This proves you are a good helpdesk tech, and I tip my hat to you. I am a system admin who occasionally gets called in for such duties (read: when nobody else is around, which doesn't happen often), and I admit I am better as a second or third line tech (because that's where the more clued in people end up with wholly different problems).
Sure, I've could've handled that the way you decribed. But helldesking is not something I do often, or do gladly. But I do have great respect for my brothers in arms at the helldesk. The amount of patience they have is staggering.
Me: "Hello, helpdesk. user: "Yeah, hi. I can't seem to connect to the internet" Me: "Ah, right. What operating system are you running?" user: "Netscape" Me: "No, what version of Windows are you using?" user: "Uhhh... Hewlet Packard?" Me: "No, Right click on 'my computer', and select properties on the nice li'l menu" user: "Your computer? It's _MY_ computer!" Me: "No sir, I mean the little picture called 'my computer' on your desktop" user: "I don't see an icon called that on my desktop. I do see one called that on my screen." Me: "Right, just right click that, and choose Properties from the menu" user: "right-click?" Me: "Just a moment, Sir." *mutes phone* AAAAAAARRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
This went on for a while. Somewhere I just snapped and had him format his disk and call the manufacturer. As long as he _stayed_ ot of my hair.
I've had a directory full of 'typical' windows sounds in my homedir to make that seem more convincing. The tech was oblivious that I was running FreeBSD. Oh well, as long as I get what I want.
Uhhuh, me too. Having manned the helldesk front line in the past, I got some hefty battle scars. Thank $DEITY at one time, my employer decided I wasn't fit for doing 1st line support anymoe, and assigned me to the usual sysadmin duties while backing as a second line support person.
I'm sure that has _nothing_ to do with the fact that I started LARTing people who called in when they didn't "get it" after explaining the solution to their problems in so called "plain language" for the twentieth time. *ahem*
Note, I wasn't doing support for customers, but users in our network at our building.
I'm aware that you make it clear that "you're on a roll" but you should be more pissed off that people simply aren't writing with Unix, posix, portability in mind.
Sure my annoyances are with other programmers, but that's normal with someone that develops and butts his/her head against things like this. It's the mindset of other programmers that primarily develop on Linux and nothing else. They usually mean "unix-like" when they say Linux in 95% of all cases. Especially when you work with Linux and other platforms, Linux's quirky nature can be quite an annoyance. I never said it's the end of the world, but it's pretty annoying. If you work with people that are supposed to work on a portable codebase, and some developer pees in the well by contaminating the codebase with Linuxisms, causing the builds to break on other architectures, I'd bet you'd be pretty miffed^Wannoyed.
About the VM issue, well, it's just annoying. It's not bad or anything, it doesn't really break stuff, but it's pretty stupid seeing Linux swap out some mem when it's virtually idle, doing almost nothing besides it's usual kernel stuff + maybe X and some idle apps. When I add up the amount of mem all the apps use, I can see it should safely fit in my RAM. Why the ^&%(@$ has it swapped out? Annoying. Oh, I've seen this happen on recent stable kernels as of 2.4.20. I can clear it by turning off and turning on swap again, but after like 15 minutes, it does it again. ARGH! Why?
GNU libc is a godawful bloated mess. Why most Linux vendor ever stepped away from libc5 is beyond me. When I write code that's totally posixly correct which compiles perfectly and warningless on most other platforms, I have to use GNU libc specific defines to make glibc conform. (_POSIX_SOURCE, _GNU_SOURCE and _BSD_SOURCE spring to mind). Having code break on me in Linux while it works fine on almost everywhere else is pretty annoying.
The multiline strings suddenly being illegal in gcc 3.3.x are annoying too. Much code still uses multiline strings. Yes I know about ANSI concatenation, but I'm not talking about my code here, I'm talking about the heaps of OPC (other peoples's code) out there. Many wasted moments were filles cleaning up other people's mess. Oh well, not really a linux issue, but a gcc one, but what the heck.
The Linux VM swaps an awful lot when it really shouldn't. Well, it doesn't suck as much as it used to, It used to be a whole lot worse, but it still sucks. I have quite a bit of memory in my machine. I bought the extra mem just to avoid the godawful paging to disk. Linux somehow still sees fit to page to disk. Yes I could turn off swapping, but I just want to be safe instead of sorry. The OOM killer isn't very nice to your processes when you run out of mem or swap.
