Lincoln, though I'm working in Champaign. But the nearly 1.5 hour one-way commute is my choice, not something I *have* to do - there are jobs closer to home. Lincoln's nice - it's about 1/2 hour from Bloomington, Springfield, and Decatur (far enough away to not get the ADM/Staley smell); 45 minutes from Peoria; and about an hour or so from Champaign/Urbana, depending on where you wanna go
Get a piece of 12-16 gauge wire. Crimp a ring terminal onto each end. One end goes to a screw somewhere on the stereo's case, one end goes to a screw somewhere on your PC's case (to which your motherboard and therefore sound card is, or should be, grounded). Now ground is ground on both devices, and your risk of dying due to a problem in the PC power supply is decreased (presuming the stereo uses a 3-prong plug or you fix the plug on the PC).
I live in a town with a population of about 15K. I'm within an hour's drive of more museums than I care to count, there are major musical acts of most genres nearby every couple of weeks, art shows come through often enough, and if you haven't met someone "interesting" today you must not have left the house. There's riverboat gambling 45 minutes away if that's the big thing, etc.
Basically, there are cities nearby, and Chicago, Indianapolis, or St. Louis are less than a 2 hour drive if for some reason I'm compelled to visit some overcrowded craphole full of people who think they're somehow better than me just because their groceries cost more and they spend more time coughing in traffic.:)
You have a strange definition of "better" if you think that using flash and graphics where text makes sense is "better". Hooray for wasting bandwidth in roder to provide a "media-rich" experience, when utilizing actual valid HTML would work just as well *and* provide a means of formatting for a variety of different output devices.
You don't have to design to the "lowest common denominator" if you use proper HTML 4.1 with CSS, but you do have to think about making a page that degrades gracefully. It's not really even hard - but thanks to IE and Netscape adding their own screwy tags + cheerfully accepting ill-formed HTML, web developers are among the laziest, worst informed developers around. Yeah, things sure are better now.
I'm a professional perl programmer, and that's generally how I generate code as well.:)
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm sorry you did poorly in school. I generally did OK, and found things to entertain myself, but it really works better if there's some direction given by someone who's already picked up some knowledge. Yeah, the bright kids can find ways to entertain themselves, but the schools don't just "not provide" a means of extra learning, they actively stifle it. Say I'm sitting in a "science" course while the instructor repeats the same friggin' lecture as was given yesterday, because a couple of people weren't paying attention (and aren't paying attention again today). Now lets say I coudl be doing somethign constructive, like reading another book. Nope, then *I* get scolded for not paying attention in class. Just for example. Or, imagine PE. I played basketball and kept in decent shape outside of school, but no, the state somehow requires that I attend PE, rather than using that hour to learn something. Or, the teachers say so, later I found out that it's not a state requirement.
Not that any of this really happens to me. I've been out of high school for a long time now. But somehow I'm guessing that things haven't changed *that* much in rural IL. Yeah, I did alright, because my parents weer somewhat encouraging. I hate mentioning my IQ, becuase I put little stock in that alone, but it seems like tests generally put it in the upper 160s to the lower 170s - I think I tested at 177 in gradeschool (I guess I'm getting dumber as time goes on;)). Whoopie, I'm a gosh damned genius. I'm not paying the $50 (45, whatever) Mensa charges to get the "I'm better than you" card with membership in the pompous ass club, and I'm not throwing it around - this is the first and last time I expect that empty number to appear on/. - but I'm mentioning it here because it's relevant. I'm in the upper less-than-one percent as far as that "testing" claims, and the public school system *actively* wasted my time. I badly wanted to learn and do more all through school, but merely doing "good enough" was all that school would allow me to do. Now I volunteer when I can to help other kids who might be in a similar situation. I do that because I know that there were other pretty smart kids in school with me whose interst in learning had totally atrophied by the time high school was through. One guy's done time in prison for stupid shit (I'm sure that's what the arresting officer wanted to cite him for), one of the girls lives in a trailer while working a checkout somewhere. This is largely because their desire to learn was stifled by an unsympathetic school system, and they didn't have anywhere to turn. I'm hoping I can prevent that by providing a modicum of guidance. That guidance is what really needs to be provided, IMHO, since the "average" people will find a way to get by without special attention. This I also know, because average people have been making it without personal attention for centuries.
