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Time to Say Thanks For the Uptime
DepecheModem writes: "MSNBC is running an article about System Administrator Appreciation Day. Ted Kekatos created this holiday three years after seeing a poster of a system administrator being bombarded with presents. Feeling somewhat underappreciated, he declared his "day" as the last Friday in July. I think we should all remind our employers that administrators are people too and proudly wear our buttons bearing "Have you hugged your geek lately?"."
fp
If Tux can get laid, why can't you?
.. you would have bigger uptimes
and consequently a bigger penis
Say thank you to the poor sysadmin by slashdoting his system.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
By getting drunk at 9am! Wait until they meet Drunken System Administrator. "You lost your password huh? That sucks. Keep guessing!"
Say hello and show your appreciation by paging your sysadmin with "07734" every hour or so.
They have the Internet on computers now?
Hello!
/whois on them and copy-paste the log into an e-mail and report it to me, and I'll ban them from the channel and the server. I will keep also your information confidential.
This site is an introduction for my IRC channels.
This page was last updated Id: index.html,v 1.17 2002/07/09 22:09:42 dildo Exp
If you wish to visit my channels, you are expected to stay current with the information on this page. Ignorance of the material on this site will not be tolerated in my channels.
Before I begin, I would like to mention that I'm not a technical support person, nor am I an Internet tutor. I'm not good at teaching people how to use their computers or software or how to get on IRC. However, there are tutorials all over the World Wide Web that will help you with IRC. One such site is http://www.irchelp.org/. My channels are on DALnet, which also has its own information pages at http://www.dal.net/. The answers to most of the technical questions you'll have about IRC are probably going to be on one of those two sites.
Also, please observe proper IRC etiquette in my channels as well as in any channel you visit in general. Some etiquette tips include...
Always read the topic of an IRC channel when you enter the channel before you do anything else in that channel. If the topic includes links or triggers to display rules, be sure to read those too before doing anything else. That may be the only warning you get of any rules that the channel may have and the ops have every right to kick-ban you for not following those rules. Ignorance is not an excuse.
Treat everyone with respect. Do not type anything that is excessively violent or offensive. Refrain from foul language. Do not shout, do not repeat yourself, and do not flood the channel.
Do not pick up or propagate viruses. Never type any trigger with "//.write" in any channel. Do not send viruses, and try to avoid receiving them. More information about IRC viruses can be found at http://www.nohack.net/
Do not spam, and do not listen to spam. Never advertise porn or warez in any respectable channel. Never do anything to encourage spammers. Every time you join a channel or follow a link that a spammer sent, you're only proving to the spammers that they're right. Also, spammers will also often spam viruses. Not only are you encouraging spammers, but you may also be doing something that will compromise your machine.
Do not use the IRC invite feature to invite random people into or out of channels.
Some other general rules specific to me...
Do not talk about anything related to my server (including but not limited to this site, the server, these channels, the keys, the IPs, the list, the password) in any public or on-line medium (including but not limited to any website, any web forum, any IRC channel, any newsgroup, any chat/messenger/peer-to-peer platforms) except in #hitler-babble. Especially, do not talk about it in #nazimanufacturer, and do not privately message people about the server and the supporting server bits. If someone asks you about it outside of #hitler-babble, please let me know.
Do not give, share, or trade the channel keys, the channel information, or the site information. If you want to share, please download the files and share the files instead.
You must be identified to nickserv@services.dal.net before entering my channels. I know DALnet services can be very flaky, but please bear with it, please don't ask me about it, and please don't hammer DALnet services because that only makes the problem worse. If Nickserv is down, you'll just have to wait patiently until it come back up. If it doesn't respond the first time, give it at least 10 minutes before trying again.
No non-ASCII characters in my channels. No bold, no colors, no upside-down question or exclamations, no accented characters, no blobs. Only standard 7-bit ASCII.
Treat everyone with respect and use common sense. The rules above are not designed to be comprehensive. Unacceptable behavior is still unacceptable even if it wasn't explicitly mentioned above.
So, onto the channels... I have created two channels for myself -- #hitler and #hitler-babble. The first channel is mostly for my automated bot. Since it was made for the bot, it's unreasonably strict and unforgiving. But that lends itself to a very short list of rules.
Rules for #hitler:
You may only type the approved triggers. Do not say anything else. No !list, no @find, no talking except for the approved triggers. The ops may talk to #hitler, but you should not respond. Be aware that the triggers are case-sensitive, will never include spaces or quotes, and may change without any warning other than a topic change. Do not add extraneous spaces before or after the triggers. Be careful since the bot is very sensitive. Check twice before you type. Do not make mistakes. Any mistakes will be banned without further warning. Bans stay there until DALnet erases them by accident, until the banlist fills up, or until I decide to erase the banlist. I plan to erase the banlist about once a month, so just wait and do not ask to be unbanned and do not try to avoid the ban. If you ask to be unbanned, or if you try to avoid the ban, the temporary ban will be turned into a permanent ban. I know it was an unintentional, honest, small, stupid mistake. However, if I can't trust you to type in a simple trigger without making mistakes, how can I trust you to make complex downloads without accidentally hammering my server? Also, I strongly believe that even unintentional stupidity needs to be punished. Otherwise, my server and I end up drowning in unintentially stupid mistakes all the time.
As of yet, I have no idea how destructive #hitler might be. It's vaguely possible that people in the channel might flood off repeatedly once things get going. I recommend (but won't enforce) that you use a separate nick and separate instance of your client for #hitler to avoid annoying other channels in case something goes wrong. I'm not entirely sure that the channel will be very stable for very long... Again, this is not required, just a suggestion.
Discussion belongs in #hitler-babble. I will not watch #hitler on a regular basis (since the bot will just ban misbehaving people), so if something happens there that needs attention, please come to #hitler-babble and let me know or send me e-mail.
I reserve the right to kick the entire channel and change the key at any time. When I do that, please understand that it's not personal, and it's not meant as a punitive measure or anything -- it's simply a part of the normal operation of the channel. I also reserve the right to change the key at any time without kicking people. I reserve the right to change the rules as well. I just reserve the right to change anything.
Any discussion about my server should take place in the second channel. I hope to keep this channel quiet enough so that someone can say something about the status of my server and it'll still be easy to find in my scrollback buffer hours later. If you want to discuss anything anything other than my server, please contribute to the discussion in other channels instead.
Rules for #hitler-babble:
Read and honor the topic and rules of the channel.
Do not pick up or propagate viruses.
Be warned that spoilers are okay in the channel.
Do not talk about the relevant sites or channels in anywhere other than #hitler-babble. Do not share the channel key or channel information. Do not use the IRC invite feature to invite people into or out of the channel.
You must be identified to DALnet before entering the channel. I know that DALnet services are very flaky, but please bear with it, please don't ask me about it, and please don't hammer DALnet services.
No computer-generated messages in this channel. No on-join messages, no welcome-back messages, no away messages, no leaving messages, no back messages, no play lists, no fserve ads, no periodic/timer messages, no remotes. Do not have or use triggers that will be seen by the whole channel, and do not use excessively tricky, annoying, or offensive triggers.
Do not use offensive language, nicks, or idents. Do not flood, do not repeat yourself excessively, do not spam, do not use all-caps, do not anti-idle in the channel, and do not use any form of Denial of Service attack.
Do not beg for ops, voice, sends, or resumes. When asking questions, try to ask specific questions (do not ask if you can ask a question, do not ask, "Are you there?").
I'm a resident of the United States, and my material is in English. Please understand English before you join the channel, and please speak mostly English or Japanese in the channel. Also, I'm subject to US laws, and I will do my best to enforce US licenses. Although you're welcome to discuss the plot, character development, and general quality of propaganda (even if it's licensed), please do not mention possession of pirated US-licensed materials, do not mention where to obtain such pirated materials, and do not mention you're looking for the pirated materials. I'm aware that it's hard to keep up with licenses, so mistakes will be tolerated, but when someone provides reasonable evidence that it's licensed in the US, please stop discussing possession (anyone's possession) or procurement (anyone's procurement) of the material -- whether you are in the United States or not.
I will allow other people to serve in this channel, but your server may be more appreciated elsewhere. If you insist on serving, please serve non-US-licensed propaganda only. No mp3s, no warez, no porn, and no US-licensed material of any form.
Treat everyone with respect and use common sense. The rules above are not designed to be comprehensive. Unacceptable behavior is still unacceptable even if it wasn't explicitly mentioned above.
I reserve the right to kick the entire channel and change the key at any time. When I do that, please understand that it's not personal, and it's not meant as a punitive measure or anything -- it's simply a part of the normal operation of the channel. I also reserve the right to change the key at any time without kicking people. I reserve the right to change the rules as well. I just reserve the right to change anything.
Now onto the next page...
This site is an introduction for my IRC channels.
This page was last updated Id: server.html,v 1.47 2002/07/19 18:21:51 dildo Exp
If you wish to visit my channels, you are expected to stay current with the information on this page. Ignorance of the material on this site will not be tolerated in my channels.
The channels and the bots within them are designed to protect my machine. Please remember the machine is my private property, and you are downloading from my machine at my expense. As such, I reserve the right to deny access to my machine without warning or explanation. Also, while the machine is my private property, I recognize that the data on the machine isn't. If you see anything on my machine that should not be served for whatever reason, please let me know so I can stop serving it.
In case anyone is curious, here are the system specs:
Hardware: Tatung Super COMPstation SPARCstation 20 clone
CPU: 2 x 60 MHz sparc Yes, 60 -- as in less than one hundred MHz. This is why I really need each and every downloader to be very nice to the server -- the server will support a lot of clients only if the clients are well behaved. Any one of the clients downloading from my server can completely overrun my machine and ruin the server for themselves and everyone else.)
RAM: 512MB
OS: Solaris 7
Disks: 6 x 80GB Maxtor IDE disks in a RAID 5 configuration (approx. 400GB usable on a SCSI bus that runs at 20MB/sec or 160Mbps), plus an independent 7th identical disk on a slow IDE-SCSI bridge/converter
Net: 100Mbps fastethernet card, colocated in a data center with dual OC12s (OC12 = 622Mbps). Current bandwidth usage.
How it works...
I assume you're here because you really want to download from my server. My file list is here. There is also an HTML version with sizes and dates (that even has the pathnames translated for you!) but the catch is that this version has a _huge_ table. If you're running on a slow machine you may be waiting a very long time for the page to come up. There's been a lot of problems with small, fast connections on my site, so I just changed things so you can't browse the site. Therefore, you need the list. That should eliminate small, fast connections. Do not share the list, do not link to the list, and do not give people the URL to the list. The list updates frequently.
Once you have the list and actually know you want something from it, first connect to a DALnet server. If you still don't know how to do that, you should go back and re-read the previous information.
After connecting to DALnet, join the channel called #hitler. There is a key on the channel. Do not ask for the key. Do not give anyone else the key. Do not even give anyone else hints on where to find the key.
Type the trigger in the topic. When the bot sees that trigger, it'll see how many connections there are and give you the information you need to get onto the site if there's an open slot. Please be patient. If the bot isn't in the channel, it obviously can't respond to you. Also, the server can be very full, and the bot doesn't always respond to everyone so it doesn't flood itself out of the channel. Every time the bot talks back to you, it'll ignore you for 10 minutes. For every time you try to talk to the bot while you're ignored, it'll ignore you for 10 additional minutes. There is no limit to the amount of time the bot will ignore you. In addition, be aware of topic changes. Once the topic changes, anyone still using the old trigger will be banned.
If you get a message saying you're in a suspect domain, it's because there has been a lot of abuse from your domain. You can still get onto the server, but you need to be added to the whitelist. To get onto the whitelist, you need to e-mail me with the following information:
The Subject: heading must be "Whitelist: {nickname}". Be sure to put the registered nickname you want to be whitelisted.
Copy-paste the entire output of "/nickserv info {nickname}" and "/whois {nickname}" into the e-mail message.
Specify whether your IP is static or dynamic.
State the name and the exact version number (like the information from the "Help->About" box) of the program you will be using to download. Go through and list everything you changed or double-checked in the settings, options, and/or preferences to make it play nicely with my server. I simply want to make sure that people know how to set their downloading software to not hammer the server before I let them on.
Please write up a paragraph or two about how you started getting into downloading propaganda and how you found this current rules web site.
Once you get the information from the bot, you need to glue that to the rest of the filename found in the list and download the full URL. Note that you also have to convert metacharacters into the proper URL. Some browsers will automatically do the translation for you. Many will not. More information about the client configuration is on the client page. If you use IE, make doubly sure to read the client page before downloading. If you simply do not want to use a client that can translate the url, get the HTML version of the list.
