***Go do it yourself. I'm pointing out the fact that it's a trend.***
You're not pointing out a fact at all, just spewing your factually unsupported opinion. There is a world of difference between the two.
***I certainly don't need to prove it. If you're interested, go look it up yourself.***
Which is really just another way of saying "I like to spew nonsense, but not be burdened with the work of ensuring what I'm saying is remotely based in reality"
Wow, an entire post filled with broad, sweeping, generalizations and not a shred of proof provided to substantiate any of your claims. Sounds like a troll to me.
Statistics are great, but often abused especially by people who do not bother to look at the data behind a particular statistic. Your post mirrors the same erroneous ideas found in an article [1] I read earlier on zdnet this year, touting the supposed security advantage of IIS6 over Apache2. The article allowed comments, and one of the thread of comments [2] picked apart the fallacy behind this statistic quite well.
I've include the link to the article and the retort below.
There are no issues with compatibility, DRM, or any other technical concerns. My intelligence will not be lowered through mere exposure, and I don't have to choose which evil corporate entity (I detest both Sony and MS) I support by purchasing anyone's product.
Rather then mocking the post perhaps you should be appreciative of the steady success of an operating system that has survived and prospered for over a quarter of a century.
OpenVMS has embraced and innovated concepts like clustering and high availability long before they came into vogue amongst the Unix world. It may not be everyone's idea of a "sexy" operating system but it has gotten the job done for quite some time now.
As someone with both extensive technical background and solid leadership and project management skills I can state for a fact that my ability to successfully envision, flesh out (e.g. requirements and design documents), estimate and plan (e.g. develop project schedules and resource estimates which I then translate into MS-project) a project or development effort is inextricably linked to my understanding of that project and its technical underpinnings.
Over the course of my career I have dealt with legions of formal "project managers", (folks who are pure project managers lacking any technical background) and I have yet to realize any value in my interactions with any of them, beyond the occasional willingness to record meeting minutes.
To date I have found them to be glorified secretaries, whose primary tactic is to latch on to knowledgeable people and not only drain information but actually get them to perform the real tasks of project management, such as scheduling and resource estimation.
In addition, many of these folks like to act as middlemen, brokering information and jealously hiding their sources so people must go to them for information. This would not be a terrible thing if they actually understand the project and had the knowledge required to effectively answer questions and communicate the status of the project accurately but that is very rarely (never in my experience) the case.
In my own experience, I have had a number of project managers assigned to various efforts I was responsible for, ostensibly so I could focus purely on the development effort and on technical leadership. In every case I have spent months working with a non technical project manager, spending 3-4 hrs a day with this person reviewing (creating) the project plan and having to spoon feed information to them (essentially so they could answer questions in meetings) as well making detailed suggestions about how they could overcome some obstacle external to our group that was needed in order for the project to succeed. In the mean time while this significant chunk of my time is being invested into sharpening my puppeteering skills the formal project manager has been horrible miscommunication project requirements and status to other groups.
So in short order these folks are out and I'm back attending meetings and working with external groups as well internal.
The primary factor behind the ineffectiveness of these folks is there complete lack of technical background. Successful project management is not just about writing up project plans and throwing dates and times down, its about understand the underlying objectives, as well as the pitfalls and obstacles in the way of those objectives. It's about understanding the project goals thoroughly enough to be able to determine what tasks are required to accomplish the project and making resource estimates that are realistic and effective.
This understanding and affinity for the project is something formal project managers very rarely have.
Why would anyone with even basic intelligence automatically assume that a candidate with an MCSE certification (or any other cert for that matter) is worth less then a candidate without such a certificate?
This has to be one of the most backwards lines of thought I've heard in a while.
First off, in a correctly conducted job search a candidate's worth would be based on their actual experience as determined by a hopefully extensive interview process and not judged on the alphabet soup of buzzwords they have on their resume.
There are many extremely experienced technical folks out there that are smart enough to realize that certifications (MSCE or other) can be very helpful in securing employment, which is why they get them!
In addition, many companies are able to maintain reseller agreements, and other business partnerships with vendors based on having a certain number of certified staff on board, thus making the hire of a person who is already certified even more attractive.
