The product is not the problem. The distributors are the problem.
For some reason, the distributors, who are effectively screwing consumers out of metric tons of money by playing up to teenagers and charging usurious prices, don't like the idea of losing all that money. Corporate pirates are like that, sometimes.
In college, we had sky racks in pour room (you know, the bunk is up near the ceiling). I didn't use a ladder; I had to get up onto my desk and climb into mine. I put the clock radio on my desk, and set it to the most obnoxious station I could find. That way, I *had* to get out of bed to shut the steenking music off, and it was harder to get back into bed than to wake up.
Then again, one morning I fell asleep sitting up on the couch while putting on my socks. I missed a final...
Yeah, I was trying to imagine it in my daughters' room, with her mounds of clothes, books, and whatnot everywhere. The thing would either need a burrowing feature, or some serious tracks, to get around in there.
2 weeks would be acceptable, 4 weeks is about right, especially since this is a startup and you have been crucial. Then again, it doesn't sound as if he's really treated you as a key person.
As to his expectations, he's trying to cover his fanny for being stupid enough to run this way. He should never have had you as the sole techie., or if he did, he should have been working on golden handcuffs. (Even there, he's gotta have a backup plan. What if you got hit by a tiny comet?)
I'd ask myself a couple of questions at this point.
1) How has he treated me overall? 2) What do I want at this point-- extra work and money, or to get on with life and have some free time?
Those should help you decide what to do.
Personally, I would not be likely to do what he asks, even if the boss was my best friend, unless the compensation was very, very good.
What level is it? Well, if computer building were nethack, this article would be, at most, level 3. Gridbugs and newts.
I'd call his article "Things you may want to consider when building a machine."
It was 75% Windows tweaks, not even that much for machine building. I'm not a Windows guru, and *I* even knew most of it. So how about, "Things you may want to consider when using Windows machines."
YAWN.
WARNING: Article may cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery in vicinity of htis web page.
But any contractor will tell you these people have a legitimate beef.
Nope. I've done plenty of contracting, and I see no real beef here. Just mad cow disease.
There are legitimate reasons to use contractors.
Sorry, but that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter what HP's reasons were. These contractors, allegedly adults, allegedly professional, allegedly educated, allegedly rational, went in with their eyes wide open (if not, whose fault was that?) and signed the contract. It is a gross moral failure on their part to now try to use the courts to change the rules, to try to force their desires and wills on HP. It's a stickup, pure and simple.
If you don't like the terms, don't contract! It's that simple. If the only other option is starving to death, that's one thing. But there's always other options. Many people either don't look for other options, or don't like the ones they see, so they say there aren't any.
I contracted at IBM at the tail end of the time when contractors were a life form below even co-ops and interns, where if a contractor entered a break area, the IBM employees had to leave so as not to fraternize. I contracted at a high tech startup during the dot com time, where the only differences between me and an employees were that I had no stock options and couldn't be in meetings where finances were discussed. In both cases I busted my butt for my customer and got paid what I'd agreed on, and both sides were happy.
On the face of it, these contractors appear to have decided it's OK to mug and rape your customer. I have a real problem with that.
If you want to effect change, work on the laws through the Congress, and work through professional associations, networking, whatever, to get companies to do things differently. Form a union, whatever.
What are the likely outcomes of what these people are doing?
1) More offshore outsourcing, screwing over potential contractors in the US. 2) Companies will revert to treating contractors like scum, instead of part of the team and as human beings.
I submit that both of these results suck, unless you're an offshore contractor.
I've been all over the map on this one. At one point we had a main server, and the other systems were just X servers. As things got busier, I went to a full install on the other systems, but the main server is still a file server (as well as print server, scanner home, etc). Now that the kids are mostly not home, I may be going back to the first model.
Neither is purely thin client, but neither follows the Windows models real closely, either (although with file sharing Windows now follows the latter model!) Even with the current model (standalones + NIS/NFS) some apps run on the main server, so it's sorta thin-client-ish. Whatever, it's all just distributed computing in my book.
