This is pretty much the reason I left my last job. I didn't want to do anything so extreme as come in for 12 hours one day and 4 the next, but I did want to work a more flexible schedule. It was much easier to get everything done after 5pm when most people had gone home, or on the weekend when there wasn't an administrator or faculty member in sight.
Then, they had to start cutting the budget. They didn't ever come out and tell me "we need you to find a different job, we can't afford to pay you anymore". They just started doing little things that annoy me, and I took a stand on principle and left (which played into their hands, but whatever, it's what I had to do to sleep at night).
My schedule was supposed to be 8a-5p. I regularly worked till 5:30 or so, and two out of three weekends during the school year (I was a sysadmin for a department at a university, it's not hard to figure out which one if you read my post history), I was in for an hour or three doing odds and ends. I also worked from home at night and answered emails from home regularly. So, I'd usually stroll into work at about 9am. I don't function well in the morning; add this to the fact that none of the faculty or administration did either (if they worked at all...), and the 8am - 9am hour is really just a waste.
Then, all of a sudden, all that they cared about was when I showed up. I say "they", but it's really ambiguous who cared, since my boss worked 5 hours a week 9 months a year (for $120,000/yr). And yet, they'd make me call in downstairs to the secretaries to report when I showed up every morning. If I wasn't there by 8am, they got on my case. Never cared how much else I worked.
I told the Department head that I'm an exempt employee, and if you're going to make me punch a timeclock (which is what calling down to verify your arrival time is), then I wanted to be paid for all the hours I worked, including overtime for anything 40+. He said "that's not how it works, you're exempt, you don't get overtime". I said "you can't have it both ways; you can't have me punch a timeclock, AND not pay me overtime". He said that they could, I told him that he could find a new sysadmin and quit.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, something about timeclocks and overtime. It's fine to be Exempt or Non-Exempt, but for the love of god, don't let someone rape you both directions. Make sure you're getting something out of either scenario in exchange for what you're giving, and make sure the employer is giving something in exchange for what they're giving.
I came here to say this - most of your shows these days are letterboxed anyway, i.e. mythbusters and deadliest catch are two that come to mind. Also, law and order, and Burn Notice... just naming a few that I've noticed. Anyway, even for stuff that's not, most of the time there's not much going on in the top and bottom portions that get cut out.
Yep, I am getting an HD sat receiver, but haven't yet made a decision, so I'm still getting 4:3 TV. It is a bit annoying to take a signal in 4:3, with black bars at the top and bottom, and stretch it to 16:9 natively on the TV, and THEN zoom it so that the black bars go away - I'm sure I'm losing some resolution - but it's the right aspect ratio. Can't wait to get my 16:9 broadcasts, though.
Oh, also, plasmas don't have black bars on the left and right. They have grey bars. Wtf, i know rite?
The big email providers all do this; gmail, yahoo, and commodity email providers like RIM. Forwarding spam to them will get your server's ip reputation trashed.
Where I work, we finally had to make the choice that anytime a user has a preference set to "forward mail to an external account", we explicitly over-ride their spam settings, and don't forward spam, period. There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere. This means that people that want their spam marked as [SPAM] (instead of sent to their spam folder or deleted immediately) will not get these emails on their Blackberry (they still get them in their local mail, marked however their preferences say), but them's the breaks, in the end you can't compromise your entire operation's integrity because someone wants to not only delete the copy of the p3n1s mail they saved in their webmail, but also delete it on their Blackberry slash gmail.
Hate to burst your bubble, but after standard oil broke up, it split into a bunch of "Standard Oil of the state of ______".
S.O. New Jersey became Exxon, New York became Mobil, and they became ExxonMobil, the world's most profitable corporation. The rest of the Standard Oils: Standard Oil of California bought Kenucky and Ohio and became Chevron, then they bought Gulf Oil and Texaco, became ChevronTexaco, then dropped the Texaco to be "Chevron". Standard Oil of Indiana eventually became Amoco, merged with the Anglo-American Oil Company and became BP, who also bought Standard Oil of Ohio.