Linuxisms in code. Programmers that write very cool software (e.g. KDE) but fall into the GNU libc-extension and Linux-only features traps, and thereby making their code instantly unportable. Linuxisms are the bane of my (and others') existance when porting stuff porportedly written for linux to another OS. Instead of a straightforward recompile, I have to monkey around to beat all the linuxisms out of the code to get it to function well on other systems. Examples include/proc abuse, library/system calls only available to Linux, assuming the env is little-endian, alignment assumptions, filesystem feature assumptions, and wearing 32-bit blinds. Not really a linux system annoyance, but more a Linux-attitude-towards-other-systems and brainfarted programmer annoyance, but hey, we're on a roll here.
Bash-isms. Yes, I know the venerable bourne-again shell is the "default" bourne type shell in Linux. It's actually quite featurefull, and can do a heap more stuff than the normal POSIX bourne shell can do. Linux coders seem to thing *all* systems use bash as their bourne shell and write their supposedly bourne shell scripts with bash extensions. For someone using systems like the BSD's, IRIX and whetever doesn't ave bash as their default shell it's mightily irritating. Also the linux bash shebang cancer is an annoyance. If you absolutely must have bash, use env(1) to find bash, instead of hardcoding it into your shebang. Else, just stay away from those bourne again extensions. Use the korn shell if you must.
GNU's rabidness against man(1). GNU has deemed the info(1) documentation the "standard". info(1) sucks. It's counterintuitive, bloated, and redundant. It has absolutely no advantage over HTML, SGML or even LaTeX docs. And the man(1) system is nice and lean for a quick reference. For some reason, GNU wants to stamp out man(1). Luckily, many linux developers still embrace the man(1) system and still write manual pages (bless their little souls). But to find any useful docs about say gnu autoconf, you have to interface with that monstrosity that is info(1).
That's it for a while. I'll think up some more concrete really linux application related ones and post them to the list if I have time. FOr now, this is just a small list of some tings I find annoying about Linux and GNU.
Re:not the answer - you got that right!
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
Do you mean an exchange like this?
Relay->MTA: I've got a message for user@thisdomain from foo@origin with message-id 12345678 MTA: Lemme see that MTA->MX@origin: Did you send out a message from user foo with message-id 12345678? MX@origin: Yes, I did. MTA->Relay: It seems to check out. Thanks, I'll accept the mail, bye.
OS X/Darwin is _NOT_ FreeBSD. It is a Mach/BSD hybrid kernel with a FreeBSD userland. The architecture of FreeBSD and Darwin differ tremendously. The "lots of other stuff on top" is Aqua, which uses some Mach threading stuff.
Also, another thing where Darwin differs is package management. Darwin uses apt and.deb files. FreeBSD uses it's ports and it's pkg_* tools.
Saying that OS X is FreeBSD is like saying that a chopper is an airoplane. Sure, they both fly, but they aren't the same.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. No, really. Thanks. That was the _one_ missing piece of insight that I was missing.
Well, it seems like I have to re-learn lots of stuff about perl. Although I somewhat like the new syntax. Finally, perl has call by value and call by reference. Now, when will we get _real_ pointers? *ducks away to dodge the pelting of rocks in my direction*;)
From the article: "I use Solaris at Princeton, Irix when I visit Bell Labs, and FreeBSD on my Mac; I also have Cygwin on several PCs so that standard tools are readily available."
That's odd... How useable is the FreeBSD PPC port nowadays? Last I heard it only booted and nothing much more. Isn't he confusing FreeBSD and NetBSD? Or is he referring to the FreeBSD userland in OS X/Darwin?
I love FreeBSD though, I'd love to run it on my iMac instead of OS/X.
I would reply in great length in transcribed morse code, but the slashdot lameness filter wouldn't let me do it.
Seriously, I really tried. Maybe someone should hack slash (the engine) and make a morsedot or something. I even supplied a lot of lameness filter food and it still wouldn't let me post a normal morse sentence (not even the dit/dah variant). Woe the person that ever wants to try to post brainf*ck or befunge code on slashdot.
Yep, and to top it off, I hacked the xmms port to compile with ipv6 support. I just diffed the contents of the xmms tarball there with the original, made a patch, and submitted it to FreeBSD gnats here.
Oh, you just want the ipv6 patch I made from it? Go ahead, take it. Just go to your xmms 1.2.7 source root and do a patch -p0, oh well, y'all know the drill.
right, I sent out a send-pr with the modified xmms port... Anyone up for hosting the modded ipv6-enabled xmms port? My upstream can't handle slashdotting.
Drop me a line if you have a little bandwith to spare (although the port files are very small).
X has direct access to the graphics hardware. So blitting a bitmap on to a screen is really no more labour intensive than doing it from the kernel. You want to draw a line? Fine, you do it. You want to blit a bitmap on the screen, sure, you can either do it through DRI, or just through DGA. Either one is fine. Oh, and if you really need to you can use the raw X lib.
