Too many employer/employee relationships lack trust. It probably can't be helped if you work in a huge company that your direct superior has no interest in you.
I don't get it. Why would you base your livelihood on people you wouldn't trust to take care of a pet, or your car, or to keep a secret? When you work for strangers, or even people who hate you, you're bound to come into situations where you have 60+ hour work weeks, feel unappreciated, and believe that your only choice is an all-or-nothing walk-out.
Maybe I'm just being naive, but I hope my employees trust me enough to think I'm giving them a fair deal (and I hope they told me the truth when I hired them under such arrangements), and if they don't like it, I also hope that they'll come talk to me about it.
I'm not saying that you're being unreasonable, perhaps your employers are genuine assholes. I just can't fathom a relationship getting to such a point. In prior jobs, the second something went wrong and looked as if it was not going to be reconciled, I would quit immediately.
The Slashdot standard rebuttal is irrelevant. To recap:
Phoenix: The most devastating part about having laptops stolen is forfeiting the information they contain! Industrial spies hglaugalghalghalgh! Our anti-theft system will protect against this!
Slashdot A: Uh, just disable the MAC address/change the hostname/change the MAC?/hack the BIOS?/Yank the hard drive?
Slashdot B: A, you fool! The average laptop thief doesn't know this! He'll probably just sell it!
The average laptop thief isn't an industrial spy. The average laptop thief doesn't give a damn about the data on the laptop. Industrial spies are presumably a wee bit smarter, and if they got burned on their first anti-theft protected laptop, they won't make the mistake again.
When the game industry was smaller and less accessible, a sophisticated, clever game would gain the recognition it deserves.
Now that gaming is a huge business, with a larger portion of revenue coming from casual gamers, it's so much harder for a clever game to make it as a success.
Liquidwar, for example, is clever, addictive, and basically a very simple game. Who has played it? Could it make any money if sold mass market?
NEW YORK, Monday -- Responding to Microsoft's announcement to donate $1 Billion in software to non-profits, Netgraft Corp aims to one up Microsoft by announcing a $20 TRILLION software giveaway.
Microsoft's move has been criticised by many in the free software community as an attempt to stifle [free software] adoption. "They're using their influence and might to suppress what is clearly better software. Well, as a company that earns its bread and butter promoting free software, we felt it would only be right to give our free software away as well", said Michael Bacarella, the company's founder and Chief Technology Officer.
Effective immediately, the company will make its award winning TCP connection forwarder, tcpfwd, which normally retails for $5,000,000 per copy, freely available from its web site at http://netgraft.com/tcpfwd.c under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
"No one has ever attempted this before", he continues, "but my hope is that in doing so, we can show the world that free software can beat proprietary software vendors, no matter what stunts they try to pull."
Netgraft Corp will end the giveaway program for tcpfwd once it surpasses 4,000,000 downloads, which would retail for $50 trillion.
"And it's not just for non-profits. tcpfwd is available to all, for-profits, students, and so on. Share and enjoy." concludes Mr. Bacarella.
Microsoft did not immediately return comment requests.
We have MySQL managing a 30+GB dataset with InnoDB tables, receiving approximately 700 queries/second average.
It's running on a dual P3-1.4GHz with 2GB of RAM on 36GB RAID-1 array. We're about to replace it with a dual P4-Xeon at 2.4Ghz, 3GB of RAM, and two 72GB RAID-5 volumes.
That if they draw the Linux community proper into a legal battle, that in court the judge will see SCO's lawyers, all sharp and buttoned down, representing tireless innovators who are meekly trying to defend their intellectual property, and on the other side, will see unwashed, smelly, hairy anti-capitalist hackers trying to rape and pillage all of the intellectual property in the world in support of some fanatical anti-business ideal.
The judge doesn't even have to hear an argument, he slams the gavel, case closed. SCO wins.
Boy, do they have another thing coming.
If there's one thing that hackers like to tinker with besides technology, it's law.
I'd watch it on C-SPAN with a bucket of popcorn.
Re:The description is very vague
on
Gentoo Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
How the hell does one port "aggresively"? Like this?
Contact a whole assload of game publishers and offer them free Linux ports? That sounds aggressive to me.;)
The description is very vague
on
Gentoo Games
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Are they going to produce a super optimized distro for games?
Are they planning to aggressively port popular games to Linux?
Are they planning to develop games from scratch?
From the announcement, it suggests that they're doing 1 and/or 2...
Engaging in behavior that annoys a large group of companies and even many more individuals is a very stupid thing to do. No matter how legally in the right you think you may be, the more of an asshole you are the greater the chance that you'll offend someone who has no respect for the law.
Look what happened to the spammer Alan Ralsky who gloated about how he was living it up filling inboxes with spam. Someone posted his home address and now he's being bombarded with sheer tons of postal mail.