I don't think any of them are hurt at all.
Same thing with AT&T - after the breakup, they became Bell $Region, and over time they changed names (bell atlantic = verizon, pac bell becomes qwest, etc). With AT&T buying qwest a few years back, almost all the original parts of Ma Bell are under the same roof again.
at £25 (pounds, if the ascii doesn't work), you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 PER DAY JUST TO DRIVE into Ken Livingston's traffic jams, BEFORE $6/gal gas and BEFORE wear and tear on your car.
Seriously; several thousand years ago (15,000ish, I think), the Sahara was a tropical jungle, with rivers, lakes, and gazillions of plants.
What happens is the earth warms up to the point that there's so much moisture in the air off of the Atlantic and Mediterranean that it starts raining in the desert. Essentially, global warming eventually *cools* the sahara, which blooms, and absorbs the carbon dioxide. As the earth cools off, it becomes a desert (very rapidly). The last time this happened, it went from lush jungle to desert within 200 years, possibly within a human lifetime. Must have been quite a shock.
~Wx
Re:Can Oscar's be given posthumously?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You have to see it.
There is no backstory; the Joker is not some business man that tragic things happened to. There isn't a plan, there isn't a motivation, there's no rhyme or reason.
He is Just. Fucking. Crazy.
Given any situation imaginable, his only concern is "what will cause the most entropy". That's it, there's nothing else.
And the performance is otherworldly. I never once looked at the joker and thought "That's Heath Ledger". He disappears into the role.
If you want to get an idea, just peep this quote (from wikipedia):
The Herald Sun and The Mercury quote Michael Caine, who portrays Alfred Pennyworth, as saying that Ledger topped Jack Nicholson's performance as the Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. "He's gone in a completely different direction to Jack. Jack was like a clown figure, benign but wicked, maybe a killer old uncle. He could be funny and make you laugh...Heath is like a really scary psychopath. I did one scene with him and he was ready to go and had to come up in a lift and raid our place...I didn't see him for rehearsal and when he came out of the lift he was so incredible I forgot my lines. He frightened the life out of me.... I'd never met him before. He's a lovely guy and his Joker is going to be a heck of a revelation in this picture."
He made MICHAEL CAINE, one of the most acclaimed and professional actors in the WORLD, forget his lines ON SET, he was so freaky.
70 years ago, there was this thought process in America that basically said "you can have X amount of income, but after that, you're really just being a dick, and other people are starving". So, money above a certain threshold (I've heard 8 mil a year in 2007 adjusted dollars) was taxed at something like 90%. Because, come on, you don't need things that you can buy with a 20 mil a year income that you can't buy with an 8 mil a year income.
We've totally lost that sense of social responsibility. The feeling that we're all in this together; the feeling that the wealth of a society is measured by it's poorest citizens, not by its richest. We used to want to care for the downtrodden, the elderly. Now? Now, there's this feeling that poor people are poor because they want to be poor, and if they'd just work harder, in 30 years, they could own an NFL franchise and a fleet of yachts.
Someone somewhere along the line convinced us that hard work makes you rich, in order to a.) get more work out of the lower class people to exploit, and b.) hide from them the myth that there is upward mobility in America (there isn't). We've all but done away with unions, the minimum wage isn't enough to pay for a cardboard box to live in, workers have no rights, and I'm wondering what has happened to us.
And even then, there are people that are trying to take away the safety net that society has put in place for those that can't save money (social security). They are trying to convince people that society as a whole would be better off if we all just had our own little piece of net, while the financial managers and the rich continue to get rich off of the money management.
I dunno what's happened in America, man. We used to be a country of generous, caring people. Now, we step on whoever we have to in what we think is our climb to the top, and it just turns out that we're on a treadmill, going nowhere.
