Thanks for the generalization. I resent the statement that I lack the "motivation, nor the intellect to conceptualise or actually solve problems"
I work as a tier 1 support person on a scripted help desk. I have 25 years of computer experience- no formal training, but I can build a PC from scratch in my sleep, configure a wireless network with my eyes closed, and recite from memory most of the common scripts we use. We support 40000 users who use some subset of approximately 1200 applications ranging from Microsoft products to custom applications written by our own developers. My colleagues don't all have the same skill set I have, but we were all trained to the same basic standards. I've seen people fail the training and not be able to work in my department- I owe my job to one. Also, we are expected to reach customer satisfaction goals as well as call resolution goals.
For reasons I do not wish to discuss publicly, this job suits me very well. I'm motivated each day to come in, do my job, and when my shift ends, I go home and live my life without worrying about being on call, managing people, or other job related issues.
I get paid very well to spend my day resetting passwords, explaining to people how to archive their email, and creating tickets for printer jams. I deal with secretaries, executives, developers, and sales people, so I encounter end users of all skill levels. I also encounter problems not covered in our knowledgebase (the scripts). In every case, I do my best to resolve my caller's issues, scripted or not. Sometimes I do solve them. If not, I will pass them along to the appropriate Level 2 (or above) support team.
I find that some callers lie, some provide more information than I need, some won't provide any information. In short, they run the gamut of human experience, just like my colleagues do. The best callers are the ones who say "I don't know much about computers", because I can tell them that they don't need to be, they just need to answer my questions and follow the steps I give them. It's up to me to extract the information that I need to solve their problem from the things they say.
The bottom line, for me, is that if they knew the answers to their questions, I would not have a job. I treat each call as unique, and each customer with respect. I can't say the same for my treatment by the callers, but it doesn't bother me, because I do my best.
It's people like the parent poster that I have the hardest time dealing with- arrogance cloaked in superiority leads to more foolish mistakes than the people who call and say "I don't know much about computers", who tend to make more honest mistakes.
Actually, I thought the A-movie/B-Movie thing was from drive-ins (remember those?). The B-movie was the feature that ran before sundown, typically a lower quality film, the A-movie was the 'Top billed' film people actually came to see, and generally ran after sundown for better picture quality.
The last one I remember seeing was 'Return of the Living Dead/Desperately Seeking Susan', but I'll be damned if that's not an exception to my explanation... they're both 'B' movies at best!
At least 'Return' is thematically appropriate for the parent thread! BRAAAAIIINNNSSS!
"always be able to kill your students" seems pretty self-defeating, to me. It implies that the master could die (eventually), knowing more than the student, who then becomse the master, and doesn't teach his student everything he knows, and so on... depending on how much knowledge there is to start with, eventually, you have an idiot teaching a half-wit ALMOST everything he knows...
A cheap "easiest install ever" post is useless- no idea what level user you are, what version, what kind of hardware... etc. Those are all factors in ease of install and use. I don't think installing an OS is for ANY newbie, unless it's in a guided environment.
In the last month, on the same machine, I've tried RH9, FC1, SuSE Personal 9.1 (twice), Mandrake 10.0 Official, Slackware 10, Knoppix 3.4 Live CD, and ultimately FC2 twice- full install, reformatted and then did a personal workstation install.
I've been using computers since I had to program in BASIC, and when I was first looking at Linux, I took a basic community college course aimed at Red Hat 7.
Every distro I've tried has had shortcomings. SuSE had issues with my NVidia audio... which was reported as AC'97. There were some sneering links through Google that indicated that this could be resolved by recompiling my kernel following instructions either at NVidia or various other places. Since recompiling the kernel defeats the purpose of a simple install experience, I bailed. That was the first time. The second time, it seemed to install fine, but couldn't write to some config files for KDE, and wouldn't boot into runlevel 5 on the first boot. I didn't want to figure it out, so that install failed.
Slackware didn't see any Linux partitions on the HD I selected, even though I was installing over previous installs. I couldn't make heads or tails out of the CLI formatting options, and when I finally did, and the install started, I was told by the installer that there wasn't a valid Slackware install image on the CD I was installing from. End of that attempt, leaving me with a blank-but-ext3 formatted HD.