So I would say the implicit assumption that someone with an MCSE is inherently less "cluefull" then someone without is just another line of clap-trap from the cro-mags that expound other useless philosophies such as "real men don't read manuals."
I've read through the replies to my post, and it looks like people perceived the following:
* I was taking pot shots at the profession of systems administrator.
* I was implying that sys admins couldn't be hackers.
Neither of these is the case, nor was I implying them.
I did use the term "glorified sys admin" once in the post, so I guess shame on me. I do think that some of the conclusions people took away from post were kind of a stretch but so be it.
What I was railing against was applying the term hacker to someone just because they run a particular operating system, exhibit odd behavior or spend all day staring at a screen.
(This description seems to sum up the person the author of the article is focusing on)
None of these things in and of themselves make you a hacker, a geek maybe, but not a hacker.
If anything, hacking is about results and effectiveness, not superficial appearances.
The article seemed to be all about superficiality, which is why I had a negative reaction to it.
I also had a bad reaction to the article due to what I felt was a strong similarity between the attributes of a supposed hacker that the author chose to dwell on and some of the traits exhibited by two ex-coworkers.
The author seemed to be overly impressed by the fact the sys admin in the article was installing the 2.4 kernel, or because he was... gasp... compiling KDE. Whoop de freaking do!
Like the author, my ex-coworkers seemed to revel in the superficial.
They had just the appropriate number of Linux posters put up in their cubes, the obligatory tux stuffed animal, an impressive library of virtually unused technical books (mostly Oreilly, of course) on their shelves, several PC's in their cubes, each running a different distro of Linux (which seemed to change weekly).
Despite all these trappings, they were useless when it came time to doing actual work, such as installing and appropriately configuring our development/test systems (Solaris + custom app), scripting in Perl/DBI, configuring and tuning Oracle, working on the load balancing/DNS component of our solution or developing any other aspects of the service.
Requests for them to do work were greeted with some flip response and then right back to making yet another failed attempt to correctly compile enlightment or get transparent e-terms working.
Given what I read in the article, the author would probably consider my ex-coworkers hackers as well and of he would be outrageously incorrect.
Slackers and phonies maybe, but definitely not hackers.
This article is pretentious crap. I doubt I'll bother with the book.
I use open source software all the time, like so:
Configure --options-go-here
make
make install
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
Sometimes I even have to perform small customizations to a piece of open source code prior to performing the steps mentioned above.
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
Sometimes installs have problems and I need to review and make small fixes to what make install (or what ever the installer is) is doing in order for things to install cleanly.
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
What all these things make me is an educated consumer of open source code, nothing more.
Hackers are the people who actually do the hard work of the writing the software that the rest of us use to get our work done.
I really doubt the glorified sys admin in the article will be writing the next version of Perl or Apache anytime soon.
He's a code consumer like the rest of us, and apparently one with out much in the way of time management skills.
Which brings me to my second point...
Our development group "had" two induhviduals who exhibited many of the same behaviors as the one mentioned in the article.
They spent inordinate amounts of time building the current latest pen-ultimate Linux desktop, spent weeks are the holy grail of the perfect configuration of enlightment, had impressive arrays of hardware on their desk, were always suggesting that we use some obscure but "cool" open source tool to do a job and then spending weeks trying to build said tool only to come up weeks later with neither the tool or the work completed. On top of this they would come and go as they pleased, showing up at 11 and then bailing at 5, as well as constantly blowing off meetings.
After about 5-6 months of zero productivity they were both fired, and good riddance.
And now my point, the behavior of these two induhviduals seemed very close to that described in the article. This behavior seems to be linked to being a hacker and in fact the article is promoting the book "The Hacker Ethic". I think this is erroneous; the name of the article should be changed to "Hunting the wild poser" or maybe even "hunting the wild wanna-be".
>You see that this puts you way out of step with most REAL science fiction readers. In fact, so >much so that you should probably not make your opinion about this series public.
Actually it puts him right into the fairly large group of REAL science fiction readers that after multiple attempts have finally fought their way through the long-winded, pretentious and fairly boring first edition of the dune series. I myself did this largely because if it's supposed reputation as a piece of classic science fiction. I should have trusted my initial impression of the book.
