I've had times when someone asks someone else for a quick n dirty script to do one little thing, or to just produce a quick report to read a number. The request ended up to me as get this report done properly, double check everything, make it look pretty and built a nice and secure interface because the big guys want it. Now the difference may be 30min to 2 days there.
I dont know how much do the dudes in India suck, I just know that the best results are obtained when I'm sitting with the person requesting the project, looking into my eyes and expressing the importance of the various parts of the project in a language that cannot be written. Send the same request to India through 3 people, to a totally different culture, so many time zones away that they cannot ask quick questions while they're working on it. And you'll end up with spaghetti.
The problem with IT is there are way too many ways to do one thing, and a bigger problem is the people who are requesting the results cant define it clearly because theyre not IT people. In meetings I frequently finish the requester's sentences because (s)he cant clearly express what (s)hes looking for.
Now you could say Indian workers suck when they have software companies in India able to compete in International markets on equal terms, and still produce sucky software.
Yet I agree with the 'chalta hai' attitude that stretches from Karachi to Dacca. It means 'it'll work' or more like, the stupid white men will buy it. The recent IT craze in which countless uninterested kids entered the field in a goldrush doesnt help things either.
More to do with culture. Nothing to do with racism.
Linux is free. That means if you dont like the direction, just fork it and improve it. You can still call it Linux. The better fork will win in the community.
Now Solaris is free (kinda, I have reservations about the license). That means people have Solaris code available to them. If Linux is generally good, except for some solaris features, they'll just port those features to Linux. If Solaris is awesome except for some Linux features, the same will happen. In the end we'll have code that is good, does cool things and is free. Whether you call it Solaris because you think it was 'descended' from Solaris or Linux, is a political matter. Linux wasnt threaded or ran ELF in the beginning. It wasnt SMP. Now its all those. Can we say it is a Solaris with the Linux name?
Canada does have that effect on everyone who visits the country. Here in Toronto, there are many places where strangers say 'hi' to each other as they walk by, like people do in small villages. Toronto is the biggest city.
However, there are places where it feels worse than the US. Most immigrants like me who visit Montreal or Quebec make the huge mistake of speaking English to the locals there. You see them watching english channels and reading english newspapers, but try speaking the language. Suddenly you're about to get lynched.
I have also been not impressed with the way native people are treated in some places. However they are treated extremely well compared to the neighbors in the south. But I shouldnt rant away in public. It is unbecoming of a Canuck.
And broken games. He will have to get into the BASIC code to fix things.
More seriously, he wont be digging into wikipedia data yet, and cant program that early. Beside browsing websites and drawing pictures, its all games for him.
Do get him hooked up to games on the PC instead of consoles. In a console you just insert the disc and there you go. In the PC you have to install the game, and configure things like the resolution. Dont underestimate the power of broken games to teach alot about how the computers work.
Build a model, add the sun, all planets (or what your definition of a planet is), all their moons, asteroid belt, and you should have it approximate enough. I was gonna say add the gravity of the major satellites, closest stars, the milky way, but any spacecraft can correct any bit of gravitational damage to the path from these tiny factors.
Oh and add the solar particle forces to the equation, which fluctuate randomly.
And the natural selection of good apps depend more on NEED than WANT.
Think of the Spitfire fighters. They were cool. They no longer exist because better aircraft have appeared. Even the F-16 flew awesome, and is now replaced with more automated stealth fighters, and will soon be replaced with unmanned drones. Now I would prefer to see spitfires zip across the skies rather than drones, and dogfight videos rather than nightvision targets blowing up. But thats wanting what you dont need.
I loved the IBM model M keyboards, and their feel. But I chucked them out because they were loud and heavy, and didnt buy another because the market produces cheaper and lighter keyboards now. All the new IBM keyboards are pretty good and at a good price given their easy mass production and low quantity of plastic. So I'll use these now, and remember the gool ol days.
