You're in the wrong field. Programming involves a huge amount of people skills: Talking to the client, dealing with management, dealing with coworkers, discussing the project with coworkers, daily meetings, constant phone interruption, etc. It's maddening. I'm suprised if I get more than 10 lines of code written a day with all of the human bullshit involved.
System administration is far more suited to people who hate other people. Everyone expects their sys admin to be an asshole. See BOfH.
If you're the project leader, the blame rests squarely on you when your superiors ask you why it's not completed! As such, there are two things you can do to make sure the project is moving along:
Make sure all progress is visible. Be able to view everyone's code at any time. How you achieve this is unimportant (CVS, shared development directory, whatever). Just make sure you can see if work isn't getting done.
Talk to your developers often. Not just a "how are things going?". Almost everyone responds "fine" and leaves it at that. Ask them questions, anticipate problems they may have had and see how they worked them out, get them thinking. Maybe even set up some pair coding sessions, etc. Especially do this if you are unfamilar with a developer's work habits.
Do you suffer from usenet poster's syndrome? You address individual points entirely out of context, completely missing the implications as a whole. But perhaps I'm just not that good a writer. Oh well. I guess I won't feel bad for wasting good writing on an idiot.
But here's one part that did stick out that I can't pass up. Get a mirror and hold next to your monitor while you read this..
The funniest part about this is that the article which you seem to have failed to read explicitly states that it is being built on Linux. Not only are you calling me a dumbass for not assuming your conspiracy theory, but you've failed to do the basic requisite reading to have half a clue what you're talking about. Would you like fries with that?
Niether article mentions anything about Linux, except for the writer of The Register article wondering if it's Linux based. QUICK CHECK THE MIRROR!
See that? That expression that was on your face was one of a fucking dumbass.
Some kind fellow was running an SELinux box with a guest root account.
The account was powerless. SELinux is a paranoid sys admin's dream. You have to specifically grant ifconfig permission to see properties on each interface. Ping needs raw sockets access granted for each interface it wants to send pings over. etc.
Software development is difficult to parallelize. Eight-ten years is a good bet given an optimum use of programmer time. See: The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
I doubt China gives a damn about violating Microsoft's copyright.
Windows 2000 is a better future base to develop on than Windows 98. Microsoft has been trying to replace Windows 9x with the NT line for the last 8 years now.
Group X cannot complete copying Product 2, Revision 4. Besides, it's foolish for them not to try to mimic Product 3, Edition 4. (sighs).
Think about it, dumbass. It suggests that they just got their hands on Windows 98 source code and went with it.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
That depends.. can profitable telecommunications companies (MCI) resist being acquired by bullshit corporations (Worldcom) who just want to leech money and discard them like last night's whore?
There is a reason people don't develop new all-purpose operating systems from scratch today. It's an extraordinarily expensive and time consuming undertaking. We're talking about 10 years of development for talented, well organized groups, with constant feedback, review, testing, and some degree of industry support.
There's no way China developed this from scratch, this fast, with their resources, unless it supports only a tiny insignificant fraction of Microsoft Windows functionality. Cloning Windows 98 of all things doesn't make sense either. Windows 2000 is more stable, extensible, powerful.
It's either Linux + WINE + custom hacks, or they probably got their hands on Windows 98 source code and did some global search and replaces.
There are companies out that purchase every mailing list possible. No, they're not spammers, they're collating all of these mailing lists into a huge psych database, keyed against your name. In addition to every magazine subscription you've ever had, they can tie it against voter records, DMV records, credit reports, ad naseum. Some of them even key to usenet postings.
This is mostly used by investigators/perverts to determine gobs of information about someone just by typing in their name and paying $5. The fact that phone companies will now start sharing detailed information about their customers means that these profiles are just going to become THAT much more detailed.
Now the target is absolutely irresistable. They're going to read the notice out loud at the conference and then call AT&T just to make a point. I bet they were even planning to call a different company this year.
Of course, AT&T may be doing this to trap them --it's curious that they say h2k2 several times and clarify it instead of just saying "group of hacker terrorists". Or maybe they really are just that stupid.
Their "hacker" image ended up hurting them in court. The MPAA lawyers played up the fact that they published what looks like the anarchist's playbook. If these cases had happened more recently you can be sure they would've played the terrorism card. To the uninformed, or frankly, to anyone incapable of intelligent reasoning, 2600 appears to be a criminal group with an underground publication attempting to spread terror. The only way it could've been better for the MPAA is if it were Neo Nazis linking to DeCSS.