Yeah, I was going to say - RHEL hasn't flown under the radar. It's expensive. So, not everyone wants it - consumer home markets will use Fedora, and smaller businesses use CentOS. But, where I work, we have thousands of servers running RHEL.
Yeah, speaking as a sysadmin, I think I'm pretty decent at my job. I am pretty damn good in bash scripting, and can muddle my way through basic PHP, perl, and I'm trying to learn python. But if you passed me straight up ANSI C, and were like "does this have any vulnerabilities?", I'd tell you to either trust the upstream or hire a developer to code review. That's not my area.
Yeah, when I worked at Virginia Tech, we used a variety of naming schemes in the CS Department - our remote login cluster was all Final Fantasy 3 characters (that was me), the lab machines were fruits and nuts (for linux machines), or Unreal Tournament map names (for windows machines). Heh. facingworlds.cslab. Our main servers were named after weather patterns (storm, typhoon, monsoon, etc).
For instance, a server which serves up a web service for HR might be called hr-web-1, and if a second one is needed, it gets hr-web-2.
IMO, and from what I've experienced working where I do (we have 700 servers in 3 datacenters), you could break that up even more. Since everything we do is based on redundancy (N+1 with a focus towards N+2), every machine comes in a cluster, so we do: (machine name).(cluster).(datacenter).domain.com
I.e.hr-web1.hr-web.nyc.domain.com
That way, if you cluster hr-web1 - hr-web3, you can just call the cluster hr-web, and everything will be a 4th (5th?) level domain above that.
I have a relatively cheap monitor at work; I'm looking for something that keeps the black background (I know, I know, but I'm so used to it), but that makes the comments in bash scripts (most of what I do) easier to read. That really deep blue bleeds onto the black, and hurts my eyes - I seriously have to concentrate to focus on the comments, and it's sometimes difficult to determine at first whether or not my #!/bin/bash or #!/usr/bin/env python don't have a typo.
Try going to medical school (or more to the point, putting some through medical school in my case).
My wife is a first year vet student, and her anatomy text book was $200+. That's one book, and she took 19 hours of classes. And there are NO used textbooks - because everyone keeps them and uses them for a reference. And I'd imagine part of the price is the high standard that's required for peer review, versus a first year linear algebra workbook.
I can confirm this - just go do something you like and get good at it.
I have $liberal_arts_degree, but after working for $webhosting_company and $random_consulting_firm, I moved to doing Linux sysadmin work for $major_university_with_30000_students, and after a couple of years I moved to $major_hosting_provider_who_advertises_on_slashdot, and now I really love my job and I get paid $plenty.
Do something that you like, practice until you do it well, and find a good company to work for. The execution may be difficult, but the concept is universal.
Not "finished" in terms of "completed", you dolt. "Finished" in terms of "polished", like the finish on a piece of furniture.
1.0 doesn't mean there are never going to be any improvements. It means that it's production ready and does everything that the spec says it needs to do, right now.
If what you are saying was the case, nothing would ever reach version 2.0, or 1.0.1 for that matter. One Point Oh is just a way of saying "this product does everything we wanted it to do, to our satisfaction". The point being that with 18,000 people, they should be able to get a product to do everything that they want it to do; if not, then their managers need to be sacked for presenting the coders and testers with a moving target.
Just to be clear, I think it's stupid that google has so many things in beta still. I mean, seriously, froogle and gmail are still beta? It's been what, 5 years?
Slashdot Mirror
View page source (on his xkcd-style ad) for a hidden message to geeks.
Right.
It's the timeclock that makes the difference.
This is pretty much the reason I left my last job. I didn't want to do anything so extreme as come in for 12 hours one day and 4 the next, but I did want to work a more flexible schedule. It was much easier to get everything done after 5pm when most people had gone home, or on the weekend when there wasn't an administrator or faculty member in sight.