What if the terrorist threat has expanded, with a much larger organization backed by several states? They'd develop nuclear weapons first, so whats the next step?
Taking their countries offline would be the first step then, so that like the WWII, they could do whatever in their countries they want without satellies looking at them, radars tracking them or cruise missiles smacking them. That is achieved by destroying satellies breaking all communication around the world.
Destroying satellites may well be easier than destroying fighter jets. You just scan the clear skies and locate all the orbiting objects, and destroy as many as possible by laser or more conventional means.
Now the US sphere of influence isnt just in the USA, its in outer space, all the high seas and even the atmosphere of the 'terrorist-infected' countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes the production of chemical and nuclear weapons by terrorists very difficult. To keep this sphere of influence where it is, you need space weapons.
Sure it will spark a space race, but havent the nuclear weapons done that? The only people who can match the US are the large countries who desperately need economic uplift and need to keep their governments intact, and so will never need to go at war with the US. It is frequently these large countries who are themselves fighting the same 'terrorists'.
I remember my electrolysis experiments. There are issues with this product:
(1) High power usage. (2) Residue. I just couldnt find ways to keep the water clean enough beside distilling it. The chemistry textbook suggested a few drops of h2so4 but that worsened things. (3) Bad marketing. It claims oxygen will be released in the room. In fact no net oxygen will be produced if all the hydrogen is burnt. (4) Ignition is ALSO required.
A better product might be maybe somthing that further compresses the gases in a rocket and you get a hydrogen-propelled rocket. Or possibly combine both the H and O in a container and ignite for a nice pop.
We keep knoppix CDs just for this purpose; hardware diagnostics. dmesg and the/var/log/messages provide information that is otherwise hard to obtain from Windows 2000 or XP, especially if you cant boot the windows.
Another crucial thing is lspci, which is absent from windows. Say you do a fresh install of windows, which does not detect the network card. How do you know what card is it to obtain the drivers for? In windows you just cant so easily get the PCI information. Enter knoppix.
I have also used memtest in knoppix and found memory issues before, where windows simply acted up. The problem with windows is you have to boot the entire OS and take ~130MB of Ram and resolve all IRQs before you can run Sandra or the likes. Memory issues, disk issues or IRQ issues will prevent you from booting even.
Knoppix when booted in single-user mode takes little memory, and you can boot it not to use ACPI, not to use HLT instruction, not to detect SCSI that might freeze the system etc. Then you can diagnose the system. Just get a CD and read the man pages of various tools on the CD.
I oppose Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. I MUST be a terrorist.
I wonder if all blogs that display opinion against the WOT can be considered terrorist in nature and be shut down no matter where they're being hosted.
I oppose Britain's involvement in Iraq!
There. That should qualify it being a terrorist statement. Now I'll sit back and watch a slashdot editor being forced to remove that post.
Please do not WOW slashdot users by using 'width of human hair'. Just give us the plain metric or scientific units like 1.3E-4 Something like.45nm fabrication plant will WOW me no matter what the fraction of ape hair it is.
A computer repair/upgrade business is just tough. Simpler stuff like virus removal is something for which people will not notice anything different and possibly expect more (my Internet still doesnt work).
Hardware or software upgrade is even worse. Conflicts might appear later in usage and youll be held responsible. In fact, any subsequent problems with the computer will be your responsibility and their call will just me 'my computer doesnt work' followed by silence implying you should just FIX it since you fixed it the last time.
One thing you can do is offer just complete reinstalls, while requiring serial keys from them. Use a remote windows installation system to just clear the harddrive and install everything, burn a ghost image and keep the image for the next time they bring the computer in. Do NOT attempt to clean spyware or the likes. Just clean format and reinstall for $100 or something and nothing else.
Anything else will either take too much of your time, is too prone to failure and subsequent blame, or will cost equal to a new computer. This is very similar to the car mechanic business. They have a reputation of ripping people off just because the customers dont know what theyre asking for or even whats wrong. Same story.