And even if as you suggest his opinion is so widely out of step with the majority of science fiction readers (which it most certainly is not), why should he not voice his it?
>It's your right, and I don't have a problem with it, but dude..... It's a classic. It can still be found in any bookstore with a sci fi >section. So many people have read this and found ?it powerful that it has taken on a palpable mystique. It's like saying you don't >like apple pie. Everyone likes apple pie. And that's the way it should be. Same with Dune.
I think what is truly out step with REAL science fiction readers is the type of herd mentality that apparently rules your life. Palpable mystique, everyone likes apple pie? Those are some of the weakest rationales I have heard for doing anything.
>Why do you think he kept writing sequels? Because he was bored? No, it was because people kept buying and reading them.
Volume does not equate to quality, nor does popularity. If this were the case the works of Danielle Steele (spelling) would all have to be crowned as literary masterpiece and classics in their own right. Ditto for much of the other trash that so regularly dominates the top ten best seller list.
Though it is off topic, reading these posts brings to mind one central question:
Why is ESR afforded so much attention?
Based on what I have seen, I fail to see where or how he has contributed to the open source movement in even the most trivial of ways.
While he has certainly done well for himself, (speaking engagements, etc.) acting as a self proclaimed spokesman for the open source community what has he really contributed to that same community (Does fetchmail really count)?
There are any number of real contributors to the open source community (Larry Wall, Richard Stallman, anyone in the apache foundation just to name a few) out there. Anyone of which would be happy to comment on any aspect of the open source phenomenon and its impact on the software world in general.
I think another really big problem on slashdot is the number of weak ass, donkey-humping, shit eating bitches who don't know how to use profanity effectively!
We'll use this post as an example. Let's see, essentially we have mother fucker and cocksucker. Gee, those really hurt my feelings! Come on people, is that the best you can do? I bet your typical 2nd grader is more creative then that!
Now lets rework a portion of this post to demonstrate sharper more effective profanity. Let's use the lead sentence for our example.
Initially it reads: Yo motherfucker, why don't you take your ignorance and blow it out your ass?
Now, does this really effectively communicate your disdain for this individuals post? I think not.
Let's try this: Listen here you uncle fucking, goat luv'en, dick sucking, piece o' shit, cretin. Why don't you keep your lame, weak ass, dumb fuck, stank ass opinions to your bitch-ass self.
Now, the person who read this as part of a reply to their post will have no doubts as to the person's feelings toward them or their post. That lack of ambiguity is really what you are striving for.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right. So remember, next time you're tempted to throw a bit of profanity into you post be a little creative. Don't fall back to using the same tired-ass, shit-stale, piss-stank goat berries that every other lame, down-syndrome looking, pig fucking retard on the net has already used. Push yourself a little, the results are well worth it.
Games driving the market, I really don't think so! The primary catalyst behind computer development has been and will continue to be buisness systems developed to perform information processing for a useful purpose. Take a look at the dollars spent on IT systems, data centers etc. and then compare that amount to the dollar amount invested in the whole gaming industry (including console systems as well as PC based games) and you'll find that money involved in the gaming industry is very small potatos when looked at side by side with the IT world.
Slashdot Mirror
I am boycotting the 21st century. Maybe if it gets better I'll participate but until then I'm sticking with my tomes, and abacus.
Ha, if you think Tennant is good, check the older incarnations of Dr. Who such as Tom Baker!
Wow, I bow my head in respect to all those who's mastery of Whovian lore far exceeds mine!
Yes I know its fiction/TV but there should still be some pressure to keep consistent within whatever rules supposedly govern the fictional universe.
As other have pointed out though, the latter Dr. who serious have not been very good at do this.
Exactly, Tom Baker (and maybe Pertwee) will always be the quintessential Dr. Who! I found everything after Peter Davidson pretty much unwatchable.
Maybe this explains why they put wrestling on SciFi.
*shudder*
So what are the adults supposed to watch?
Seems like they have been burning through regenerations in the latter Dr. Who series. What are they gonna do when they hit twelve? No more Dr. Who?
