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User: ebh

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  1. Re:Like this? on How Were You Fired? · · Score: 1

    I'm German-Irish.

  2. Re:This one happened to my Dad. on How Were You Fired? · · Score: 1

    Something similar to this happened to a coworker of mine. The Company closed our building, offering relocation of a subset of the staff and laying off the rest. Among those laid off were four tech writers. Among those offered relocation was their manager, who took the offer.

    He gets to the new place, and what do you think the PHBs told him to do first?

    That's right: Hire four tech writers.

    Firing us two weeks after 9/11, when most of us were still going to funerals, wasn't very nice either.

  3. Re:Pro-Linux Conspiracy on SCO Derides GPL, Will Revoke SGI's UNIX License · · Score: 2, Informative
    You know what SGI is going to do if they lose their Unix lisence.


    Not a damn thing.


    In their financials, they stated their belief that the license was non-terminable. So, even though they don't have the deep pockets of IBM, they should still wait and let a judge sort it out.


    And it's "when", not "if". I wouldn't be surprised of SCO pulled the licenses of every licensee who ever contributed anything to Linux, GNU, or any other GPL'd project, because of their asinine opinion of what constitutes a derivative work.

  4. Re:A thinly veiled political rant, actually on The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed · · Score: 1

    I tried getting a job flipping burgers when I was unemployed, figuring I could do that at night and look for a REAL(tm) job during the day. None of the fast-food joints would hire me because they knew I'd walk as soon as that REAL(tm) job came along.

    I suppose I could have made up a resume and a good story, and used a fake address and all that, to hide what I really do for a living, but it wasn't worth it.

  5. Re:Heh. on The Guy Responsible For Ctrl-Alt-Del · · Score: 2, Funny

    Only on Slashdot could there be an argument over what CTRL-ALT-DEL does.

  6. Re:Not coming to New York? on SCO's Roadshow Coming Soon · · Score: 1

    Take them to Newark.

  7. Re:Post Y2K business plan. on SCO's Plan Examined · · Score: 1

    Gives new meaning to "floating a trial balloon".

  8. Re:Some things for most people: on Geek Eye for the Average Guy · · Score: 1

    I use a Home Theater Master remote and it's as good (and as expensive). The geeks in the FA tried configuring their remote using only preprogrammed code sets (and they may not have had any choice).

    I tried that with mine, and after about ten minutes decided that programming each function manually would be the best way to go. (It was a lot of work; it'd be nice if there was a way to back it up.) The nice thing about that is that I assigned the buttons the way I wanted to, not they way someone else thought I should, and I could take into account things like my habit of leaving all the gear on all the time except for the TV itself, so that no matter what mode it's in, "power" always controls the TV.

    The only thing I wish it had, and I don't know of anything that can do this, is the ability to detect the state of a device. Some functions (like TV power) are not idempotent, so when my four-year-old turns the power off using the front panel button, the TV is now out of phase with the "power everything down" macro.

    I suspect that a complete single-brand solution would have a two-way remote so that each device could broadcast any state changes back to the remote (hope it's not stuck between the sofa cushions).

  9. Excel on How Do You Punch In? · · Score: 1

    We're salaried. Every month, our HR person emails us an Excel spreadsheet into which we plug in any non-holiday time off. We print that out, sign it and turn it in to our managers, who sign them and then hand them back to HR.

    Every now and again the bean-counters come up out of their holes and ask what the time is being spent on, so the managers send around another spreadsheet where we plug in the percentage of our time spent on various things. It's OK for that to be a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate.

    It's all pretty painless, and the only irritation is that it perpetuates the fiction that we all work eight-hour days.

  10. Re:Predicted response on Booting Linux Faster · · Score: 1

    Try working from home when you're watching your toddler, and tell me that an extra minute doesn't matter. :)

  11. Re:palm os = blah on New Treo Reviewed · · Score: 1

    Wouldn't that be replacing one ache with another, i.e., the RSI from writing 300 pages using Graffiti?

    Or is that what your dissertation's about?

  12. Re:Nails? on New Treo Reviewed · · Score: 1

    So what's going to happen to Graffiti after this? Is anyone going to use it? Clearly Palm et al chose not to license it.

    The thing is, it WORKS. I'd hate to see it effectively become abandonware. Not only will we not get to use it except on outdated devices, it's not going to do Xerox any good sitting in one of their patent attorney's file cabinets.

  13. Re:Erm, try reading your contract. on Are You On Time To Work? · · Score: 1

    That's precisely the point. We DO give it our time, in many cases a lot of unpaid overtime. Even when I'm not putting in 60 hour weeks, I check my email periodically during the evenings and on weekends, and I'm reachable by cellphone, even though I'm technically not on call.