Mandrake had to be burned to a second set of CD's, as there may have been issues with the quality or condition of the first set. The second set installed, but threw errors reading some install packages, and when it booted, I couldn't tell if things weren't working because those packages failed or some other inherent flaw in the OS. So that went out the window.
Knoppix... well, I didn't feel like figuring out how to install it to a hard drive. I'm sure it's not that hard, but the look and feel of the CD distro was offputting, as well. It's almost too "leet" to use.
The various flavors of RH, up to and including FC2 have given me the least grief, mostly just adding MP3 support and some others. I still can't print to my HP Laserjet1000 without switching to XP, even after downloading the firmware, extracting the critical file, and successfully uploading it to the printer.
I also can't get the Java virtual machine to work- in page Javascript is fine, but I paid for stat-tracking in my Yahoo fantasy baseball leagues, and the live updates are done in a Java applet that asks for the plugin everytime. That may be because I use Firefox instead of Mozilla and I just need to set my class path correctly, but, again, so much for "ease-of-use"!
All that being said, I also did an upgrade from 98->XP Pro for mom & dad, and that didn't go smoothly, either. A clean install, however, did go much more smoothly than any of my Linux installs, but I did have to replace their modem after, because under XP it would go offline after 2 minutes no matter which driver we used, and which numbers their ISP provided.
In any case, my Dad, the ultimate newbie (at 68!) wouldn't have been able to handle ANY of the roadblocks that installing ANY OS involves. He also believes that computers "should be as simple to use as a refrigerator door", which infuriates me. I don't think it's a linux vs windoze issue.
I do think that OEM support would help- if a Dell or Gateway or eMachines had Linux installed at the factory, all the application names made sense (how is Dad supposed to know that you burn CD's with K3B?), and it all worked right out of the box, my dad wouldn't care if you called the OS Myxtylplyzx, as long as he could get online, type (& print!) letters, and play Mah-jhongg and solitaire.
I appreciate all the help I've gotten from the Linux community over the years, but if installing, configuring, and using Linux was "easy", I wouldn't have needed most of it.
Charles DeLint is a Canadian author (& songwriter & poet &...)who writes brilliant urban fantasy- most set in Newford, a city that doesn't exist but should. Try "Moonheart" as a jumping on point.
Or try Guy Gavriel Kay- If you liked Tolkien. He worked with Christopher on some of the early "Lost Tales" books, then moved on to his own stuff when her realized that CT was going to publish every scrap of JRRT's writing down to the last cocktail napkin. Kay has written "The Fionavar Tapestry", a great trilogy, and some good stand alone stuff, too.
And for a Canadian trifecta, of course there's Spider Robinson, once dubbed the "Next Robert Heinlein" (Of course that was 25 years ago...) He's never lived up to it, but who could? He's still a must-read, IMHO. The Callahan's books are the best place to start, as is the short story collection "Melancholy Elephants".
Robin Hobb (who is also Megan Lindholm) has written some solid non-trad fantasies, including the Assassin's Apprentice Trilogy, the Liveship Traders books, and the Farseer Triliogy. She's tying them all together in the Tawny Man series.
JV Jones's "The Baker's Boy" series is good too, and I enjoyed "Cavern of Black Ice", but I'm dying for the sequel (2-plus years overdue). "The Barbed Coil", too.
Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books have become few & far between, but are always excellent. The Adept series is okay- sort of like Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" without, well, the magic going away.
And if you like alternate realities, Harry Turtledove is your guy- "Guns Of The South" for example, but his entire "World at War" series, etc.
SM Stirling wrote a cool trilogy about Nantucket being sent back to the 1200's or so. Just Nantucket. "Island In The Sea Of Time" et al.
I'll second every "Song of Ice & Fire" recommendation, too. One of the best high fantasy series.
I used to manage a chain bookstore... can you tell? I could go on and on...
And I thought I was the only one who remembered them! I just dug out my copy of "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in The Mystery of the Green Ghost" to compare with the similarly titled "The Three Investigators and the Mystery of the Green Ghost" reprinted in the early 90's. I think they cut the Hitchcock refereneces for a generation that didn't know him, but I want to know for sure!
I always envied Jupe and all the secret passages in the salvage yard!
