How is it "unprofessional" and "rude" in this scenario to stay in touch with someone who was fired unfairly? You didn't fire them (presumably), your manager fired them. It would be rude for your manager to ask them for friendly advice, but not for you to do so.
Sure, but you would think he/she would have mentioned that if that's how it went down. And besides, even if the mentor got fired, they still exist, so you could still approach them with questions like this over a beer after work if you had to (unless they got the job by getting the more senior guy fired, in which case they deserve their fate).
How did you get a job as a company's sole "network and server administration" (sic) when you are a "total newbie to corporate and enterprise networking and servers"?
In every case I've experienced where someone was hired for a sysadmin job with absolutely no experience, there was a more senior person on staff there to mentor/train them. But it doesn't sound like that's the case here.
So... either (a) you were completely up front with your employer about your lack of experience and they hired you anyway, in which case there's no problem because they have limited needs, know you're learning and don't expect much; or (b) you lied to them, in which case the answer is "quit and go get a job you're actually qualified for".
Even if the claim you're being sued for has no merit, you have to pay a lawyer to go to court and explain that to a judge in order to get it dismissed. So even in the best case you're out of pocket for some amount of money. Other countries have "loser pays" (aka English-rule) provisions -- which require the loser in a suit to pay both sides' attorneys' fees -- to prevent this, but that's not true in the U.S.
The absence of such a rule is the reason SLAPP suits work -- corporations just threaten to bury their opponents under legal fees by launching a huge volume of lawsuits at them. They don't expect to win any of the suits, but their opponent goes bankrupt paying legal fees to knock them all down.
I think that it'd be a straight up financially bad idea for almost everyone. In addition to making the barriers to entry for new developers and IT professionals higher, we'd all suffer in terms of the actual money we take home. Union contracts base pay around seniority, not productivity. In fact, most unions violently oppose productivity-based pay scales.
Actors and writers have unions. You think they're not getting paid based on their performances?
A union is whatever the workers who form it make it. Those workers know the facts of their industries and form their unions accordingly. Just because some unions stress seniority doesn't mean yours has to.
I know that on broad topics I am often frustrated by the abundance of crap that I have to wade through in order to get to the few gems that are worth reading. When it comes to long-winded textbooks and weeks-long learning processes I would be more than happy to allow someone with years of experience to direct me to the optimal path of learning (why going to school still makes at least a little sense).
Perhaps./ could help here by finding and mobilizing some experts within its vast community to develop resources like this for common needs (languages, frameworks, etc.)?
Such documents would cost practically nothing to put together, and if they were done right should attract lots of pageviews (and hence, ad revenue)...
"Corporates" hate investing in technology that appears to be on the verge of being made obsolete. Obsolescence means rewrites, and rewrites cost money. They would prefer to wait for the new version and just build with that.
Usually this isn't a problem since the wait between announcement of a new version and release is a couple years at most. But Perl6 has been threatening to obsolete Perl 5 for nearly a decade now, without actually ever materializing. That's scary for "corporates" because they can't plan their Perl6 migration. All they know is that at some undefined point in the future, they're going to have to do it, or move to another language altogether -- and in the meantime, every line of Perl they pay for is just adding to the potential future liability.
I know we'll hear from Perlistas that Perl6 is awesome, and for all I know it may turn out that way. But for years now all it has done is inject uncertainty into the case for using Perl, and uncertainty is something "corporates" try to minimize, for good reasons.
Having implemented a Scoop site myself I can speak from experience in saying that it is terrible, terrible, terrible software.
Someone asked me about Scoop a few months ago and here is the response I sent them:
As someone who has spent a lot of time deploying, administering and managing a site based on Scoop, let me give you this advice:
DO NOT USE SCOOP.
If, for some reason, you feel the urge to use Scoop, just take a fork, cover it with salt and then stick it in your eye. That will give you the "Scoop experience" without having to install any software.
Well, in fairness to Scoop it's hard to call it dead when it powers Daily Kos, one of the most popular sites on the Web today. Though dKos has extensively modified Scoop and my understanding is they're doing a total rewrite that will remove Scoop altogether.