    That's the respect that I give the company and my coworkers. If they were to say, "None of that matters, the Rule Book says you're at your desk at 7:30am, and by God you're going to be there," how much respect (or gratitude) is the company showing me?

    And during crunch times, forcing me to be at work at 7:30am after having worked until 5:00am is nothing more than a slap in the face. My not wanting to abide by that doesn't make me a lazy fuck.

    Where I am now, my management is smarter than that. We treat each other as professionals, the work gets done on time, we have a good time doing it, and within reason, I come and go as I please.

  14. Re:Glad I Live In The UK! on Are You On Time To Work? · · Score: 1

    That law doesn't exist in the U.S. Here it's perfectly legal to require that you're seated and working by your start time, i.e., that you have to arrive on premises early enough to make your way to your desk on time (a friend of mine works under this rule). They do have to pay you for that lead time, though.

  15. Good for the goose on SCO's Open Letter to Open Source Community · · Score: 4, Insightful
    SCO says: We cannot have a situation in which companies fear they may be next to suffer computer attacks if they take a business or legal position that angers the Open Source community.

    Likewise, we cannot have a situation in which computer users fear they may be next to suffer ruinous litigation if they take a business or legal position that angers SCO.

  16. Re:no. on Supersonic Flight Without The Sonic Boom · · Score: 1

    They've done that already. :(

  17. Re:Anyone up for porting linux onto this thing? on Woz OK's Apple I Resurrection · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, the first thing you do is devise a 32-bit pseudo machine and cobble up an assembler for it. You could call it "Sweet-32" or something...

  18. Re:Prior Art on New Heinlein Novel · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    But his estate now owes SCO $699.

  19. Re:This clinches it ... on SCO Says IBM is Beating Up on Them · · Score: 1

    A: Because "vast right-wing conspiracy" was already used.

  20. Re:You don't know what you're talking about. on Pressure-Induced Pains - Fact or Fiction? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but the best about migraines is the euphoria when they break. I haven't heard too many migraine sufferers talk about this, but about one time in four, I can tell my migraine is about to break, even before the pain subsides, because I'll feel like I've just been shot with happy juice.

    Oh, and let me put in another good word for Imitrex. I use the nasal spray, and in most cases the migraine is turned off like a switch within 15-30 minutes. (I'm lucky that my insurance pays for it, so all I pay is a $10/6-dose copay.)

  21. I'm sending for my law degree on SCO Prepares To Sue Linux End Users · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...from a Prestigious NON-ACCREDITED University.

    Until SCO gets squashed, they'll be working so many actions at once, they'll hire any lawyer with a pulse. They'll be lucky if the IBM suit isn't argued by paralegals.

    Or maybe they'll just outsource the whole thing to India.

  22. Re:hurray for apple on G5s Start Shipping · · Score: 1
    I wonder how long it will take for the operating system let alone anything else to make proper use of it.

    I don't know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if the kernel were 64-bit clean/optmiized right now. OTOH, if 32-bit emulation is 100% binary backwards-compatible, don't be surprised if a lot of userland code stays 32-bit forever.

    Not having an extra flavor to build cuts way down on maintenance overhead and doesn't introduce reliability-reducing churn. Besides, most userland code doesn't really benefit. Sure, a 64-bit optimized Photoshop could win big, but the only measurable "performance" improvement of the mount command would be on the kernel side. Not worth it.

  23. Re:A moving target is still a target on WindowsUpdate.com Secured, Permanently · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Um, not to be a Microsoft apologist or anything, but at least in the case of MSBlast, they DID fix the problem.

    This is not like those stupid email trojans that are inexcusable because Microsoft intentionally opened the door (with scriptable email, etc.). This is a garden-variety buffer-overflow exploit of the sort that could just as easily still exist somewhere in Linux.

  24. Re:And California? on Power Outages Strike East Coast · · Score: 1

    I have a well with an electric pump. When there's no electricity, I have no water. Here in central New Jersey, we lost power very briefly, but my wife has (cleaned and) filled our bathtub with water in case we get a prolonged outage.

  25. Re:SCO support... on FSF, GCC, and SCO Compiler Support · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The customers/ISVs big enough to matter all use SCO's own development tools, not the GNU toolchain. GCC support or lack thereof will not direct their actions. However, those customers depend heavily on the stability and continued existence of their vendors. Were I one of those customers, I'd have already written them a scathing letter telling exactly what I think of the prospect of going through the pain of changing platforms because SCO litigated itself out of business.

    Claimer: I worked on those development tools for UnixWare back in the USL/Novell days. I have no present connection with SCO, Bell Labs, Novell, or Darl's astrologer.