Better idea: offer computer leases. Give them computers for a monthly fixed payment and dont provide the admin passwords. Disable software installs. Should anything break they'll just bring it in and youll reghost the machine no questions asked. I expect such services to be in demand since I see way too many people walking around with infected computers wondering how to fix it and how to keep it fixed for a price less than the value of the damn machine.
Theres an entirely different reason for switching from AOL. They now require all email senders to be listed with them as HAM senders. They asked us to ask our ISP to list all their IP addresses as HAM addresses, even though we alone handle our mailservers.
So we currently cannot send emails to AOL. Their demands are rediculous for the previlege of being able to send emails to AOL members. I'd rather tell all our users AOL doesnt take our emails.
The OP should get his father off AOL simply so he could receive emails from people.
Seriously who is in a LUG anymore? Linux is mainstream now. Its no longer about 'hey we're cool we use Linux', people everywhere use Linux, sometimes without even knowing it.
Do LUGs include people who use Linksys routers?
Linux developers OTOH frequently also develop on Win32, Solaris, BSD and other stuff
Cisco's certs push cisco technologies over other sane technologies. For example they suggest EIGRP is better than OSPF and should be used.
Like wise BSD certs should be like:
Which OS is more stable? (a) Linux (b) BSD (b) Windows
Which License is best for real FREE software? (a) GPL (b) BSD (c) MIT
Which OS will soon surpass Linux? (a) None (b) SkyOS (c) BSD
Why is BSD less in use than Linux? (a) The stupid AT&T lawsuits (b) Less propaganda (c) Less corporate support (d) No bells n whistles (e) More geekcentric than fanboycentric (f) GPL has been overly and wrongly marketed (g) All of the above
Which OS's TCPIP stack is used EVERYWHERE? (a) Trumpet TCPIP stack (b) BSD (c) DEC (d) cisco
What should you worship to pass this test? (a) ZetaOS (b) ELKS (c) Minix (d) Sybian (e) ReactOS (f) BSD
Section B
Please List at least 20 developers who have worked on the BSD kernel
Section C
Write an essay on either (a) the early days of infighting in the BSD camp with allowed Linux the lead or (b) The BSD developed heirarchy. Should you even hint Linux is better or BSD is dying your paper will be torn angrily to shreds and a small but strong BSD mob will break into your house and delete your partitions.
...when they have news like this and absolutely no pictures. Remember the giant catfish? Most of the value of the news was in the pictures which showed the fish compared with people, pictures worth a thousand words.
Now how would you feel if you had read all about elephants and never seen one?
I somehow associated opera with the acid2 passing. I think i read the opera guy promising to pass the test or something in an interview. Just tested it too.
FF is at a sweet spot, works rather well and fast. Add more, its too heavy. Remove stuff its too light.
The only way forward I think is complete integration of SVG(coming!), complete compliance with HTTP, HTML and XML standards (possible SMGL too); as much as it should pass the ACID2 test which only one test opera version has passed.
I moved to opera from firefox simply because opera is slightly faster. Theyre not too different in functionality otherwise. Opera is also better standards compliant. This is where I want FF to catch up.
Apart from these, a browser is most needed where there are no native browsers. Firefox is the first thing I download when I install Solaris or AIX. They should keep updated ports for all the architectures, even the lesser known ones and the dead ones like openvms, beos, OS2 etc.
Slashdot Mirror
There will be fake Hugh Hefner graves all over the country.
I've had times when someone asks someone else for a quick n dirty script to do one little thing, or to just produce a quick report to read a number. The request ended up to me as get this report done properly, double check everything, make it look pretty and built a nice and secure interface because the big guys want it. Now the difference may be 30min to 2 days there.
I dont know how much do the dudes in India suck, I just know that the best results are obtained when I'm sitting with the person requesting the project, looking into my eyes and expressing the importance of the various parts of the project in a language that cannot be written. Send the same request to India through 3 people, to a totally different culture, so many time zones away that they cannot ask quick questions while they're working on it. And you'll end up with spaghetti.