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest
on
Why Corporates Hate Perl
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· Score: 3, Informative
The actual quote is this:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
I was using Amazon S3 before realizing I was paying double when I had a spare 20 gigabytes on my FTP/HTTP hosting service. I could pay an extra $10 a month to get SFTP/SSH service but I guess I'm being cheap.
You may find that using your Web hosting service as a file storage solution will backfire on you.
I use Dreamhost for my personal Web hosting. It's cheap, reasonably reliable (one major outage in the five years I've been with them, but then Rackspace has had a major outage too in that time too), and comes with a metric ton of disk capacity.
BUT... Dreamhost (like most commodity hosting providers) assumes that 99% of their customers will never actually use all that capacity. That assumption held true until last year, when they noticed more and more of their customers using all their previously unused disk capacity for stuff like automated backups of their home PC. Which, it turns out, they explicitly ban in their terms of service, which state that your Dreamhost disk space is for web hosting only.
So customers started getting emails telling them that they had three options: erase all those backup files, close their account, or start paying Dreamhost $.20/GB/month for non-Web file storage. That's a nickel more per GB/month than S3.
I don't bring this up to knock Dreamhost; from their perspective this kind of use of their service is really abuse, since they sell it as Web hosting storage space, not generic online disk space, and most hosting providers would probably just kick you off altogether rather than futz with setting up a for-pay storage option. I bring it up to encourage you to just use S3, since Amazon has already solved all the problems you're spending time solving, and the cost savings would be negligible and could even lead to you getting kicked off your Web host altogether (there's no guarantee that your host will offer you a "non-Web storage" option like DH does). All of which is more hassle than I would recommend undergoing to save a couple of bucks a month.
Re:Re-usable libraries
on
Bash Cookbook
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· Score: 1
Doing advanced things in bash is a personal hobby mine, and if it proves useful to other admins and the company as well, than that's just a bonus.
Unless you leave or are hit by a bus, and then some poor slob has to come in and reverse-engineer all your cleverness to figure out how to keep your company's systems working.
If it's a personal hobby of yours, tinker with it at home. Don't be forcing everybody you work with to take up your hobby too.
If business analysts are that dumb, how could they know they had to use Visual Basic in the first place?
I didn't say they were dumb, I said they weren't programmers. (There are plenty of smart people running around businesses who fit that description.) They knew they should use VB because Microsoft marketed it heavily as an application development environment that non-programmers could use. It was the natural next step for people who were used to scripting Microsoft Office. (Microsoft reinforced this impression by naming Office's scripting language "Visual Basic for Applications" (VBA), and making its syntax very close to VB's.)
Visual Studio also comes with support for more than one language: C, C++, C#, J#, Visual Basic, etc. Same problem.
Visual Studio is a different product from Visual Basic. I'm talking about the "classic" Visual Basic (VB 1.0 through VB6), which included a cut-down version of Visual Studio with support for one language: VB. ("Classic" Visual Basic died when.NET took over; most VB apps were written prior to this.) Visual Studio is a full-blown IDE, comparable to Eclipse or Netbeans, that's more suitable for "real" programmers than the VB audience.
As for default installs, telnet doesn't come with the default Windows Vista install, yet I enabled it afterwards. So I guess for you telnet isn't "integrated" with Windows Vista either.
That's correct, unless somebody sells a Vista distribution that comes with telnet and has telnet hooked up to the usual Windows points of integration (inclusion in shell menus, etc.).
(Of course, telnet is massively insecure, as all its traffic is passed without encryption, so you should be using ssh anyway. But that's a subject for another day...)
Actually, an alternative to Visual Studio for Linux (and other platforms) is Eclipse. It supports Java, C, C++, PHP, Python (with the Pydev [sourceforge.net] plugin) and more. Coming with a "stack" or not is irrelevant.
That "whoosh" sound you just heard is my point flying over your head.
The appeal of Visual Basic for non-programmers was that they could go to the store, buy the box with "Visual Basic" on it, and have everything they needed to write their app right in the box -- and all the parts were fused together in a single interface. You just installed the software in the box, run the program called "Visual Basic", and you were good to go.
Remember, the core audience for VB was not programmers -- it was business analysts, people whose programming experience had been writing macros in Excel and who were ready to "step up" to something more powerful. For these people choices are bad because they don't have the background to know how to choose.