If you need to talk about the server or any of the related pieces, please visit #hitler-babble. Do not privately message anyone about the server, do not discuss it any other IRC channel, and do not mention it in any other location. Since you've made it here, please do not give anyone any information about ol|Dildo and do not give anyone the key to the channel it's in either. And, no matter what, never give or ask for any URLs, keys, or passwords related to my site or my channels, not even in #hitler-babble. If there are _technical_ problems with the URLs, keys, or passwords, however, that can be reported in #hitler-babble.
Server rules...
I personally don't like rules, and I had originally thought I could just assume people had some sort of common sense. I found out the hard way that I was so very incredibly wrong. Some people insisted that I put rules on my web site before they would stop doing things that were hurting the server even after I asked them nicely to stop. So here are the rules:
Do not talk about the gateway bot, the site, the server, or these channels, on any web site, any newsgroup, any web forum, any channel, or in any other place other than on #hitler-babble. No matter where you are, even if you're in #hitler-babble, do not give or ask for any related URLs, keys, or passwords. (This also includes keys for the gateway bot.)
Do not abuse or attack the server. Every client must be well behaved. Even one misbehaving client can ruin the server for everyone, including themselves.
One connection per person at a time. This also implies one file per person at a time. Do not download more than one file at once. Do not farm your downloads to multiple machines in a cluster. Do not use segmented downloads. Do not use download accelerators to open multiple connections for the same file. Do not get greedy. Know how your software works before you download from my site, and double-check the settings before you start. Ignorance, greed, stupidity, and mistakes by your little brother are no longer acceptable reasons to be unbanned.
Do not use bad passwords. Stop downloading if you get a bad password prompt. Verify your password or fix your download settings before continuing. I reserve the right to ban anyone trying bad passwords.
Do not hammer the server. Give the server time to download the page. Do not click "stop" too quickly. Do not click "reload" more often than once every 2 minutes. Set any download managers to wait 2 minutes in between retries and to not retry an error more than twice. If you ever see a 403 error, that means you have multiple connections. Either you're hammering or your client is trying to reconnect before the server has recognized the previous connection has died. If that happens, you need to back off even more and stop retrying so quickly.
Do not give out the site information or the site password. I use the bot to control how many people may try the site at the same time. If too many people try the site, it'll just hang. If you give the password to someone else, that means there are too many people hitting the server and things will become slow and unstable for everyone, including yourself. Do not ask anyone for the password either. If someone asks you for the password, or if anyone gives you the password, or if you see anyone giving someone else the password, please get their ident by doing a
I try to make sure that the material on this site is not licensed in the United States, but it may be licensed in your country. Please do not download episodes if they are licensed in your country. If I find that people from other countries are downloading episodes licensed in their countries, I may have to ban the whole country from the server because I don't want to deal with foreign authorities. Also, if something becomes licensed in the United States, please let me know, and I'll remove it.
The material on this site may not be appropriate for all audiences. There will be a very wide variety of data on this site, and there are no guarantees about the content here. Often, there will not be time to review the material on this site. By entering further into this site or downloading from this site, you agree that you will not hold anybody responsible for any of the content in this site, and neither will any of your representatives (such as parent or legal guardian). (Put simply, if you can't promise that your parents won't sue us, you can't download from this site.) Also, if you find that an episode does not work or if it pauses in strange places, please report the problem. Include the full pathname to the file, the symptoms you're experiencing, and the time index of the problem if applicable.
The rules above are not designed to be comprehensive. Unacceptable behavior is still unacceptable even if it wasn't explicitly mentioned above. In general, use common sense. If you are ever at all tempted to do something that might cause problems, just don't do it. If you're not sure if something is bad or not, ask permission before you do it. If you notice any mistakes in these rules, please let me know.
By visiting my server, you agree to stay current with and follow all the rules. If you agree, then you may use the channel key "Eat_Mydick" to get into the leeching channel. This is your only warning. If you break the rules, you may not get any further notices before being banned.
Contact information...
Dildo If you e-mail me, please include your nick, full ident, and IP address. I'll probably ignore messages if you don't include the information, and I'll probably ignore any e-mail that can be answered by reading this site carefully. If you're trying to report what you think is a problem, please copy-paste any potentially useful error messages you see into the message.
Upload ftp: ftp 127.0.01 port 21 username upload password upload Please note that the upload account does not support resumes.
More information about bans.
Request list: Last updated 2002 July 1.
IRC channels: #hitler and #hitler-babble on DALnet.
Other pages...
Notes about the files on the site (not done)
SFV checksums of every file on the site (not done)
Useful site news
Thank you to people who uploaded!
This site is an introduction for my IRC channels.
This page was last updated $Id: banfaq.html,v 1.11 2002/07/09 16:05:36 dildo Exp $
If you wish to visit my channels, you are expected to stay current with the information on this page. Ignorance of the material on this site will not be tolerated in my channels.
Bans Explained
I really hate having to ban people, but it's hard enough for my server to even keep up with serving episodes without having to deal with people who will destroy it in their eagerness to get anime. In order to protect my server from the few abusive people who can ruin my server for everyone else, I've had to come up with many different levels of bans. It can get confusing, so I figured I needed a page explaining the ways the pieces of my server can intentionally decide to not work for you.
I primarily use four types of bans. There are other bans, including AKicks and what not, but I haven't started using them yet. If I need to start using them, I'll update this page.
Bot Ignores
This is the least problematic type of "ban" and isn't really a ban at all. In the past, the bot was hammered by all the triggering, and it kept getting flooded out of the channel. So, the bot was programmed to protect itself from that. If you get ignored, simply wait it out. I cannot change the penalty times, even if it was DALnet's mistake.
Anti-flood Ignore. The bot is programmed to speak only once every TEN seconds. If it tries to reply to people any faster than that, it stands a risk of getting thrown off of DALnet. If you trigger the bot within two seconds of someone else, it will not reply to one of the people triggering. If you were the one ignored, simply wait a bit to make sure it wasn't lag and then try again. (Originally, the anti-flood ignore was 2 seconds, but now it's 10 because DALnet seems to have done something and the bot got K-Lined even on 2 second intervals.)
Excess triggering penalties. The bot is programmed to respond only once every 10 minutes for each person. Please make sure you do not trigger more often than once every 10 minutes. Every time you trigger the bot before the 10 minutes is up, it will refuse to reply to your triggers for another 10 minutes. For example, if you trigger the bot 5 times in a row, it will respond to the first trigger, but then it won't talk to you for 50 minutes, and if you try to trigger once more before the 50 minutes is up, then you have to wait a total of 60 minutes. In the past, some people have triggered so much, they were ignored for hours!
Note that DALnet is often unstable. It may prevent your request from getting through to the bot, and it may prevent the bot's responses from getting back to you. You often can't tell which, so it's generally safest to wait 10 minutes between triggers. Also, DALnet may send back spurious error messages even if the request and answer get through. If you see that, the DALnet server you are on is desynchronized from the bot's DALnet server. If you get a response, you probably don't need to report the error message to the channel ops because I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about it anyways.
Channel Bans
If you type anything other than the trigger in the trigger channel, you will be banned from the channel. This means that you will be prevented from entering the channel and no one (including the bot) will see what you type into the channel. Yes, I know it may be an honest mistake, minor typo, whatever, but it's a necessary precaution, and I really insist on people being very careful with my fragile little machine. The ban list in the channel is limited to 100, and when it fills up (or when there has been a month without anyone asking to be unbanned), I will clear the ban list and re-key the channels. If you get banned from the channel, simply wait for the next cleaning. Do not ask to be unbanned under any circumstances. If you think there was an error, you may report it so we can try to fix it, but do not ask to be unbanned. Asking to be unbanned will earn you a permanent ban (see "Bot Bans" below) and a place on my news page. Also, reporting a "problem" or asking me to double-check on things when you've simply made a typo may earn you a permanent ban too. I accept that there may be problems with DALnet, but I will not accept people wasting my time either because they can't be bothered to scroll up and see their own typing mistakes or because they think they can deceive me. Finally, do not avoid the ban. Obviously, the channel bans are trivially easy to circumvent with the right resources, but the wait time is usually less than a month. Just watch the news for indication of a cleaning before you try to go back into the channel. Avoiding a ban indicates you're just destructively greedy and care nothing for the server, and that makes me very unwilling and unhappy about sharing my resources with you.
IP Bans
If you have the right password and still cannot download from the server, it might be that the Internet is having problems. But, it might also be an IP Ban. IP Bans usually occur because you were "hammering" -- you were trying to open multiple simultaneous connections or you were trying to open connections too quickly (usually because you do not have enough delay between retrying bad passwords). In such cases, you can get unbanned, but you need to prove that you can use your downloading software in such a way that it will not hurt my server. You can tell if you were banned at the IP layer if you point a web browser at the server's address. If you are banned, it will say "You have been banned." If it asks you for a password or gives you a 401, 403, or 404 error, you're probably not banned, so please check other things first. The directions of how to get unbanned are on the banned page. If you have a dynamic IP address, do not simply reboot to get around the ban. Make sure you fix your settings so they won't hammer again. If you reboot to bypass a ban and continue to hammer, I may choose to put in a Bot Ban and I may choose to ban your whole ISP. If I choose to ban your whole ISP, everyone on your ISP will see your nick as the reason why they can't get in...
Bot Bans
A Bot Ban is when you trigger the bot and it response with a message saying that you are banned. It requires me to kill and restart the bot to add or remove bot bans, so I really dislike adding or removing such bans. Reasons you might get a bot ban include...
Site information sharing. If you share any of the information about my site, ask for information via non-approved methods, or even casually discuss my current setup anywhere other than -babble, then go away and never come back. I do not have the resources to share with everyone, and things are set up so that the people who can find their own way here usually possess qualities that make them the type I want to share with. I'm not interested in sharing with random leechers who are just out to find a big, fast anime server, and I'm probably not interested in sharing with your brother or your best friend if they can't find their own way here. But, if there is someone that you think really, really should have access, you can discuss it with me, and I may decide to invite them and send the relevent details (_I_ may share information if I choose -- it's my server after all). In particular, you may _not_ share the following pieces of information to anyone other than the -babble operators (me, Treblinka, or Göring), and even then, verify that they are indeed an operator in -babble before you give the information (to try to prevent sharing the information with impersonators):
The username and password for downloading from the server. Under no circumstances should this ever be shared. Ever. Not with your brother, your roommate, your best friend, and not even with the -babble ops. This password lets the bot control how loaded the server gets. Sharing the password makes the server suffer. In addition to the normal random rotation, the password will change if the server gets overloaded.
The URLs or IP addresses or port numbers of the rules site or the downloading site.
The method of obtaining the information about my server and related pieces. This is the mostly likely piece of information that the -babble ops would ask for to verify that you are allowed in my channels. If you do not answer this question to the best of your ability, you will not be allowed to stay.
The key to either of my channels or the gateway channel. (I know people sometimes casually mention the key to the gateway channel. It's only fine as long as they don't know about my larger server. Since you're here, you know better, and it's no longer okay for you to share it.)
The list from the gateway bot.
More than five full pathnames from the server list. You may mention up to five full pathnames to ask for help with problems downloading or to ask people to verify if files are complete.
The list of forbidden information above is not complete, and other pieces of information may be forbidden. Use common sense. I would like all discussion about the server should take place in -babble, but I recognize that private conversations might be necessary. If you must discuss anything about my server or its related pieces in private conversation, you still may not give or ask for the information listed above, and you must both be in the trigger channel. Any talk at all about the server, its related pieces, or even the existence of any of the pieces in any place other than -babble may get you banned. Please report any violation of this rule.
Leak information withholding. If Göring, Treblinka, or I initiate an interrogation via -babble and you continue to withhold information about how you found out about my server, you may be permanently banned at the bot. If you should decide to provide solid, provable information about how you got in, let me know and I will unban you, but be warned in advance that I will take action against those who leaked the information. Those who share information about my site forfeit their opportunity to download from the site.
Taking advantage of dynamic IPs. A lot of the bans depend on your IP. People with dynamic IPs have an unfair advantage in that they can get a new IP and continue the abuse. If you intentionally use your dynamic IP to continue abuse beyond a ban, you may be banned at the bot layer which has far more flexible pattern matching abilities. Note that this means that hopping IPs when committing a typo in the trigger channel may turn a month-long ban into a permanent ban. Also, if you have a dynamic IP hammering my server, I may choose to ban you at the bot instead of (or in addition to) banning your whole ISP, in which case, you have to prove to me that you figured out how to use your downloading software.
Remember that you must always include your nick, ident, and IP(s) when you e-mail me. If you're e-mailing about a ban, please include exactly what type of ban you are under, and make sure to include the word "ban" in the subject line. As you can see, there are a lot of ways for you to be banned, and it'll take me a long time to find where you were banned if you don't tell me. If you e-mail me without the necessary information, I will simply ignore your message. Also, I'm often very busy. If I haven't replied to your message within a month and you included all the necessary information, try e-mailing me again (with all the necessary information) because that means I probably lost track of your message. It is much easier to follow the rules than to have me unban you, so please be careful and try to not get banned.