Man, I don't need those damned lunatic vandals anywhere near me. Friggin' PETA. There's one group that causes me to actually support the anti-terrorism laws...:)
I presume you're a vegiterian, too, 'cause those "raised for food" animals are usually trapped and killed, and are pretty helpless before they're put down, too. Yeah, even fish. People have been putting out rat traps, mouse traps, raising cats, and doing various other less humane things to rats for centuries. Rats don't seem to be nearing extinction either...
Not that I should really care one way or another what you think, but I suppose I'll tell you that, as I've grown, I've developed a bit more respect for animal life in general, and wouldn't intentionally hurt a rat should I encounter one. For example, the last time we had a mouse in our home, I got it away from the house cats (which were playing with it at the time, and hadn't apparently hurt it), put it in a container, and drove out to the nearby national park where the mouse was released. Sure, some other animal probably ate it within minutes of my leaving it in the tall grass, but I suppose that's "nature" and better than me harming it. I still don't think rats are generaly cute, though the mouse was kinda cute.
However, "current nature lover" cloudmaster wouldn't have been as appropriate as "past farmer" cloudmaster in response to the person who felt compelled to try to provoke a reaction, now would it?:)
There were several of those in the late 90's - ranging from free ISPs to free computers. They're all gone now. I think that pretty well answers the original question with a "no, I would not, nor would enough other people".
No, I'm not grossed out, nor did I particularly villify rodents - visciously or not. However, most any wild animal whose apparent primary purpose in life is to infiltrate and destroy my darned grain reserves, well, I don't particularly find them to be cute. And "cutest"? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder, but I think most anyone can agree that chickens aren't cute either. Were I looking for a pet, I'd choose a rat over a chicken any day - chickens are about the most filthy animals around... You're welcome to keep them as pets if you're all excited about the shock value of the animals in the house. Get some snakes, too - people get scared of them as well.
My immune system gets exercised adequately without rubbing random animals on my face. Though, I don't see why a domestic rat would be any worse than those screwy pet owners who let their dogs or cats lick their faces (that toungue was on an ass just moments ago, darn it). But hey, I speed almost every day, and since I haven't been in a wreck yet I can say that speeding is prefectly good idea for anyone!
BTW, if you really want a "viscious" rat story with some shock value, just picture me in a bad mood because rats have been eating the (fairly expensive) hog food and tearing up the paper feed bags, generally making a mess. Now picture me coming in to the feed shed and finding a bunch of those nasty little angry, hissing bastards somehow trapped in the bottom of a large barrel. Throw in a big hammer, or maybe it was an old ball bat. I forget, though I suppose it doesn't much matter. End the story with a barrel full of dead rats. "Did I gross you out? Good."
It's not even a partial replacement for Access - they do two very different things for two very different target markets. Developing a PHP application and dragging some controls onto a window in Access aren't any where close to being comparable. It takes 0 programming knowledge to create useful Access applications. None. Just a vauge understanding of what columns are available and possibly what kind of data go in each, combined with having seen a Windows program before ("oh, you type in a text box, and select from a list using a drop-down or radio buttons"). To get simlar functionality with a web app (say, PHP), you need to know PHP, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, and probably have some experience with cross-browser development as well as CSS. Your typical computer user can not sit down and learn all of that stuff in an afternoon, wheras someone can start creating Access programs within a day or so.
Access is the devil for other reasons, but it's *way* more than something that shows tables in an editable form. That's why it's so darned hard to get rid of. If it was as simple as using PHPMy admin or similar, there's be lots of replacements...:)
You have an odd sense of what makes things "cute" and "excellent pets". Primary carrier of the plaugue = not cute / not excellent pet, for example.:) (yeah, I know it waas the fleas. So what?)
Khakis aren't comfortable, and the pockets are worthless. Besides, geek bodies and Khakis just don't mix - they look stupid, roughly being the parallel to Capri pants on women. Both just shouldn't be done in public. Ever.
The point is that Access doesn't just make it easy to put together queries and stuff - it can actually build nice little front-end applications for people who don't know that they're working with a database - or only know that much. Sure, it can be used by non-technical people to create applications for even less-technical people, but it's essentially a RAD tool for database apps. Maybe calling it VB with easy database tools would be more appropriate. It's more like you could write phpMyAdmin in Access, and Access is closer to being PHP than to a PHP app.