This is in fact all too common. When someone wants to promote their point of view they attempt to make those that disagree appear stupid, evil, or otherwise unappealing. Fox News does it all the time when they invite "liberals" onto their shows to comment--they find maniacs with some twisted point of view and then proceed to ridicule them, and to try to generalize it against an entire group.
Everyone who lives within 10 miles of him should get a cinder block, write their favorite spam on it("MAKE MONEY FAST!"), and drop it on his property. On a weekly basis.
After 20,000 or so maybe he'll start seeing the point.
The other day I decided I needed a computer. I didn't want some name brand piece of proprietary junk. I was about ready to buy one from Wal-Mart's web site, but first I had to pick up my girlfriend from the train station. While there, I saw a small mom + pop computer shop had opened up.
I walked in, talked with the owner a bit, asked him for a quote, and I ended up with a brand smacking new computer 3 hours later (took him a few hours to put it together). THAT's why you shop at these places. Almost instant gratification.
All users: business, personal, educational, etc. should sign a petition and affirm that they will adamantly refuse to do business with hardware and software companies that support this latest attempt at a Microsoft market stranglehold.
LET THE INDUSTRY KNOW CLEARLY THAT WE REJECT THIS AND IT WILL COST THEM DEARLY IF THEY SUPPORT IT.
I will be the first: Netgraft Corporation will NOT do business with any developers who produce hardware that supports Palladium, any distributor that sells Palladium-scheme hardware, any software vendor which utilizes Palladium hardware, and any company which does business on the Palladium platform.
If someone starts such a project to collect these names, please contact me.
He doesn't know anything about Linux
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 2
From his article, I soaked in two points basic points.
Linux is dead because the huge Wall Street hype machine has died down, and Red Hat isn't making any money.
First, Red Hat != Linux. There is constant innovation and development in Linux, and while Red Hat is a significant force, they are not the whole.
Linux survived for 9 years before Wall Street dildoheads ever knew that it was the next big IPO craze.
Finally, Microsoft is terrified of Linux (which makes the article kind of interesting given the source), even more so today than ever. You can probably find an article on Slashdot on any given day on how Microsoft is trying to do something to kill open source: linking it to terrorism, embrace and extend, incompatible hardware standards, lobbying, etc.
In my direct work experience, the number of systems I deal with running Linux is increasing, not decreasing.
Homely SecuriCrack Teamz in coordination with the Culinary Institute of America Security Research Group has discovered a serious vulnerability in the LG Internet Refrigerator.
An unchecked buffer in FridgeScape 3.12, the web browser built into the user interface panel will, if exploited, allow malicious users to gain full superuser control of the refrigerator. From here, it's trivial to set the temperature of the fridge to spoil the food, shoot ice cubes out at high velocity, or set invalid parameters in the cooling unit causing the freon tank to rupture, turning your refrigerator into a 250lbs titanium shrapnel grenade.
The vendor was notified 6 months ago and again 3 months later but has not responded.
We recommend that all users run their home appliances behind a firewall and that extraneous features on other household appliances, such as Auto-Ironing and Mow-On-Demand be disabled
You cannot beat pricewatch. However, be smart about it.
You will find companies that must be selling at a break-even point or even at a loss, leading certain categories. While many believe that part of their scam is to make it back in shipping (it's probably not, calculating exact shipping costs is often a lot of work, many just charge a ballpark), the real purpose is to get you looking at their site so that perhaps you'll buy other products which have sweeter margins. Buyers are often inclined to do just this to cut down the shipping costs.
Add up the numbers using that method, and then go back to pricewatch and pick the absolute lowest price in each category of parts you need. Even if they're not from the same company (you'll notice that no one company leads all of the categories, not even close). Even with shipping costs from so many individual vendors, you'll probably find the price to be far less than if you had gotten more parts from fewer vendors.
Having just built a high end graphics workstation for my sister, the end quotes differed by as much as $300 (it was $1500 and $1200, including shipping). Shop wisely.
Re:Source based vs. Binary based: Possible comprom
on
Gentoo Linux 1.2
·
· Score: 2
Pulling it out of my ass, I'm willing to bet most of the perceived speedup probably comes from custom compilation of glibc and XFree86.
I was making something like $10,000/year. I walked into my employer's office one day and said "Ok, I'm out of High School, I'm not going to college, I need to make more money!". And he said I had to earn it. So I do the exact same thing I've always done and find my salary was increased to about $25,000/year.