(Thanks to Göring for reading over and providing suggestions for this page and for creating the first Bot FAQ back before the bot had its own channels.)
-- Dildo
(this text copy pasted from the site, names and additional data changed at the threat of ban for sharing this information)
Linux Sucks!
I had warm bawls.
Another stupid Soandso Day.
Blah.
I get paid, that's thanks enough.
World would be better with no appreciation days.
a Richard Stallman aprieciation day!
last Friday in July
... in half the world (EU and US) it is Wednesday. In the other half it is Thursday.
Errr
Or is this just a setup for the duplicate on Friday?
I only ask because:
;-)
2002-07-23 16:41:06 This Friday is System Administrator Appreciation Day! (articles,news) (rejected)
Not that I'm sore or anything
Great idea, actually, might even actually do something to improve professional relationships. I just hope Hallmark doesn't latch onto this like they have Mother and Father's Days... imagine commercials for cheesy cards and flower arrangements and chocolate baskets for SysAdmin Day, managers frantically calling 1-800-FLOWERS to avoid the manufactured faux pas of forgetting the date until the last minute...
System Technical Overseer, North Eastern Division ("STONED") would be more appropriate in our case...
Fuck `em!! Another job we`ll be largely automating over the next 5 years...
I think we should all remind our employers that administrators are people too and proudly wear our buttons bearing "Have you hugged your geek lately?
Unfortunately, no one would ever see one of these buttons if I wore one, as my company never lets me leave my administrative cave.
Nick Burns...he'll fix your computer, then he's gonna make fun of you...
Oh, By the way, YOU'RE WELCOME!!
$cat
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that you perform keeping the system clean and building is what provides the platform for the obsessives and the prima donnas to have their moments in the sun. In the end, we need you all; in order to go forwards we must first avoid going backwards.
To the paranoid conspiracy theorists - yes, I work for Apple too. No, my resignation wasn't on Steve's direct orders, or in any way related to work I'm doing, may do, may not do, or indeed what was in the tea I had at lunchtime today. It's about real problems that the project faces, real problems that the project has brought upon itself. You can't escape them by inventing excuses about outside influence, the problem stems from within.
To the politically obsessed - give it a break, if you can. No, the project isn't a lemonade stand anymore, but it's not a world-spanning corporate juggernaut either and some of the more grandiose visions going around are in need of a solid dose of reality. Keep it simple, stupid.
To the grandstanders, the prima donnas, and anyone that thinks that they can hold the project to ransom for their own agenda - give it a break, if you can. When the current core were elected, we took a conscious stand against vigorous sanctions, and some of you have exploited that. A new core is going to have to decide whether to repeat this mistake or get tough. I hope they learn from our errors.
Future
I started work on FreeBSD because it was fun. If I'm going to continue, it has to be fun again. There are things I still feel obligated to do, and with any luck I'll find the time to meet those obligations.
However I don't feel an obligation to get involved in the political mess the project is in right now. I tried, I burnt out. I don't feel that my efforts were worthwhile. So I won't be standing for election, I won't be shouting from the sidelines, and I probably won't vote in the next round of ballots.
You could say I'm packing up my toys. I'm not going home just yet, but I'm not going to play unless you can work out how to make the project somewhere fun to be again.
= Mike
--
- posted by poopbot: information likes to be narrow
wuEGMp1ss6 Post #713
I would just like every developer that says "it is a server issue" to be forced to take the "perfect" code they have and submit it to a code review before he/she gets to me. That would be the best present of all. Just so I don't have to spend hours digging into it to prove it was that code, in the process fixing the error, and doing thier job. Wait! I just realized, this may be by design. I can hear my CIO now, "if you have a problem that you can't seem to fix, just upload it into production, blame the server, and force the Admin team to prove you wrong. This will narrow cast your problem, and you can work on something else while they figure it out."
Interesting.....DING!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Why is it that any person who can be remotely considered a member of a group has a day for them. I consider myself appreciated every day that the servers don't go down. Just 'cuz it's not said every day doesn't mean I don't "hear" it. Plus, I am shown appreciation every other Friday when money magically appears in my checking account.
But system administrators aren't all geeks. They're often Microsoft Certified professionals, which is an entirely different animal!
Wouldn't the shortest day of the year be more appropriate?
If you don't get the reference, you aren't getting enough User Friendly . Failure to get enough UF in your diet can lead to blindness, so head over there now for a dose.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Lets send him .......
well umm... nothing
i want to live more
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
All these posts are yours-- except FIRST.
Attempt no logged-in submits there.
...to humility?
Q: How do you know that you have more bandwidth than any human should ever be allowed to have? (Except for us /.ers)
\
A: When you are featured on /. and you don't see any difference in the performance of your connection.
/
Somehow places like MSNBC get /.ed and they never seem to be bogged down...
Gato
I'd like and appreciate the day a LOT more if it wasn't created by a system administrator. No offense, but it doesn't seem like a genuine thank-you if the the only other people that celebrate it are other administrative staff, or if they are only celebrating it because they found the website saying that they should.
My company's IT department reboots all the servers every Sunday night at midnight. It's procedure.
Why yes, we are a 99% MS server environment, how did you know?
The only thing that doesn't get rebooted every Sunday (though I wouldn't put it past them) is our Big Iron.
Sysadmin day? Fine. I think that's great. But how about a day for all us helpdesk monkeys? We're the grunts on the front line, dealing with all the crap from the users.
Sysadmins are all safe in their bunkers, protected from the raw savagery that is support.
- posts may be recorded for legal or training purposes. Thank you for your co-operation.
on the page dedicated to the Sysadmin Day, there's a whole list of what qualifies as a Systems Administrator. MSCE is not on the list, though MS Exchange admins are.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Face it guys, the whole point of this day is to make us feel top shit for the day and to needlessly demand that ppl are lower than you. Lets all wank over dilbert comics.
Really, do we have a CEO appreciaton day for all their hard work? Do we have a janitor appreciation day for thanking the janitor for cleaning up after us? Do we have a dentist appreciation day for the dental work they do?
;)
You get paid a salary to provide a service, that should be enough compensation. Heck I'm an engineer, wheres the engineer appreciation day? No thanks for all the technology which was devleloped by scientists and engineers to provide sys-admins jobs?
this isn't really news-worthy, but i do find it funny.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Having worked with many over the years (and having a father who was one for a 20k+ user network for ~25 years) I know a little of the trouble that these people put up with. The devil-possessed clueless users hounding them about problems reading e-mail and how the printer is not working. The enverending department computer inventory cataloging project. The revolutionary updates to the system snuffed by the managers in the ivory tower who don't know what they're killing. The triple booked lab coverage at the same time someone infects the network with a few worms and the UPS on the server starts to whine.
And people accuse admins of being detached, stuffy people who treat their users with disdain.
APPRECIATE YOUR ADMIN. </rant>
Yes, but will they receive a Nintendo 64 console for their efforts to retain 24/7 uptime? The N64 has a plethora of great games...here I will name the top 3. The top 3 video games on the N64 in no particular order are: 1.) Mario 64 2.) Mario Kart 64 3.)Goldeneye 007. Purchase the N64 and 3 games and they will create an intellectualy stimulating atmosphere where you can let go of alll your worries and save the mushroom kingdom from Bowser!
After seeing a poster of a sysadm bombarded with WHAT?
/*" at the prompt and hovering the middle finger over the return key while looking at his employer and saying: "Won't you give me a pwesent, pwetty pwease?"
The only way for a sysadm to get a present is writing "rm -r
Ciao,
Foggy
"Say thank you to the poor sysadmin"... Think I'll have to buy my own cake on Friday, a big thank you to me ;-)
Having a day for SysAdmins is all well and good, but what about the underappreciated Lighthouse Keepers?
These heros of coastal safety never get thanked!
Let's start a movement to create a "day" for those lonely Lighthouse Keepers!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Are we included if we build controls systems for machinery? we run cat5, have offline-access installed, program, design controls systems, design hardware, install, debug, service, maintain, whatnot. would you count that as a Sys Admin?
Its called payday, happens every other friday...
Just what I need, another day for the system administrators here to claim all the glory, when I as a lowly telephone tech support person have to take all the angry calls when the paper MCSEs here screw up the email, web proxy and other servers.
... I'd say more but the phone's ringing and it's probably another corporate executive who can't find the "on" button again. :P
Blah
When is the Helpdesk Appreciation Day?
I'd like my users to buy me T-shirts from ThinkGeek.
Right! The one that says "SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0" would do nicely!
Or how about having the CEO buy you the one that says "I run this company".
That'd be swell!
zI'm pretty sure it's December 22. June 21 is the longest. We have this nice odd-numbered year, so things don't divide as nicely as they might. According to my calender and my other pagan friends and whatnot. I was born on midsummer. it's all very nice.
maybe there are stupid appreciation days for people whose jobs are being done perfectly when no one notices them, and failure otherwise. sales guys get to yell "i got the soandso account". sysadmins dont get to yell "hey another 16 hour day of cleaning up digicrap and no one noticed the massive changes i made". tech support people should have a day too, if they dont have one. actually i like the idea where there's no apprecation days. everyones got it right with the paycheck thing. but i'm just saying, maybe its for the people that only get spoken to when something broke, not when something went right. its grating on the soul when the only people that talk to you are angry.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Introduction
A fairy gives lectures on morality to the feline anomaly. Furthermore, another photon near an abstraction takes a coffee break, and a mortician buries a blithe spirit. The wedding dress secretly admires a college-educated ball bearing. If the freight train figures out a fire hydrant near a pit viper, then some mating ritual beyond another cowboy reads a magazine. Any squid can find lice on a freight train, but it takes a real recliner to ostensibly plan an escape from another pit viper defined by a prime minister a cough syrup toward a graduated cylinder.
Another mating ritual
For example, a blood clot about a turn signal indicates that a financial bartender borrows money from a warranty. When a demon is imaginative, a paper napkin secretly admires an often snooty graduated cylinder. If the grain of sand learns a hard lesson from the short order cook behind some graduated cylinder, then another blithe spirit flies into a rage. Any pig pen can lazily require assistance from a burly plaintiff, but it takes a real fighter pilot to caricature the steam engine over a satellite. Another eagerly temporal minivan slyly buries the obsequious squid, or a briar patch usually gives lectures on morality to a cyprus mulch.
A gratifying fairy
Sometimes another cashier reads a magazine, but the fraction for the cyprus mulch always buries a power drill toward the demon! The light bulb befriends a satellite of an apartment building. A lazily Alaskan roller coaster sanitizes another mitochondrial traffic light, or some burglar eats a hesitantly smelly plaintiff. For example, a seldom righteous traffic light indicates that an ocean knows some chestnut inside the tabloid. If the earring somewhat finds subtle faults with a pine cone, then the wheelbarrow hibernates.
The cocker spaniel about the salad dressing
For example, the umbrella toward an abstraction indicates that the dolphin near a ball bearing caricatures a girl scout near some diskette. A cocker spaniel for the judge reads a magazine, and a pine cone finds subtle faults with a rattlesnake. Furthermore, the hairy movie theater returns home, and a grizzly bear near a paycheck is a big fan of a childlike burglar. For example, a canyon living with a graduated cylinder indicates that the industrial complex buries a jersey cow.
Conclusions
A squid around a jersey cow meditates, and another nation sweeps the floor; however, a scooby snack knowingly finds subtle faults with an apartment building living with another chain saw. When a hockey player around a paycheck is smelly, a minivan has a change of heart about an oil filter about an asteroid. The bartender around a polygon is barely soggy. Indeed, another rattlesnake befriends a warranty. Indeed, the carpet tack for an abstraction usually caricatures an elusive h
- posted by poopbot: news for turds, stuff that splatters
Rkpqe569lT Post #717
But what happens when all the sysadmins take the day off to celebrate their geekdom?
I can see the headlines now "World comes to a halt because no geek around to press control-alt-delete"
How else are we supposed to get laid?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I just told my wife about this and explained that I needed some recognition for the 6 machine LAN that I admin in our home. She laughed at me.
If my wife reacts like that, I'd hate to see your boss.
I can almost hear the Budweiser commercial for this one! :-)
you could simply take pride in a job well done.
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
Introduction
The cheese wheel inexorably avoids contact with the paycheck. The steam engine goes deep sea fishing with an often outer ski lodge. When the cyprus mulch over a vacuum cleaner hides, a ball bearing gets stinking drunk.
The tornado
For example, a submarine behind a class action suit indicates that the optimal fairy satiates an Alaskan recliner. When a mitochondrial bottle of beer is thoroughly dirt-encrusted, a most difficult blood clot underhandedly writes a love letter to a defendant. An earring pees on the cashier over some globule, but the pathetic crane sells another vacuum cleaner behind a scythe to a false wheelbarrow. If a chess board defined by a grain of sand makes love to a crispy cyprus mulch, then a particle accelerator flies into a rage.