I've spent several years writing database frontends in mostly PHP, with a good chunk of perl and some Cold Fusion 'n Java thrown in. When it comes time to get the seceretary set up with something easy that she can use to search through and edit the asset database, though, setting up an ODBC conenction and piping her through Access is one quick and easy way to get to the goal with a native look and feel. People just don't take web apps as seriously as something that looks like a "real windows program", and lots of places already have Access bundled with Office anyway. Given the time, I'd always choose something else. Who here always has time to do everything exactly the way they'd want to, though?:)
I suppose it's worth noting that Intel has two 64-bit lines, Itanium and Xeon. IPF and EM64t are not exactly 100% compatible, so I wonder which "64-bit" platform MS is pushing towards...
Make sure that DMA is enabled - most rescue-type CDs don't enable dma and that slows things down *a lot*. hdparm -d 1/dev/hda will probably help, you can do hdparm -i (or -I) and find out what the drive supports, and then specify a particular mode with -X ("hdparm -X udma33", for example).
Access is more than just a front-end to table viewing, it also generates reports + VB-like user interfaces and generally *does stuff* with the data. I love PHPMyAdmin and use it almost daily for MySQL admin tasks, but it is most certainly *not* a replacement for Access.
I mean, just a short while ago, MS didn't even have an OS that worked properly (ie, utilized more than 32-bit compatibility) on 64-bit processors. I find it difficult to believe that they're so confident in their code's stability and have adequately tested it... Oh, yeah, this is MS, company who forces upgrades for extra fluff features rather than real usability, functionality, or stability. Nevermind.
I don't see them sleeping at the firehouse at all - I see them sleeping at home, often miles away from one another. I collaborate with people that I don't share an office with, but I suppose others may not...
I'm sitting in my office right now eating lunch at my job at a company listed in the top 60 of the Fortune 100. I can guarantee you that we're not a tiny company, that you've heard of them, and that I don't speak for them in any of my other posts.:)
It's a Microsoft OS, and you're saying that they made a mistake when mentioning that one of their goals is increased dependence? Hell yes that's their goal. Vendor lock-in, forced upgrade cycles, dependence - all the same thing, and all the goal of any winning software company.:)
Yup - that's the one that triggered the grumpy disclaimer.:)
You seem to be making the distinction between "provinding technical support" and "supporting the system by releasing updates and security patches sometimes". The post I replied to did not. Partially due to my bad mood, I took personal offense at the implication that I have delusions of granduer based on my positon as a sysadmin, as well as at the implication that people in said positon are not actually as important as they think they are. It's also partially because the last place I worked for hit some financial troubles, and I was one who was asked to leave, under the assumption that the small business woudl get by fine without any IT people and that non-technical employees would all be able to administer their own workstations just fine. Coincidentally, the mail and imap server for this company - whose business was creating web sites - experienced a hardware failure within a few weeks (no, it wasn't sabotage). They were offline for nearly a full week. RHEL's support wouldn't have done them any good, since it turned out to apparently be something at the system board level. I wonder if they calculated how much it cost them to be offline while the people with little to no experience tried to debug the problem and bring the services back up on a different machine v/s how much it would've cost them to have kept me - someone who's succesfully fixed similar problems within a mater of hours and who wouldn't have gone home until it *was* fixed. Eh, their loss - I was told I had 1 month on Friday, and had an interview on Monday which resulted in a job offer by Wed. Whoops.:)
Back to the topic at hand, sort of, I do appreciate RedHat's contribution to the community, as well as their part in making Linux a more commonly known solution. I've long held a feeling that they do it more because it's good business than because they really think it's the "right thing to do". Sort of a "we should throw those geeks a bone so they don't try too hard to replace us with something else" kind of thing. It just feels like they do something crappy for every thing they do nice. Like the LSB thing - they have this setup that's supposed to help standardize, but it's poorly documented and the test utility does dumb things tha are redhat specific. I guess it's similar to the way I feel about car salesmen. Sure, they appear friendly and smile to my face, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that they'd stab me in the back if it'd get them another couple of dollars.
Realistically, that's just something I personally dislike about RedHat. It's perfectly fine for a company to be more interested in money than in ideals. But you know, I like Linux et. al. for the ideals more than the cost savings. I'd really like my vendor to really feel the same way, or at least be up front about it if they aren't. SuSE - they've always seemd quite clear about how they're about making money, but they give the stuff away after a month or so because it's the right thing to do. Ubuntu has a real strong community feel where the money is made to look like a secondary concern. Redhat, though, they just rub me the wrong way, but they don't do it enough for me to 100% condem them.