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the generalization. I resent the statement that I lack the "motivation, nor the intellect to conceptualise or actually solve problems"
I work as a tier 1 support person on a scripted help desk. I have 25 years of computer experience- no formal training, but I can build a PC from scratch in my sleep, configure a wireless network with my eyes closed, and recite from memory most of the common scripts we use. We support 40000 users who use some subset of approximately 1200 applications ranging from Microsoft products to custom applications written by our own developers. My colleagues don't all have the same skill set I have, but we were all trained to the same basic standards. I've seen people fail the training and not be able to work in my department- I owe my job to one. Also, we are expected to reach customer satisfaction goals as well as call resolution goals.
For reasons I do not wish to discuss publicly, this job suits me very well. I'm motivated each day to come in, do my job, and when my shift ends, I go home and live my life without worrying about being on call, managing people, or other job related issues.
I get paid very well to spend my day resetting passwords, explaining to people how to archive their email, and creating tickets for printer jams. I deal with secretaries, executives, developers, and sales people, so I encounter end users of all skill levels. I also encounter problems not covered in our knowledgebase (the scripts). In every case, I do my best to resolve my caller's issues, scripted or not. Sometimes I do solve them. If not, I will pass them along to the appropriate Level 2 (or above) support team.
I find that some callers lie, some provide more information than I need, some won't provide any information. In short, they run the gamut of human experience, just like my colleagues do. The best callers are the ones who say "I don't know much about computers", because I can tell them that they don't need to be, they just need to answer my questions and follow the steps I give them. It's up to me to extract the information that I need to solve their problem from the things they say.
The bottom line, for me, is that if they knew the answers to their questions, I would not have a job. I treat each call as unique, and each customer with respect. I can't say the same for my treatment by the callers, but it doesn't bother me, because I do my best.
It's people like the parent poster that I have the hardest time dealing with- arrogance cloaked in superiority leads to more foolish mistakes than the people who call and say "I don't know much about computers", who tend to make more honest mistakes.
Actually, I thought the A-movie/B-Movie thing was from drive-ins (remember those?). The B-movie was the feature that ran before sundown, typically a lower quality film, the A-movie was the 'Top billed' film people actually came to see, and generally ran after sundown for better picture quality.
The last one I remember seeing was 'Return of the Living Dead/Desperately Seeking Susan', but I'll be damned if that's not an exception to my explanation... they're both 'B' movies at best!
At least 'Return' is thematically appropriate for the parent thread! BRAAAAIIINNNSSS!
"always be able to kill your students" seems pretty self-defeating, to me. It implies that the master could die (eventually), knowing more than the student, who then becomse the master, and doesn't teach his student everything he knows, and so on... depending on how much knowledge there is to start with, eventually, you have an idiot teaching a half-wit ALMOST everything he knows...
Didn't Apple jump from ADB to USB keyboards & mice anyway?
I'll admit, I gave up my 1st gen Power PC Mac when I started building PC's from scratch, but I don't remember any Macs with PS/2 ports, anyway.
C'mon... that's just flame bait.
A cheap "easiest install ever" post is useless- no idea what level user you are, what version, what kind of hardware... etc. Those are all factors in ease of install and use. I don't think installing an OS is for ANY newbie, unless it's in a guided environment.
In the last month, on the same machine, I've tried RH9, FC1, SuSE Personal 9.1 (twice), Mandrake 10.0 Official, Slackware 10, Knoppix 3.4 Live CD, and ultimately FC2 twice- full install, reformatted and then did a personal workstation install.
I've been using computers since I had to program in BASIC, and when I was first looking at Linux, I took a basic community college course aimed at Red Hat 7.
Every distro I've tried has had shortcomings. SuSE had issues with my NVidia audio... which was reported as AC'97. There were some sneering links through Google that indicated that this could be resolved by recompiling my kernel following instructions either at NVidia or various other places. Since recompiling the kernel defeats the purpose of a simple install experience, I bailed. That was the first time. The second time, it seemed to install fine, but couldn't write to some config files for KDE, and wouldn't boot into runlevel 5 on the first boot. I didn't want to figure it out, so that install failed.
Slackware didn't see any Linux partitions on the HD I selected, even though I was installing over previous installs. I couldn't make heads or tails out of the CLI formatting options, and when I finally did, and the install started, I was told by the installer that there wasn't a valid Slackware install image on the CD I was installing from. End of that attempt, leaving me with a blank-but-ext3 formatted HD.