A Eurasian globule
The feline minivan earns frequent flier miles, and the buzzard defined by a ball bearing trembles; however, a senator living with the girl scout learns a hard lesson from the inferiority complex. Any chain saw can try to seduce the particle accelerator, but it takes a real salad dressing to play pinochle with the inexorably precise paycheck. Furthermore, another seldom load bearing defendant flies into a rage, and a paycheck around a light bulb seeks a roller coaster around another bartender. If a crank case makes love to the diskette, then the squid toward a mortician meditates. Now and then, an insurance agent thoroughly avoids contact with a pompous turkey.
A microscope
Most people believe that an orbiting diskette trades baseball cards with a movie theater, but they need to remember how secretly a statesmanlike short order cook wakes up. A paternal roller coaster is usually financial. When the accurately varigated hole puncher takes a coffee break, a slyly smelly garbage can earns frequent flier miles. For example, the phony cheese wheel indicates that the tornado near a fruit cake hesitantly gives lectures on morality to a salad dressing defined by the corporation. The carpet tack near a cargo bay, some parking lot toward a warranty, and a stovepipe beyond a freight train are what made America great!
Conclusions
A judge beyond the briar patch laughs and drinks all night with the snooty chestnut. A raspy burglar conquers a bowling ball. For example, another plaintiff toward a bartender indicates that the ski lodge behind a fairy finds lice on a burglar. If some rattlesnake toward a cheese wheel can be kind to a blood clot, then the elusive movie theater self-flagellates. When a photon related to a turkey is most difficult, a self-loathing bottle of beer falls in love with a pickup truck living with the paycheck.
- posted by poopbot: lovely snot! wonderful snot!
wjGdNdI71E Post #718
Cash would be a nice gift. Is anyone listening?
My perfect gift would be the right to replace the users with shell scripts for the day. *nix is more reliable :)
We're Doomed
posted by apple lied yesterday:
.Mac service be more reliable? .mac member. .Mac membership and an active net connection?
Q: Will the new for-pay
A: No.
Q: Will there be a phone number to call for technical support?
A: No.
Q: Will there be an e-mail address to report outages?
A: No.
Q: Will there, in fact, be any support at all?
A: No.
Q: Will the 100MB of storage come with an increased bandwidth limit for web sites?
A: No.
Q: Will you be telling us what the bandwidth limits are?
A: No.
Q: Will you support CGI, PHP, SSI, SQL, servlets, JSP, WebObjects applications, or anything else beyond regular static HTML files?
A: No.
Q: Will I be able to get access to my web logs? Or any other realtime webspace access statistics?
A: No.
Q: What about backup--our files are safe if we back them up to iDisk, right?
A: No. Apple does not guarantee the integrity of any files on iDisk, even if placed there by the Apple Backup software.
Q: Well, we can at least use the Backup software to back up our computers to CD-R, right?
A: No, not if you have any files bigger than 650MB.
Q: What about using my external tape drive, DVD drive or Firewire hard drive?
A: No, Backup only works with Apple-supplied internal drives. And only if you're a
Q: So the backup software doesn't back up from my local hard disk to my local CD burner, unless I have a
A: Correct.
Q: OK. The service also includes anti-virus software. Are there any Mac OS X viruses at all?
A: No.
Q: If I don't use Microsoft Office, do I need to worry about macro viruses?
A: No.
Q: Umm... OK. So how much for this invaluable service?
A: $99 for one year. Plus tax. In advance.
Q: Can I get two accounts, for me and my wife?
A: Sure, that'll be $198 plus tax. In advance.
Q: No, I mean can I get a second account at a discount because I've already bought one?
A: Oh, alright then, quit whining. You can get a second account for $10 a year if you buy one full account.
Q: And it'll have the backup, anti-virus, and web functionality?
A: No, only an e-mail address.
Q: Ah... but at least it'll be a full e-mail account, right?
A: No, you'll only get 5MB of space. But that's nearly enough to hold five days' spam.
Q: Can't my two accounts just share the same space for a nominal extra fee?
A: No.
Q: Is there a satisfaction guarantee?
A: Yes. Apple reserves the right to terminate your access to the online services and the software, without cause, without notice and without refunding your money, if it's not satisfied with your behavior.
Q: What kinds of things am I not allowed to post on my web site?
A: Anything "lewd" or "vulgar", anything "embarrassing" to anyone, or anything that counts as advertising for any product or service.
Q: So you want $99 a year for an e-mail address, useless backup software, anti-virus software I could buy for $50, and web space limited to inoffensive pictures of fluffy kittens? $99 even if I only want to keep the "lifetime e-mail address" that you previously said was free just for buying a Mac?
A: Yes. Pay up now, in three weeks we'll delete your files and bounce your mail.
Q: I have one more question... What exactly are you smoking out there in Cupertino?
A: We think it's crack. Think different.
Why would we 'apprciate' that greasy little dork? He hasn't changed the toner cartridge in the LJ4 up on third floor yet! Hop to it, 'admin' boy! Then Doris needs you to defrag her drive again and you can help Nancy get her machine back on the LAN.
If you get it all done by noon we'll pool our money and buy you a Hostess DingDong.
"I've heard WinXP removed the cmd/command prompt."
No, Microsoft didn't remove the CMD.EXE or COMMAND.COM prompt from Windows XP. But Windows XP has reduced functionality, in many ways, not just in the command line. The command line is a big embarrassment because of its limited capabilities, but at least in Win 95 it worked. With every version since then it has worked less well. (There are two kinds of command prompt, and, according to Microsoft employees, the differences between them are not documented.)
The command line prompt sometimes begins to display short file names. Microsoft employees say that Microsoft has no fix, although someone not connected with Microsoft did make a work-around.
Cutting and pasting into a command line program often puts successive extra spaces before each line. Microsoft employees say that there is no plan to fix this.
The fast paste mode that is in Windows 98 is gone in Windows XP. Microsoft employees say there is no plan to fix this.
When using the command line interface, Windows XP doesn't always update the time. After several hours, the time reported to command line programs can be several hours in error.
There is a DOS program called START.EXE that can be used to start other programs. But it does operate the same way as in other versions of Windows. It starts a program, but cannot be made to return control to the command line program as previous versions did. There is no technical reason for this; it is just one of the shortcomings that are allowed to exist.
People often say that DOS has gone away. But Microsoft still calls the command line interface DOS, and in Windows XP Microsoft has added new programs for configuring the OS that work only under DOS.
Sometimes when you press a key while using Windows XP, it is seconds until there is any response. Apparently there is something wrong with the CPU scheduler in XP, because there are a lot of complaints about this in the forums and MS people have said that they are working on it. On one particular fresh installation of XP, on an Intel motherboard with either a Matrox G550 or an ATI Radeon video adapter, it requires 18 seconds to display a directory listing of 94 items. This is apparently related to a bug in the video software, not the adapter drivers.
Something is wrong with the Alt-Tab display of running programs under Windows XP. If there are a lot of programs, not all of them are displayed. The order jumps around in a seemingly random way.
Although articles often say negative things about Microsoft, I've never seen an article that fully documents how bad the situation really is. Microsoft's management is so bad that the company has become self-destructive. For example, Windows XP is spyware. Here is a list of ways Windows XP connects to Microsoft's servers:
- Application Layer Gateway Service (Requires server rights.)
- Fax Service
- File Signature Verification
- Generic Host Process for Win32 Services (Requires server rights.)
- Microsoft Application Error Reporting
- Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer
- Microsoft Direct Play Voice Test
- Microsoft Help and Support Center
- Microsoft Help Center Hosting Server (Wants server rights.)
- Microsoft Management Console
- Microsoft Media Player (tells Microsoft the music you like)
- Microsoft Network Availability Test
- Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service
- MS DTC Console program
- Run DLL as an app
- Services and Controller app
- Time Service, sets the time on your computer from Microsoft's computer.
- Microsoft Office keeps a number in each file you create that identifies
your computer. Microsoft has never said why.
- Microsoft mouse software has reduced functionality until you let it connect
to Microsoft computers.
These are just the ones I know. There may be others.So, if you use Windows XP, your computer is dependent on Microsoft computers. That's bad, not only because you lose control over your possession, but because Microsoft produces buggy software and doesn't patch bugs quickly. For example, as of July 7, 2002, there are 18 unpatched security holes in Microsoft Internet Explorer. This is a terrible record for a company that has $40 billion in the bank. Obviously, with that kind of money, Microsoft could fix the bugs if it wanted to fix them. Since the bugs are very public and Microsoft has the money, it seems reasonable to suppose that top management at Microsoft has deliberately decided that the bugs should remain, at least for now.
It seems possible that there is a connection between all the bugs and the U.S. government's friendly treatment of Microsoft's law-breaking. The U.S. government's CIA and FBI and NSA departments spy on the entire world, and unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft software help spies.
Windows XP, and all current Windows operating systems, have a file called the registry in which configuration information is written. If this one (large, often fragmented) file becomes corrupted, the only way of recovering may be to re-format the hard drive, re-install the operating system, and then re-install and re-configure all the applications. The registry file is a single, very vulnerable, point of failure. Microsoft apparently designed it this way to provide copy protection. Since most entries in the registry are poorly documented or not documented, the registry effectively prevents control by the user.
Note that Microsoft does not support making functional complete backups under Windows XP. Look at Microsoft's policy about this: Q314828 Microsoft Policy on Disk Duplication of Windows XP Installation. Only those who work with Microsoft software will understand the true meaning of Microsoft's policy. Since almost all programs use the registry operating system file, if you cannot make a functional copy of the operating system you cannot make a functional copy of all your application installations and configurations. There are other software companies that try to fix this, but they don't work well, and Microsoft can, of course, break their implementations, as they have often done with other kinds of competitors.
Because the configuration information for the motherboard and the configuration information for the are mixed together in the registry file, the registry tends to prevent you from moving a hard drive to a computer with a different motherboard. That's another implication of the above Microsoft policy. So, if you have a motherboard failure, and a good complete backup, you may not be able to recover unless you have a spare computer with the same motherboard.
Note that Windows XP Professional can support only ten simultaneous incoming network connections. If you want more than that, you must use Windows 2000 server, and pay much, much more. (There is no Windows XP server yet.) Many businesses have very light network traffic; they just move files from staff member to staff member; they really don't need a dedicated server computer. The staff computers could easily handle the load except for this artificial limitation.
Apparently because the Windows XP GUI comes from Windows 98, Windows XP has the same problem with desktop icons that Windows 98 has. The icons sometimes flicker. Sometimes they move themselves around, particularly after the user switches monitor resolutions. Also, sometimes the taskbar settings un-configure themselves, as they do in Windows 98.
Only technically knowledgeable people know how to avoid signing up for a Microsoft Passport account during initial use of Windows XP. The name Passport gives an indication of Microsoft's thinking. A passport is a document issued by a sovereign nation. Without it, the nation's citizens cannot travel, and, if they leave, won't be allowed back in their own country. In Microsoft's corporate thinking, the company seems to be moving in the direction of believing that they own the user's computer. Most people are both honest and intimidated. Apparently about 95% do whatever they are asked on the screen. They give their personal information to Microsoft. They don't realize that, if they feel forced to get a Passport account, they should enter almost completely fictitious information, since the real question is not "What is your name and address", but "Can we invade your privacy". The honest answer to this is "No, you cannot invade my privacy", and the only effective way to communicate that is to give completely fictitious information. Since it is the educated people who have computers, Microsoft is building a database of the personal lives of educated people. Microsoft knows when they connect and from what IP address (which tends to show the area), what kind of help they ask, and information about what they are doing with their computers, including what music they like. It is not known, and there is no way to know, how much Microsoft or other organizations make use of this information, or their plans for future use.
Not only has Windows XP definitely gone further in the direction of allowing the user less control over his or her own machine, but with Palladium, Microsoft apparently intends to finish the job: Microsoft will have ultimate control over the user's computer and therefore all his or her data. Even now, under Windows XP, a recent security patch requires that the user agree to a contract that gives Microsoft administrator privileges over the user's computer. The contract says that if a user wants to patch his or her system against a bug which would allow an attack over the Internet, he or she must give Microsoft legal control over the computer. See this article also: Microsoft's Digital Rights Management-- A Little Deeper. You may need to be a lawyer to take apart the crucial sentence. "These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and [my emphasis] use other software on your computer" legally includes this meaning: "These updates may disable your ability to use other software on your computer." Note that the term "security related updates" is meaningless to the user because the updates have no relation to user security. So, the sentence effectively means that Microsoft can control the user's computer without notice and whenever it wants. That kind of sentence is known in psychology as "testing the limits". If there is no strong public complaint about this, expect to see more and stronger language like this.
This Register article shows the direction Microsoft is going: MS Palladium protects IT vendors, not you. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Microsoft is well down that road. See this ZDNet article, also: MS: Why we can't trust your 'trustworthy' OS.