SCO seems determined to draw this kind of reaction. What are they thinking?
Imagine though, that instead of signing up just any plain individual with an ego problem, that you signed up a business for all of this junkmail.
Think about a company sabotaging its upstart competitor by saturating their mailbox with junk. The competitor starts missing bills, notices from vendors, etc.
Or even worse, imagine someone who has been screwed by the phone company one too many times decides to mailing list bomb their bill payment center. The costs of processing payments shoots up while mail peons have to separate the payments from the junk.
Congresspeople start getting cut off from their constituency.
etc...
And the worst part is that this is so hard to undo. Even if you take the effort to unsubscribe from every single mailing list you're on, it would take the attacker mere seconds to re-add you to all of them.
This is probably one of the most devastating non-violent denial of service attacks you can utilize today.
...is not the industry that most programmers work in.
If you're getting a degree in software development, there's about a 98% chance that if you write code, it will be for a custom business system that will never be used outside of the company you work for.
Programmers rarely work in software product companies, and in those companies the programmers find themselves to be the minority (both in number and in pay) -- overshadowed by marketers, admins, and lawyers. Their jobs are to produce the product, worked 18 hours a day, paid what amounts to minimum wage, and maybe one day it might result in a royalty check.
See, the software product industry doesn't really exist. The billions of dollars made by Microsoft are in truth a bizarre anomoly that most companies have not been able to recreate. That is not to say that other companies don't sell software profitably too, but in those cases the software is sold as simply a service offering vessel. Microsoft is one of the few that can sell a shrinkwrap product to millions of people and walk away from them until it's time to sell them the next release.
Other cases where software is sold as a product usually has nothing to do with the rest of the software industry. The box is an end user consumable like entertainment content or some kind of shovelware gimmick.
It is the software product industries Ellison is talking about when he says the software industry is on the decline. He probably even sees it in his own company. No one buys Oracle for the sake of having Oracle software, they buy Oracle so they have Oracle's support infrastructure behind it.
So while the software product industry may be on its way out, it doesn't mean you should switch majors just yet.
The software systems and services industries are poised for a boom. Businesses are starting to collect more information, expanding into more markets, becoming (finally) a little more computer literate. It is in these fields we can seek to sell ourselves, and it is also in these fields we can best sell Linux and open source.
When you piss off a huge group of people...
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
You'd be foolish not to expect something bad to happen to you. It's quite natural really. The more people you wrong, the greater your odds of facing harsh retaliation, because you have increased your chances of offending someone who has no fear of the law.
It's simple cause and effect. Be an asshole = vengeance. Police even tell you that while the vengeance act is wrong, you might want to consider not being a dickhead.
They should be thankful that they haven't been mailbombed like Alan Ralsky, that living-large spammer who gloated about how much money he was making filling inboxes with trash. I'm suprised that's the worst thing that to have happened to him.
If I were SCO I'd drop the lawsuit and STFU, it sounds like it'll only get worse.
Their entire suit may be based on header files in Linux which conform to SYSVR4 specifications. To an untrained reviewer, this may indeed look like infringement.
Fortunately, there's plenty of legal precedence about header files, conforming to specifications, etc. which should make short work of this claim.
Anyway, down to business...
SCO customers in New York! would you like to move away from a sinking ship and regain control of your systems? Looking to develop a Linux strategy? We can help.
And it shows. Their songs sound like nothing else on the radio today. Raw, unique, original.
On one hand, it's obnoxious because you probably have to go through great trouble nowadays in recording an album just to say "no computers were used!", but on the other hand, who can argue with results?
Belive it or not most os's actually use 1 page per process. And use the memory controler to make it look like 1 page 4 gig long. The only reason you need a 64bit memory space is if your using data bigger than 4gig. Which at this point in time is HUGE. There are SOME applications that use more than that. But not many.
If someone's about to shell out $100,000 for a SSD it's pretty likely that they have more than 4GB of data they need to access quickly.
It also means that they're probably stuck with a 4GB address space limit.
It also means that if they could rewrite to avoid the 4GB limit, they could almost as easily rewrite to just use multiple servers.
It also means that x86-64 will address their problems better than SSDs.
...they offer permanent stable storage. In the meantime there are all of these hacks to back the SSD with a magnetic disk, battery backups, etc.
In those cases, you're better off loading up on RAM and relying on the buffer-cache to make the disk slowness transparent.
Of course, you could be in a position where you already have 4GB of RAM stuck in a machine and it runs an x86 processor and it's still too slow. Then you're up shit creek unless you can deal with a measely 100MB/sec RAID solution.;)
Ummm... it takes a modern day processor less than 1% cpu to play a high quality mp3. So either the trailer's chosen sound codec is either so bad , or an extra 1% cpu usage makes it unviewable, or perhaps it is something like Quicktime sucking ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Too many employer/employee relationships lack trust. It probably can't be helped if you work in a huge company that your direct superior has no interest in you.
