Who in particular?
 Beastie |
Posted on 09/11/2011 8:47:53 AM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
Who in particular?
Beastie |
My opinions on the subject go back a ways. Back to when I first started using Linux. (over 10 years ago) I cannot tell you at this point the name of the people who told a mocking bar story about a trip through Texas and the backward Christian goobers they found.
My father-in-law was in the weapons industry for 40 years and had some contact with Berkeley. His impression was no different than what I picked up on researching Linux.
I am convinced that Free BSD and probably Open BSD and some other derivatives are technically more efficient and advanced in some aspects than Linux. It did at the time have the licensing hurdle that has since been overcome.
If I got the wrong impression of the creators of BSD? I would like to understand where I missed it.
Here is an example of what I suggested.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-February/076191.html
It is funny what you run into when you wander around.
The only time I actually used FreeBSD was running from a 1.44 MB floppy using PicoBSD. Low and behold I found a guy who listed in his background putting that project together. He is Polish and a born again Christian. interesting.
Andrzej Bialecki
—
I have been running Xubuntu 11.4 Linux recently. I made the decision on that because I had come to like XFCE window manager. I first used that window manager back when Redhat 8.0 came out. Back a ways. XFCE is light, fast, simple and Gnome compatible on most things. This machine is pretty fast and has lots of RAM and hard drive space, so resources are not the real issue.
Thinking that just because people share you views on operating systems they must also share you views on religion and foreign policy is sheer hubris.
I'd have to agree with David Johnson on that. Political wisdom and technical (and even business) proficiency are separate spheres. Consider Google, Microsoft, Apple, Warren Buffett. The incongruity astonishes me at times. Individuals who are technical geniuses and political idiots are legion. But that's no reason for cynwoody to refuse to use their output!
When I'm trying to solve a technical or business problem, I do not take politics into account. Analyzing such choices is difficult enough by itself. Adding the political dimension overloads the bandwidth! It takes too much time and limits the choices too much.
Besides, there's always hope that political idiots who are geniuses in some other field can learn. Consider David Mamet!
Interesting. If Beastie had scared him away, the world would be poorer. LOL!
Yes, I see the pattern. Science (not-sudo Science like Globull Warming) is not political or theological. But the restraint of honest faith constrains the danger of doing business with dishonest people.
I am not an IT person. My degree is in business management and most of my experience is in sales/sales management/project management/advertising. I have been a Ham Op since 1976 and also hold a commercial radio license. I built my first computer in 1982. For a non-programmer I am pretty comfortable with most computers. My last job was publishing a 3,000 page catalog, maintaining a product database for 37,000 items, maintaining images for the website and composing all the company promotions (some were huge, 1,000+ pages). That was done with Quark and Xdata or Xtags plugins. The process was a total hack. Resorted to using Grep to recover page numbers for the database and to recover the item sequencing pattern. Talk about a mess. I did that for 5-1/2 years.
Thanks for the link to David Mamet.
Interesting article that I bookmarked for later study.
Liberal vs Conservative terms.
It is odd how language had changed since the 1700’s. A liberal then was an anti-Statist (anti-Monarchist) and today a liberal is a Statist/Marxist.
I infuriate the left when I tell them I am a Classic Liberal. But I am by the 1700’s definition a liberal.
—
a disputation between reason and faith.
That is also an interesting concept. Faith cannot be arrived at by reason. (I believe that is the way God planned it.) Faith is not a product of intelligence. It is like the conflict between knowledge and wisdom. You can have technical knowledge and not have wisdom. Wisdom requires more than understanding the mechanics, but how it all fits together. A much harder task.
I laugh a lot about keeping up technically with the Wonder Kinder (wonder children, smart young techies). It is the same, perspective comes with experience. (a commodity that few tech companies value today)
—
Now the issue of creativity. Creativity? That is an interesting word. It is not engineering, it is not science, it is not logic.
God created order out of chaos. Imagine that. The left today has achieved the exact opposite, they create chaos out of order. But that is understandable, they do not believe in God.
For a time I used the tag line:
“Finding order in apparent chaos is the highest form of creativity.”
I did not use it here, but at work. I truly believe it is correct.
I have to rest now, I need to help load several hundred bushels of seed wheat early tomorrow morning.
Best regards my FRiend,
TF
That job description would add up to programmer
, as far as I can tell. Real programmers don't study to be programmers. It's not like you want to be a lawyer, so you go to law school, or you want to be a doctor, so you go to medical school. Programming is just there, and you either know how to do it or you don't.