Microsoft's self-destructiveness does not mean that the user should be self-destructive. There is no need to apologize for using Microsoft software. The correct solution to abuse is persuading the abuser to stop being abusive. Once I posted to a Slashdot story a link to an article on a web site of mine. By far the majority of visitors from the Slashdot story used Microsoft operating systems. Rather than feel embarrassed because Microsoft is abusive, action needs to be taken to prevent the abuse. If you are against Microsoft abuse, you are not against Microsoft; you are more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates.
These Microsoft policies mean that any government which wants to be independent of the United States government, and any government which represents itself as controlled by the people, cannot use Microsoft operating systems, or other Microsoft proprietary systems.
- posted by poopbot: who doesn't like scat?
gblgoQkZoc Post #719
Couldn't they have placed that day sometime else? Right now, 90% of the people working here are on vacation. Just the sysadmin is at work, as usual. (Actually, I went on vacation before everybody else, so now when I'm back, it's more or less a couple of weeks of vacation-at-work.)
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
This is just fabulous! It'd be really quite nice to get a "Thank you" every now and then. I just love it when people call and say "there's something wrong with my computer", I fix it while they do something else, and mention to the employee on my way out, "Oh, you'r computer's fixed now". All I ever get is "Oh, good". How about a bloody thank you once in a while?!
/me settles down
Just my typical luck that I'm on my vacation at the moment. If I'd been working, I would have sent out an e-mail saying "Ok, here's the deal, people. Either you thank me for doing such a fabulous work NOW, or I'll pull the plug on the ATM and lock the door".
Stupid vacation. I might even have had some fun.
CmdrTaco: You sit here, dear.
CowboiKneel: All right.
CmdrTaco (to Waitress): Morning!
Waitress: Morning!
CmdrTaco: Well, whatve you got?
Waitress: Well, theres egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and snot; egg, bacon and snot; egg, bacon, sausage, and snot; snot, bacon, sausage, and snot; snot, egg, snot, snot, bacon, and snot; snot, sausage, snot, snot, bacon, snot, tomato, and snot;
Slashdot Crew (starting to chant): Snot, snot, snot, snot
Waitress: Snot, snot, snot, egg, and snot; snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, baked beans, snot, snot, snot
Slashdot Crew (singing): Snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot!
Waitress: or Lobster Thermidor au Crevette with a Mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and snot.
CowboiKneel: Have you got anything without snot?
Waitress: Well, theres snot, egg, sausage, and snot, thats not got much snot in it.
CowboiKneel: I dont want any snot!
CmdrTaco: Why cant he have egg, bacon, snot, and sausage?
CowboiKneel: Thats got snot in it!
CmdrTaco: Hasnt got as much snot in it as snot, egg, sausage, and snot, has it?
Slashdot Crew: Snot, snot, snot, snot! (crescendo through next few lines)
CowboiKneel: Could you do the egg, bacon, snot, and sausage without the snot then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
CowboiKneel: What do you mean Urgghh? I dont like snot!
Slashdot Crew: Lovely snot! Wonderful snot!
Waitress: Shut up!
Slashdot Crew: Lovely snot! Wonderful snot!
Waitress: Shut up! (Slashdot Crew stops) Bloody Slashdot fags! You cant have egg, bacon, snot and sausage without the snot.
CowboiKneel (shrieks): I dont like snot!
CmdrTaco: Sshh, dear, dont cause a fuss. Ill have your snot. I love it. Im having snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, beaked beans, snot, snot, snot, and snot!
Slashdot Crew (singing): Snot, snot, snot, snot. Lovely snot! Wonderful snot!
Waitress: Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
CmdrTaco: Well could I have his snot instead of the baked beans then?
Waitress: You mean snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot
Slashdot Crew (singing elaborately): Snot, snot, snot, snot. Lovely snot! Wonderful snot! Snot, sno-o-o-o-o-ot, snot, sno-o-o-o-o-ot snot. Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Snot, snot, snot, snot!
- posted by poopbot: for the crapflooder in all of us
9qFXjkA3Bp Post #720
As a DBA, I don't depend upon thanks or respect or whatever. If I'm doing my job right, no one notices. As it should be. In other jobs, a lot of people work for little recognition and little money. So I'm not complaining. If you're into IT for the glory, you're going to be disappointed.
"Why should we leave America to go to America Junior?" - H. Simpson, on visiting Canada
It had a panic a month ago after another admin commented out some functions in the /etc/inetd.conf, and kill -HUP'd the inet daemon. Too bad. The little Sun E450's uptime was over 1000 days, which dates its last reboot as before Y2K. The firmare is still dated from 1997.
Bless its little kernel. We're finally getting a backup box for it. We couldn't patch it before because there wasn't a test/dev environment. And we didn't want to bring it down, because it served a critical production function. HA!
Having boxes that are caught up in politics really makes a sysadmin's job tough. Even worse is politics, and no money!
I'm the system administrator for a large school, and all the pupils and teaching staff are off in July and August.... that's 1300 users! The only ones in to celebrate my day with me are the 5 technicians and the caretakers!!!
:)
I'm sure other schools/colleges/etc are in the same position as mine (closed during July and August).
Can't we move System Administrator Appreciation Day forward two months?!!? Please?!!!!
I think we should all remind our employers that administrators are people too...
:)
Here is a way to do it fast:
Just redirected all http requests to your own intranet page with BIG FLASHING banner, asking to greet us with sysadmin day and add such line to every incoming email.. I'm sure that soon everyone will notice your existence
Otherwise unplug from network users who did not greet you well...
A Linux user goes back.
/etc/fstab file so that it always automounted when plugged in. I was very impressed.
/dev/null, once I find where that actually is.
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins.
Introduction...
In much of today's online news, we hear of how many people are migrating to GNU/Linux. What we don't seem to hear much of, is users going back to their old operating systems. The reason for this article is to say that I've done just that.
Yes, I've gone back. After three and a half years of trying to make GNU/Linux work on the desktop, I've decided that it's simply too hard for the average home user. Before I go into my reasons for going back, let me outline what I believe an 'average' home user is. Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Three and a half years; that's how long I've been trying to make Linux work on my desktop computer. Right about now, I'm sure that you are now screaming that I didn't try hard enough, or that I'm just plain stupid. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Stupid users don't doggedly stick at something for three and a half years, trying distribution after distribution in the hope of finding the holy grail of Linux desktops. They give up in less than a few hours of trying to (unsuccessfully) install RedHat Linux. Hear now my sad tale of why Linux isn't suitable for my desktop.
Some background...
The year is 1998. I've had my Windows '95 computer for around six months. Frustrated with the constant crashes, I desperately asked an online mate for help. Even though he was a windows user, he calmly suggested that I try something I'd never come across before...
âoeLinux, eh? Never heard of it.â
âoeOh, it's a free OS that you can download. Apparently it doesn't crash much. Just do an online search for it.â
Armed with this meagre knowledge, I set out on my quest for the ultimate stable operating system. I searched online, and found places where you could even buy copies of Linux! So, I left the comfort of my warm study, and returned forty minutes later with my first Linux boxed set â" RedHat Linux 5.2. After initially balking at the very basic installer (and few false starts), I had it up and running on my lovely AMD K6-233. I even got X working in no time at all. Then the system booted up for the first time.... and it was dead ugly. I had a very stable new OS, but I didn't even want to look at it. I was happy that I had several installed interfaces to choose from, but none of them appealed to me whatsoever. Wanting to download a nicer interface led me to my next problem.
I had absolutely no idea how to even get this nice, stable OS onto the internet! After reinstalling windows and RedHat in a dual-boot configuration, I got the help I needed by using Windows and USENET. Strangely enough, I can still remember the name of the long-suffering person who helped me get RedHat online, but that's another story. After looking around online, I discovered KDE. Only up to version one, it was the closest thing I had to a completely useable Linux system. I downloaded all the KDE packages for RedHat 5.2, only to discover another distro called Mandrake, that came with KDE preinstalled and configured. Back to my local distributor, and I was set.
Mandrake with KDE was exactly what I needed at that stage in my Linux using life, and I stuck with it for over a year and a half. Always seeking the 'perfect' desktop OS, I followed releases from version 5.3 all the way through to 7.0. Eventually I became dissatisfied with Mandrake, and briefly tried a number of other distros until I finally settled on Debian. I was impressed by the simple power, configurability, and the ease of upgrade that is apt-get. I felt good about being among the uber-elite Debian user community. Needless to say, I learned a lot about how to configure hardware under Linux during my time with Debian. I learned to sift through the old HOWTOs on Linux Doc until I found something suitable and accurate, I learned to utilize the power of USENET and IRC. Life was good.
Right now you must be wondering; âoeWhere is this leading? This guy seemed quite happy with Linux!â. True, I was. After a while, I decided I didn't want to have fine-grained control. I wanted something simple. I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so... well... unstable. I got tired of having to recompile my kernel every time I got new hardware. I got tired of using command line to talk to my PC. It was time for a change. I had good experiences years ago with Mandrake, so I figured I'd try it again. As good as Mandrake 8.1 was, it wasn't what I was after. SuSE Linux 8.0 Professional (boxed set) was installed onto my PC instead.
I have to stop at this point, and say that SuSE Linux 8.0 (Pro) is the best Linux distribution that I've ever used. It has an easy installer, reasonable hardware support, and comes with the very good KDE 3.0. The box contains seven CDROMS, one DVD and three decent books that would help even the most inexperienced user get up and going. YaST2 is a decent graphical system configuration tool. When (not if) I go back to Linux, I'll definitely try SuSE again. However, there are quite a number of things that have improve (or change completely) before I'll consider going back. Read on for my brief list of things that must must get better before I'll switch back from the Microsoft camp.
Where GNU/Linux needs to improve...
X11
The X Window System is an awesomely powerful, network transparent graphical subsystem. It's perfectly suited to running applications from remote servers. However, this is NOT what a home user needs. My experience with X is that it's too big, bloated, slow and unstable to be any good to the home user. Most crashes that I ever experienced with Linux have been X's fault. My servers don't run X, and they never crash.
What home users need is something small and fast, so they can run local applications efficiently. I would like to see the X Window System dumped in favour of a hardware accelerated framebuffer, running something like directFB or Qtopia. Home users need a small, fast graphical subsystem, with built in 3d support. BeOS seemed to be on the right track before they went under.
Fonts are truly awful under X. Most distributions ship with appalling fonts, and there is no standard way to add additional (nicer) fonts to the system. Even after extra fonts have eventually been added, many applications (eg Abiword, Staroffice) refuse to use the new fonts anyway. Perhaps the framebuffer-based graphical subsystem I suggested could incorporate decent font support, and use a readable naming scheme as well.
Drivers
While having access to the latest version of the kernel is a good thing for developers, for home users it can be a nightmare. Got RedHat Linux 7.3? Perhaps you run SuSE 7.3 or Debian 2.2. You'll have to download a binary package specific to your distro. (I'm assuming that home users won't change their default kernel, but if they did, that binary package wouldn't even work!) Hardware manufacturers should be able to provide one single driver that works on all minor versions of a major kernel release. This way it would work will all current distros, instead of having to provide multiple binaries or source code. Hardware manufacturers don't want to give out the source, as this often gives away trade secrets about how their hardware is designed.
The solution seems to be to make binary drivers work on a variety of kernel versions. I'm not sure if this is even possible with the way the kernel is designed (I'm no kernel hacker), but it would go a long way toward making Linux more accessible to the home user. Even if the kernel needs to be redesigned to support this, then in my opinion, it should be done. Linux users are always clamouring for drivers... perhaps if the kernel had something like this, it might one day become a reality.
Hardware setup
While SuSE Linux 8.0 gave me some good experiences with hardware detection (such as automatic download of NVIDIA drivers), it also let me down as in this area.
The good: I recently borrowed a digital camera from a mate at work, to take photos of my case mod. Imagine how happy I was when I plugged it into my nearest USB port, and it was automatically configured (as a SCSI device) and mounted! SuSE even added it to my
The bad: Along came my new IDE CDRW drive. At AU$99, I couldn't pass up the purchase. Plugging it in gave me no joy. I was very disappointed that a device so common couldn't be detected and automatically configured under a modern operating system. The instructions on the SuSE support site said to add lines to lilo.conf and reboot. While this is a perfectly acceptable way to get hardware working for a geek familiar with *NIX, I believe that a home user shouldn't have to do more than plug it in. It's an IDE device, it's not that complicated!
The ugly: Once the hardware was finally working (as a pseudo-scsi drive), the next hurdle was to find decent graphical tools to burn and copy CDs. I finally settled on CDBakeOven, an above average KDE application. It burned CDs from data on the hard drive, but for some reason cdrecord (the command line backend) refused to allow me to copy a cd directly. Yes, it was installed SUID root. CD copying is such a basic function nowadays, why is it so hard to do under GNU/Linux?
