Hi there, OP here. You're the only one of these assholes I'll actually respond to.
Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you! You get it!
To the rest of the Slashdot IT crowd, I shame you for your balls. Your utter lack of balls. Only this guy gets it.
I want to abandon Google for personal reasons. Maybe an ex's dad works there and I'm "being watched". Maybe I'm a nudist, and my signature.png doesn't comply with their ToS. Fuck off, it's my business. Yes, I am a hobbyist. I only administer about fifteen servers, all cloud VPS that I've built by hand with love. I am not, however, employed as a sysadmin, hence my claims of "I am not a sysadmin", so I approach everything here with the stance of "I don't know about this as well as the qualified IT professionals who frequent this site."
If this email server is just for me, I don't really worry about downtime, etc. My motivation to keep it up is intrinsic. Let's just assume I already keep my own blog hosted (with satisfactory uptime) and I'm not worried about having another service running on the box.
If I can't easily provide for myself this base internet "staple good", then my friends, THE INTERNET IS BROKEN.
I'm jumping into the deep end, installing postfix/dovecot/roundcube this weekend. I'd rather be SBL'd for coming from a small-time IP than hosted on servers sponsored by Google's Advertising division.
I've gotta chime in here:
We hired some Philippines (outsourced, based in the Philippines, while our main office is in San Diego) to work on a few small projects. In the 6 months they worked here, they should have had no trouble finishing the scripts we assigned them. Granted, there were some [massive, devastating] natural disasters in the Philippines during the period I'm complaining about, therefore we elected to fire them and move on, instead of pressing for a refund.
In addition to asking for more time, money and vacation, as parent suggested, in one single week -- ONE WEEK -- the following complications arose:
Monday, my employee could not make it to the office due to a fever.
Tuesday, my employee showed up for work at 9am, but the power went out at noon, and the whole office was given the rest of the day off.
Wednesday, as my employee was driving to work, he got in a motorcycle accident, and did not come into the office.
Thursday, my employee worked a full 8 hour day, but did not `git commit` anything, did not email me about his status, and did not, apparently, get anything done.
Friday, my employee was lost in a flood. His manager called me to explain that, while she has no idea where my employee is right now, she's going out into the flood, personally, to search for him.
+1 for showers at work.
I work at a major software vendor where there are showers in about half of the buildings. I've got a locker, no registration necessary, that'll stay locked for a week after I last accessed it, which means I can leave things at work when I need to, leave clothes in random buildings close to bars I'm hanging out at (mattress in my office; why drive home?), or just work all night before a deadline.
Granted, I live ~15 miles from work, and still don't bike, but I'm still in the younger years and have the metabolism to support 36 cups of Raman a day without lifting more than an xbox controller in over a week.
I think you're missing the point. While it's true that a "real" programmer can write in any language (I knew 10 by the time I was 17), what matters most is your *first* language.
Java/C++/C/Lisp/ADA are *ALL* terrible choices for a first language. The problem we're encountering today is one of retention rates- 30% of the computer science majors at my school change their major after taking CSE 231 (Intro to C++), unless they're in the experimental, alternate route (Intro to Python). Programming in "real" languages like C++ and Java isn't fun, and typically, it's frustrating to learn unless you have some experience, or serious drive. Languages that some people consider "inferior" due to their ease of use, or lax conventions, may be more attractive to students trying to learn. And that should be the main goal of CS departments at colleges across the world.
Your arguments are mostly valid, but you seem to be struggling with something- It's not my job to *prove* that Vista was everything promised. On the contrary, it's the job of the consumers in question to prove that Vista was less-than-promised, if they want to deem it "faulty" and that they were "defrauded."
My point is that they haven't. There's no proof, beyond your lacking* sound driver argument that Vista has failed to deliver on any premise.
*We can all agree that it's silly to expect any operating system to come with drivers for all hardware configurations by default. Or were you expecting SPARC support in Vista, too?
The fallacy in your argument lies in your assertion that "people feel defrauded" by Vista, or rather, that they have a right to "feel defrauded" by Vista.
Vista is EXACTLY what was promised. It works the same as [or better than] the betas, the RCs, it works like every product description says. Every program I had running on XP now runs on Vista. Every movie I have plays on Vista. Every part of the operating system works as advertised.
People just didn't know what they were buying. And that's the consumer's fault, not Microsoft's.
Thank you! I've been using Vista for ~2 years on and off [Since pre-beta leaks]. I'm currently dual-booting Gutsy/Vista, and although I love Gutsy, I find myself in Windows most of the time for day-to-day work. I love it.