I don't get it. Why would you base your livelihood on people you wouldn't trust to take care of a pet, or your car, or to keep a secret? When you work for strangers, or even people who hate you, you're bound to come into situations where you have 60+ hour work weeks, feel unappreciated, and believe that your only choice is an all-or-nothing walk-out.
Maybe I'm just being naive, but I hope my employees trust me enough to think I'm giving them a fair deal (and I hope they told me the truth when I hired them under such arrangements), and if they don't like it, I also hope that they'll come talk to me about it.
I'm not saying that you're being unreasonable, perhaps your employers are genuine assholes. I just can't fathom a relationship getting to such a point. In prior jobs, the second something went wrong and looked as if it was not going to be reconciled, I would quit immediately.
Good luck.
Don't forget about petsovernight.com
...this after reading that article yesterday about Jawed Karim's plans for a vicinity-based instant messenger program (Trepia?).
Jawed Karim and Justin Frankel were both part of nullsoft, in whatever capacity that was.
He probably read about someone he knew doing something cool and wanted out. Maybe they're planning to do something together?
The Slashdot standard rebuttal is irrelevant. To recap:
Phoenix: The most devastating part about having laptops stolen is forfeiting the information they contain! Industrial spies hglaugalghalghalgh! Our anti-theft system will protect against this!
Slashdot A: Uh, just disable the MAC address/change the hostname/change the MAC?/hack the BIOS?/Yank the hard drive?
Slashdot B: A, you fool! The average laptop thief doesn't know this! He'll probably just sell it!
The average laptop thief isn't an industrial spy. The average laptop thief doesn't give a damn about the data on the laptop. Industrial spies are presumably a wee bit smarter, and if they got burned on their first anti-theft protected laptop, they won't make the mistake again.
When the game industry was smaller and less accessible, a sophisticated, clever game would gain the recognition it deserves.
Now that gaming is a huge business, with a larger portion of revenue coming from casual gamers, it's so much harder for a clever game to make it as a success.
Liquidwar, for example, is clever, addictive, and basically a very simple game. Who has played it? Could it make any money if sold mass market?
MySQL is pretty professional enough for us.
We have MySQL managing a 30+GB dataset with InnoDB tables, receiving approximately 700 queries/second average.
It's running on a dual P3-1.4GHz with 2GB of RAM on 36GB RAID-1 array. We're about to replace it with a dual P4-Xeon at 2.4Ghz, 3GB of RAM, and two 72GB RAID-5 volumes.
It operates 24/365.
...says that there may be some useful information in the sealed documents in the court battle between Caledera/SCO and Microsoft.
It's interesting that this airs today.
That if they draw the Linux community proper into a legal battle, that in court the judge will see SCO's lawyers, all sharp and buttoned down, representing tireless innovators who are meekly trying to defend their intellectual property, and on the other side, will see unwashed, smelly, hairy anti-capitalist hackers trying to rape and pillage all of the intellectual property in the world in support of some fanatical anti-business ideal.
The judge doesn't even have to hear an argument, he slams the gavel, case closed. SCO wins.
Boy, do they have another thing coming.
If there's one thing that hackers like to tinker with besides technology, it's law.
I'd watch it on C-SPAN with a bucket of popcorn.
How the hell does one port "aggresively"? Like this?
Contact a whole assload of game publishers and offer them free Linux ports? That sounds aggressive to me. ;)
Are they going to produce a super optimized distro for games?
Are they planning to aggressively port popular games to Linux?
Are they planning to develop games from scratch?
From the announcement, it suggests that they're doing 1 and/or 2...
Engaging in behavior that annoys a large group of companies and even many more individuals is a very stupid thing to do. No matter how legally in the right you think you may be, the more of an asshole you are the greater the chance that you'll offend someone who has no respect for the law.
Look what happened to the spammer Alan Ralsky who gloated about how he was living it up filling inboxes with spam. Someone posted his home address and now he's being bombarded with sheer tons of postal mail.
SCO seems determined to draw this kind of reaction. What are they thinking?
Imagine though, that instead of signing up just any plain individual with an ego problem, that you signed up a business for all of this junkmail.
Think about a company sabotaging its upstart competitor by saturating their mailbox with junk. The competitor starts missing bills, notices from vendors, etc.
Or even worse, imagine someone who has been screwed by the phone company one too many times decides to mailing list bomb their bill payment center. The costs of processing payments shoots up while mail peons have to separate the payments from the junk.
Congresspeople start getting cut off from their constituency.
etc...
And the worst part is that this is so hard to undo. Even if you take the effort to unsubscribe from every single mailing list you're on, it would take the attacker mere seconds to re-add you to all of them.