You say having the complete stack is "irrelevant". It may be irrelevant for you, since you appear to be an actual programmer and thus competent to make these choices for yourself, but VB was not for people like you. It was for "accidental programmers" -- people in other lines of work who found themselves having to write software anyway.
Eclipse "supports" all those languages you listed, but how is your business analyst supposed to know which one to use? How do they pick between Java, C++, Python et al? And if they do make a choice, how do they get the environment for that language set up -- do they need to download a compiler, VM etc.? Are there configuration options to be set so Eclipse can work with the downloaded tools?
Visual Basic made all those choices for them, which is one reason why it was so popular.
Ubuntu, for one, has all of this (OS, bindings, Eclipse, Pydev, etc) so IMO it is more integrated than Windows+Visual Studio, rather than less.
"Integrated" does not mean "comes with" (and it's a stretch even to say that Ubuntu "comes with" all that stuff, since it isn't there in a default install; you have to get it yourself, from the repos). It means "all the components work seamlessly together out of the box". Ubuntu may give you access to all that stuff, but it's still up to you to integrate it (download/install it, configure it, and so on), which is why it isn't really comparable to 'classic' VB. A better analogue would be something like Hypercard, which also bundled everything you needed to create simple apps in a single package.
As for Qt4: Is it compelling and appropriate for business software vendors? (I don't know).
The genius of Visual Basic was that it packaged up everything business types needed to write a GUI-based app for Windows -- a language (with simple syntax), a GUI toolkit, an interface designer, an IDE, and a compiler -- in one package.
This meant you could go from start to finish without having to stop and make decisions all the time about how to fit the next piece into your puzzle. When you wanted to design your GUI, you just used VB's tools for that. When you wanted to write your business logic, you used VB's tools for that too. You never had to step out of the VB environment to figure out how to accomplish something.
Qt isn't really comparable -- you can give someone Qt, but then they have a whole chain of other decisions to make before they have a working app. Visual Basic made all those decisions for you, so your average business analyst-type could concentrate on their app and not on debating the merits of Eclipse vs. Netbeans or C++ vs. Python or what have you.
(You might object that most of the applications that this "all in one" approach made possible are crap, and from a technical perspective you'd be right. But they worked, mostly, and businesses came to depend on them.)
To the best of my knowledge there's nothing really comparable to this for Linux. You can build a stack similar to the stack VB gave you, but you have to build it, and that's a barrier to entry that's too high for the VB audience to scale.
A Microsoft executive today acknowledged that part of a videotaped computer demonstration submitted as evidence in the antitrust trial might not really have been what the software giant purported it to be.
The prospect of fixed evidence in the Microsoft antitrust trial arose after Department of Justice antitrust prosecutor David Boies revealed a discrepancy in a videotaped demonstration that Microsoft played yesterday to contradict a government witness.
What I would like to see, and perhaps this is already available, is a set of agreed upon application practices, written by distribution maintainers, that developers follow that standardize the interface, the population of the OS menus, the distribution of files, etc, so that it app installs are seamless.
Meet freedesktop.org, which addresses a lot of those things.
Slashdot Mirror
The Naval Observatory is the location of the residence of the Vice President of the United States.
The RIAA's opinion is not law.
How is it "unprofessional" and "rude" in this scenario to stay in touch with someone who was fired unfairly? You didn't fire them (presumably), your manager fired them. It would be rude for your manager to ask them for friendly advice, but not for you to do so.
Nah, that's too extreme. Everyone knows that the best way to learn Unix is to run Gentoo.
Sure, but you would think he/she would have mentioned that if that's how it went down. And besides, even if the mentor got fired, they still exist, so you could still approach them with questions like this over a beer after work if you had to (unless they got the job by getting the more senior guy fired, in which case they deserve their fate).
How did you get a job as a company's sole "network and server administration" (sic) when you are a "total newbie to corporate and enterprise networking and servers"?
In every case I've experienced where someone was hired for a sysadmin job with absolutely no experience, there was a more senior person on staff there to mentor/train them. But it doesn't sound like that's the case here.