My colleagues were making far more, so I decided to hunt for another job. A company offered me $45,000/year to start, a raise to $60,000/year in 6 months if I proved valuable. I delivered my resignation to my boss.
Boss counter-offers with $60,000/year, plus other perks (tax breaks for him). I ended up staying.
100+% increase in pay that only came once I gave my 2 weeks. To say that I felt used was an understatement, especially since I had requested a raise earlier and he gave me this whole story about how he'd love to pay me more but I had to earn it.
One year later I ended up quitting for real and started a computer consulting firm of my own. I'm a few months from hiring an employee to help me, and I'm sure my past experience will be a valuable lesson on how not to treat employees.
If Quake3 turns kids into cold heartless street murderers, wouldn't strategy games turn them into fascist dictators? Or is that something that a parent can be proud of?
Microsoft is the only successful proprietary software product company. That is, they're the only company that can sell shrink-wrap software (or user licenses), walk away from them, and still make billions of dollars.
Every other proprietary software company must back up their products with service and support or they're kaput. These are the companies you can possibly convince to open source since their true business is supporting their products or supplying services based on them.
Microsoft going open source would be throwing away an extremely lucrative and unique monopoly.
* Games are an exception, and you may find some niche companies with a similar business model.
If there is then more free software out there, covering a wider variety of application than your average 'shrink-wrap' stuff, that means less of a demand for programmers-for-hire, too.
Maybe it will mean that we'll stop wasting our damn time (and our client's money) duplicating the efforts of others so that we can actually concentrate on doing something useful for a change.;)
Business logic is very hard to generalize and redistribute to others in a way that they'll find useful. You will always need programmers to write this for you. Everything else is more or less just a means for executing business logic.
I just can't buy the 19:1 ratio. Even if you include database designers and people who do some scritping as part of their jobs the 19:1 number doesn't make sense.
Go down hotjobs.com. Or the New York Times classifieds. Get a good sample range. It's 19:1. But I still think that's too low.
Oh, you meant it can destroy the shrink-wrap software economy? Ho hum. Only Microsoft really makes money doing that anyway. Everyone else must offer service and support on top of that to survive.
Microsoft does supply support. They provide it to OEMs and large customers. They expect the consumers to get support from the OEMs as part of their agreement. People who load the OS on their own are much more on their own, it's a choice the consumer makes.
Please read the entire paragraph first. Microsoft is one of the only software companies that can sell you an imaginary license to use a collection of bits, walk away from it, and still make billions of dollars. Some would argue that such a magic feat is not magic at all, but perhaps indicative of a monopoly.
Most other proprietary software vendors don't leverage their software this way at all. They must provide services and support based on top of these products to survive.
Your other comments are better addressed by people with more time than me.;)
Slashdot Mirror
One way or another, ddt will see that a Linux port is produced. (Inside joke)
You're in the wrong field. Programming involves a huge amount of people skills: Talking to the client, dealing with management, dealing with coworkers, discussing the project with coworkers, daily meetings, constant phone interruption, etc. It's maddening. I'm suprised if I get more than 10 lines of code written a day with all of the human bullshit involved.
System administration is far more suited to people who hate other people. Everyone expects their sys admin to be an asshole. See BOfH.
If you're the project leader, the blame rests squarely on you when your superiors ask you why it's not completed! As such, there are two things you can do to make sure the project is moving along:
Do you suffer from usenet poster's syndrome? You address individual points entirely out of context, completely missing the implications as a whole. But perhaps I'm just not that good a writer. Oh well. I guess I won't feel bad for wasting good writing on an idiot.
But here's one part that did stick out that I can't pass up. Get a mirror and hold next to your monitor while you read this..
The funniest part about this is that the article which you seem to have failed to read explicitly states that it is being built on Linux. Not only are you calling me a dumbass for not assuming your conspiracy theory, but you've failed to do the basic requisite reading to have half a clue what you're talking about. Would you like fries with that?
Niether article mentions anything about Linux, except for the writer of The Register article wondering if it's Linux based. QUICK CHECK THE MIRROR!
See that? That expression that was on your face was one of a fucking dumbass.
Some kind fellow was running an SELinux box with a guest root account.
The account was powerless. SELinux is a paranoid sys admin's dream. You have to specifically grant ifconfig permission to see properties on each interface. Ping needs raw sockets access granted for each interface it wants to send pings over. etc.
Software development is difficult to parallelize. Eight-ten years is a good bet given an optimum use of programmer time. See: The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
I doubt China gives a damn about violating Microsoft's copyright.