"The network *is* the computer" - Bill Joy.
I'm running Linux, but it would work exactly the same with any *nix.
I expect us to always have PCs in the house. The majority of them won't make Mr. Gates happy, but they're still PCs!
Obviously he fights piracy by getting stoned and peeing in his pants. Why didn't we think of that? Perhaps this is the gist of the sequel for Pirates of the Caribbean...
Because Slackware wasn't moving forward in crucial areas, including installation, upgrades and overall integration. I gave up on Slackware after 4 versions, because every version required a new install. RedHat and others had already figured out that upgrades (of overall OS or individual packages) were useful, so I switched.
Each claim should be evaluated regardless of messenger.
Nonsense. After a while, there's just no point in listening to some people. WRT Linux, SCO comes to mind. As does Microsoft. They've thrown out too much BS, and proven they couldn't care less about reality. They just want to own everything they don't already own, in addition to what they do. So why would I listen to any of their claims?
There are a number of ways to test software, and you should use as many of them as possible. I have found quite a few bugs over the years by building generators that applied random inputs (with or without constraints) to a given piece of software. The whole idea is to test things you haven't thought of, test out of sequence, etc.
The test here is the security world's version of my random test generator.
Lots of other people hit most of the points I would have made (and I have primary responsibility for a server room with a raised floor).
Consider just raising the computers, not the whole floor! You could use shelving (you could have some great, custom shelving made for your room much cheaper than you could buy the cheapest raised floor), or milk cartes as another did (as I do this with guitar amps), or anything else. Just run the cables under these. If you do the custom shelving, you can get a front panel. It could be like a 3" to 6" high shelf with cabinet doors in front. It can be painted, stained, carpeted, covered in red velvet, sprayed with truckbed liner, covered with beaten copper, layered in kevlar, or covered any way you like.
Or you could make some sort of custom gutter around the floor/wall junction, instead of hanging gutters. You can get these with a strip that closes them up.
You could use the little gutters that look sort of like skinny chair rails, at chair rail height. These are made for wiring added after the fact.
You have lots of options, all cheaper, easier, and safer than a raised floor.
We use PBS at work. I didn't pick it, but it works. There are other around, as well, though I don't recall their names off the top of my head. (PBS is avaoilable free, or supported, for a fee. We use the latter-- a commercial version of an OSS project. 8^/
A search of google or any of the OSS sites should turn up several more.
I'd certainly like to see a test of browsers run for weeks at at time. Be tricky, but great to have the data.
I switched from Firefox to Opera when Opera 7.54 came out. But while Firefox slows down a bit after a few weeks (multiple windows open, one with lots of tabs, several tabs and windows auto-reloading every 5-15 minutes), opera either locked up or crashed after about a week. Consistently. Back to firefox it was.
The fact that it doesn't matter to you has no relevance to anyone else. You are not the center of the universe.
There are people still running 300MHz systems, 1GHz systems, 2GHz systems, and 3GHz+ systems. There are people on everything from analog modems to high speed links. And they run everything from Windows 95 to whatever version of *nix came out 37 minutes ago.
And to a great many of them, speed matters. Whether it's a 30 second load vs a 15 second load, or a 1 second load vs a half second load. No, it's not the only thing, or for most people the most important thing (though it can become that). But it *is* important.
My wife hates computers. She's never had a job where she had to use one. She will sometimes do stuff on them at home, but if something feels like it's taking "too long", she's outta there. And we have several other friends like that, too.
It depends on what you're doing, both in terms of operating systems and apps.
Some OSes and apps keep sucking more and more cycles; in fact they drive much of the direction of new hardware.
I use Linux (RH8) at home and at work. The system at work is several times faster than the system at home, and for things like web browsing, it shows. For anything I normally do that doesn't push the graphics too hard, the system at home is usually fast enough, whereas the one at work usually feels really fast.