So... either (a) you were completely up front with your employer about your lack of experience and they hired you anyway, in which case there's no problem because they have limited needs, know you're learning and don't expect much; or (b) you lied to them, in which case the answer is "quit and go get a job you're actually qualified for".
Even if the claim you're being sued for has no merit, you have to pay a lawyer to go to court and explain that to a judge in order to get it dismissed. So even in the best case you're out of pocket for some amount of money. Other countries have "loser pays" (aka English-rule) provisions -- which require the loser in a suit to pay both sides' attorneys' fees -- to prevent this, but that's not true in the U.S.
The absence of such a rule is the reason SLAPP suits work -- corporations just threaten to bury their opponents under legal fees by launching a huge volume of lawsuits at them. They don't expect to win any of the suits, but their opponent goes bankrupt paying legal fees to knock them all down.
Yes there is.
Not all unions are the same, you know.
Professional baseball players have a union. You think they're getting paid based on seniority?
Actors and writers have unions. You think they're not getting paid based on their performances?
A union is whatever the workers who form it make it. Those workers know the facts of their industries and form their unions accordingly. Just because some unions stress seniority doesn't mean yours has to.
If I had mod points you'd get a +1... that was exactly the same thought I had, only I couldn't remember the exact name of the movie!
Perhaps ./ could help here by finding and mobilizing some experts within its vast community to develop resources like this for common needs (languages, frameworks, etc.)?
Such documents would cost practically nothing to put together, and if they were done right should attract lots of pageviews (and hence, ad revenue)...
(Head explodes)
Don't forget Poland!
... is Perl6.
"Corporates" hate investing in technology that appears to be on the verge of being made obsolete. Obsolescence means rewrites, and rewrites cost money. They would prefer to wait for the new version and just build with that.
Usually this isn't a problem since the wait between announcement of a new version and release is a couple years at most. But Perl6 has been threatening to obsolete Perl 5 for nearly a decade now, without actually ever materializing. That's scary for "corporates" because they can't plan their Perl6 migration. All they know is that at some undefined point in the future, they're going to have to do it, or move to another language altogether -- and in the meantime, every line of Perl they pay for is just adding to the potential future liability.
I know we'll hear from Perlistas that Perl6 is awesome, and for all I know it may turn out that way. But for years now all it has done is inject uncertainty into the case for using Perl, and uncertainty is something "corporates" try to minimize, for good reasons.
Having implemented a Scoop site myself I can speak from experience in saying that it is terrible, terrible, terrible software.
Someone asked me about Scoop a few months ago and here is the response I sent them:
Well, in fairness to Scoop it's hard to call it dead when it powers Daily Kos, one of the most popular sites on the Web today. Though dKos has extensively modified Scoop and my understanding is they're doing a total rewrite that will remove Scoop altogether.
The actual quote is this:
The source of the quote is Jamie Zawinski, who said it on Usenet in 1997.
You may find that using your Web hosting service as a file storage solution will backfire on you.
I use Dreamhost for my personal Web hosting. It's cheap, reasonably reliable (one major outage in the five years I've been with them, but then Rackspace has had a major outage too in that time too), and comes with a metric ton of disk capacity.
BUT... Dreamhost (like most commodity hosting providers) assumes that 99% of their customers will never actually use all that capacity. That assumption held true until last year, when they noticed more and more of their customers using all their previously unused disk capacity for stuff like automated backups of their home PC. Which, it turns out, they explicitly ban in their terms of service, which state that your Dreamhost disk space is for web hosting only.
So customers started getting emails telling them that they had three options: erase all those backup files, close their account, or start paying Dreamhost $.20/GB/month for non-Web file storage. That's a nickel more per GB/month than S3.
I don't bring this up to knock Dreamhost; from their perspective this kind of use of their service is really abuse, since they sell it as Web hosting storage space, not generic online disk space, and most hosting providers would probably just kick you off altogether rather than futz with setting up a for-pay storage option. I bring it up to encourage you to just use S3, since Amazon has already solved all the problems you're spending time solving, and the cost savings would be negligible and could even lead to you getting kicked off your Web host altogether (there's no guarantee that your host will offer you a "non-Web storage" option like DH does). All of which is more hassle than I would recommend undergoing to save a couple of bucks a month.