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Lincoln, though I'm working in Champaign. But the nearly 1.5 hour one-way commute is my choice, not something I *have* to do - there are jobs closer to home. Lincoln's nice - it's about 1/2 hour from Bloomington, Springfield, and Decatur (far enough away to not get the ADM/Staley smell); 45 minutes from Peoria; and about an hour or so from Champaign/Urbana, depending on where you wanna go
Get a piece of 12-16 gauge wire. Crimp a ring terminal onto each end. One end goes to a screw somewhere on the stereo's case, one end goes to a screw somewhere on your PC's case (to which your motherboard and therefore sound card is, or should be, grounded). Now ground is ground on both devices, and your risk of dying due to a problem in the PC power supply is decreased (presuming the stereo uses a 3-prong plug or you fix the plug on the PC).
I live in a town with a population of about 15K. I'm within an hour's drive of more museums than I care to count, there are major musical acts of most genres nearby every couple of weeks, art shows come through often enough, and if you haven't met someone "interesting" today you must not have left the house. There's riverboat gambling 45 minutes away if that's the big thing, etc.
:)
Basically, there are cities nearby, and Chicago, Indianapolis, or St. Louis are less than a 2 hour drive if for some reason I'm compelled to visit some overcrowded craphole full of people who think they're somehow better than me just because their groceries cost more and they spend more time coughing in traffic.
You have a strange definition of "better" if you think that using flash and graphics where text makes sense is "better". Hooray for wasting bandwidth in roder to provide a "media-rich" experience, when utilizing actual valid HTML would work just as well *and* provide a means of formatting for a variety of different output devices.
You don't have to design to the "lowest common denominator" if you use proper HTML 4.1 with CSS, but you do have to think about making a page that degrades gracefully. It's not really even hard - but thanks to IE and Netscape adding their own screwy tags + cheerfully accepting ill-formed HTML, web developers are among the laziest, worst informed developers around. Yeah, things sure are better now.
It's all about having the right keywords in the resume. And people say that meta tags aren't useful anymore... :)
I'm a professional perl programmer, and that's generally how I generate code as well. :)
I'm sorry you did poorly in school. I generally did OK, and found things to entertain myself, but it really works better if there's some direction given by someone who's already picked up some knowledge. Yeah, the bright kids can find ways to entertain themselves, but the schools don't just "not provide" a means of extra learning, they actively stifle it. Say I'm sitting in a "science" course while the instructor repeats the same friggin' lecture as was given yesterday, because a couple of people weren't paying attention (and aren't paying attention again today). Now lets say I coudl be doing somethign constructive, like reading another book. Nope, then *I* get scolded for not paying attention in class. Just for example. Or, imagine PE. I played basketball and kept in decent shape outside of school, but no, the state somehow requires that I attend PE, rather than using that hour to learn something. Or, the teachers say so, later I found out that it's not a state requirement.
;)). Whoopie, I'm a gosh damned genius. I'm not paying the $50 (45, whatever) Mensa charges to get the "I'm better than you" card with membership in the pompous ass club, and I'm not throwing it around - this is the first and last time I expect that empty number to appear on /. - but I'm mentioning it here because it's relevant. I'm in the upper less-than-one percent as far as that "testing" claims, and the public school system *actively* wasted my time. I badly wanted to learn and do more all through school, but merely doing "good enough" was all that school would allow me to do. Now I volunteer when I can to help other kids who might be in a similar situation. I do that because I know that there were other pretty smart kids in school with me whose interst in learning had totally atrophied by the time high school was through. One guy's done time in prison for stupid shit (I'm sure that's what the arresting officer wanted to cite him for), one of the girls lives in a trailer while working a checkout somewhere. This is largely because their desire to learn was stifled by an unsympathetic school system, and they didn't have anywhere to turn. I'm hoping I can prevent that by providing a modicum of guidance. That guidance is what really needs to be provided, IMHO, since the "average" people will find a way to get by without special attention. This I also know, because average people have been making it without personal attention for centuries.
Not that any of this really happens to me. I've been out of high school for a long time now. But somehow I'm guessing that things haven't changed *that* much in rural IL. Yeah, I did alright, because my parents weer somewhat encouraging. I hate mentioning my IQ, becuase I put little stock in that alone, but it seems like tests generally put it in the upper 160s to the lower 170s - I think I tested at 177 in gradeschool (I guess I'm getting dumber as time goes on
Man, I don't need those damned lunatic vandals anywhere near me. Friggin' PETA. There's one group that causes me to actually support the anti-terrorism laws... :)
I presume you're a vegiterian, too, 'cause those "raised for food" animals are usually trapped and killed, and are pretty helpless before they're put down, too. Yeah, even fish. People have been putting out rat traps, mouse traps, raising cats, and doing various other less humane things to rats for centuries. Rats don't seem to be nearing extinction either...