Then, they had to start cutting the budget. They didn't ever come out and tell me "we need you to find a different job, we can't afford to pay you anymore". They just started doing little things that annoy me, and I took a stand on principle and left (which played into their hands, but whatever, it's what I had to do to sleep at night).
My schedule was supposed to be 8a-5p. I regularly worked till 5:30 or so, and two out of three weekends during the school year (I was a sysadmin for a department at a university, it's not hard to figure out which one if you read my post history), I was in for an hour or three doing odds and ends. I also worked from home at night and answered emails from home regularly. So, I'd usually stroll into work at about 9am. I don't function well in the morning; add this to the fact that none of the faculty or administration did either (if they worked at all...), and the 8am - 9am hour is really just a waste.
Then, all of a sudden, all that they cared about was when I showed up. I say "they", but it's really ambiguous who cared, since my boss worked 5 hours a week 9 months a year (for $120,000/yr). And yet, they'd make me call in downstairs to the secretaries to report when I showed up every morning. If I wasn't there by 8am, they got on my case. Never cared how much else I worked.
I told the Department head that I'm an exempt employee, and if you're going to make me punch a timeclock (which is what calling down to verify your arrival time is), then I wanted to be paid for all the hours I worked, including overtime for anything 40+. He said "that's not how it works, you're exempt, you don't get overtime". I said "you can't have it both ways; you can't have me punch a timeclock, AND not pay me overtime". He said that they could, I told him that he could find a new sysadmin and quit.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, something about timeclocks and overtime. It's fine to be Exempt or Non-Exempt, but for the love of god, don't let someone rape you both directions. Make sure you're getting something out of either scenario in exchange for what you're giving, and make sure the employer is giving something in exchange for what they're giving.
~Wx
I came here to say this - most of your shows these days are letterboxed anyway, i.e. mythbusters and deadliest catch are two that come to mind. Also, law and order, and Burn Notice... just naming a few that I've noticed. Anyway, even for stuff that's not, most of the time there's not much going on in the top and bottom portions that get cut out.
Yep, I am getting an HD sat receiver, but haven't yet made a decision, so I'm still getting 4:3 TV. It is a bit annoying to take a signal in 4:3, with black bars at the top and bottom, and stretch it to 16:9 natively on the TV, and THEN zoom it so that the black bars go away - I'm sure I'm losing some resolution - but it's the right aspect ratio. Can't wait to get my 16:9 broadcasts, though.
Oh, also, plasmas don't have black bars on the left and right. They have grey bars. Wtf, i know rite?
~Wx
Not to mention that CAN-SPAM requires a one-click valid unsubscribe link anyway... How hard is that compared to clicking "this email is spam"?
The big email providers all do this; gmail, yahoo, and commodity email providers like RIM. Forwarding spam to them will get your server's ip reputation trashed.
Where I work, we finally had to make the choice that anytime a user has a preference set to "forward mail to an external account", we explicitly over-ride their spam settings, and don't forward spam, period. There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere. This means that people that want their spam marked as [SPAM] (instead of sent to their spam folder or deleted immediately) will not get these emails on their Blackberry (they still get them in their local mail, marked however their preferences say), but them's the breaks, in the end you can't compromise your entire operation's integrity because someone wants to not only delete the copy of the p3n1s mail they saved in their webmail, but also delete it on their Blackberry slash gmail.
X
http://www.mosso.com/cluster.jsp
Mosso is owned by Rackspace, and they've been using the term for a while.
(disclaimer: I work for Rackspace).
Hate to burst your bubble, but after standard oil broke up, it split into a bunch of "Standard Oil of the state of ______".
S.O. New Jersey became Exxon, New York became Mobil, and they became ExxonMobil, the world's most profitable corporation.
The rest of the Standard Oils:
Standard Oil of California bought Kenucky and Ohio and became Chevron, then they bought Gulf Oil and Texaco, became ChevronTexaco, then dropped the Texaco to be "Chevron".