The problem with IT is there are way too many ways to do one thing, and a bigger problem is the people who are requesting the results cant define it clearly because theyre not IT people. In meetings I frequently finish the requester's sentences because (s)he cant clearly express what (s)hes looking for.
Now you could say Indian workers suck when they have software companies in India able to compete in International markets on equal terms, and still produce sucky software.
Yet I agree with the 'chalta hai' attitude that stretches from Karachi to Dacca. It means 'it'll work' or more like, the stupid white men will buy it. The recent IT craze in which countless uninterested kids entered the field in a goldrush doesnt help things either.
More to do with culture. Nothing to do with racism.
My feelings exactly.
Think of it this way:
Linux is free. That means if you dont like the direction, just fork it and improve it. You can still call it Linux. The better fork will win in the community.
Now Solaris is free (kinda, I have reservations about the license). That means people have Solaris code available to them. If Linux is generally good, except for some solaris features, they'll just port those features to Linux. If Solaris is awesome except for some Linux features, the same will happen. In the end we'll have code that is good, does cool things and is free. Whether you call it Solaris because you think it was 'descended' from Solaris or Linux, is a political matter. Linux wasnt threaded or ran ELF in the beginning. It wasnt SMP. Now its all those. Can we say it is a Solaris with the Linux name?
Wow. That was some war and peace rant.
Canada does have that effect on everyone who visits the country. Here in Toronto, there are many places where strangers say 'hi' to each other as they walk by, like people do in small villages. Toronto is the biggest city.
However, there are places where it feels worse than the US. Most immigrants like me who visit Montreal or Quebec make the huge mistake of speaking English to the locals there. You see them watching english channels and reading english newspapers, but try speaking the language. Suddenly you're about to get lynched.
I have also been not impressed with the way native people are treated in some places. However they are treated extremely well compared to the neighbors in the south. But I shouldnt rant away in public. It is unbecoming of a Canuck.
And broken games. He will have to get into the BASIC code to fix things.
More seriously, he wont be digging into wikipedia data yet, and cant program that early. Beside browsing websites and drawing pictures, its all games for him.
Do get him hooked up to games on the PC instead of consoles. In a console you just insert the disc and there you go. In the PC you have to install the game, and configure things like the resolution. Dont underestimate the power of broken games to teach alot about how the computers work.
Not just the moon. How about EVERYTHING?
Build a model, add the sun, all planets (or what your definition of a planet is), all their moons, asteroid belt, and you should have it approximate enough. I was gonna say add the gravity of the major satellites, closest stars, the milky way, but any spacecraft can correct any bit of gravitational damage to the path from these tiny factors.
Oh and add the solar particle forces to the equation, which fluctuate randomly.
If this thing could be made small enough, it could be put within the > bladder</a> (1.1 to 1.3 litres) to work as a permanent machine. It could talk using 802.11b and bluetooth, be its own 'hotspot' so that a human mesh can be made. You wouldnt need to carry a wallet at all. It could also check your health that way. I wonder if it can be used with a plug and an actuator to 'hold it' for you when you really have to go and have nowhere to go.
Those arent sysadmins. Sysadmins dont go crazy. They just secure systems.
But I didnt know you could install a screensaver like that. It'll get installed on this sysadmins system.
And the natural selection of good apps depend more on NEED than WANT.
Think of the Spitfire fighters. They were cool. They no longer exist because better aircraft have appeared. Even the F-16 flew awesome, and is now replaced with more automated stealth fighters, and will soon be replaced with unmanned drones. Now I would prefer to see spitfires zip across the skies rather than drones, and dogfight videos rather than nightvision targets blowing up. But thats wanting what you dont need.