Mandrake had to be burned to a second set of CD's, as there may have been issues with the quality or condition of the first set. The second set installed, but threw errors reading some install packages, and when it booted, I couldn't tell if things weren't working because those packages failed or some other inherent flaw in the OS. So that went out the window.
Knoppix... well, I didn't feel like figuring out how to install it to a hard drive. I'm sure it's not that hard, but the look and feel of the CD distro was offputting, as well. It's almost too "leet" to use.
The various flavors of RH, up to and including FC2 have given me the least grief, mostly just adding MP3 support and some others. I still can't print to my HP Laserjet1000 without switching to XP, even after downloading the firmware, extracting the critical file, and successfully uploading it to the printer.
I also can't get the Java virtual machine to work- in page Javascript is fine, but I paid for stat-tracking in my Yahoo fantasy baseball leagues, and the live updates are done in a Java applet that asks for the plugin everytime. That may be because I use Firefox instead of Mozilla and I just need to set my class path correctly, but, again, so much for "ease-of-use"!
All that being said, I also did an upgrade from 98->XP Pro for mom & dad, and that didn't go smoothly, either. A clean install, however, did go much more smoothly than any of my Linux installs, but I did have to replace their modem after, because under XP it would go offline after 2 minutes no matter which driver we used, and which numbers their ISP provided.
In any case, my Dad, the ultimate newbie (at 68!) wouldn't have been able to handle ANY of the roadblocks that installing ANY OS involves. He also believes that computers "should be as simple to use as a refrigerator door", which infuriates me. I don't think it's a linux vs windoze issue.
I do think that OEM support would help- if a Dell or Gateway or eMachines had Linux installed at the factory, all the application names made sense (how is Dad supposed to know that you burn CD's with K3B?), and it all worked right out of the box, my dad wouldn't care if you called the OS Myxtylplyzx, as long as he could get online, type (& print!) letters, and play Mah-jhongg and solitaire.
I appreciate all the help I've gotten from the Linux community over the years, but if installing, configuring, and using Linux was "easy", I wouldn't have needed most of it.
Cavedragon
Charles DeLint is a Canadian author (& songwriter & poet &...)who writes brilliant urban fantasy- most set in Newford, a city that doesn't exist but should. Try "Moonheart" as a jumping on point.
Or try Guy Gavriel Kay- If you liked Tolkien. He worked with Christopher on some of the early "Lost Tales" books, then moved on to his own stuff when her realized that CT was going to publish every scrap of JRRT's writing down to the last cocktail napkin. Kay has written "The Fionavar Tapestry", a great trilogy, and some good stand alone stuff, too.
And for a Canadian trifecta, of course there's Spider Robinson, once dubbed the "Next Robert Heinlein" (Of course that was 25 years ago...) He's never lived up to it, but who could? He's still a must-read, IMHO. The Callahan's books are the best place to start, as is the short story collection "Melancholy Elephants".
Robin Hobb (who is also Megan Lindholm) has written some solid non-trad fantasies, including the Assassin's Apprentice Trilogy, the Liveship Traders books, and the Farseer Triliogy. She's tying them all together in the Tawny Man series.
JV Jones's "The Baker's Boy" series is good too, and I enjoyed "Cavern of Black Ice", but I'm dying for the sequel (2-plus years overdue). "The Barbed Coil", too.
Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books have become few & far between, but are always excellent. The Adept series is okay- sort of like Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" without, well, the magic going away.
And if you like alternate realities, Harry Turtledove is your guy- "Guns Of The South" for example, but his entire "World at War" series, etc.
SM Stirling wrote a cool trilogy about Nantucket being sent back to the 1200's or so. Just Nantucket. "Island In The Sea Of Time" et al.
I'll second every "Song of Ice & Fire" recommendation, too. One of the best high fantasy series.
I used to manage a chain bookstore... can you tell? I could go on and on...
And I thought I was the only one who remembered them! I just dug out my copy of "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in The Mystery of the Green Ghost" to compare with the similarly titled "The Three Investigators and the Mystery of the Green Ghost" reprinted in the early 90's. I think they cut the Hitchcock refereneces for a generation that didn't know him, but I want to know for sure!
I always envied Jupe and all the secret passages in the salvage yard!