What really irks me, though, is that some people have the nerve to demand XP back. I can understand being unhappy. I can understand hating it, and hell, we can even pretend for a minute that it really is garbage. YOU STILL BOUGHT IT. When was the last time you went to the store, picked up a gallon of chocolate milk, and after drinking half of it, decided you like white milk better, so you _DEMAND_ a free gallon of white milk. And Microsoft refused to give them free XP? No shit. Idiocy.
Really, this is nothing if not a blow to Mono and Novell. I've worked for MS in the past, and due to my 3-month stint there, I've been turned away from contributing to several open source projects [Mono and the linux kernel included]. In IRC chat on #mono, several folks told me that "they'd rather not risk accepting work from anyone who *may* have *ever* seen any of the.Net source code." This new release of source is concerting, for exactly that reason.
HAH! Why would they spend money on text books? At my (michigan) high school, we couldn't afford *PAPER* to stock the classrooms. If kids needed paper or a pencil at any time during the day, we were told with straight faces that we should go out in the hall and beg from friends. Meanwhile, across the road, we approved a multi-million dollar rennovation to our football stadium (yes, "stadium") which was already much nicer than most of the ones in the area; two of the best-liked teachers in the school (who were also the newest) got fired to help fund that. And we had a $300,000 camera surveillance system which, when four guys broke into my friends car and lit it on fire, did NO good identifying them (and most of the cameras were in the parking lot, for that matter). Between 6th grade and 12th grade, the district-wide price of a school lunch hiked from $1.75 to over $3.00, and I'm confident that the volume of the lunch went down over that period.
I graduated last spring.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that we're giving kids iPods instead of text books.
PHP on XTC works pretty well, too.
So you're one of the guys who makes the PHP code that looks like somebody was just caressing the keyboard... Actually, we usually just run out to the local K-Mart, pick up a USB-powered-inflatable-girlfriend, and use it as... *ahem*... an "Input device"
If I recall, the exact same thing happened in Ann Arbor, Michigan, not too long ago. Marijuana is already decriminalized, and 57% voted for medicinal legalization. I went to one of the rallies (there were plenty) outside the courthouse to protest the city council's overturning of the matter.
And they've probably never even seen YouTube, or any other of a hundred awesome productivity wasters. Convince all employers to lighten up the block-lists at work, let employees spend a little time getting to know the interweb, and you'll have a full demographic of addicts eager to buy.
Let's start off with the assumption that I know almost nothing about broadcast law, so this is just my fuzzy understanding of it-
[Definition of "Pirate" in this comment: Not 'stolen content', just 'independently produced']
That's how it'd normally happen, naturally true- and with the interweb, it's very possible. But due to the way broadcast rights work, and how providers deliver content, it's not guaranteed that a pirate TV station would even be able to broadcast (that is, Comcast doesn't have to provide XYZ-Pirate-TV if ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/TNT/alpha-soup companies pay them enough not to. See "Dell+Microsoft", which is, despite recent rumors about undecided 'linux distrobutions', still a hand-in-hand partnership.)
The scary part is, if Viacom wins $1b from YouTube, and other companies follow suit (sic), Google could drop YouTube, and it might set precedent for joe_content_owner to sue UltraCoolSite99 because of accidental uploads of copyright material. All of a sudden, it's 'too dangerous' to host user-submitted video content, and we, the interweb, start paying for access to PirateTV.com's "premium content", which is really just the same user-submitted, human-moderated crap we have now. (Not that I don't love YouTube, I just wouldn't pay for it)
No PirateTV on Channel 12, and no free PirateTV online... I'd just consider myself done with TV, by that point.
Agreed. Don't get me wrong, I love Law & Order, but that's about the only reason I even turn on cable programming anymore. I'll just plug in my DVD player + Wii, and consider the entertainment center complete.
The thing that really frustrates me, though, is that it's all at the consumers expense. My $25 DVD player will soon be replaced by what-could-have-been a $25 HD-DVD player, Blueray, or whatever, but the device costs will continue to stay high when the entertainment companies treat us all like criminals. DRM isn't cheap.
I don't have a lot of dirt myself on 1and1, but I used to work for a good-sized hosting company, and whenever a customer asked about buying a domain from 1and1, my boss would crap out a community of small woodland animals. He didn't necessarily hate them, but he was pretty convinced that they were a load of bad news, and it was corporate policy to do whatever we could to keep the customer away from that registrar.
Also, we'd get lots of testimonials from old 1and1 hosting customers who had venerable horror-stories, complete with "site offline for 5 days+", "wont answer my emails" and "took my money and ran" situations.
Yeah, sorry, let me clarify-
It was a high school web design class. By which I mean it was WYSIWYG-based, no HTML, no JS, no coding. The irony lies in the fact that I still couldn't pass it.
Watching that teachers house burn down was one of the greatest feelings I've ever had, and for only the cost of a liter of gasoline...