Of course, the real goal dealing with the sort of problem you describe is to be the lazy programmer. To reach lazy nirvana, you have to automate everything relentlessly, which is a lot of work. In your example, that probably means getting the users to act naturally and utter catalog content. Then you run a script, and voila! a 3000-page PDF! Of course, you get there in stages. You need to analyze the process as whole and identify the stages where a little bit of technology would save a lot of human labor. Where using a new tool would short-circuit a whole set of steps. Each iteration gets you closer. It's very stimulating mentally, because of the number of different areas you need to understand at some level. Not everybody can do it, and the ones who can are valuable!
I had spent 35 years in the industry (hardlines distribution) and knew the product. I finally convinced them to let me order the catalog logically (in human terms) and forget about the category tool that they were using. After the first section, no one ever wanted me to go back, except the operations manager (my old friend). He did not think it was worth the effort because it took so long the first time.
When I took it over they had not printed a general index in 8 years, and the section indexes were not indexes, but looked like indexes. They had tried to use product name in some reverse naming convention to order product where there was no system to organize it. What a mess.
I created a general index from a 11,000 line spreadsheet that I manually composed from product name and catagories I had used for a product type. As I made the entries I cross-indexed by reversing the names where appropriate and used similar name entries where appropriate. These were kept by catalog section within the master spreadsheet. That allowed me to update the entire general index when I revised a section. Both indexes came from the same spreadsheet. Only merged with the total for the general index. That was a learning experience.
It was a 100+ year old company and is now closed. They purchased another company like it in CA a little over 10 years ago that took them down. The year before the Texas company began to close they made the owner $1-million profit on $6-million in inventory, but the CA counterpart lost 1.5 million. With the economic downturn sales dropped by 10% and the cash flow suffered. They got where they could not pay their suppliers and it was over.
It was sad to see it close. The sales force and 2 of the officers left and went to work for a competitor (that I was also with for about 15 years). That is all that was left.
One neat thing I learned with that project was how to open a finished .pdf after it was sent to the printer and extract the item sequence from the print document. I used PdfTK to unzip the Adobe .pdf and use a text editor (usually Notepad++) to remove some proportional spacing syntax to allow me to use Grep to recover the items sequence and the page number for each of the items. That was a total hack, like I said.
I just looked at the clock, my how time flies when you are having fun.
I have to be at the farm at 8:00 AM so, good night. Talk another time.
Running Linux or *BSD on just any old computer you could buy at Walmart is nearly impossible, especially if you want all of the devices to work. Don’t know anything about Ubuntu, but it’s much easier to get up-to-date drivers for newer hardware if you can keep the source code up to date and upgrade by rebuilding the kernel, etc. That’s the upside and downside of using an open source Unix. My laptop works well enough on FreeBSD 8, but whenever I decide to upgrade I’m considering getting an Apple laptop. OS X Lion sounds like it has some dubious “features” tacked on, but in theory I should be able to use most of the same open source applications on OS X as BSD/Linux. But Windows has been around since before average computer users knew what Unix was, and to think that any alternative OS can dominate desktop PCs (which are going into a decline themselves) is silly.
I have an old beater Dell laptop that was getting a regular BSOD. Pretty much a brick. I figured I didn't have anything to lose and installed Ubuntu on it.
I had used Ubuntu a few years ago. It worked okay then but I spent many hours searching for drivers.
This time, I had no problems at all! Its great!
Plus it has a fully compatible version of Office that can read and edit all Windows office tools. And the network features are fully compatible with my network at work and home.
Is it perfect? No — mainstream games are not supported, Netflix is not supported, etc.
But who cares — its FREE! — and it does 90% of what I want it to do.
The Ubuntu website includes a list of certified platforms. And they offer a version with LTS — long term support. So, they are serious about supporting it. Most mainstream PCs manufactures, Dell, HP, etc. are compatible. My Dell laptop was fully compatible.
Best of all you don't have to be a super techie nerd to install and run it. It is very similar to Windows so the transition from Windows is easy.
I installed it on a other PC as a dual boot — no compatibility issues there, too. And I am running the server version on another “odds and ends” PC as a web server running Apache and WebDAV.
I highly recommend it!
NOTE: stay away from the 11.04 version unless you like the Iphone icon style of gui. It didn't work well for me. Plus it is not ready for prime time yet. 10.04 is the best.
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
Agreed about Windows. It is not possible for another OS to overcome Windows. Even Apple. Windows is a lot more mature now and stable and secure... thanks in part to Linux. A little competition forced MS to fix their OS. Is it perfect? No. But it has come a long way.
I rely on XFCE 4.0 and FreeBSD. But I’m a lot more willing to engage in techy and fiddly stuff than most.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.