The only point as to were you are right is with ancient framebuffers. Hello, welcome to the 21st century. We have accelerated drivers for X that do basically the same as writing direct to the video memory. Your point is so moot it isn't funny.
A display server in the kernel has no place in the kernel. Yeah it's IPC, but windows uses IPC to draw windows, OS X uses IPC to draw windows, OS/2 uses IPC to draw windows, and the list goes on and on. Using domain sockets is as efficient as it gets.
The library calls cause no more overhead as calling into say, libc. And I never said a pipe. I said domain socket. You don't need to marshall your data to send it through. That's nonsense.
X gives us a nice graphics solution that gives us network transparancy for free, and also with the added benefit that it can all run from userspace.
I have to complain about that BillGates user. I think he found a bug in the economics code and is exploiting it like there's no tomorrow. Will that bug be fixed with your 'balance' fix?
Otherwise, love the game, although it can be repetitive and boring sometimes.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, I've could've handled that the way you decribed. But helldesking is not something I do often, or do gladly. But I do have great respect for my brothers in arms at the helldesk. The amount of patience they have is staggering.
This went on for a while. Somewhere I just snapped and had him format his disk and call the manufacturer. As long as he _stayed_ ot of my hair.
I've had a directory full of 'typical' windows sounds in my homedir to make that seem more convincing. The tech was oblivious that I was running FreeBSD. Oh well, as long as I get what I want.
I'm sure that has _nothing_ to do with the fact that I started LARTing people who called in when they didn't "get it" after explaining the solution to their problems in so called "plain language" for the twentieth time. *ahem*
Note, I wasn't doing support for customers, but users in our network at our building.
Sure my annoyances are with other programmers, but that's normal with someone that develops and butts his/her head against things like this. It's the mindset of other programmers that primarily develop on Linux and nothing else. They usually mean "unix-like" when they say Linux in 95% of all cases. Especially when you work with Linux and other platforms, Linux's quirky nature can be quite an annoyance. I never said it's the end of the world, but it's pretty annoying. If you work with people that are supposed to work on a portable codebase, and some developer pees in the well by contaminating the codebase with Linuxisms, causing the builds to break on other architectures, I'd bet you'd be pretty miffed^Wannoyed.
About the VM issue, well, it's just annoying. It's not bad or anything, it doesn't really break stuff, but it's pretty stupid seeing Linux swap out some mem when it's virtually idle, doing almost nothing besides it's usual kernel stuff + maybe X and some idle apps. When I add up the amount of mem all the apps use, I can see it should safely fit in my RAM. Why the ^&%(@$ has it swapped out? Annoying. Oh, I've seen this happen on recent stable kernels as of 2.4.20. I can clear it by turning off and turning on swap again, but after like 15 minutes, it does it again. ARGH! Why?
What was your username again? :)
The multiline strings suddenly being illegal in gcc 3.3.x are annoying too. Much code still uses multiline strings. Yes I know about ANSI concatenation, but I'm not talking about my code here, I'm talking about the heaps of OPC (other peoples's code) out there. Many wasted moments were filles cleaning up other people's mess. Oh well, not really a linux issue, but a gcc one, but what the heck.
The Linux VM swaps an awful lot when it really shouldn't. Well, it doesn't suck as much as it used to, It used to be a whole lot worse, but it still sucks. I have quite a bit of memory in my machine. I bought the extra mem just to avoid the godawful paging to disk. Linux somehow still sees fit to page to disk. Yes I could turn off swapping, but I just want to be safe instead of sorry. The OOM killer isn't very nice to your processes when you run out of mem or swap.
Linuxisms in code. Programmers that write very cool software (e.g. KDE) but fall into the GNU libc-extension and Linux-only features traps, and thereby making their code instantly unportable. Linuxisms are the bane of my (and others') existance when porting stuff porportedly written for linux to another OS. Instead of a straightforward recompile, I have to monkey around to beat all the linuxisms out of the code to get it to function well on other systems. Examples include /proc abuse, library/system calls only available to Linux, assuming the env is little-endian, alignment assumptions, filesystem feature assumptions, and wearing 32-bit blinds. Not really a linux system annoyance, but more a Linux-attitude-towards-other-systems and brainfarted programmer annoyance, but hey, we're on a roll here.
Bash-isms. Yes, I know the venerable bourne-again shell is the "default" bourne type shell in Linux. It's actually quite featurefull, and can do a heap more stuff than the normal POSIX bourne shell can do. Linux coders seem to thing *all* systems use bash as their bourne shell and write their supposedly bourne shell scripts with bash extensions. For someone using systems like the BSD's, IRIX and whetever doesn't ave bash as their default shell it's mightily irritating. Also the linux bash shebang cancer is an annoyance. If you absolutely must have bash, use env(1) to find bash, instead of hardcoding it into your shebang. Else, just stay away from those bourne again extensions. Use the korn shell if you must.