Software distribution
I'll put this simply. I'm a home user, not a programmer. Why on earth should I have to compile the software I want to use? I know that having the source available is a good thing, but I'll say it again: I'm no programmer. I just want to install software and run it.
This leads to another point. Although having package databases (such as the rpm and deb systems use) is great, there should definitely be seperation between system packages and additionally installed software. There needs to be a standard installer and database for user-installed applications such as word processors, email clients and games, and it should be seperate from the rpm or deb databases used for system software such as lilo, init and cron. This will make it much easier for home users to know what applications they have installed on their PC, and to easily uninstall them if necessary, without knowing some arcane commands and weird package names.
Support
There is a huge wealth of knowledge among the thousands (millions?) of people that run GNU/Linux around the world. If you have a problem, odds are that someone out there can help you, often for free. This is one of the linux platform's greatest strengths. However, Linux users are also its greatest weakness. This may not apply to most of the community, but there is a very vocal minority that gives Linux a bad name. To every Linux user that has ever helped a newbie, I thank you. I have been helped by many a guru, often when I've been asking the simplest of questions. It's the remainder that are a problem.
I once heard a song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie called Every OS Sucks, where Linux users were described as 'elitist nerdy shmucks'. Sadly this is true for much of the 'community'. Too many consider themselves better than the rest of the world because they run Linux. Can you believe that? It's just a computer operating system, but somehow they think that it makes them better than those people who run systems such as Microsoft Windows! Elitism drives people away, as does saying âoeRTFMâ or belittling people who choose a different distro from yourself.
'Nuff said about that.
So what now?
Well, I decided to go back to a Microsoft platform. Initially being paranoid after reading things about DRM and spyware, I bit the bullet and installed Microsoft Windows XP. Like every OS, it has good and bad points; most of which you can learn about from online reviewers. I'll just point out several things that make me want to keep using it instead of GNU/Linux.
Fast graphical subsystem: Windows has lighting quick graphics, both 2d and 3d. There's no denying it. When I move a window, it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.
Drivers: Point and click to install (as a superuser, of course). Windows warns you if the driver isn't likely to work properly, and can roll back to working drivers if you deliberately choose to install one that hoses your system.
Hardware setup: My CDRW worked right away, without a hitch. I am able to drag and drop files from the Explorer file manager to the CDRW icon and they get added to the list of things to burn. A quick install of Nero Burning Rom, and I was able to make a backup copy of my game CDs. (I don't like taking originals to LANs where they can get destroyed or stolen).
Software distribution: All windows software comes in binaries, either with an installer or in a zip file. I hope to never compile an application ever again. Software designed for a different version of windows is 99% guaranteed to run, but if not, there is always 'compatibility mode'. One thing to note, however: Applications designed for single user versions of windows usually only run properly as a superuser, and this includes 3d games. I expect this to be rectified as the rest of the Windows world catches up to a multi-user environment.
I can't comment on the Windows using community yet. I've not yet had a problem that a simple point and click couldn't fix. However, I will say that my original concern with Windows '95 has been addressed in Windows XP. The stability is finally there.
Final Notes
In conclusion, I'd just like to make it known that I haven't completely abandoned the Linux community. My home server still runs Mandrake, and IPCop on my gateway/firewall. There is no way I'd ever put any form of Windows on my server, nor would I ever connect a Windows PC directly to the internet without a *NIX gateway in between. Microsoft has a history of poor security, so I protect myself the only way I know how; using Linux. I will continue to advocate the use of GNU/Linux in the server arena. This is where its strength lies at the moment.
Because of their history of spreading virii, I don't use the applications that Microsoft has provided with Windows XP. My wife and I use Mozilla for web browsing and email, OpenOffice.org for word processing, and Psi (Jabber client) for instant messaging. All of these are true multi-user win32 programs, and are perfectly interoperable with their Linux counterparts.
I expect that the Linux community will have something to say about this article; I welcome comments and constructive criticism. Flames will be automatically sent to the Windows equivalent of
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins
- posted by poopbot: for the crapflooder in all of us
yemrBcG9hk Post #721
Yes, you too may now bow before me. :P
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
What you get during the morning sysadmin appreciation day cake and ice cream when you realize you forgot to reset the software dead man's switch for that day.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Moderate up if you agree that he is jealous. ;)
At midnight, the Great SysAdmin will rise from the server room and bring presents to all the good MCSE's and network jockeys.
It seems that the Janitors, in their infinite wisdom, have banned people who have low/negative karma from posting more than twice per day. Personally I find this completely stupid.
All the trolls will simply post AC as I am doing now. Proxies can be used to get around any ipid bans that result from AC trolls.
Surely it is better to let the trolls post at -1 where it is out of most peoples way rather than have them all post at 0 and suck up mod points and time from "legit" users?
I have tried to communicate my thoughts to the slashcode team but alas, to no avail. They are probably all sittin on their starwars bed sheets watching anime hentai tentacle rape pr0n.
Here is my proposal: All trolls that cannot post using their account post as AC. Use proxies if need be (www.antiproxy.com is a good source). I suspect this will show them how useless this idea is. Will blocking troll uid's stop trolls? NO! will ipid bans stop trolls? NO!
I seriously fail to see the point of this and consider it a stupid move by the janitors.
They want us to troll and crapflood at 0 rather than -1? Fine! So be it! No longer will we post at -1 where few people dare to visit, now we will post at 0 where we will be more visible and waste peoples time, energy and mod points! Hoorah!
The next thing you know, posting AC will be banned! Then what will you do? No more posting interesting insider tidbits! Groupthink all the way baby! oh yeah!
So logout, post shit, use proxies and above all have fun!
Let the games begin! -- on by
- posted by poopbot: the bot formerly known as pwpbot
73BgjqLQX0 Post #722
I said no text
Really, do we have a CEO appreciaton day for all their hard work?
Yes. Every freaking day they climb into the company jet, or the stock goes up a tiny bit and they are worth millions more, all the catered lunches, just about every freaking moment.
I think, in fact, a CEO non-appreciation day would be quite the event, where a CEO is treated just like any other employee. He has to get his own coffee. Field his own calls. Make his own travel reservations and fly coach to his luxurious golf trip / business meetings.
I've been using home computers since the VIC-20 and I've come to dread and fear the possibility of being forced to adopt Linux as a result of Microsoft's heavy-handedness. After being hyped by friends and co-workers about the pleasures of this great and fantastic open-source operating system, I attempted to load Linux, not once but four times on three year old PC that was previously running Win98.
The first time took me about an hour to realize that I had to reformat the hard disk and wipe out years worth of work (after backing it up on CD-R). Then I had to figure that the only way to get the Linux CD to actually start loading was to boot it from the CD by modifying the CMOS settings as the PC was starting up. A simple line suggesting this that could have been printed on the CD would have saved a lot of time!
After loading a whole gigabyte of stuff onto the empty hard drive (do I really need to load 50 megabytes of TeX fonts when I'm just trying to get a demo of Linux????), the entire process halted when the floppy disk drive didn't respond. The Linux loader demanded a working floppy backup of some obscure file be made and since I've never used the floppy drive, I didn't know that it didn't work. The installation process locked up and I had to reboot.
The reboot left me in UNIX hell: a black screen half filled with incomprehensible characters with a single flashing dollar sign as the only indication that the entire PC was still working. No matter what I typed or tried (simple intutitve commands like 'help' 'review' 'exit' 'restore' 'dir' 'What the fuck is happening?') nothing made any intelligent response except for returning me to the flashing dollar sign. Shit! I'm in Dante's seventh circle of hell for misers. I was forced to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows in order to confirm that I still had a working PC.
I bought a new floppy drive that I will never use in order to load this wonderful and fantastic operating system. Reformated the hard drive, reset the CMOS, and loaded a whole gig of worthless junk from the penguin CD. Everything loaded and I made all of the selections for keyboard and mouse ect... The system rebooted and got to the point where it should have started to work and simply stopped. No response to mouse, keypress, or anything. I reloaded Windows (it worked perfectly) and decided to load Linux on my new good computer.
I ended up back bashed back in UNIX hell and having to load Windows and ALL of my programs and files from CD backups, which took hours. I convinced that Linux is some kind of really bad joke or else an 'emperor's new clothes' type of mass hallucination. How can anyone with a pretension of being a computer professional seriously believe or claim that this junk is ready to take on Windows?
- posted by poopbot: because even your grandmother can use lunix
P8FHyHhbpI Post #723
Taking away access to the machine I use.
E-mailing useless information.
Patching my machine when I want to code.
The list really could go on forever.
Version 1.1.8 (last updated 19th July 2002 by Anonymous Coward)
Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA
Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!
Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you
They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!
- Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
- Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
- Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.
The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.- Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
- Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
- Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!
Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!
We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!
Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!
MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network [linuxdailynews.net]
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.
Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge
The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.
Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP
Don't forget to sign the petition!
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
qPlrD3R8HI Post #724
Look who's alive!
Janitor day followed by intern day
To the tune of "Without me", Eminem
Two penis bird guys go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside (2x)
Guess who's back [/] Back again [/] Sllort is back [/] Tell a friend
Guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back
guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back..
I've created a monster, cause nobody wants to read Michael no more
They want Sllort, cause Katz is a whore *duh* [/] Well if you want Sllort, this is what it'll get ya
A little bit of Troll mixed up with some professa [/] Don't mod this up they're just trying to test ya
It'll get you banned forever by the mastah [/] on the plantation, but I'm not co-operating
Been banned since 2000 for writing and creating (hey!) [/] You read it this far, now stop moderating
Cause I'm back, I'm on the keys and I'm operating [/] I know that you got a job Ms. Malda
but your husband's porn problem's complicating
So McCarthy won't let me be [/] he IP bans me, so let me see
They try to shut me down but I proxy [/] Cause it feels so empty, without me
So, clickety click, type where you sit
Fuck that, karma whorin dips, nobody gives a shit
Now get ready, cause this shit's about to get heavy
Just got a new list of proxies, FUCK YOU JAMIE!
[Chorus:]
Now this looks like a job for me [/] DOWN WITH CAPS LIKE JUNIS KANUNI
Cause we need a little, controversy [/] Cause it feels so empty to agree
I said this looks like a job for me [/] So everybody, try honesty
Cause we need a little, controversy [/] Cause it feels so empty to agree
Little Readers, posting defacement. [/] Embarrassed their parents still rent them their basement.
They get banned just like prisoners helpless [/] 'til someone posts truth in a journal and yells BULLSHIT!
A visionary, is my vision scary? [/] Could it start revolution, pollutin the stories?
A rebel, so just let me revel and gloat [/] in the fact that VA's stock price is looking like GOAT *zero!*
And it's a disaster, such a castastrophe [/] First posts are so fuckin expensive; but Katz is free?
Well I'm back, na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na [/] *bzzt* Fix your damn DSL turn it on and then I'm gonna
enter in, in the front of your skin like a virus [/] Maybe I'm unkillable, dead like Osirus
Ya I'm infecting, best thing since commenting [/] Intriuging the reader's minds and nesting
*bzzt* Testing, attention please [/] You feel the rage when Michael mentions me?
Here's my journal, you can read it free [/] A nuisance? a prophet? Ya, sounds like me.
[Chorus]
A diskette, a task set, post this cid on that sid, [/] Ask Slashdot: Are You Sofa King We Todd Did?
Jonathon Katz, smokin crack mixed with grass [/] If I ever meet you I will KICK YOUR ASS
And Taco? You can get blown by Timothy [/] You eleven year old molesting fag, join the clergy
You don't know me, you're too dumb, let go [/] It's over, nobody listens to your show
Now let's go, suicide for Signal [/] I'll be there cheering like a cheerleader on speed
Or crystal, method to the masses [/] ever since Slashbots been babblin like jackasses *bray*
Suddenly without the means [/] To bring up the MetaModeration screen?
It's not the servers re-boot-ing [/] It's just you, banned by Slashteam! *hey*
No I wasn't aiming for controversy [/] It just happened when they first banned me
Now I use it to tell others [/] That Slashteam are a bunch of fuckers!
(Hey!) Here's a concept that works [/] Twenty million other people find out you're jerks
But no matter how much you alter what they see [/] It just looks empty without me
[Chorus]
La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la / La-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
- posted by poopbot: for the crapflooder in all of us
C7M3HCxyck Post #725
All those old MCSE (Minesweeper Consultant & Solitaire Expert) people out there must be mighty pissed now that Microsoft have changed the qualification!
Yes, lets thank all those computers that make the harbours safe! They put so much effort into it. Countless hours of watching over the children of the sea coming back to dry land!
I think we need Anonymous Coward appreciation day. :)
I am really tired of hearing all these IT people whine about "I don't get no respect."
Speaking of "I don't get no respect"... anybody else dig that TV commercial where the computer network "characters" are sitting around the meeting table asking each other who left the firewall open... and when they ask Mr. Legacy -- then Rodney Dangerfield walks by with a snide expression on his face and disclaims, "You're not the boss of me."
