[I might get modded offtopic for not bitching that it doesn't work for me.]
I have a friend who's struggling through her anatomy and physiology course (becoming a physical therapist). Something like this would be a great study aid if the labels had more resolution. For example, the vertebrae are all labeled "{cervical,thoracic,lumbar} vertebra" when it would be more useful to label them individually, e.g., "5th thoracic vertebra".
I'm autistic, and yes, I occasionally need full-body pressure to calm down, but I also need quiet and space to think. I sure as hell don't want to work cheek-by-jowl with a bunch of people I know only by what went into them at lunch and is coming out of them in the afternoon.
Then there are mandates: Our internal corporate web site FORCES you to use IE for much of its content, for two reasons. Internally developed web apps are only tested on IE, because the beancounters won't give IT the budget to test and certify on anything else, nor will they give tech support even the meager extra money to handle the calls where they say to Firefox users, "What part of 'Only supported on IE' didn't you understand?". External apps (benefits, etc.) may or may not be supported on browsers other than IE, but nothing's *not* supported on IE.
Do you want to *support* four customers who have each put a million dollars in your pocket, or do you want to support four million people who have each put a dollar in your pocket?
My wife and I are both amblyopic. For me 3D doesn't work, but for her it's worse: Not only does it not work, but after about ten minutes of it, she's usually got a splitting headache.
Me! 110 baud acoustic coupler, with the RS-232 port wired through a 20mA current-loop adapter to the ASR33 Teletype. We didn't have the fancy Teletype that had the phone and modem built in, but we did have paper tape!
ObTopic: I have a working original Apple ][, and an Apple ][+ with the UCSD Pascal system (let's see you run Java in 64K of RAM!). What I appear to have misplaced is the original manual set.
Don't forget that ham geekery also tends toward the low end (doing amazing things with nearly nothing) because of hams' association with emergency preparedness.
Even though my novice license expired in 1985 and I never got around to retaking the test to get it back, I always made sure I never forgot Morse code, one of the original forms of digital communication. Very useful in all sorts of emergencies.
Back in the day (early 1990's) building Unix System V, we had cscope for all of that except the actual refactoring task. We built its database as part of the regular build process, and it maintained our sanity when the environment was your favorite text editor and make and 35,000 source files.
OK, discuss the ethical ramifications of this one:
I am up for a promotion at work. My cheap-bastard boss's boss is holding it up because he thinks he'll get a gold star for saving the money, and probably won't let it go through until he has my resignation letter in hand. I don't want it to come to that.
I'm a sysadmin and I rarely wear anything but blue jeans to work. My April Fool's joke is that I told them I was taking this morning off to "take care of some personal business". I'm going to show up at lunchtime in a dress shirt and suit pants, letting them believe that my "personal business" was an interview. They'll see through it quickly, but I want that half-second of panic to stick.
Even for servers I don't think having a brief downtime every couple months would be a serious issue for the vast majority of users.
My servers run non-stop because my users are non-stop.
No, they're not chained to their desks 24/7, but the user base is large enough that at any given moment, it's crunch time for *someone*.
In order to find those rare times when bringing a server down won't cause someone to miss a critical deadline, downtime has to be planned months in advance. To do that I have to be able to rely on my systems being stable for months or years on end.
As the other poster said, rebooting just to interrupt the degradation process is not an option for me. If a system degrades on its own, I have to find out why and fix it.
Keep in mind, though, that this is an OS-independent issue. Some of the applications I support only run on certain OSes, so I have to build stable Linux systems, stable Windows systems, etc. Nobody cares but me that that's harder to do with some OSes than with others.
If Rational is any indication, IBM is going to figure out what Sun's cash cows are and hold those customers hostage.
I've been an enthusiastic ClearCase user and administrator (please let's not start that flamewar again) all the way back to the Atria days. After dealing with IBM as a vendor since they bought Rational, I've seriously considered recommending against ClearCase to my customers.
It's not just the incompetent and ever-changing bureaucracy, which is indeed infuriating, it's the attitude of their reps. They go way beyond "We've got it, you want it, you get it on our terms." They act more like bill collectors than anything else. At one point, because of a paperwork delay in my purchasing organization, our ClearCase support lapsed. IBM called me EVERY DAY until they got their check, even after I told them to stop and let all their calls go to voice mail.