Unless you leave or are hit by a bus, and then some poor slob has to come in and reverse-engineer all your cleverness to figure out how to keep your company's systems working.
If it's a personal hobby of yours, tinker with it at home. Don't be forcing everybody you work with to take up your hobby too.
I didn't say they were dumb, I said they weren't programmers. (There are plenty of smart people running around businesses who fit that description.) They knew they should use VB because Microsoft marketed it heavily as an application development environment that non-programmers could use. It was the natural next step for people who were used to scripting Microsoft Office. (Microsoft reinforced this impression by naming Office's scripting language "Visual Basic for Applications" (VBA), and making its syntax very close to VB's.)
Visual Studio is a different product from Visual Basic. I'm talking about the "classic" Visual Basic (VB 1.0 through VB6), which included a cut-down version of Visual Studio with support for one language: VB. ("Classic" Visual Basic died when .NET took over; most VB apps were written prior to this.) Visual Studio is a full-blown IDE, comparable to Eclipse or Netbeans, that's more suitable for "real" programmers than the VB audience.
That's correct, unless somebody sells a Vista distribution that comes with telnet and has telnet hooked up to the usual Windows points of integration (inclusion in shell menus, etc.).
(Of course, telnet is massively insecure, as all its traffic is passed without encryption, so you should be using ssh anyway. But that's a subject for another day...)
That "whoosh" sound you just heard is my point flying over your head.
The appeal of Visual Basic for non-programmers was that they could go to the store, buy the box with "Visual Basic" on it, and have everything they needed to write their app right in the box -- and all the parts were fused together in a single interface. You just installed the software in the box, run the program called "Visual Basic", and you were good to go.
Remember, the core audience for VB was not programmers -- it was business analysts, people whose programming experience had been writing macros in Excel and who were ready to "step up" to something more powerful. For these people choices are bad because they don't have the background to know how to choose.
You say having the complete stack is "irrelevant". It may be irrelevant for you, since you appear to be an actual programmer and thus competent to make these choices for yourself, but VB was not for people like you. It was for "accidental programmers" -- people in other lines of work who found themselves having to write software anyway.
Eclipse "supports" all those languages you listed, but how is your business analyst supposed to know which one to use? How do they pick between Java, C++, Python et al? And if they do make a choice, how do they get the environment for that language set up -- do they need to download a compiler, VM etc.? Are there configuration options to be set so Eclipse can work with the downloaded tools?
Visual Basic made all those choices for them, which is one reason why it was so popular.
"Integrated" does not mean "comes with" (and it's a stretch even to say that Ubuntu "comes with" all that stuff, since it isn't there in a default install; you have to get it yourself, from the repos). It means "all the components work seamlessly together out of the box". Ubuntu may give you access to all that stuff, but it's still up to you to integrate it (download/install it, configure it, and so on), which is why it isn't really comparable to 'classic' VB. A better analogue would be something like Hypercard, which also bundled everything you needed to create simple apps in a single package.
The genius of Visual Basic was that it packaged up everything business types needed to write a GUI-based app for Windows -- a language (with simple syntax), a GUI toolkit, an interface designer, an IDE, and a compiler -- in one package.
This meant you could go from start to finish without having to stop and make decisions all the time about how to fit the next piece into your puzzle. When you wanted to design your GUI, you just used VB's tools for that. When you wanted to write your business logic, you used VB's tools for that too. You never had to step out of the VB environment to figure out how to accomplish something.
Qt isn't really comparable -- you can give someone Qt, but then they have a whole chain of other decisions to make before they have a working app. Visual Basic made all those decisions for you, so your average business analyst-type could concentrate on their app and not on debating the merits of Eclipse vs. Netbeans or C++ vs. Python or what have you.
(You might object that most of the applications that this "all in one" approach made possible are crap, and from a technical perspective you'd be right. But they worked, mostly, and businesses came to depend on them.)
To the best of my knowledge there's nothing really comparable to this for Linux. You can build a stack similar to the stack VB gave you, but you have to build it, and that's a barrier to entry that's too high for the VB audience to scale.
Here you go.
Indeed, she has been repeatedly cited as one of the people on McCain's short list for vice president.
Meet freedesktop.org, which addresses a lot of those things.