***Go do it yourself. I'm pointing out the fact that it's a trend.***
You're not pointing out a fact at all, just spewing your factually unsupported opinion. There is a world of difference between the two.
***I certainly don't need to prove it. If you're interested, go look it up yourself.***
Which is really just another way of saying "I like to spew nonsense, but not be burdened with the work of ensuring what I'm saying is remotely based in reality"
Wow, an entire post filled with broad, sweeping, generalizations and not a shred of proof provided to substantiate any of your claims. Sounds like a troll to me.
Statistics are great, but often abused especially by people who do not bother to look at the data behind a particular statistic. Your post mirrors the same erroneous ideas found in an article [1] I read earlier on zdnet this year, touting the supposed security advantage of IIS6 over Apache2. The article allowed comments, and one of the thread of comments [2] picked apart the fallacy behind this statistic quite well.
t hreadID=9147&messageID=183193&start=-12
I've include the link to the article and the retort below.
[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?p=44
[2] http://www.zdnet.com/5208-10533-0.html?forumID=1&
I think I'll just read a book instead.
There are no issues with compatibility, DRM, or any other technical concerns. My intelligence will not be lowered through mere exposure, and I don't have to choose which evil corporate entity (I detest both Sony and MS) I support by purchasing anyone's product.
Sounds like a winner to me.
Rather then mocking the post perhaps you should be appreciative of the steady success of an operating system that has survived and prospered for over a quarter of a century.
OpenVMS has embraced and innovated concepts like clustering and high availability long before they came into vogue amongst the Unix world. It may not be everyone's idea of a "sexy" operating system but it has gotten the job done for quite some time now.
As someone with both extensive technical background and solid leadership and project management skills I can state for a fact that my ability to successfully envision, flesh out (e.g. requirements and design documents), estimate and plan (e.g. develop project schedules and resource estimates which I then translate into MS-project) a project or development effort is inextricably linked to my understanding of that project and its technical underpinnings.
Over the course of my career I have dealt with legions of formal "project managers", (folks who are pure project managers lacking any technical background) and I have yet to realize any value in my interactions with any of them, beyond the occasional willingness to record meeting minutes.
To date I have found them to be glorified secretaries, whose primary tactic is to latch on to knowledgeable people and not only drain information but actually get them to perform the real tasks of project management, such as scheduling and resource estimation.
In addition, many of these folks like to act as middlemen, brokering information and jealously hiding their sources so people must go to them for information. This would not be a terrible thing if they actually understand the project and had the knowledge required to effectively answer questions and communicate the status of the project accurately but that is very rarely (never in my experience) the case.
In my own experience, I have had a number of project managers assigned to various efforts I was responsible for, ostensibly so I could focus purely on the development effort and on technical leadership. In every case I have spent months working with a non technical project manager, spending 3-4 hrs a day with this person reviewing (creating) the project plan and having to spoon feed information to them (essentially so they could answer questions in meetings) as well making detailed suggestions about how they could overcome some obstacle external to our group that was needed in order for the project to succeed. In the mean time while this significant chunk of my time is being invested into sharpening my puppeteering skills the formal project manager has been horrible miscommunication project requirements and status to other groups.
So in short order these folks are out and I'm back attending meetings and working with external groups as well internal.
The primary factor behind the ineffectiveness of these folks is there complete lack of technical background. Successful project management is not just about writing up project plans and throwing dates and times down, its about understand the underlying objectives, as well as the pitfalls and obstacles in the way of those objectives. It's about understanding the project goals thoroughly enough to be able to determine what tasks are required to accomplish the project and making resource estimates that are realistic and effective.
This understanding and affinity for the project is something formal project managers very rarely have.
> However, I hate browsing the internet with a 56k modem more;)
vivent la résistance
Why would anyone with even basic intelligence automatically assume that a candidate with an MCSE certification (or any other cert for that matter) is worth less then a candidate without such a certificate?
This has to be one of the most backwards lines of thought I've heard in a while.
First off, in a correctly conducted job search a candidate's worth would be based on their actual experience as determined by a hopefully extensive interview process and not judged on the alphabet soup of buzzwords they have on their resume.