I don't know what Sun is like to deal with these days, but no matter how bad they are, it can't be worse than IBM.
Happened to me too. Only I didn't drop the deck down the stairs, I dropped it into a mud puddle. I was able to salvage about a quarter of the cards, and had to repunch the rest. Fortunately, I'd used one of those fancy Univac keypunches that printed the characters across the tops of the cards. Also, I wasn't close to deadline, so it was just a PITA instead of a disaster.
And yes, I also remember the diagonal magic marker line trick.
I read Linus's mind in 1974, keyed what would later become Linux 0.0.01 into the front panel of an IMSAI 8080 with 1K of RAM, and once I got it running, backed it up using the paper tape punch of the ASR-33 I used for the console.
The first application I wrote for it was an ESP transmitter which I used to beam the Apple II monitor ROM bits into Steve Wozniak's brain.
I run a development lab with about 125 machines, almost all Linux. The users have XP desktops, managed by IT, but I support the bits that interact with the lab machines. I've been running this lab for five years.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to run regedit on a user's Windows machine. I'm editing config files all the time on the Linux machines.
OTOH, I only have to reboot the lab machines when the users screw them up or when there are major OS or product upgrades (development, remember?). The core servers never go down except for power outages that last longer than our UPS can handle, and the one time an idiot electrician cut power to all the lab circuits before I could tackle him.
The users have to have their XP boxes reimaged every 6-12 months, just because they "get sick", despite (or because of?) the firewall and anti-malware software that comes on the standard IT-provided OS image.
Slashdot Mirror
[I might get modded offtopic for not bitching that it doesn't work for me.]
I have a friend who's struggling through her anatomy and physiology course (becoming a physical therapist). Something like this would be a great study aid if the labels had more resolution. For example, the vertebrae are all labeled "{cervical,thoracic,lumbar} vertebra" when it would be more useful to label them individually, e.g., "5th thoracic vertebra".
I'm autistic, and yes, I occasionally need full-body pressure to calm down, but I also need quiet and space to think. I sure as hell don't want to work cheek-by-jowl with a bunch of people I know only by what went into them at lunch and is coming out of them in the afternoon.
Mike Markkula.
Because Slashdot can't be rewritten from the ground up every time the Next Big Thing comes along.
"We're losing money on every unit we ship, but we'll make it up in volume."
Instead of zero-day exploits, it'll have zero-millisecond exploits.
I always remember to ask the anesthesiologist for anti-nausea meds before going into the OR.
Then there are mandates: Our internal corporate web site FORCES you to use IE for much of its content, for two reasons. Internally developed web apps are only tested on IE, because the beancounters won't give IT the budget to test and certify on anything else, nor will they give tech support even the meager extra money to handle the calls where they say to Firefox users, "What part of 'Only supported on IE' didn't you understand?". External apps (benefits, etc.) may or may not be supported on browsers other than IE, but nothing's *not* supported on IE.
More bonus points if the handset still smells like cigarettes even though no smoker has used it in 25 years.
Do you want to *support* four customers who have each put a million dollars in your pocket, or do you want to support four million people who have each put a dollar in your pocket?
My wife and I are both amblyopic. For me 3D doesn't work, but for her it's worse: Not only does it not work, but after about ten minutes of it, she's usually got a splitting headache.
(Oddly, neither of our kids are amblyopic.)
No, $0 is supposed to be the difference between the harm to the plaintiff and the *compensatory* award.
Me! 110 baud acoustic coupler, with the RS-232 port wired through a 20mA current-loop adapter to the ASR33 Teletype. We didn't have the fancy Teletype that had the phone and modem built in, but we did have paper tape!
ObTopic: I have a working original Apple ][, and an Apple ][+ with the UCSD Pascal system (let's see you run Java in 64K of RAM!). What I appear to have misplaced is the original manual set.
Don't forget that ham geekery also tends toward the low end (doing amazing things with nearly nothing) because of hams' association with emergency preparedness.
