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Well, with the spare time (huh?) that comes with the weekend, I've been poking around inside of NetSlaves. Good site that looks at real life "Dilberts", with real-life examples of disgruntled tech workers from inside the industry. Careful-sometimes the stories-like the current one about "K" who goes from support drone to production, only to meet his doom at the hands of his PHB-ring /way/ too close to real life. My comps to Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin.
Funny how this post has been up for over an hour, but no comments... Hmm? Must be someone on a religious crusade.
At the rate slashdot is moving, it will quickly surpass even the low standards Usenet has to offer. Atleast you know who the moderators are.
Where's the accountability here, hmmm?
the censoring of anonymous cowards, by anonymous cowards. Isn't it ironic. All this from the self-righeous net.geeks. This is deeply disturbing.
I read the story about the Prodigy guy. It was hilarious. To appreciate it, though, you had to have had at least one bad boss in your life. Hopefully, you won't get one until you've been out of school at least 5 years.
I'm going to submit a story about a Development Director at a nonprofit that switched from DOS to UNIX(r) in a less-than-successful way that managed to touch on everybody's lives.
She was fired, the Boss was fired, the parent org stepped in and fired the Board of Directors, the donors fired them as a charity, the volunteers hit the road, but it had its funny moments.
Ok, I started to read the stuff this article was linked to, but I couldn't read past the opening material. This stuff is just wrong. The behavior described as "commonplace" in fortune 500 companies just turns my stomach. I would rather live in a cabin in the woods with my family and work from sunup to sundown plowing the fields and chopping firewood than trade my integrity to work in such an environment.
But maybe that's just the hacker ethic in me.
10 years, 16 jobs, two bankruptcies... and ONE vacation.
Beware those offering stock options, they seek your blood.
I was really drawn in to the latest two stories. Great site.
surak_at_my_dejanews_dot_com
The reason patents are needed for physical things is because you cannot copywrite them. If i make a terrific new pez dispenser, one with replaceable plastic heads (themes) and a mind reading device to dispense pez whenever you wish, without even needing to push a button,
nothing prevents someone from buying one of your pez dispensers, looking at it, and making and selling his own. He didn't have to do the years of intensive research and development, but you did. Thats because you can't copy physical things, only imitate. copywrite cannot protect this kind of thing. Patents, on the other hand, would prevent competitors from using your invention in their product.
While i fully agree with and support the goals of Free Software, the argument that programmers need to sell copies of their software to make money is at least something arguable. However, you can copyright software. Copying software, unlike imitating a physical product, can be made illegal with copyrights. If you don't want all your hard work spent developing your algorithms used by someone else, simply don't release your source code. this goes against the ideas of Free Software, but at least it doesn't prevent us from writing a free alternative. True, someone could reverse engineer your executable and get some clue as to how your algorithm works. This isn't so bad, for all they are getting is a clue. Your competitor would still have to write his own code to make use of your invention. If he simply cut and paste, he would be violating the copyright.
Patents are the equivalent of copyrights for physical machines. Since software can be copyrighted, it is going way too far to let patents lock up the concepts used in writing the code. if you must own your creation, own the code, not the ideas that were in your head when you wrote it
no one is really writing. believe me-no moderators have even logged in.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
I was working with a business guy, just starting out in a mom and pop business. The business guy didn't know a single thing about UNIX. One day I typed swapon -a on the firewall, a firewall which I had set up and even paid for from the ground up to masquerade the office onto an IP address on the saturated T1. The T1 averaged 900 bytes/sec during business hours.
/var/log/messages on his screen which said
The point is, I routinely turned on and off swap space by hand, a technique that improved performance immensely on Linux 2.0.34.
At that point, whatever the business guy was downloading happened to drop to 900 bytes/sec and he happened to have a view of
Adding Swap: 64256k swap-space (priority -2)
Then boom, "WHAT THE FSCK ARE YOU DOING!!!!@#!@#! YOU RUINED MY DOWNLOAD!!!!@#!#@%%$ WHATEVER YOU DID KILLED THE NETWORK CONNECTION!@!#!@#!@#@#! NEVER EVER DO THAT!!@#!@#***"
Well that guy moved on to manage some accounting firm's networking staff while working on his MBA. The moral is even if you're paying for part of the business, business people are going to do what they're best at.
Moderators can't *delete* comments. If you adjust your viewing threshold down a notch or two you will see everything.
The fact is, there simply were no comments made. Perhaps that tells more about the quality of the article than the supposed fascism of the evil moderators.
Hey, this site for some reason reminds me: for decidedly more low-tech corporate terror, check out the utterly classic Temp Slave! If you luck out and come across one of TS!'s published-at-Kinko's issues on a newsstand, give it a shot. The "Best Of" book is available from their page or at bookstores. It's an anthology of millenial horror stories from temps within the corporate beast. The misery that flows from these tales is like therapy to those who can identify with them, and leave everyone else thankful that they can't.
Hey! Give us a break. Some of us are trying to sleep ;> And it's saturday aswell. Probably lots of slashdot readers who only reads from work during the weekdays.
The sun was rising over 50th Street. Its rays reflecting red and orange light against the glass-plated towers and gray streets that were slowly coming back to life...
Man, this sounds like the drivel a second year English major submits for a creative writing class.
GACK!
A classic case of a writer falling in love with their own words.
If this is the quality of the writing we can expect, I'll pass...
harrumph, lynx's popup boxes are all wrong on the console after I load an isolatin1 font... and every trip to X and back restores the default yucky ibm charset.
Some Guy Named Chris wrote:
"A classic case of a writer falling in love with their own words."
I'd probably have more faith in your talents as a literary critic if I were more confident that you were capable of composing a coherent sentence yourself. So next time try this:
"A classic case of a writer falling in love with his (or her) own words".