If I used the same hardware with an even vaguely recent version of WIndows (and I have) the system at work would merely feel adequate, and the system at home would be a joke (will XP even install on a 500MHz system?)
I have wasted at least 15 days of my time because of spammers over the years. That's just my personal life. Do the math; 10 minutes a day is about 2.5 days a year. That's counting everything from finding and maintaining filters to going through the crap that gets through to going through the tagged stuff to improve the filters, etc. It doesn't count the time spent helping my wife do the same thing.
The scumbags basically killed me 15 days before I would have died. And they keep killing me a little bit earlier every day.
I say, put their heads on pikes. They're murderers.
``The woman who proposed that blogger's bill of rights got fired because she posted on her blog pictures that could be offensive to some of her employer's customers and let people know where she worked. That's just about one of the things that you DONT DO online. You just don't post comments that can be connected with your employer unless your employer has given you the green light to do so.''
It's not a blogging issue, per se. It's not even an online issue, per se. If she wants to put up photos dressed like that, that's her prerogative. (This could still lead to problems, but it would be an entirely different set of problems.) But to do so in a company uniform (nevermind on a company plane) can potentially harm the company image, and that's inappropriate by any reasonable standard. Even without the uniform and plane, suggestive photos on pages at all associating her with the airline would be foolish.
Had these photos been in a magazine, on a billboard, or whatever, she would be exposing (sic) her employer and hence in trouble. Law pertaining to this has been around far longer than computers, nevermind blogs.
Slashdot Mirror
The product is not the problem. The distributors are the problem.
For some reason, the distributors, who are effectively screwing consumers out of metric tons of money by playing up to teenagers and charging usurious prices, don't like the idea of losing all that money. Corporate pirates are like that, sometimes.
In college, we had sky racks in pour room (you know, the bunk is up near the ceiling). I didn't use a ladder; I had to get up onto my desk and climb into mine. I put the clock radio on my desk, and set it to the most obnoxious station I could find. That way, I *had* to get out of bed to shut the steenking music off, and it was harder to get back into bed than to wake up.
Then again, one morning I fell asleep sitting up on the couch while putting on my socks. I missed a final...
So the solution worked, but the subject didn't!
Yeah, I was trying to imagine it in my daughters' room, with her mounds of clothes, books, and whatnot everywhere. The thing would either need a burrowing feature, or some serious tracks, to get around in there.
2 weeks would be acceptable, 4 weeks is about right, especially since this is a startup and you have been crucial. Then again, it doesn't sound as if he's really treated you as a key person.
As to his expectations, he's trying to cover his fanny for being stupid enough to run this way. He should never have had you as the sole techie., or if he did, he should have been working on golden handcuffs. (Even there, he's gotta have a backup plan. What if you got hit by a tiny comet?)
I'd ask myself a couple of questions at this point.
1) How has he treated me overall?
2) What do I want at this point-- extra work and money, or to get on with life and have some free time?
Those should help you decide what to do.
Personally, I would not be likely to do what he asks, even if the boss was my best friend, unless the compensation was very, very good.
And as other have said. don't sign anything!
What level is it? Well, if computer building were nethack, this article would be, at most, level 3.
Gridbugs and newts.
I'd call his article "Things you may want to consider when building a machine."
It was 75% Windows tweaks, not even that much for machine building. I'm not a Windows guru, and *I* even knew most of it. So how about, "Things you may want to consider when using Windows machines."
YAWN.
WARNING: Article may cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery in vicinity of htis web page.
Repeat after me, Windows != PC"
But any contractor will tell you these people have a legitimate beef.
Nope. I've done plenty of contracting, and I see no real beef here. Just mad cow disease.
There are legitimate reasons to use contractors.