There are many extremely experienced technical folks out there that are smart enough to realize that certifications (MSCE or other) can be very helpful in securing employment, which is why they get them!
In addition, many companies are able to maintain reseller agreements, and other business partnerships with vendors based on having a certain number of certified staff on board, thus making the hire of a person who is already certified even more attractive.
So I would say the implicit assumption that someone with an MCSE is inherently less "cluefull" then someone without is just another line of clap-trap from the cro-mags that expound other useless philosophies such as "real men don't read manuals."
Blah to the lot of ya.
>People at that time were the same as now, just doing their jobs, trying to make a living etc.
...
mmmm hmmm
Just following orders, right?
I've read through the replies to my post, and it looks like people perceived the following:
... gasp ... compiling KDE. Whoop de freaking do!
* I was taking pot shots at the profession of systems administrator.
* I was implying that sys admins couldn't be hackers.
Neither of these is the case, nor was I implying them.
I did use the term "glorified sys admin" once in the post, so I guess shame on me. I do think that some of the conclusions people took away from post were kind of a stretch but so be it.
What I was railing against was applying the term hacker to someone just because they run a particular operating system, exhibit odd behavior or spend all day staring at a screen.
(This description seems to sum up the person the author of the article is focusing on)
None of these things in and of themselves make you a hacker, a geek maybe, but not a hacker.
If anything, hacking is about results and effectiveness, not superficial appearances.
The article seemed to be all about superficiality, which is why I had a negative reaction to it.
I also had a bad reaction to the article due to what I felt was a strong similarity between the attributes of a supposed hacker that the author chose to dwell on and some of the traits exhibited by two ex-coworkers.
The author seemed to be overly impressed by the fact the sys admin in the article was installing the 2.4 kernel, or because he was
Like the author, my ex-coworkers seemed to revel in the superficial.
They had just the appropriate number of Linux posters put up in their cubes, the obligatory tux stuffed animal, an impressive library of virtually unused technical books (mostly Oreilly, of course) on their shelves, several PC's in their cubes, each running a different distro of Linux (which seemed to change weekly).
Despite all these trappings, they were useless when it came time to doing actual work, such as installing and appropriately configuring our development/test systems (Solaris + custom app), scripting in Perl/DBI, configuring and tuning Oracle, working on the load balancing/DNS component of our solution or developing any other aspects of the service.
Requests for them to do work were greeted with some flip response and then right back to making yet another failed attempt to correctly compile enlightment or get transparent e-terms working.
Given what I read in the article, the author would probably consider my ex-coworkers hackers as well and of he would be outrageously incorrect.
Slackers and phonies maybe, but definitely not hackers.
This article is pretentious crap. I doubt I'll bother with the book.
I use open source software all the time, like so:
Configure --options-go-here
make
make install
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
Sometimes I even have to perform small customizations to a piece of open source code prior to performing the steps mentioned above.
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
Sometimes installs have problems and I need to review and make small fixes to what make install (or what ever the installer is) is doing in order for things to install cleanly.
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
What all these things make me is an educated consumer of open source code, nothing more.
Hackers are the people who actually do the hard work of the writing the software that the rest of us use to get our work done.
I really doubt the glorified sys admin in the article will be writing the next version of Perl or Apache anytime soon.
He's a code consumer like the rest of us, and apparently one with out much in the way of time management skills.
Which brings me to my second point...
Our development group "had" two induhviduals who exhibited many of the same behaviors as the one mentioned in the article.
They spent inordinate amounts of time building the current latest pen-ultimate Linux desktop, spent weeks are the holy grail of the perfect configuration of enlightment, had impressive arrays of hardware on their desk, were always suggesting that we use some obscure but "cool" open source tool to do a job and then spending weeks trying to build said tool only to come up weeks later with neither the tool or the work completed. On top of this they would come and go as they pleased, showing up at 11 and then bailing at 5, as well as constantly blowing off meetings.
After about 5-6 months of zero productivity they were both fired, and good riddance.