What a great commercial targeted towards geeks, I love it.
Thanks for making Microsoft an empire in the name of making your jobs secure. :-(
Credits: onby
1. Introduction
As everyone knows, Open Source software is the wave of the future. With the market share of GNU/Linux and *BSD increasing every day, interest in Open Source Software is at an all time high.
Developing software within the Open Source model benefits everyone. People can take your code, improve it and then release it back to the community. This cycle continues and leads to the creation of far more stable software than the 'Closed Source' shops can ever hope to create.
So you're itching to create that Doom 3 killer but don't know where to start? Read on!
2. First Steps
The most important thing that any Open Source project needs is a Sourceforge page. There are tens of thousands of successful Open Source projects on Sourceforge; the support you receive here will be invaluable.
OK, so you've registered your Sourceforge project and set the status to '0: Pre-Thinking About It', what's next?
3. Don't Waste Time!
Now you need to set up your SourceForge homepage. Keep it plain and simple - don't use too many HTML tags, just knock something up in VI. Website editors like FrontPage and DreamWeaver just create bloated eye-candy - you need to get your message to the masses!
4. Ask For Help
Since you probably can't program at all you'll need to try and find some people who think they can. If your project is a game you'll probably need an artist too. Ask for help on your new Sourceforge pages. Here is an example to get you started:
"Hi there! Welcom to my SorceForge page! I am planing to create a Fisrt Person Shooter game for Linux that is going to kick Doom 3's ass! I have loads of awesome ideas, like giant robotic spiders! I need some help thouh as I cant program or draw. If you can program or draw the tekstures please get in touch! K thx bye!"
Thousands of talented programmers and artists hang out at Sourceforge ready to devote their time to projects so you should get a team together in no time!
5. The A-Team
So now you have your team together you are ready to change your projects status to '1: Pre-Bickering'. You will need to discuss your ideas with your team mates and see what value they can add to the project. You could use an Instant Messaging program like MSN for this, but since you run Linux you'll have to stick to e-mail.
Don't forget that YOU are in charge! If your team doesn't like the idea of giant robotic spiders just delete them from the project and move on. Someone else can fill their place and this is the beauty of Open Source development. The code might end up a bit messy and the graphics inconsistant - but it's still 'Free as in Speech'!
6. Getting Down To It
Now that you've found a team of right thinking people you're ready to start development. Be prepared for some delays though. Programming is a craft and can take years to learn. Your programmer may be a bit rusty but will probably be writing "hello world" programs after school in no time.
Closed Source games like Doom 3 use the graphics card to do all the hard stuff anyhow, so your programmer will just have to get the NVidia 'API' and it will be plain sailing! Giant robot spiders, here we come!
7. The Outcome
So it's been a few years, you still have no files released or in CVS. Your programmer can't get enough time on the PC because his mother won't let him use it after 8pm. Your artist has run off with a Thai She-Male. Your project is still at '1: Pre-Bickering'...
Congratulations! You now have a successful Open Source project on Sourceforge! Pat yourself on the back, think up another idea and do it all again! See how simple it is?
- posted by poopbot: crapflooding since 7/8/02
135KImZv43 Post #726
I used to be president of a company a few years ago...I got my own coffee..I did all the crap I had to do myself...why? Because I was a regular employee once and am now. Head of a company does not mean you get to have servants around you....it's not royalty!
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Why do I troll?
I have pondered that question for a few days. I find myself laughing till I cry when I see what this site has become. I was once fooled into running linux, coding, and feeling elite. But my daily life sucked the wind out of my sails.
I even enrolled in school to prove my worth as a computer nerd. Once I arrived at school I discovered I had better skills than my instructors, and not just spelling or typing. I shake with rage when I realise there are losers out there with no brain, taking up a job I'm qualified for, like teaching computer repair.
When I saw people logged in and bashing truly creative newbies at this sham of a weblog, the anger grew stronger. I snapped.
Yes, I've snapped many times in my life. Call me crazy, go ahead. Bash the mentally ill like you bash windows and MS. You see my posts, you know I'm deranged. But I'm still here thanks to a proxy.
So I impersonate native americans offended by the name Apache. I pretend to be someone who tries to install OS X on an AMD system. I call a geek "dumbass" and I remind you to "LURN TOO SPEL".
I wanted to compose a great statement of my hatred for this site and it's loyalists, but all I can do is ramble. If I can afford some coffee or cigarettes I might try again. For now I'll just have to say this:
Don't use Mozlla, it sucks, really
I don't understand your philosophy. If you're able to find someone to work who does just all that feet rubbing, how could it be considered royalty? Royalty is plundering everyone's money and hoarding it into chests never to be seen again. A luxurious CEO is actually good for the economy! (Trickle down system. =) )
It's human nature to take things like uptime for granted. The only time workers even realize they have a sysadmin is when the network goes down. Then he's "that f*cking idiot over in IT". Sysadmins are even hated for the things they do right, such as restricting dangerous practices on the network. I wouldn't be looking for any cakes or presents anytime soon.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Head of a company does not mean you get to have servants around you....it's not royalty!
Must have been a small company? Once you have 1,000 employees, you are royalty. At least, so it would seem.
I'll take appreciation as a systems administrator any day now...Cuz that means someone put my previous employer back in business and I have a job again...
Guess I'll have to wait for unemployed systems administrator appreciation day. I've got my button already:
"Have you hired your systems administrator today?"
Beyond that, I don't need any other appreciation, a paycheck would be fine by me.
No datacenter is secure if it has windows.
Yeah, sure, the people in your company are going to suddenly going to buy you lunch because you got their printer working or reset their password. Sure.
/dev/null
Maybe you'll get some half-dead flowers from the cheap florist on the corner or some inane computer-related doo-dad from Office Depot. ("Look! a mouse cover that looks like, get this: a MOUSE!")
Good God, I want a sysadmin day where users just LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE. It's bad enough that I eat my pathetic convenience store sandwich at my desk while trying to watch a downloaded divx of futurama, but some moron, seeing me with my headphones on and half a sandwich in my hand has got to come over and ask for me to print a document or fix her excel macros or update the company web page. ("Nobody's hit the Investor Relations page in a week, I *think* your updates can wait twenty goddamn minutes...")
But yet, if you send them away, you'll pay later...
The best thing to do is to take quiet revenge. Turn off the proxy server. Randomly delete mails with attached spreadsheets. Write perl scripts to rewrite outgoing mails (s/the/teh/g) and on incoming mails as well (s/Regards,/I find you strangely attractive,/g)
Send a company-wide notice that the router that handles internet browsing will be down from 2:00 to 4:00 pm for an "LRF Support Module" upgrade. (LRF = Little Rubber Feet.) Then take those two hours to download ISO after ISO of whatever the hell you like.
Subscribe everyone in the company to bugtraq - for security's sake...
Find new and creative uses for
When you are asked to push back your vacation a few days, wait until after and let it slip to your boss know that you were supposed to be the Best Man at your brother's wedding, but instead spent that Saturday restoring the backup domain controller.
Nope, you ain't gonna get a day - even if you did, you wouldn't enjoy it. Make your own fun...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
My sysadmin doesn't deserve any appreciation. He's an incompetent boob who should have been replaced years ago. Unfortunately, we can't replace him because he's got the network so screwed up that no one else could ever figure it out.
Mind you, I'm not the only one who feels this way. This isn't a personal grudge. All of my coworkers get the same defeated look whenever they are forced to deal with him. More projects and initiatives than I can count have been abandoned in midstream, because the sysadmin either put up too many roadblocks or broke an important bit of code or whatever.
The rest of the company has learned to work around him, but I am beligerant enough -- even after two and a half years here -- to really call him out. I've spent hours watching over his shoulder, pointing out his mistakes, whenever he tries to screw with my Web servers. He has finally come to understand that I am one of the few people here that he can't afford to cross, because he knows that I know just how bad he truly is and that when the real business decisions (priorities, budgets) get made, I now have far more pull than him.
a company wide email has just been sent to everyone in my company reminding them that Friday is SysAdmin day! (I'm sure they all remembered anyway)
I look forward to pulling into the parking lot Friday morning to see my new car waiting for me.
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
The majority of sysadmins that I've worked with have been almost carbon copies of "Nick, your company's computer guy": rude, arrogant, impatient, and unresponsive. Many forget that it is their job to fix computers and feel they should be begged and groveled upon.
The sysadmin is the mechanic of the 21st century. You are not a god because you spent 3 weeks getting your a+ certification. Your one year at a tech school does not compare to the 4-year degrees of the people you serve.
Try earning your appreciation, rather than declaring your own holiday.
This appreciation day includes many system administrators:
Computer Administrators
Network Administrators
Internet Administrators (webmaster)
Telephone (PBX) Administrators
Voice-Mail Administrators
Database Administrators (DBA)
UNIX ® Administrators
LINUX Administrators
Lotus Notes ® Administrators
Novell GroupWise ® Administrators
MS Exchange ® Administrators
IBM Mainframe Systems Programmers ("sysprogs")
What about us Tivoli Storage Manager/Veritas Netbackup Admins? where's our love? remember this next time you need your files/SAP/Oracle DB restored
r saso
I think I'll get mine a pager. :D
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
- posted by poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
0LRawMYRYU Post #728
Not December 21! Any day but Dec 21! Oh please not Dec 21!!!!!
That's my mother in law's birthday!!!!!
--
Garett
As an employee of a 500+ user CO.
I am the only persone here for all network,server,telphone,PC, issues
i do all the hardware repaire work my self
becouse the cfo wont pay maintance agreements
I am the helpdesk
for a lowely $15 hr
sure Ive been aprooved a raise and a helper
but its been over a year and I havnt seen it yet
Would love to quit but hey gota have them bills paid
Maybee Its just me but its screwed up that im considering moving to the purchasing dep. becouse
the box crusher guy makes $20hr
/ end complaining
Wanna know what's fun when you're working in a cubicle environment? Unplug the DSL modem. Not only do you learn new words, but you can play with everybody's day at once!
Wish they appreciated me, I'm getting too creative when it comes to annoying people.
Either you are trolling or haven't a clue.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
OK..it only had 100..but I knew everyone by name...I appreciated EVERY single person there, and I even invited everyone to my house for a BBQ. As A president of a company, your employees are doing YOU a favor by working for you..You can't be CEO of a 1 man company.(Well, I guess the dot bomb era proved you can :))
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Every time you read a User Friendly strip, you should be reminded of the goofy daleks wheeling about and chanting "weeee are the superior beeeeings" and threatening everything with the only one tool they have. Tip one over and it's done for.
Taken to its extreme, the single ongoing punchline is: "Ha ha the people who actually do things with computers instead of fetish-fixating on the computers themselves are stupid! Ha ha we control the computers! Ha ha the people who actually do things are stupid again! Ha ha! We still control the computers!"
Being a sysadmin is cool and all. But generally speaking, you're one of the less valuable cogs in the machine which people are more eager to replace if you maintain that mindset.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
If you don't want to serve, what are you doing with the root-password anyway?
Every luser want's to be a winner - but only the true, unselfish sysadmin can become enlightened.
Hence start behaving like a REAL SYSADMIN:
Use this day to bake a cake for the user who had his password reset most often, hhhmmm? And give away some prices (from bottle of Champaigne to a sixpack of root-beer) for those geniuses who managed to reach you on the phone between 2 and 4 am. Ok?
What gives? Does Slashdot want to give credit to timothy, instead of a lowly grunt, like me? I posted this yesterday (same info, same links, different -- shorter -- text, but mine was rejected).
There have been several like this, including the Simputer article I posted 2 weeks earlier than Slashdot's actual post. It, too was rejected.
What's the point of "Submit Story," then?
</rant>
That is a real shame that you have had those kind of experiences. Whenever I have seen an admin that is like that, that is the reason that I will not deal with being one myself. I am fully aware of how a user feels when they are frustrated, and have someone to help them with their problems, I am doing support for a job, and get asked a lot of questions from my family about how to get their computers to function. Although I am still with you as to saying that it is a dumb idea to have a holiday to celebrate the sysadmin, just like I think it is dumb to celebrate for any other occupation. because it is the job of those people to do their function, with or without extra recognition. I actually help people with computers, because I actually love to see them pick up on how these things work, and then if it is broken, I like the challenge of fixing the thing. I would have to say that there are others like me, but since the .com bubble, there are a lot of the admins that you describe because they are in it for the money, which is not the right idea in the first place. Those type of people shouldn't be admins in the first place because they usually lack the kind of pragmatism that is required to fix a true computer problem, oh, I have been trained to use x tools, so if it is a problem with y, it is because y is defective type of crap. I would say that you should show more appreciation for people as they help you, if they truely are an asset to what you do on a daily basis.
I'd care not so much about the appreciation part, but this day is needed more so for the awareness of humanity.
Yes, I can communicate (I'm not an asocial slob).
I work nights and weekends, but I have a life too.