Sorry, but that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter what HP's reasons were. These contractors, allegedly adults, allegedly professional, allegedly educated, allegedly rational, went in with their eyes wide open (if not, whose fault was that?) and signed the contract. It is a gross moral failure on their part to now try to use the courts to change the rules, to try to force their desires and wills on HP. It's a stickup, pure and simple.
If you don't like the terms, don't contract! It's that simple. If the only other option is starving to death, that's one thing. But there's always other options. Many people either don't look for other options, or don't like the ones they see, so they say there aren't any.
I contracted at IBM at the tail end of the time when contractors were a life form below even co-ops and interns, where if a contractor entered a break area, the IBM employees had to leave so as not to fraternize. I contracted at a high tech startup during the dot com time, where the only differences between me and an employees were that I had no stock options and couldn't be in meetings where finances were discussed. In both cases I busted my butt for my customer and got paid what I'd agreed on, and both sides were happy.
On the face of it, these contractors appear to have decided it's OK to mug and rape your customer. I have a real problem with that.
If you want to effect change, work on the laws through the Congress, and work through professional associations, networking, whatever, to get companies to do things differently. Form a union, whatever.
What are the likely outcomes of what these people are doing?
1) More offshore outsourcing, screwing over potential contractors in the US.
2) Companies will revert to treating contractors like scum, instead of part of the team and as human beings.
I submit that both of these results suck, unless you're an offshore contractor.
I've been all over the map on this one. At one point we had a main server, and the other systems were just X servers. As things got busier, I went to a full install on the other systems, but the main server is still a file server (as well as print server, scanner home, etc). Now that the kids are mostly not home, I may be going back to the first model.
Neither is purely thin client, but neither follows the Windows models real closely, either (although with file sharing Windows now follows the latter model!) Even with the current model (standalones + NIS/NFS) some apps run on the main server, so it's sorta thin-client-ish. Whatever, it's all just distributed computing in my book.
"The network *is* the computer" - Bill Joy.
I'm running Linux, but it would work exactly the same with any *nix.
I expect us to always have PCs in the house. The majority of them won't make Mr. Gates happy, but they're still PCs!
You are[,] number six.
So do computers in the UK just come with spamming software preinstalled, or what? The article was fairly useless.
Obviously he fights piracy by getting stoned and peeing in his pants. Why didn't we think of that? Perhaps this is the gist of the sequel for Pirates of the Caribbean...
Because Slackware wasn't moving forward in crucial areas, including installation, upgrades and overall integration. I gave up on Slackware after 4 versions, because every version required a new install. RedHat and others had already figured out that upgrades (of overall OS or individual packages) were useful, so I switched.
Why not ask them to FOSS it instead? They are supposedly opening up tons of code, why not VB?
Each claim should be evaluated regardless of messenger.
Nonsense. After a while, there's just no point in listening to some people. WRT Linux, SCO comes to mind. As does Microsoft. They've thrown out too much BS, and proven they couldn't care less about reality. They just want to own everything they don't already own, in addition to what they do. So why would I listen to any of their claims?
Not to mention receiving stolen goods, tampering with government computers, interfering with an investigation...
If this cat's on the level, I forsee a nice, government-paid vacation soon...
There are a number of ways to test software, and you should use as many of them as possible. I have found quite a few bugs over the years by building generators that applied random inputs (with or without constraints) to a given piece of software. The whole idea is to test things you haven't thought of, test out of sequence, etc.
The test here is the security world's version of my random test generator.
As well as OO, look into AbiWord and Gnumeric. I find them much faster than OO, easier to install
and maintain, tpam.
Lots of other people hit most of the points I would have made (and I have primary responsibility for a server room with a raised floor).
Consider just raising the computers, not the whole floor! You could use shelving (you could have some great, custom shelving made for your room much cheaper than you could buy the cheapest raised floor), or milk cartes as another did (as I do this with guitar amps), or anything else. Just run the cables under these. If you do the custom shelving, you can get a front panel. It could be like a 3" to 6" high shelf with cabinet doors in front. It can be painted, stained, carpeted, covered in red velvet, sprayed with truckbed liner, covered with beaten copper, layered in kevlar, or covered any way you like.