Even though my novice license expired in 1985 and I never got around to retaking the test to get it back, I always made sure I never forgot Morse code, one of the original forms of digital communication. Very useful in all sorts of emergencies.
I would. It's a perfect example of "needing Windows to run the thing I need to run because there's no way to do the same thing on Linux".
That's a pretty big "if".
Back in the day (early 1990's) building Unix System V, we had cscope for all of that except the actual refactoring task. We built its database as part of the regular build process, and it maintained our sanity when the environment was your favorite text editor and make and 35,000 source files.
Because you'd never, ever release.
00 02 * * * /usr/bin/yum update tzdata 2>&1
OK, discuss the ethical ramifications of this one:
I am up for a promotion at work. My cheap-bastard boss's boss is holding it up because he thinks he'll get a gold star for saving the money, and probably won't let it go through until he has my resignation letter in hand. I don't want it to come to that.
I'm a sysadmin and I rarely wear anything but blue jeans to work. My April Fool's joke is that I told them I was taking this morning off to "take care of some personal business". I'm going to show up at lunchtime in a dress shirt and suit pants, letting them believe that my "personal business" was an interview. They'll see through it quickly, but I want that half-second of panic to stick.
Discuss.
Even for servers I don't think having a brief downtime every couple months would be a serious issue for the vast majority of users.
My servers run non-stop because my users are non-stop.
No, they're not chained to their desks 24/7, but the user base is large enough that at any given moment, it's crunch time for *someone*.
In order to find those rare times when bringing a server down won't cause someone to miss a critical deadline, downtime has to be planned months in advance. To do that I have to be able to rely on my systems being stable for months or years on end.
As the other poster said, rebooting just to interrupt the degradation process is not an option for me. If a system degrades on its own, I have to find out why and fix it.
Keep in mind, though, that this is an OS-independent issue. Some of the applications I support only run on certain OSes, so I have to build stable Linux systems, stable Windows systems, etc. Nobody cares but me that that's harder to do with some OSes than with others.
If Rational is any indication, IBM is going to figure out what Sun's cash cows are and hold those customers hostage.
I've been an enthusiastic ClearCase user and administrator (please let's not start that flamewar again) all the way back to the Atria days. After dealing with IBM as a vendor since they bought Rational, I've seriously considered recommending against ClearCase to my customers.
It's not just the incompetent and ever-changing bureaucracy, which is indeed infuriating, it's the attitude of their reps. They go way beyond "We've got it, you want it, you get it on our terms." They act more like bill collectors than anything else. At one point, because of a paperwork delay in my purchasing organization, our ClearCase support lapsed. IBM called me EVERY DAY until they got their check, even after I told them to stop and let all their calls go to voice mail.
I don't know what Sun is like to deal with these days, but no matter how bad they are, it can't be worse than IBM.
Happened to me too. Only I didn't drop the deck down the stairs, I dropped it into a mud puddle. I was able to salvage about a quarter of the cards, and had to repunch the rest. Fortunately, I'd used one of those fancy Univac keypunches that printed the characters across the tops of the cards. Also, I wasn't close to deadline, so it was just a PITA instead of a disaster.
And yes, I also remember the diagonal magic marker line trick.
Cassettes? Luxury.
I read Linus's mind in 1974, keyed what would later become Linux 0.0.01 into the front panel of an IMSAI 8080 with 1K of RAM, and once I got it running, backed it up using the paper tape punch of the ASR-33 I used for the console.
The first application I wrote for it was an ESP transmitter which I used to beam the Apple II monitor ROM bits into Steve Wozniak's brain.
Bad example.
I run a development lab with about 125 machines, almost all Linux. The users have XP desktops, managed by IT, but I support the bits that interact with the lab machines. I've been running this lab for five years.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to run regedit on a user's Windows machine. I'm editing config files all the time on the Linux machines.
OTOH, I only have to reboot the lab machines when the users screw them up or when there are major OS or product upgrades (development, remember?). The core servers never go down except for power outages that last longer than our UPS can handle, and the one time an idiot electrician cut power to all the lab circuits before I could tackle him.
The users have to have their XP boxes reimaged every 6-12 months, just because they "get sick", despite (or because of?) the firewall and anti-malware software that comes on the standard IT-provided OS image.