:)
Not that I should really care one way or another what you think, but I suppose I'll tell you that, as I've grown, I've developed a bit more respect for animal life in general, and wouldn't intentionally hurt a rat should I encounter one. For example, the last time we had a mouse in our home, I got it away from the house cats (which were playing with it at the time, and hadn't apparently hurt it), put it in a container, and drove out to the nearby national park where the mouse was released. Sure, some other animal probably ate it within minutes of my leaving it in the tall grass, but I suppose that's "nature" and better than me harming it. I still don't think rats are generaly cute, though the mouse was kinda cute.
However, "current nature lover" cloudmaster wouldn't have been as appropriate as "past farmer" cloudmaster in response to the person who felt compelled to try to provoke a reaction, now would it?
There were several of those in the late 90's - ranging from free ISPs to free computers. They're all gone now. I think that pretty well answers the original question with a "no, I would not, nor would enough other people".
No, I'm not grossed out, nor did I particularly villify rodents - visciously or not. However, most any wild animal whose apparent primary purpose in life is to infiltrate and destroy my darned grain reserves, well, I don't particularly find them to be cute. And "cutest"? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder, but I think most anyone can agree that chickens aren't cute either. Were I looking for a pet, I'd choose a rat over a chicken any day - chickens are about the most filthy animals around... You're welcome to keep them as pets if you're all excited about the shock value of the animals in the house. Get some snakes, too - people get scared of them as well.
My immune system gets exercised adequately without rubbing random animals on my face. Though, I don't see why a domestic rat would be any worse than those screwy pet owners who let their dogs or cats lick their faces (that toungue was on an ass just moments ago, darn it). But hey, I speed almost every day, and since I haven't been in a wreck yet I can say that speeding is prefectly good idea for anyone!
BTW, if you really want a "viscious" rat story with some shock value, just picture me in a bad mood because rats have been eating the (fairly expensive) hog food and tearing up the paper feed bags, generally making a mess. Now picture me coming in to the feed shed and finding a bunch of those nasty little angry, hissing bastards somehow trapped in the bottom of a large barrel. Throw in a big hammer, or maybe it was an old ball bat. I forget, though I suppose it doesn't much matter. End the story with a barrel full of dead rats. "Did I gross you out? Good."
It's not even a partial replacement for Access - they do two very different things for two very different target markets. Developing a PHP application and dragging some controls onto a window in Access aren't any where close to being comparable. It takes 0 programming knowledge to create useful Access applications. None. Just a vauge understanding of what columns are available and possibly what kind of data go in each, combined with having seen a Windows program before ("oh, you type in a text box, and select from a list using a drop-down or radio buttons"). To get simlar functionality with a web app (say, PHP), you need to know PHP, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, and probably have some experience with cross-browser development as well as CSS. Your typical computer user can not sit down and learn all of that stuff in an afternoon, wheras someone can start creating Access programs within a day or so.
:)
Access is the devil for other reasons, but it's *way* more than something that shows tables in an editable form. That's why it's so darned hard to get rid of. If it was as simple as using PHPMy admin or similar, there's be lots of replacements...
You have an odd sense of what makes things "cute" and "excellent pets". Primary carrier of the plaugue = not cute / not excellent pet, for example. :) (yeah, I know it waas the fleas. So what?)
Pork tenderloin 1) isn't a steak and 2) looks somewhat phallic.
Khakis aren't comfortable, and the pockets are worthless. Besides, geek bodies and Khakis just don't mix - they look stupid, roughly being the parallel to Capri pants on women. Both just shouldn't be done in public. Ever.
I don't respect someone in Khakis.
The point is that Access doesn't just make it easy to put together queries and stuff - it can actually build nice little front-end applications for people who don't know that they're working with a database - or only know that much. Sure, it can be used by non-technical people to create applications for even less-technical people, but it's essentially a RAD tool for database apps. Maybe calling it VB with easy database tools would be more appropriate. It's more like you could write phpMyAdmin in Access, and Access is closer to being PHP than to a PHP app.