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Hi there, OP here. You're the only one of these assholes I'll actually respond to. Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you! You get it! To the rest of the Slashdot IT crowd, I shame you for your balls. Your utter lack of balls. Only this guy gets it. I want to abandon Google for personal reasons. Maybe an ex's dad works there and I'm "being watched". Maybe I'm a nudist, and my signature.png doesn't comply with their ToS. Fuck off, it's my business. Yes, I am a hobbyist. I only administer about fifteen servers, all cloud VPS that I've built by hand with love. I am not, however, employed as a sysadmin, hence my claims of "I am not a sysadmin", so I approach everything here with the stance of "I don't know about this as well as the qualified IT professionals who frequent this site." If this email server is just for me, I don't really worry about downtime, etc. My motivation to keep it up is intrinsic. Let's just assume I already keep my own blog hosted (with satisfactory uptime) and I'm not worried about having another service running on the box. If I can't easily provide for myself this base internet "staple good", then my friends, THE INTERNET IS BROKEN. I'm jumping into the deep end, installing postfix/dovecot/roundcube this weekend. I'd rather be SBL'd for coming from a small-time IP than hosted on servers sponsored by Google's Advertising division.
Monday, my employee could not make it to the office due to a fever.
Tuesday, my employee showed up for work at 9am, but the power went out at noon, and the whole office was given the rest of the day off.
Wednesday, as my employee was driving to work, he got in a motorcycle accident, and did not come into the office.
Thursday, my employee worked a full 8 hour day, but did not `git commit` anything, did not email me about his status, and did not, apparently, get anything done.
Friday, my employee was lost in a flood. His manager called me to explain that, while she has no idea where my employee is right now, she's going out into the flood, personally, to search for him.
You must be... a DJ?
what are girls?
+1 for showers at work. I work at a major software vendor where there are showers in about half of the buildings. I've got a locker, no registration necessary, that'll stay locked for a week after I last accessed it, which means I can leave things at work when I need to, leave clothes in random buildings close to bars I'm hanging out at (mattress in my office; why drive home?), or just work all night before a deadline. Granted, I live ~15 miles from work, and still don't bike, but I'm still in the younger years and have the metabolism to support 36 cups of Raman a day without lifting more than an xbox controller in over a week.
I think you're missing the point. While it's true that a "real" programmer can write in any language (I knew 10 by the time I was 17), what matters most is your *first* language.
Java/C++/C/Lisp/ADA are *ALL* terrible choices for a first language. The problem we're encountering today is one of retention rates- 30% of the computer science majors at my school change their major after taking CSE 231 (Intro to C++), unless they're in the experimental, alternate route (Intro to Python). Programming in "real" languages like C++ and Java isn't fun, and typically, it's frustrating to learn unless you have some experience, or serious drive. Languages that some people consider "inferior" due to their ease of use, or lax conventions, may be more attractive to students trying to learn. And that should be the main goal of CS departments at colleges across the world.
Your arguments are mostly valid, but you seem to be struggling with something- It's not my job to *prove* that Vista was everything promised. On the contrary, it's the job of the consumers in question to prove that Vista was less-than-promised, if they want to deem it "faulty" and that they were "defrauded."
My point is that they haven't. There's no proof, beyond your lacking* sound driver argument that Vista has failed to deliver on any premise.
*We can all agree that it's silly to expect any operating system to come with drivers for all hardware configurations by default. Or were you expecting SPARC support in Vista, too?
The fallacy in your argument lies in your assertion that "people feel defrauded" by Vista, or rather, that they have a right to "feel defrauded" by Vista. Vista is EXACTLY what was promised. It works the same as [or better than] the betas, the RCs, it works like every product description says. Every program I had running on XP now runs on Vista. Every movie I have plays on Vista. Every part of the operating system works as advertised. People just didn't know what they were buying. And that's the consumer's fault, not Microsoft's.
Thank you!
I've been using Vista for ~2 years on and off [Since pre-beta leaks]. I'm currently dual-booting Gutsy/Vista, and although I love Gutsy, I find myself in Windows most of the time for day-to-day work. I love it.
What really irks me, though, is that some people have the nerve to demand XP back.
I can understand being unhappy. I can understand hating it, and hell, we can even pretend for a minute that it really is garbage.
YOU STILL BOUGHT IT. When was the last time you went to the store, picked up a gallon of chocolate milk, and after drinking half of it, decided you like white milk better, so you _DEMAND_ a free gallon of white milk.
And Microsoft refused to give them free XP? No shit.
Idiocy.
Exactly.
.Net source code." This new release of source is concerting, for exactly that reason.