And now my point, the behavior of these two induhviduals seemed very close to that described in the article. This behavior seems to be linked to being a hacker and in fact the article is promoting the book "The Hacker Ethic". I think this is erroneous; the name of the article should be changed to "Hunting the wild poser" or maybe even "hunting the wild wanna-be".
:)
It's a good thing you don't work where I do else you would be banished to sensitivity training
for an entire work day... _shudder_
How about the following:
The "Book of the New Sun" series by Gene Wolfe
The "Galactic Center" series by Gregory Benford
I will also include this one even though it is fantasy and not exactly current.
The "Earthsea" series by Ursala LeGuin
>You see that this puts you way out of step with most REAL science fiction readers. In fact, so
>much so that you should probably not make your opinion about this series public.
Actually it puts him right into the fairly large group of REAL science fiction readers that after multiple attempts have finally fought their way through the long-winded, pretentious and fairly boring first edition of the dune series. I myself did this largely because if it's supposed reputation as a piece of classic science fiction. I should have trusted my initial impression of the book.
And even if as you suggest his opinion is so widely out of step with the majority of science fiction readers (which it most certainly is not), why should he not voice his it?
>It's your right, and I don't have a problem with it, but dude..... It's a classic. It can still be found in any bookstore with a sci fi >section. So many people have read this and found ?it powerful that it has taken on a palpable mystique. It's like saying you don't >like apple pie. Everyone likes apple pie. And that's the way it should be. Same with Dune.
I think what is truly out step with REAL science fiction readers is the type of herd mentality that apparently rules your life. Palpable mystique, everyone likes apple pie? Those are some of the weakest rationales I have heard for doing anything.
>Why do you think he kept writing sequels? Because he was bored? No, it was because people kept buying and reading them.
Volume does not equate to quality, nor does popularity. If this were the case the works of Danielle Steele (spelling) would all have to be crowned as literary masterpiece and classics in their own right. Ditto for much of the other trash that so regularly dominates the top ten best seller list.
Though it is off topic, reading these posts brings to mind one central question:
Why is ESR afforded so much attention?
Based on what I have seen, I fail to see where or how he has contributed to the open source movement in even the most trivial of ways.
While he has certainly done well for himself, (speaking engagements, etc.) acting as a self proclaimed spokesman for the open source community what has he really contributed to that same community (Does fetchmail really count)?
There are any number of real contributors to the open source community (Larry Wall, Richard Stallman, anyone in the apache foundation just to name a few) out there. Anyone of which would be happy to comment on any aspect of the open source phenomenon and its impact on the software world in general.
So why waste even an ounce of attention on ESR?
I think another really big problem on slashdot is the number of weak ass, donkey-humping, shit eating bitches who don't know how to use profanity effectively!
We'll use this post as an example. Let's see, essentially we have mother fucker and cocksucker. Gee, those really hurt my feelings! Come on people, is that the best you can do? I bet your typical 2nd grader is more creative then that!
Now lets rework a portion of this post to demonstrate sharper more effective profanity. Let's use the lead sentence for our example.
Initially it reads:
Yo motherfucker, why don't you take your ignorance and blow it out your ass?
Now, does this really effectively communicate your disdain for this individuals post? I think not.
Let's try this:
Listen here you uncle fucking, goat luv'en, dick sucking, piece o' shit, cretin. Why don't you keep your lame, weak ass, dumb fuck, stank ass opinions to your bitch-ass self.
Now, the person who read this as part of a reply to their post will have no doubts as to the person's feelings toward them or their post. That lack of ambiguity is really what you are striving for.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right. So remember, next time you're tempted to throw a bit of profanity into you post be a little creative. Don't fall back to using the same tired-ass, shit-stale, piss-stank goat berries that every other lame, down-syndrome looking, pig fucking retard on the net has already used. Push yourself a little, the results are well worth it.
Over and out.
Games driving the market, I really don't think so! The primary catalyst behind computer development has been and will continue to be buisness systems developed to perform information processing for a useful purpose. Take a look at the dollars spent on IT systems, data centers etc. and then compare that amount to the dollar amount invested in the whole gaming industry (including console systems as well as PC based games) and you'll find that money involved in the gaming industry is very small potatos when looked at side by side with the IT world.