I loved the IBM model M keyboards, and their feel. But I chucked them out because they were loud and heavy, and didnt buy another because the market produces cheaper and lighter keyboards now. All the new IBM keyboards are pretty good and at a good price given their easy mass production and low quantity of plastic. So I'll use these now, and remember the gool ol days.
What if the terrorist threat has expanded, with a much larger organization backed by several states? They'd develop nuclear weapons first, so whats the next step?
Taking their countries offline would be the first step then, so that like the WWII, they could do whatever in their countries they want without satellies looking at them, radars tracking them or cruise missiles smacking them. That is achieved by destroying satellies breaking all communication around the world.
Destroying satellites may well be easier than destroying fighter jets. You just scan the clear skies and locate all the orbiting objects, and destroy as many as possible by laser or more conventional means.
Now the US sphere of influence isnt just in the USA, its in outer space, all the high seas and even the atmosphere of the 'terrorist-infected' countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes the production of chemical and nuclear weapons by terrorists very difficult. To keep this sphere of influence where it is, you need space weapons.
Sure it will spark a space race, but havent the nuclear weapons done that? The only people who can match the US are the large countries who desperately need economic uplift and need to keep their governments intact, and so will never need to go at war with the US. It is frequently these large countries who are themselves fighting the same 'terrorists'.
Go find daemons out there to film now.
You're trusting slashdot articles and comments aren't you?
I remember my electrolysis experiments. There are issues with this product:
(1) High power usage.
(2) Residue. I just couldnt find ways to keep the water clean enough beside distilling it. The chemistry textbook suggested a few drops of h2so4 but that worsened things.
(3) Bad marketing. It claims oxygen will be released in the room. In fact no net oxygen will be produced if all the hydrogen is burnt.
(4) Ignition is ALSO required.
A better product might be maybe somthing that further compresses the gases in a rocket and you get a hydrogen-propelled rocket. Or possibly combine both the H and O in a container and ignite for a nice pop.
We keep knoppix CDs just for this purpose; hardware diagnostics. dmesg and the /var/log/messages provide information that is otherwise hard to obtain from Windows 2000 or XP, especially if you cant boot the windows.
Another crucial thing is lspci, which is absent from windows. Say you do a fresh install of windows, which does not detect the network card. How do you know what card is it to obtain the drivers for? In windows you just cant so easily get the PCI information. Enter knoppix.
I have also used memtest in knoppix and found memory issues before, where windows simply acted up. The problem with windows is you have to boot the entire OS and take ~130MB of Ram and resolve all IRQs before you can run Sandra or the likes. Memory issues, disk issues or IRQ issues will prevent you from booting even.
Knoppix when booted in single-user mode takes little memory, and you can boot it not to use ACPI, not to use HLT instruction, not to detect SCSI that might freeze the system etc. Then you can diagnose the system. Just get a CD and read the man pages of various tools on the CD.
I oppose Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. I MUST be a terrorist.
I wonder if all blogs that display opinion against the WOT can be considered terrorist in nature and be shut down no matter where they're being hosted.
I oppose Britain's involvement in Iraq!
There. That should qualify it being a terrorist statement. Now I'll sit back and watch a slashdot editor being forced to remove that post.
We do the same hard work anyway
Please do not WOW slashdot users by using 'width of human hair'. Just give us the plain metric or scientific units like 1.3E-4 Something like .45nm fabrication plant will WOW me no matter what the fraction of ape hair it is.
A computer repair/upgrade business is just tough. Simpler stuff like virus removal is something for which people will not notice anything different and possibly expect more (my Internet still doesnt work).
Hardware or software upgrade is even worse. Conflicts might appear later in usage and youll be held responsible. In fact, any subsequent problems with the computer will be your responsibility and their call will just me 'my computer doesnt work' followed by silence implying you should just FIX it since you fixed it the last time.
One thing you can do is offer just complete reinstalls, while requiring serial keys from them. Use a remote windows installation system to just clear the harddrive and install everything, burn a ghost image and keep the image for the next time they bring the computer in. Do NOT attempt to clean spyware or the likes. Just clean format and reinstall for $100 or something and nothing else.