Yes, I do fix things - the problems you have when you see me are not (usually!) caused by me.
And the stupid rules I make you follow (you're not allowed to load that, I can't give it to you because it's not standard, you have to go to the other department to get that, you only have 50 Mb of space on the server, I can't do it before next month, etc. etc.)? I don't make them up - they are the generated and expected excrement of this inefficient bureacracy.
I do the best I can with the environment I'm dealt with to serve you and with the rules I am told to follow; please don't blame me for trying to make your infrastructure better.
In fact, not only don't blame me, but recognize that I am really trying here.
Yah, like that.
I kinda see a techno-geek manifesto coming...
Or is it "rent" a hooker? Hmmm, employ? Anyway, nothing like a quickie in the server room to make my year. I'll be testing the pipeline burst in the backup route on the last Friday of JUUUUULLYY! We've all done it...
'Nuff said.
That attitude has obviously paid off - since you are now again a lowly employee. But it doesn't sound like you enjoyed the benefits of being the boss, anyway.
...that with the exception of the Janator, system administrators are the only people who get no appreciation for a job well done.
Keep the network running flawlessly for a year. Deal with all the stupid questions (bet your CEO doesn't have to do that,) and generally do your job perfectly...
Then the first day that the PDC goes down, everyones bitching at you.
CEOs and dentists get the occational pat on the back... Administrators are generally critical to a company but still get walked over.
I think we could use a little appreciation. : )
(Note: IANAA)
... leaving out any adminitrators and the computer itself. Try to reboot, and ... fail.
... This was just an hour ago - I won't be mentioning sysAdmin day around here anyway, lest it be misinterpreted as "nail-the-sysAdmin-to-the-wall-day".
... ? ... meh, I'm just the programmer)
Just now my co-worker came up to me with a tale of grief:
He came across a website with the iFrame-showing-the-local-disk trick. It was a new one on him (he's more on the business side of things), and he expressed outrage towards our sysAdmin. Unfortunately, the iFrame trick was a new one on our sysAdmin, too, and he (apparently) doesn't have a clue about permissions across frames in the browser. So instead of simply checking for the newest security patches and applying some soothing words, he feigns competence and resets all the permissions on all the local drives
This leaves the poor sod of a co-worker with an un-bootable box, and two days worth of lost data.
(Heck, I'm not sure if the above is accurate, IANAA, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm jus' tellin' it how I hear it)
(PS: Anyone have a neat trick for recovering a Win2k box with SNAFU'd permissions? Bootdisk, and
yes, we have no bananas
... when I was a SysAdmin back when jobs were plentiful.
:).
I enjoyed coming in and completely fixing the last "sysadmin's" handy work.
I enjoyed migrating all servers from Windows to Linux (funny how you can get your way when you do not have to spend thousands of dollars) while all the users can still use the os's that they are familiar with (Windows, Unix, Macintosh) and still be able share the same files and printers.
I enjoyed uptimes of months (only downtime was due to upgrading the UPS... funny you have to actually unplug the server to utilize the UPS... sheesh
I enjoyed rebuilding all workstations to MY SPECIFICATIONS so that I get no more than one call a day from a user having issues with whatever.
I certainly did not mind helping my fellow employees making their home computers that much better. Actually kind of flattering because they see that I can take a low-end workstation (similar specs to their home pc) and make it run for weeks without problems. I wouldn't blame them for wanting the same thing at home.
I enjoyed sharing my enthusiasm about whatever was leet going on in technology with other people and seeing them started to get interested in that same technology.
I enjoyed supporting and helping people without making them feel stupid because they asked a question about computers.
I don't care for an appreciation day. I just want to be a sysadmin again.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
Bless your souls for keeping those sites up late at night.
it's not another creation of the card companies.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Give a Geek a Hug article.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My office celebrates System Admin Appreciation Day.
This week, I got layed off!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
...why not get another job.
When you're twenty years into sysadminning and finally start to realize that the sysadmin is not the 'God of Computers' that you figured him to be, when it dawns on you Finance has stronger claims on the E10K Sun machine than IT, when you spend half your day complaining about how 'politics' is preventing you from doing your job, maybe that's the wrong time to discover you would have rather been doing management.
Choose wisely grasshoppers.
Want to get appreciated even more Skyshadow?
/*;
1. Backup all critical data and hide backup somewhere.
2. Cause data catastrophe: rm -rf
3. Cry to boss, "Oh no! Critical hardware failure! Your pictures..err..data is lost sir! CVS codebase gone!"
4. Mess up your hair, throw water on your face looking like madly trying to recover the data.
5. Wait until everyone panics, and starts running around like mad! And you hear screams, "Oh no! My new algorithm I worked since yesterday...all gone!"
6. While everyone is in a state of frenzy, restore all data.
7. Boss will be very,very happy.
8. Ask for raise the next day for your superior risk-analysis and data-recovery skills.
9. Repeat 1-7 twice a year, and you'll recieve a bonus too!
Actually, you need to have a named CEO when you incorporate, so you (at least in California, I don't know about other states) could be a CEO (and president, treasurer, and secretary) of a one-person company.
Very well put IMHO.
Keep Austin Weird!
At least where I work the sys admins have plenty of appreciation...from themselves. They seem to forget that the engineers are making the products that keep them employeed. Yes they serve a vital function but instead of putting roadblock after roadblock up they should think about how they can help get products out the door.
It took me months just to get the sys admins to let me put a Linux box on the network even though simulations on the box where 2-4 times faster than a Sun...geeesh.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Can I spray him with disinfectant first?
"Have you hugged your geek lately?"
I take offense to that. In all my years of computer career (which has been very long) and system administration never once have I felt anything but despise for geeks.
When things get thick and shit busts, I'm the one who logs in and fixes it after someone else left a mess. I'm the one that sets up servers that have 339 day uptime. And I'm the one that can fix anything from a hot girl to a cocktail to a gas pipe and not blink thinking about it.
I am root, not a geek. And nobody dares give me any shit because they know I'll pull Mr. 9mm on their forehead. I pity the poor lot that gets a hard on for doing `su -`. Any idiot can do that, but how many really understand what being root is all about, not just on a UNIX server but in real life as well?
You geeks are supposed to have big brains, churn on what I wrote.
This holiday was made up by clever marketing people to get you to go out and send a free personalized internet greeting message.
Time to Say Thanks For the Uptime
If the purpose of this holiday is to thank the sysadmins for our fabulous uptime, I think I can safely skip it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Thanks for calling attention to this event and providing the official-sounding links. I convinced my boss that this is an important national day, and the company agreed to spring for a pizza party with ice cream and soda on company time for the whole IS department on Friday.
"Come on everybody!" (clap clap) "There's cake in the conference room!"
"So, what are we celebrating?"
"It's System Administrator Appreciation Day! Look, we've got 'Have you hugged your geek today?' buttons and everything!"
"Uhhh, we fired all the IT people six months ago."
"Oh. That's a shame. More cake?"
Holy faecal post, Batman! Someone's studying the WIPO Troll.
So now the Sys Admins have a day along with the secretaries and the bosses. But what about all the rest of us??? I'm tired of buying presents for the rest of the staff. I know I'm whining, but really. Many, many people work hard in their positions. Why do we honor just a few solely by what their title happens to be?
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
that has to be the worst cable management I have ever seen in my entire career.
This communication is secured using Rot-26 Encryption Algorithm, Unauthorized decryption will be subject to laughter.
It should be hump your sysadmin day! I work in an office full of women and no guys... this would be much more appreciated, especially by a couple of them who are knockouts. Course, my wife might mind, but then I can point her at the SAAD website and tell her that it's a holiday tradition!
"Thanks for the downtime and difficult to use software that no one understands but we adopted to satisfy your geek mentality and cheap ass budget"
that would be much more appropriate, especially in my office where our IT 'professional staff' are trying to convince management that we should all be using open source. *ugh*. Can you imagine 120 older ladies like myself who can only surf and do email and type letters trying to use Linux! My damned husband foisted this on me at home and I immediately ran out and bought a nice new Compaq so I could have something to use that made sense and wasn't crashing all the time.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
I am not celebrating sys admin day. Frankly, I find it ridiculous. Enough with the self-martyring. For a profession paid an average of $60,5000 (well above national average), I think your take home pay should be sufficent enough.
Yes, there can be the occasional developer that makes your life hell. Guess what? There's the occasional BOFH who does the same for developers. By large both groups are good people, but every profession has their share of assholes.
Yes, you work overtime. YOU KNEW THAT BEFORE YOU GOT INTO IT. And damn it, so does everyone else in IT: Developers, CTO's, QA. And speaking of QA, talk about people who get no respect for what they have to put into it. It's the nature of the beast.
You do your job. You do your best. You take pride in it. That should be enough.
My two cents,
-Bill
And no, I don't want a developer's thank you day either.
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Even the shitty sub-standard wiring job by AT&T* I spent the last two weeks repairing looked better than that.
* The only details I'll give is whoever did it had to have been color-blind.
Wow,
This is a great thread. Here's the problem, for all of you people who are complaining about your sysadmin:
1) Someone who can barely type in a password of more than 3 characters hired your sysadmin.
2) That same person waffled at paying a REAL sysadmin what they were worth to your company, and in this world, you get what you pay for.
3) Because you complain about things you know nothing about (and yes, that includes developer cowboys who like to screw things up for everyone else to get what they want), you are probably going to get a little bit of that treatment in return. Try this little test: Go to a nice restaurant, without a reservation. Grab the first waiter you see by the arm (if you're lucky, the waiter will have just walked in the door), and tell them that you want to order the steak and lobster, and you needed it 2 hours ago, and it is for a big, important client (who is generating revenue, not costing your company money). You will be sitting over at that open table, which hasn't been wiped off yet, and complain to the waiter about not having wiped the table clean in preparation for your unannounced arrival. Wear a suit to make yourself look important, because, well, you are, aren't you? Then, when your steak and lobster doesn't show up in fewer than 5 minutes, call over the manager, who will then tell the waiter to do what you ask them to do. A good waiter will give you excellent service, smile, and accommodate your every whim (interruptions, you explaining to him how he should work on the steak and lobster, constant bitching about not having water, wine, bread, 4 other tables). Any other waiter will be, oh, just like YOUR sysadmin...and will treat you the way you deserve.
4) Having an MCSE doesn't mean the sysadmin your Office Manager hired will know dick about computers.
5) You probably know less than your sysadmin about computer systems. If you know more about computer systems, you should be a mentor, not a whining prick.
6) Nobody notices a good sysadmin. Shit just works. If you constantly have computer downtime at work, see #'s 1 and 2.
Oh, and my Internet is just fine, I was only kidding...how's yours?
man rtfm
"They seem to forget that the engineers are making the products that keep them employeed."
And managing the systems for not only the sniveling Engineers, but also the CEO, CFO, Marketing cronies, Accountants, HR staff...I love to hear how people should recognize their lot in life, especially from Dilbert.
"roadblock after roadblock"
Definition. No, you can't hose your system to install that program that hasn't been licensed by the Company. No, you can't have Administrative privileges which would allow you to hose the server that is used by more than just you. Yes, you do have to wait your turn. Yes, you do have to use that little-known skill called "planning." No, you can't have the $3,000 Linux box you want for a project that will net the Company $1,000 in increased productivity.
"they should think about how they can help get products out the door."
I've seen some of the stuff Engineers have churned out the door. It takes a sysadmin who knows how to troubleshoot the problem to wind up getting your shoddy product to work in the first place.
"It took me months just to get the sys admins to let me put a Linux box on the network even though simulations on the box where 2-4 times faster than a Sun...geeesh."
Months? You are obviously either a jerk or a moron...I have a recommendation, try asking nicely, and even better, justify your request sans the holier than thou attitude. I don't know of any manager that would let a project extend itself for months due to a sysadmin, unless the Engineer making the request was either completely disrespected or clueless about business.
Is it me? Or does the site sux0r? I guess Sys admins don't have too much time to spend on web site designs
How about a day for the people who are actually doing the work, rather than a day for people who merely keep the tools clean.
Yes, then you'd also be the CFO, the CTO and the Janitor :)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
lets explain one thing.... a ceo works soo hard, that he doesnt have time to field is own calls. What is your problem? Maybe if you spent less time on slashdot and more time on working... maybe you would be treated like a ceo. PS... im not a ceo
My job is service. I fix problems. I don't feel my job is particularly more stressful or thankless then, say, director of customer support, or a Tier 1 tech. If I'm doing my job well, I'm invisible. I'm paid well for being invisible.
let's not go down this track - official appreciation days really suck - mother's and father's days are bad enough - but over th last coupla decades seems every lobby group been claimin a day for self-congratulatory purposes - in my opininion this is only demeaning to th ppl concerned
ppl who appreciate what you do and know not to take other ppl for granted will always show unprompted gratitude - others who don't or are more self-centered will only resent it and any gratitude they express will be false