This is probably one of the most devastating non-violent denial of service attacks you can utilize today.
Moral of the story: don't piss people off.
It's not the user that must be authenticated, only the content.
And that's easy.
...P2P trust model infrastructures.
It looks like the RIAA/MPAA are driving innovation, for a change.
Try liquidwar. One of the most fascinating and innovative games I've ever played.
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/
...is not the industry that most programmers work in.
If you're getting a degree in software development, there's about a 98% chance that if you write code, it will be for a custom business system that will never be used outside of the company you work for.
Programmers rarely work in software product companies, and in those companies the programmers find themselves to be the minority (both in number and in pay) -- overshadowed by marketers, admins, and lawyers. Their jobs are to produce the product, worked 18 hours a day, paid what amounts to minimum wage, and maybe one day it might result in a royalty check.
See, the software product industry doesn't really exist. The billions of dollars made by Microsoft are in truth a bizarre anomoly that most companies have not been able to recreate. That is not to say that other companies don't sell software profitably too, but in those cases the software is sold as simply a service offering vessel. Microsoft is one of the few that can sell a shrinkwrap product to millions of people and walk away from them until it's time to sell them the next release.
Other cases where software is sold as a product usually has nothing to do with the rest of the software industry. The box is an end user consumable like entertainment content or some kind of shovelware gimmick.
It is the software product industries Ellison is talking about when he says the software industry is on the decline. He probably even sees it in his own company. No one buys Oracle for the sake of having Oracle software, they buy Oracle so they have Oracle's support infrastructure behind it.
So while the software product industry may be on its way out, it doesn't mean you should switch majors just yet.
The software systems and services industries are poised for a boom. Businesses are starting to collect more information, expanding into more markets, becoming (finally) a little more computer literate. It is in these fields we can seek to sell ourselves, and it is also in these fields we can best sell Linux and open source.
You'd be foolish not to expect something bad to happen to you. It's quite natural really. The more people you wrong, the greater your odds of facing harsh retaliation, because you have increased your chances of offending someone who has no fear of the law.
It's simple cause and effect. Be an asshole = vengeance. Police even tell you that while the vengeance act is wrong, you might want to consider not being a dickhead.
They should be thankful that they haven't been mailbombed like Alan Ralsky, that living-large spammer who gloated about how much money he was making filling inboxes with trash. I'm suprised that's the worst thing that to have happened to him.
If I were SCO I'd drop the lawsuit and STFU, it sounds like it'll only get worse.
Their entire suit may be based on header files in Linux which conform to SYSVR4 specifications. To an untrained reviewer, this may indeed look like infringement.
Fortunately, there's plenty of legal precedence about header files, conforming to specifications, etc. which should make short work of this claim.
Anyway, down to business...
SCO customers in New York! would you like to move away from a sinking ship and regain control of your systems? Looking to develop a Linux strategy? We can help.
...who completely bypass computer audio processing.
And it shows. Their songs sound like nothing else on the radio today. Raw, unique, original.
On one hand, it's obnoxious because you probably have to go through great trouble nowadays in recording an album just to say "no computers were used!", but on the other hand, who can argue with results?
Belive it or not most os's actually use 1 page per process. And use the memory controler to make it look like 1 page 4 gig long. The only reason you need a 64bit memory space is if your using data bigger than 4gig. Which at this point in time is HUGE. There are SOME applications that use more than that. But not many.
If someone's about to shell out $100,000 for a SSD it's pretty likely that they have more than 4GB of data they need to access quickly.
It also means that they're probably stuck with a 4GB address space limit.
It also means that if they could rewrite to avoid the 4GB limit, they could almost as easily rewrite to just use multiple servers.
It also means that x86-64 will address their problems better than SSDs.
...they offer permanent stable storage. In the meantime there are all of these hacks to back the SSD with a magnetic disk, battery backups, etc.
In those cases, you're better off loading up on RAM and relying on the buffer-cache to make the disk slowness transparent.
Of course, you could be in a position where you already have 4GB of RAM stuck in a machine and it runs an x86 processor and it's still too slow. Then you're up shit creek unless you can deal with a measely 100MB/sec RAID solution. ;)
x86_64 any day now...
/me twiddle thumbs
Ummm... it takes a modern day processor less than 1% cpu to play a high quality mp3. So either the trailer's chosen sound codec is either so bad , or an extra 1% cpu usage makes it unviewable, or perhaps it is something like Quicktime sucking ass.
Most likely the last one.
On my Athlon 700 running Linux and mplayer, it plays smoothly and sharply, but with no sound (not supported).
On my Athlon 950 running Windows 2000, QuickTime plays sound but drops hella frames.
Any explanations?
It's not varying at all. How weird.