Anything else will either take too much of your time, is too prone to failure and subsequent blame, or will cost equal to a new computer. This is very similar to the car mechanic business. They have a reputation of ripping people off just because the customers dont know what theyre asking for or even whats wrong. Same story.
Better idea: offer computer leases. Give them computers for a monthly fixed payment and dont provide the admin passwords. Disable software installs. Should anything break they'll just bring it in and youll reghost the machine no questions asked. I expect such services to be in demand since I see way too many people walking around with infected computers wondering how to fix it and how to keep it fixed for a price less than the value of the damn machine.
Theres an entirely different reason for switching from AOL. They now require all email senders to be listed with them as HAM senders. They asked us to ask our ISP to list all their IP addresses as HAM addresses, even though we alone handle our mailservers.
So we currently cannot send emails to AOL. Their demands are rediculous for the previlege of being able to send emails to AOL members. I'd rather tell all our users AOL doesnt take our emails.
The OP should get his father off AOL simply so he could receive emails from people.
The editor is not a coder.
Seriously who is in a LUG anymore? Linux is mainstream now. Its no longer about 'hey we're cool we use Linux', people everywhere use Linux, sometimes without even knowing it.
Do LUGs include people who use Linksys routers?
Linux developers OTOH frequently also develop on Win32, Solaris, BSD and other stuff
Cisco's certs push cisco technologies over other sane technologies. For example they suggest EIGRP is better than OSPF and should be used.
Like wise BSD certs should be like:
Which OS is more stable?
(a) Linux
(b) BSD
(b) Windows
Which License is best for real FREE software?
(a) GPL
(b) BSD
(c) MIT
Which OS will soon surpass Linux?
(a) None
(b) SkyOS
(c) BSD
Why is BSD less in use than Linux?
(a) The stupid AT&T lawsuits
(b) Less propaganda
(c) Less corporate support
(d) No bells n whistles
(e) More geekcentric than fanboycentric
(f) GPL has been overly and wrongly marketed
(g) All of the above
Which OS's TCPIP stack is used EVERYWHERE?
(a) Trumpet TCPIP stack
(b) BSD
(c) DEC
(d) cisco
What should you worship to pass this test?
(a) ZetaOS
(b) ELKS
(c) Minix
(d) Sybian
(e) ReactOS
(f) BSD
Section B
Please List at least 20 developers who have worked on the BSD kernel
Section C
Write an essay on either (a) the early days of infighting in the BSD camp with allowed Linux the lead or (b) The BSD developed heirarchy. Should you even hint Linux is better or BSD is dying your paper will be torn angrily to shreds and a small but strong BSD mob will break into your house and delete your partitions.
...when they have news like this and absolutely no pictures. Remember the giant catfish? Most of the value of the news was in the pictures which showed the fish compared with people, pictures worth a thousand words.
Now how would you feel if you had read all about elephants and never seen one?
Yer right.
I somehow associated opera with the acid2 passing. I think i read the opera guy promising to pass the test or something in an interview. Just tested it too.
Just something for browser makers to do.
FF is at a sweet spot, works rather well and fast. Add more, its too heavy. Remove stuff its too light.
The only way forward I think is complete integration of SVG(coming!), complete compliance with HTTP, HTML and XML standards (possible SMGL too); as much as it should pass the ACID2 test which only one test opera version has passed.
I moved to opera from firefox simply because opera is slightly faster. Theyre not too different in functionality otherwise. Opera is also better standards compliant. This is where I want FF to catch up.
Apart from these, a browser is most needed where there are no native browsers. Firefox is the first thing I download when I install Solaris or AIX. They should keep updated ports for all the architectures, even the lesser known ones and the dead ones like openvms, beos, OS2 etc.
Thats all I could ask for.
And what the heck is TURDLING?