Or you could make some sort of custom gutter around the floor/wall junction, instead of hanging gutters. You can get these with a strip that closes them up.
You could use the little gutters that look sort of like skinny chair rails, at chair rail height. These are made for wiring added after the fact.
You have lots of options, all cheaper, easier, and safer than a raised floor.
Does that mean it can't reproduce?
We use PBS at work. I didn't pick it, but it works. There are other around, as well, though I don't recall their names off the top of my head. (PBS is avaoilable free, or supported, for a fee. We use the latter-- a commercial version of an OSS project. 8^/
A search of google or any of the OSS sites should turn up several more.
I'd certainly like to see a test of browsers run for weeks at at time. Be tricky, but great to have the data.
I switched from Firefox to Opera when Opera 7.54 came out. But while Firefox slows down a bit after a few weeks (multiple windows open, one with lots of tabs, several tabs and windows auto-reloading every 5-15 minutes), opera either locked up or crashed after about a week. Consistently. Back to firefox it was.
This is on Linux, FWIW.
The fact that it doesn't matter to you has no relevance to anyone else. You are not the center of the universe.
There are people still running 300MHz systems, 1GHz systems, 2GHz systems, and 3GHz+ systems. There are people on everything from analog modems to high speed links. And they run everything from Windows 95 to whatever version of *nix came out 37 minutes ago.
And to a great many of them, speed matters. Whether it's a 30 second load vs a 15 second load, or a 1 second load vs a half second load. No, it's not the only thing, or for most people the most important thing (though it can become that). But it *is* important.
My wife hates computers. She's never had a job where she had to use one. She will sometimes do stuff on them at home, but if something feels like it's taking "too long", she's outta there. And we have several other friends like that, too.
Oceans 13!!!!!!!
It depends on what you're doing, both in terms of operating systems and apps.
Some OSes and apps keep sucking more and more cycles; in fact they drive much of the direction of new hardware.
I use Linux (RH8) at home and at work. The system at work is several times faster than the system at home, and for things like web browsing, it shows. For anything I normally do that doesn't push the graphics too hard, the system at home is usually fast enough, whereas the one at work usually feels really fast.
If I used the same hardware with an even vaguely recent version of WIndows (and I have) the system at work would merely feel adequate, and the system at home would be a joke (will XP even install on a 500MHz system?)
I have wasted at least 15 days of my time because of spammers over the years. That's just my personal life. Do the math; 10 minutes a day is about 2.5 days a year. That's counting everything from finding and maintaining filters to going through the crap that gets through to going through the tagged stuff to improve the filters, etc. It doesn't count the time spent helping my wife do the same thing.
The scumbags basically killed me 15 days before I would have died. And they keep killing me a little bit earlier every day.
I say, put their heads on pikes. They're murderers.
``The woman who proposed that blogger's bill of rights got fired because she posted on her blog pictures that could be offensive to some of her employer's customers and let people know where she worked. That's just about one of the things that you DONT DO online. You just don't post comments that can be connected with your employer unless your employer has given you the green light to do so.''
It's not a blogging issue, per se. It's not even an online issue, per se. If she wants to put up photos dressed like that, that's her prerogative. (This could still lead to problems, but it would be an entirely different set of problems.) But to do so in a company uniform (nevermind on a company plane) can potentially harm the company image, and that's inappropriate by any reasonable standard. Even without the uniform and plane, suggestive photos on pages at all associating her with the airline would be foolish.
Had these photos been in a magazine, on a billboard, or whatever, she would be exposing (sic) her employer and hence in trouble. Law pertaining to this has been around far longer than computers, nevermind blogs.
People who do stupid things that endanger their employer deserve what they get when their employer finds out.