Standard Oil of Indiana eventually became Amoco, merged with the Anglo-American Oil Company and became BP, who also bought Standard Oil of Ohio.
I don't think any of them are hurt at all.
Same thing with AT&T - after the breakup, they became Bell $Region, and over time they changed names (bell atlantic = verizon, pac bell becomes qwest, etc). With AT&T buying qwest a few years back, almost all the original parts of Ma Bell are under the same roof again.
~W
Wear and tear. Worse gas mileage. The attitude of freeloading, or better yet, stealing, and that it "doesn't matter."
In london, if you choose to drive, you're going to be dealing with congestion charges, too.
See the first 2 or 3 minutes of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q88CQdndNWw
at £25 (pounds, if the ascii doesn't work), you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 PER DAY JUST TO DRIVE into Ken Livingston's traffic jams, BEFORE $6/gal gas and BEFORE wear and tear on your car.
~Wx
I think this is what it's talking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Pump_Theory
But, I saw it on discovery or something once.
~W
+1 (dune reference)
Bravo, sir!
The Sahara.
Seriously; several thousand years ago (15,000ish, I think), the Sahara was a tropical jungle, with rivers, lakes, and gazillions of plants.
What happens is the earth warms up to the point that there's so much moisture in the air off of the Atlantic and Mediterranean that it starts raining in the desert. Essentially, global warming eventually *cools* the sahara, which blooms, and absorbs the carbon dioxide. As the earth cools off, it becomes a desert (very rapidly). The last time this happened, it went from lush jungle to desert within 200 years, possibly within a human lifetime. Must have been quite a shock.
~Wx
You have to see it.
There is no backstory; the Joker is not some business man that tragic things happened to. There isn't a plan, there isn't a motivation, there's no rhyme or reason.
He is Just. Fucking. Crazy.
Given any situation imaginable, his only concern is "what will cause the most entropy". That's it, there's nothing else.
And the performance is otherworldly. I never once looked at the joker and thought "That's Heath Ledger". He disappears into the role.
If you want to get an idea, just peep this quote (from wikipedia):
He made MICHAEL CAINE, one of the most acclaimed and professional actors in the WORLD, forget his lines ON SET, he was so freaky.
Just... go see the movie.
~Wx
Exactly right.
70 years ago, there was this thought process in America that basically said "you can have X amount of income, but after that, you're really just being a dick, and other people are starving". So, money above a certain threshold (I've heard 8 mil a year in 2007 adjusted dollars) was taxed at something like 90%. Because, come on, you don't need things that you can buy with a 20 mil a year income that you can't buy with an 8 mil a year income.
We've totally lost that sense of social responsibility. The feeling that we're all in this together; the feeling that the wealth of a society is measured by it's poorest citizens, not by its richest. We used to want to care for the downtrodden, the elderly. Now? Now, there's this feeling that poor people are poor because they want to be poor, and if they'd just work harder, in 30 years, they could own an NFL franchise and a fleet of yachts.
Someone somewhere along the line convinced us that hard work makes you rich, in order to a.) get more work out of the lower class people to exploit, and b.) hide from them the myth that there is upward mobility in America (there isn't). We've all but done away with unions, the minimum wage isn't enough to pay for a cardboard box to live in, workers have no rights, and I'm wondering what has happened to us.
And even then, there are people that are trying to take away the safety net that society has put in place for those that can't save money (social security). They are trying to convince people that society as a whole would be better off if we all just had our own little piece of net, while the financial managers and the rich continue to get rich off of the money management.
I dunno what's happened in America, man. We used to be a country of generous, caring people. Now, we step on whoever we have to in what we think is our climb to the top, and it just turns out that we're on a treadmill, going nowhere.
~Will
http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=habib+tata+sausage&btnG=Google+Search
And there's 1440 results for Habib, Tata, and Sausage.