Really, this is nothing if not a blow to Mono and Novell. I've worked for MS in the past, and due to my 3-month stint there, I've been turned away from contributing to several open source projects [Mono and the linux kernel included]. In IRC chat on #mono, several folks told me that "they'd rather not risk accepting work from anyone who *may* have *ever* seen any of the
HAH! Why would they spend money on text books?
At my (michigan) high school, we couldn't afford *PAPER* to stock the classrooms. If kids needed paper or a pencil at any time during the day, we were told with straight faces that we should go out in the hall and beg from friends.
Meanwhile, across the road, we approved a multi-million dollar rennovation to our football stadium (yes, "stadium") which was already much nicer than most of the ones in the area; two of the best-liked teachers in the school (who were also the newest) got fired to help fund that. And we had a $300,000 camera surveillance system which, when four guys broke into my friends car and lit it on fire, did NO good identifying them (and most of the cameras were in the parking lot, for that matter). Between 6th grade and 12th grade, the district-wide price of a school lunch hiked from $1.75 to over $3.00, and I'm confident that the volume of the lunch went down over that period.
I graduated last spring.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that we're giving kids iPods instead of text books.
Shouldn't that be PHP on PCP? Oh hell no. I wouldn't dare touch that drug.
C# on Cialis?
So you're one of the guys who makes the PHP code that looks like somebody was just caressing the keyboard... Actually, we usually just run out to the local K-Mart, pick up a USB-powered-inflatable-girlfriend, and use it as... *ahem*... an "Input device"
I've always been a fan of Assembly on Acid, or C++ on Cocaine. PHP on XTC works pretty well, too.
If I recall, the exact same thing happened in Ann Arbor, Michigan, not too long ago. Marijuana is already decriminalized, and 57% voted for medicinal legalization. I went to one of the rallies (there were plenty) outside the courthouse to protest the city council's overturning of the matter.
And they've probably never even seen YouTube, or any other of a hundred awesome productivity wasters. Convince all employers to lighten up the block-lists at work, let employees spend a little time getting to know the interweb, and you'll have a full demographic of addicts eager to buy.
Episode 1.7: Winning lottery numbers are 37-11-82-26-**-**. Censored, for my own use, naturally.
Well, I suppose I'll go put in two weeks notice.
Let's start off with the assumption that I know almost nothing about broadcast law, so this is just my fuzzy understanding of it-
[Definition of "Pirate" in this comment: Not 'stolen content', just 'independently produced']
That's how it'd normally happen, naturally true- and with the interweb, it's very possible. But due to the way broadcast rights work, and how providers deliver content, it's not guaranteed that a pirate TV station would even be able to broadcast (that is, Comcast doesn't have to provide XYZ-Pirate-TV if ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/TNT/alpha-soup companies pay them enough not to. See "Dell+Microsoft", which is, despite recent rumors about undecided 'linux distrobutions', still a hand-in-hand partnership.)
The scary part is, if Viacom wins $1b from YouTube, and other companies follow suit (sic), Google could drop YouTube, and it might set precedent for joe_content_owner to sue UltraCoolSite99 because of accidental uploads of copyright material. All of a sudden, it's 'too dangerous' to host user-submitted video content, and we, the interweb, start paying for access to PirateTV.com's "premium content", which is really just the same user-submitted, human-moderated crap we have now. (Not that I don't love YouTube, I just wouldn't pay for it)
No PirateTV on Channel 12, and no free PirateTV online... I'd just consider myself done with TV, by that point.
Agreed. Don't get me wrong, I love Law & Order, but that's about the only reason I even turn on cable programming anymore. I'll just plug in my DVD player + Wii, and consider the entertainment center complete. The thing that really frustrates me, though, is that it's all at the consumers expense. My $25 DVD player will soon be replaced by what-could-have-been a $25 HD-DVD player, Blueray, or whatever, but the device costs will continue to stay high when the entertainment companies treat us all like criminals. DRM isn't cheap.
I don't have a lot of dirt myself on 1and1, but I used to work for a good-sized hosting company, and whenever a customer asked about buying a domain from 1and1, my boss would crap out a community of small woodland animals. He didn't necessarily hate them, but he was pretty convinced that they were a load of bad news, and it was corporate policy to do whatever we could to keep the customer away from that registrar.
Also, we'd get lots of testimonials from old 1and1 hosting customers who had venerable horror-stories, complete with "site offline for 5 days+", "wont answer my emails" and "took my money and ran" situations.
Yeah, sorry, let me clarify-
It was a high school web design class. By which I mean it was WYSIWYG-based, no HTML, no JS, no coding. The irony lies in the fact that I still couldn't pass it.
Watching that teachers house burn down was one of the greatest feelings I've ever had, and for only the cost of a liter of gasoline...