Windows 2000 is a better future base to develop on than Windows 98. Microsoft has been trying to replace Windows 9x with the NT line for the last 8 years now.
Group X cannot complete copying Product 2, Revision 4. Besides, it's foolish for them not to try to mimic Product 3, Edition 4. (sighs). Think about it, dumbass. It suggests that they just got their hands on Windows 98 source code and went with it.
You smell like poo.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
That depends.. can profitable telecommunications companies (MCI) resist being acquired by bullshit corporations (Worldcom) who just want to leech money and discard them like last night's whore?
There is a reason people don't develop new all-purpose operating systems from scratch today. It's an extraordinarily expensive and time consuming undertaking. We're talking about 10 years of development for talented, well organized groups, with constant feedback, review, testing, and some degree of industry support.
There's no way China developed this from scratch, this fast, with their resources, unless it supports only a tiny insignificant fraction of Microsoft Windows functionality. Cloning Windows 98 of all things doesn't make sense either. Windows 2000 is more stable, extensible, powerful.
It's either Linux + WINE + custom hacks, or they probably got their hands on Windows 98 source code and did some global search and replaces.
There are companies out that purchase every mailing list possible. No, they're not spammers, they're collating all of these mailing lists into a huge psych database, keyed against your name. In addition to every magazine subscription you've ever had, they can tie it against voter records, DMV records, credit reports, ad naseum. Some of them even key to usenet postings.
This is mostly used by investigators/perverts to determine gobs of information about someone just by typing in their name and paying $5. The fact that phone companies will now start sharing detailed information about their customers means that these profiles are just going to become THAT much more detailed.
Hooray for information!
Now the target is absolutely irresistable. They're going to read the notice out loud at the conference and then call AT&T just to make a point. I bet they were even planning to call a different company this year.
Of course, AT&T may be doing this to trap them --it's curious that they say h2k2 several times and clarify it instead of just saying "group of hacker terrorists". Or maybe they really are just that stupid.
Either way, it should be fun. I've got my ticket.
Their "hacker" image ended up hurting them in court. The MPAA lawyers played up the fact that they published what looks like the anarchist's playbook. If these cases had happened more recently you can be sure they would've played the terrorism card. To the uninformed, or frankly, to anyone incapable of intelligent reasoning, 2600 appears to be a criminal group with an underground publication attempting to spread terror. The only way it could've been better for the MPAA is if it were Neo Nazis linking to DeCSS.
This is in fact all too common. When someone wants to promote their point of view they attempt to make those that disagree appear stupid, evil, or otherwise unappealing. Fox News does it all the time when they invite "liberals" onto their shows to comment--they find maniacs with some twisted point of view and then proceed to ridicule them, and to try to generalize it against an entire group.
Everyone who lives within 10 miles of him should get a cinder block, write their favorite spam on it("MAKE MONEY FAST!"), and drop it on his property. On a weekly basis.
After 20,000 or so maybe he'll start seeing the point.
The other day I decided I needed a computer. I didn't want some name brand piece of proprietary junk. I was about ready to buy one from Wal-Mart's web site, but first I had to pick up my girlfriend from the train station. While there, I saw a small mom + pop computer shop had opened up.
I walked in, talked with the owner a bit, asked him for a quote, and I ended up with a brand smacking new computer 3 hours later (took him a few hours to put it together). THAT's why you shop at these places. Almost instant gratification.
All users: business, personal, educational, etc. should sign a petition and affirm that they will adamantly refuse to do business with hardware and software companies that support this latest attempt at a Microsoft market stranglehold.
LET THE INDUSTRY KNOW CLEARLY THAT WE REJECT THIS AND IT WILL COST THEM DEARLY IF THEY SUPPORT IT.
I will be the first: Netgraft Corporation will NOT do business with any developers who produce hardware that supports Palladium, any distributor that sells Palladium-scheme hardware, any software vendor which utilizes Palladium hardware, and any company which does business on the Palladium platform.
If someone starts such a project to collect these names, please contact me.
From his article, I soaked in two points basic points.
Linux is dead because the huge Wall Street hype machine has died down, and Red Hat isn't making any money.
First, Red Hat != Linux. There is constant innovation and development in Linux, and while Red Hat is a significant force, they are not the whole.
Linux survived for 9 years before Wall Street dildoheads ever knew that it was the next big IPO craze.
Finally, Microsoft is terrified of Linux (which makes the article kind of interesting given the source), even more so today than ever. You can probably find an article on Slashdot on any given day on how Microsoft is trying to do something to kill open source: linking it to terrorism, embrace and extend, incompatible hardware standards, lobbying, etc.
