the developers "glossed over" a few points, their target audience might have enough motivation to fill in some of those gaps.

Of course, that all assumes the whole project doesn't include the standard "the HOA considers solar panels ugly, and demands you water your exactly-2in-grass even in a drought" clause in every deed. It amazes me people still fall for those things. Funny, really, how many people who want to control what their neighbors do, don't realize that it works both ways.

Welcome to the club. Now get back in line. :p

Seriously though, I think, with the exception of the "Alex P. Keatons" among us, virtually all programmers would rather work doing some sort of pure research for the betterment of humanity, than helping some sycophantic management team please the board/stockholders for yet another quarter.

Reality of the situation, though, you (and I, and all of us) have chosen the very same thing you claim has disillusioned you. You have chosen to want a paycheck. Make no mistake, for every one software engineering job position you see posted, you can find a hundred good causes that need volunteer coders. Except, good luck getting a steady paycheck if you go that route - Short of actually becoming a professor, you very much need to treat it as an act of charity.

Which leaves you to ask yourself: Can you really afford to live without a paycheck? If you can't answer "yes" without hesitation, hey, they don't call it "work" because we go there to have eight hours of fun every day.

As a compromise solution many of us have taken, do your good deeds on the side. Get that paycheck, and put 10-20 hours a week into a FOSS project, or helping the local foodbank set up a useable LAN from their pile of 15 year old mostly-DOA donated junk, or if you still have a few "in"s at your university, ask a few of your favorite non-CS professors if they have any projects that could use your skills (almost all of them do). But make a living first and foremost.

Because most people can't remember a long string of numbers but they can easily remember three english words.

If you can remember just eight digits - Two groups of four, less than a complete long distance telephone number - That will put you within half a mile of your target location. Add two more digits (the length of an LD phone number including the "1"), and it puts you to less than a football field away.

Then again, we have DNS in the first place because non-geeks couldn't manage four groups of three, so, I don't seriously expect them to do much better with lat&long.

/ob "Correct Horse Battery Staple"

the lock on that 92FS could be quickly and easily removed without much effort. That could be picked easily or removed with bolt cutters.

So our intent has shifted from "keep your 4YO from accidentally shooting himself" to "made of unobtanium".

Show me anything portable that a cutting torch won't turn into swiss cheese, if we want to invoke large tools as a means of bypassing them. But I haven't met many toddlers who've studied the MIT Guide to Lockpicking.


That "Anti-Gun Propaganda" was being spewed by a gun owner and a CWL holder.

Fair enough. I gave it about five seconds, noticed the total length, scrolled through the video looking for "here's where he defeats a trigger lock" in another five, and closed the window. Kinda my point, even if I mistook the overall focus of the video.

Trigger locks are a joke by the way...

Instead of a nice 15 second clip of someone defeating a trigger lock (you could have found hundreds of them - Hell, your link had three linked from it), you posted 40 minutes of anti-gun FUD propagandist bullshit? Classy.

And as for locks - some trigger locks count as a joke. That amounts to a straw-man, however; some balcony rails count as a joke, but we don't scream bloody murder that we need to ban balconies - We buy functional rather than purely decorative rails instead.

You want an effective cheap gun lock? If you can Fire this with the lock in place, I'll buy you a beer (or a wine spritzer with some foofoo garnish, if you prefer). Five seconds on and off, and you can't even seat the magazine, much less rack it.

They cost more, and have lower reliability. Why would they sell well?

The only people buying "smart" guns fall into the "I fear/hate guns and want them banned and only own that one to show all my friends as a proof of concept". Anyone actually interested in owning a firearm for self defense, or hell, even just for hunting, will stick to something that doesn't beep in error and ask you to re-authenticate right when you have that deer - or soon-to-be rapist - in your sights.

It was mostly a "Goodbye Bush" celebration gift.
We could have elected Peewee Herman and they'd probably have sent HIM the Nobel Peace Prize.

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$3.8M per year for ten years. Get out, retire young. I would take that deal in a frickin' heartbeat.

Hmm...

Hey, Uncle Sam, I hear you need some replacement bomb detectors. Have you taken a look at my brand of detectors that work by the difficult-to-disprove tachyon flux method? Sure, they cost 50% more, but I guarantee at least one of us won't regret your buying them as I sip mohitos on my private beach a decade from now...

My fellow legislators, this situation is an outrage. I have been receiving letters from my constituents angry that this legislative body has placed itself above the law, and that we are not subject to paying traffic fines like everyone else. I have promised my constituents that I will IMMEDIATELY take action on this issue. As such, I hereby move that my bill, Equality Under Law Act (EULA), be scheduled for a floor vote at the beginning of the next legislative session. Thank You. God Bless America.

Let the record show that this motion has passed unanimously. The Equality Under Law Act is hereby scheduled for a vote at the beginning of the next legislative session, subject of course to the standard legislative rules for indefinite postponement in the event that any legislator makes a motion to address urgent legislation, and that motion is seconded. We now move on to the pressing matter of a bill to rename local Post Office #128 as "Veterans Memorial Post Office".

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It's interesting how many terrorists are trained as engineers.

I would call that more of a sampling bias.

You basically have one core prerequisite for driving someone to acts of terrorism - Extreme belief in a position that most others don't hold, about which you feel the "wrong" opinion will cause massive damage on a large, even global, scale.

You can then divide that into two groups - The wrong and the right. The former, for some reason, almost always seem to act based on belief in imaginary creatures - Tree spirits, Allah, Gaia, Jesus, unicorns, what-have-you. The latter tend to see things in an unusually unfiltered way, and realize that we as a species amount to little more than a harmful bacterial colony run amuk in the petri dish we call "Earth"

So, you have your prerequisites there. Now for the sample bias: Relidiots focus their intellectual efforts primarily in memorizing indoctrinating material and suppressing their logical abilities to allow them to survive the cognitive dissonance of uttering seven mutually inconsistent ideas before breakfast every morning. Engineers focus their intellectual efforts on understanding the basic principles by which our universe actually works, with a particularly perverse twist toward favoring the practical over the theoretical.

Which one can cause more destruction? Science works better than praying for a plague of locusts. Simple as that.

I wish they'd just rename the damn thing. I cringe every time I see the initialism DRM.

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