:)
I've spent several years writing database frontends in mostly PHP, with a good chunk of perl and some Cold Fusion 'n Java thrown in. When it comes time to get the seceretary set up with something easy that she can use to search through and edit the asset database, though, setting up an ODBC conenction and piping her through Access is one quick and easy way to get to the goal with a native look and feel. People just don't take web apps as seriously as something that looks like a "real windows program", and lots of places already have Access bundled with Office anyway. Given the time, I'd always choose something else. Who here always has time to do everything exactly the way they'd want to, though?
I suppose it's worth noting that Intel has two 64-bit lines, Itanium and Xeon. IPF and EM64t are not exactly 100% compatible, so I wonder which "64-bit" platform MS is pushing towards...
:)
And yeah, troll is a bit excessive.
Make sure that DMA is enabled - most rescue-type CDs don't enable dma and that slows things down *a lot*. hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda will probably help, you can do hdparm -i (or -I) and find out what the drive supports, and then specify a particular mode with -X ("hdparm -X udma33", for example).
Access is more than just a front-end to table viewing, it also generates reports + VB-like user interfaces and generally *does stuff* with the data. I love PHPMyAdmin and use it almost daily for MySQL admin tasks, but it is most certainly *not* a replacement for Access.
I mean, just a short while ago, MS didn't even have an OS that worked properly (ie, utilized more than 32-bit compatibility) on 64-bit processors. I find it difficult to believe that they're so confident in their code's stability and have adequately tested it... Oh, yeah, this is MS, company who forces upgrades for extra fluff features rather than real usability, functionality, or stability. Nevermind.
I don't see them sleeping at the firehouse at all - I see them sleeping at home, often miles away from one another. I collaborate with people that I don't share an office with, but I suppose others may not...
I'm sitting in my office right now eating lunch at my job at a company listed in the top 60 of the Fortune 100. I can guarantee you that we're not a tiny company, that you've heard of them, and that I don't speak for them in any of my other posts. :)
It's a Microsoft OS, and you're saying that they made a mistake when mentioning that one of their goals is increased dependence? Hell yes that's their goal. Vendor lock-in, forced upgrade cycles, dependence - all the same thing, and all the goal of any winning software company. :)
Or we may look back on them with the contempt we feel for Bell Telephone. Either way, I guess. :)
Yup - that's the one that triggered the grumpy disclaimer. :)
:)
You seem to be making the distinction between "provinding technical support" and "supporting the system by releasing updates and security patches sometimes". The post I replied to did not. Partially due to my bad mood, I took personal offense at the implication that I have delusions of granduer based on my positon as a sysadmin, as well as at the implication that people in said positon are not actually as important as they think they are. It's also partially because the last place I worked for hit some financial troubles, and I was one who was asked to leave, under the assumption that the small business woudl get by fine without any IT people and that non-technical employees would all be able to administer their own workstations just fine. Coincidentally, the mail and imap server for this company - whose business was creating web sites - experienced a hardware failure within a few weeks (no, it wasn't sabotage). They were offline for nearly a full week. RHEL's support wouldn't have done them any good, since it turned out to apparently be something at the system board level. I wonder if they calculated how much it cost them to be offline while the people with little to no experience tried to debug the problem and bring the services back up on a different machine v/s how much it would've cost them to have kept me - someone who's succesfully fixed similar problems within a mater of hours and who wouldn't have gone home until it *was* fixed. Eh, their loss - I was told I had 1 month on Friday, and had an interview on Monday which resulted in a job offer by Wed. Whoops.
Back to the topic at hand, sort of, I do appreciate RedHat's contribution to the community, as well as their part in making Linux a more commonly known solution. I've long held a feeling that they do it more because it's good business than because they really think it's the "right thing to do". Sort of a "we should throw those geeks a bone so they don't try too hard to replace us with something else" kind of thing. It just feels like they do something crappy for every thing they do nice. Like the LSB thing - they have this setup that's supposed to help standardize, but it's poorly documented and the test utility does dumb things tha are redhat specific. I guess it's similar to the way I feel about car salesmen. Sure, they appear friendly and smile to my face, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that they'd stab me in the back if it'd get them another couple of dollars.
Realistically, that's just something I personally dislike about RedHat. It's perfectly fine for a company to be more interested in money than in ideals. But you know, I like Linux et. al. for the ideals more than the cost savings. I'd really like my vendor to really feel the same way, or at least be up front about it if they aren't. SuSE - they've always seemd quite clear about how they're about making money, but they give the stuff away after a month or so because it's the right thing to do. Ubuntu has a real strong community feel where the money is made to look like a secondary concern. Redhat, though, they just rub me the wrong way, but they don't do it enough for me to 100% condem them.