GNU's rabidness against man(1). GNU has deemed the info(1) documentation the "standard". info(1) sucks. It's counterintuitive, bloated, and redundant. It has absolutely no advantage over HTML, SGML or even LaTeX docs. And the man(1) system is nice and lean for a quick reference. For some reason, GNU wants to stamp out man(1). Luckily, many linux developers still embrace the man(1) system and still write manual pages (bless their little souls). But to find any useful docs about say gnu autoconf, you have to interface with that monstrosity that is info(1).
That's it for a while. I'll think up some more concrete really linux application related ones and post them to the list if I have time. FOr now, this is just a small list of some tings I find annoying about Linux and GNU.
OS X/Darwin is _NOT_ FreeBSD. It is a Mach/BSD hybrid kernel with a FreeBSD userland. The architecture of FreeBSD and Darwin differ tremendously. The "lots of other stuff on top" is Aqua, which uses some Mach threading stuff.
Also, another thing where Darwin differs is package management. Darwin uses apt and .deb files. FreeBSD uses it's ports and it's pkg_* tools.
Saying that OS X is FreeBSD is like saying that a chopper is an airoplane. Sure, they both fly, but they aren't the same.
Well, it seems like I have to re-learn lots of stuff about perl. Although I somewhat like the new syntax. Finally, perl has call by value and call by reference. Now, when will we get _real_ pointers? *ducks away to dodge the pelting of rocks in my direction* ;)
That's odd... How useable is the FreeBSD PPC port nowadays? Last I heard it only booted and nothing much more. Isn't he confusing FreeBSD and NetBSD? Or is he referring to the FreeBSD userland in OS X/Darwin?
I love FreeBSD though, I'd love to run it on my iMac instead of OS/X.
Great morse link here: CGI morse translator/converter.
Seriously, I really tried. Maybe someone should hack slash (the engine) and make a morsedot or something. I even supplied a lot of lameness filter food and it still wouldn't let me post a normal morse sentence (not even the dit/dah variant). Woe the person that ever wants to try to post brainf*ck or befunge code on slashdot.
Please, take my 10.0.0.0/8. Who's your daddy now? :)
I expect an BIG increase in post-it note sales...
Oh, you just want the ipv6 patch I made from it? Go ahead, take it. Just go to your xmms 1.2.7 source root and do a patch -p0, oh well, y'all know the drill.
Have fun listening :)
never mind... You can get the shar file at gnats. The id in gnats is ports/54685. For lazy people, a clickable link to gnats here.
Drop me a line if you have a little bandwith to spare (although the port files are very small).
Of course I will be send-pr'ing the thing, so watch your favourite FreeBSD ports mailinglist.
I'll post it to my website when I have tested it ;)
Imagine this scenario:
- I grab a mach3 pack
- The thingy takes my picture
- I put it back
- I grab another mach3 pack
- The thingy takes my picture
- I put it back
- I grab another mach3 pack
- The thingy takes my picture
- I put it back
- repeat several more times...
- walk out the store
- come back next day and do it again. Tell your friends, let them do that too
Isn't civil disobedience grand?X has direct access to the graphics hardware. So blitting a bitmap on to a screen is really no more labour intensive than doing it from the kernel. You want to draw a line? Fine, you do it. You want to blit a bitmap on the screen, sure, you can either do it through DRI, or just through DGA. Either one is fine. Oh, and if you really need to you can use the raw X lib.
The only point as to were you are right is with ancient framebuffers. Hello, welcome to the 21st century. We have accelerated drivers for X that do basically the same as writing direct to the video memory. Your point is so moot it isn't funny.
A display server in the kernel has no place in the kernel. Yeah it's IPC, but windows uses IPC to draw windows, OS X uses IPC to draw windows, OS/2 uses IPC to draw windows, and the list goes on and on. Using domain sockets is as efficient as it gets.
The library calls cause no more overhead as calling into say, libc. And I never said a pipe. I said domain socket. You don't need to marshall your data to send it through. That's nonsense.
X gives us a nice graphics solution that gives us network transparancy for free, and also with the added benefit that it can all run from userspace.
X is great. You are full of it.
Otherwise, love the game, although it can be repetitive and boring sometimes. :)
Yeah, take that BillGates character for example. I bet he used the money freeze cheat. Lamer.
+1 funny for the office space reference :)
I need more vodka...