Yeah, I was going to say - RHEL hasn't flown under the radar. It's expensive. So, not everyone wants it - consumer home markets will use Fedora, and smaller businesses use CentOS. But, where I work, we have thousands of servers running RHEL.
"flown under the radar" indeed.
~Wx
Yeah, speaking as a sysadmin, I think I'm pretty decent at my job. I am pretty damn good in bash scripting, and can muddle my way through basic PHP, perl, and I'm trying to learn python. But if you passed me straight up ANSI C, and were like "does this have any vulnerabilities?", I'd tell you to either trust the upstream or hire a developer to code review. That's not my area.
Sysadmin = deployment, installation, maintenance, emergencies, network architecture, infrastructure planning, etc. Developers = code.
~W
And I certainly hope you wouldn't drive a VW or other German car ... or are you pro-Nazi?
I don't buy Bayer asprin. It's much more difficult to avoid things with chemicals supplied by BASF in them, but I make an effort.
~X
Yeah, when I worked at Virginia Tech, we used a variety of naming schemes in the CS Department - our remote login cluster was all Final Fantasy 3 characters (that was me), the lab machines were fruits and nuts (for linux machines), or Unreal Tournament map names (for windows machines). Heh. facingworlds.cslab. Our main servers were named after weather patterns (storm, typhoon, monsoon, etc).
~X
For instance, a server which serves up a web service for HR might be called hr-web-1, and if a second one is needed, it gets hr-web-2.
IMO, and from what I've experienced working where I do (we have 700 servers in 3 datacenters), you could break that up even more. Since everything we do is based on redundancy (N+1 with a focus towards N+2), every machine comes in a cluster, so we do:
(machine name).(cluster).(datacenter).domain.com
I.e.hr-web1.hr-web.nyc.domain.com
That way, if you cluster hr-web1 - hr-web3, you can just call the cluster hr-web, and everything will be a 4th (5th?) level domain above that.
~X
I have a relatively cheap monitor at work; I'm looking for something that keeps the black background (I know, I know, but I'm so used to it), but that makes the comments in bash scripts (most of what I do) easier to read. That really deep blue bleeds onto the black, and hurts my eyes - I seriously have to concentrate to focus on the comments, and it's sometimes difficult to determine at first whether or not my #!/bin/bash or #!/usr/bin/env python don't have a typo.
Any recommendations?
~W
Bash scripts, but yeah.
~W
Try going to medical school (or more to the point, putting some through medical school in my case).
My wife is a first year vet student, and her anatomy text book was $200+. That's one book, and she took 19 hours of classes. And there are NO used textbooks - because everyone keeps them and uses them for a reference. And I'd imagine part of the price is the high standard that's required for peer review, versus a first year linear algebra workbook.
But still. $200.
I can confirm this - just go do something you like and get good at it.
I have $liberal_arts_degree, but after working for $webhosting_company and $random_consulting_firm, I moved to doing Linux sysadmin work for $major_university_with_30000_students, and after a couple of years I moved to $major_hosting_provider_who_advertises_on_slashdot, and now I really love my job and I get paid $plenty.
Do something that you like, practice until you do it well, and find a good company to work for. The execution may be difficult, but the concept is universal.
~W
Not "finished" in terms of "completed", you dolt. "Finished" in terms of "polished", like the finish on a piece of furniture.
1.0 doesn't mean there are never going to be any improvements. It means that it's production ready and does everything that the spec says it needs to do, right now.
If what you are saying was the case, nothing would ever reach version 2.0, or 1.0.1 for that matter. One Point Oh is just a way of saying "this product does everything we wanted it to do, to our satisfaction". The point being that with 18,000 people, they should be able to get a product to do everything that they want it to do; if not, then their managers need to be sacked for presenting the coders and testers with a moving target.
Just to be clear, I think it's stupid that google has so many things in beta still. I mean, seriously, froogle and gmail are still beta? It's been what, 5 years?