In my direct work experience, the number of systems I deal with running Linux is increasing, not decreasing.
You cannot beat pricewatch. However, be smart about it.
You will find companies that must be selling at a break-even point or even at a loss, leading certain categories. While many believe that part of their scam is to make it back in shipping (it's probably not, calculating exact shipping costs is often a lot of work, many just charge a ballpark), the real purpose is to get you looking at their site so that perhaps you'll buy other products which have sweeter margins. Buyers are often inclined to do just this to cut down the shipping costs.
Add up the numbers using that method, and then go back to pricewatch and pick the absolute lowest price in each category of parts you need. Even if they're not from the same company (you'll notice that no one company leads all of the categories, not even close). Even with shipping costs from so many individual vendors, you'll probably find the price to be far less than if you had gotten more parts from fewer vendors.
Having just built a high end graphics workstation for my sister, the end quotes differed by as much as $300 (it was $1500 and $1200, including shipping). Shop wisely.
Pulling it out of my ass, I'm willing to bet most of the perceived speedup probably comes from custom compilation of glibc and XFree86.
I was making something like $10,000/year. I walked into my employer's office one day and said "Ok, I'm out of High School, I'm not going to college, I need to make more money!". And he said I had to earn it. So I do the exact same thing I've always done and find my salary was increased to about $25,000/year.
My colleagues were making far more, so I decided to hunt for another job. A company offered me $45,000/year to start, a raise to $60,000/year in 6 months if I proved valuable. I delivered my resignation to my boss.
Boss counter-offers with $60,000/year, plus other perks (tax breaks for him). I ended up staying.
100+% increase in pay that only came once I gave my 2 weeks. To say that I felt used was an understatement, especially since I had requested a raise earlier and he gave me this whole story about how he'd love to pay me more but I had to earn it.
One year later I ended up quitting for real and started a computer consulting firm of my own. I'm a few months from hiring an employee to help me, and I'm sure my past experience will be a valuable lesson on how not to treat employees.
The ZDNet article is missing the link to my original article which is what lead the news.com writer to interview me.
I can see why they left it out though, it calls a lot of the people they interviewed in addition to me names. ;)
How about with LIDS?
Or if you used NSA Linux?
With some openwall.com patches?
I've never used Trusted Solaris, so I have no idea. Have you tried these and still found them lacking compared to Trusted Solaris?
If Quake3 turns kids into cold heartless street murderers, wouldn't strategy games turn them into fascist dictators? Or is that something that a parent can be proud of?
Microsoft is the only successful proprietary software product company. That is, they're the only company that can sell shrink-wrap software (or user licenses), walk away from them, and still make billions of dollars.
Every other proprietary software company must back up their products with service and support or they're kaput. These are the companies you can possibly convince to open source since their true business is supporting their products or supplying services based on them.
Microsoft going open source would be throwing away an extremely lucrative and unique monopoly.
* Games are an exception, and you may find some niche companies with a similar business model.
If there is then more free software out there, covering a wider variety of application than your average 'shrink-wrap' stuff, that means less of a demand for programmers-for-hire, too.
Maybe it will mean that we'll stop wasting our damn time (and our client's money) duplicating the efforts of others so that we can actually concentrate on doing something useful for a change. ;)
Business logic is very hard to generalize and redistribute to others in a way that they'll find useful. You will always need programmers to write this for you. Everything else is more or less just a means for executing business logic.
I just can't buy the 19:1 ratio. Even if you include database designers and people who do some scritping as part of their jobs the 19:1 number doesn't make sense.
Go down hotjobs.com. Or the New York Times classifieds. Get a good sample range. It's 19:1. But I still think that's too low.
Oh, you meant it can destroy the shrink-wrap software economy? Ho hum. Only Microsoft really makes money doing that anyway. Everyone else must offer service and support on top of that to survive.
Microsoft does supply support. They provide it to OEMs and large customers. They expect the consumers to get support from the OEMs as part of their agreement. People who load the OS on their own are much more on their own, it's a choice the consumer makes.
Please read the entire paragraph first. Microsoft is one of the only software companies that can sell you an imaginary license to use a collection of bits, walk away from it, and still make billions of dollars. Some would argue that such a magic feat is not magic at all, but perhaps indicative of a monopoly.
Most other proprietary software vendors don't leverage their software this way at all. They must provide services and support based on top of these products to survive.
Your other comments are better addressed by people with more time than me. ;)