SCO is asserting that because a BSD/USL agreement was somehow not honored that SCO is entitled to recompense. Here is the problem, SCO therfore implies that it was making an eanest effort to improve the core operating system, SCO UNIX, during said time.
I know for a fact that SCOs system has bugs in it that other systems and projects fixed years ago, instead, SCO was busy making up, for the most part, utterly useless, products. Their userland is horrible, the kernel clunky, and the system is riddled with bugs that should have been fixed.
SCO claims, "they did their best" but the world owes them something.
Sorry, you can't make money for being incompetent and then blaming someone else's good fortune.
I think this is true for the majority of people in general, not just men. I do, however, have a case that is completely opposite, my wife and I. When my wife became pregnant, we were both technicians and not very experienced (in many things), I was about 22. We decided not to get married based soley on a child, instead, we chose to live together and raise the child together first and basically, see how things went. It was a rocky road at first.
We found out that we were not just compatible but complemented personalities. So we got married. During that time, we made some evolutionary leaps ourselves. My wife went back to school and eventually got a dual degree in Anhtroplolgy and Archaology. I got into UNIX systems, big time. I scored a great job, we got a great place, all was well.
With my wife's amazing school work, it became evident that I needed to return to school and continue to hone my skills. All the while raising a bright daughter who is quite well balanced.
I returned to school and my career got better, I learned more, got better at my job and got excellent raises. I was also contributing to the NetBSD project. Of course, I did this late at night, often on weekends.
I was eventually invited to join the Foundation, my career took a staggering boost when I was relocated to corporate.
I have continued to learn, stay in shape and still have time for my family, chores, and hackery. So, it can be done, when two very motivated people get together and have a child, great things can happen.
My wife was recently awarded a scholarship to attend the Unicersity of Cincinnati's Geology Program (with a focus on GIS systems) after working for the Natural History Museum. I am now re-rentering college, again, pursuing an Engineering Degree. Our daughter (going into second grade) was placed at 3rd grade math and 4rth grade reading. In my role with NetBSD, I helped design a new way to check binaries in the kernel, I had been married for 4 years.
I also contributed chapters to two books, co authored one and ran a (mildly) successful ezine about UNIX for several years. All started prior to marriage and lasting throughout.
Is it most likely people lose focus on their other interests when they become married? Sure, but not always.
Now, the other side. Not too long ago a really close friend of mine got divorced. Once the fallout ended, he got into BSD bigtime. He purchased several systems with the intent to begin hackery. He had a fair amount of experience with UNIX, so I helped him out. The day he hooked up with another woman, it ended. He has done next to nothing since, even after dropping the first one and moving to a second (I at least expected him to hack a little in between).
I agree with this statement, in general. But there certainly are exceptions. I can list the names of developers off the top of my head who have made breakthroughs in technology after being married for years (I should know, they are my friends:) but we are a small group.
It can be done, it just takes the right companion.
I have to agree with this. I am the Sr. Sysadmin where I work (and the only one for my region). I had to train someone to do my job while I was out getting a tumor removed. I covered only the most basic tasks: using our (very simple) backup software, adding users etc. and told him "Call Support for anything else..."
Well, he lapsed in many of his tasks and others he did not do correctly. I feel the training was adequate since I had done it before with someone who has a very different *personality*.
On a side note, I also liked how he disregarded certifications. Most people I have met with these always seem to have an answer looking for a problem instead of spending time actually fixing stuff and making it run better.
On a bunch of things. A small company that turns a good profit can get away with paying high salaries for a few experts, inversely, this may not work in a large company that is not tightly incorporated. It can work in a large company, but often it does not because of politics. Most of the time, what one ends up with is a mix. Some open source here, some proprietary there, and our favorite, a strange mix. I would venture to say that a small company that can handle paying high salaries can grow well using open source, but simply dropping it on a large one could prove extraordinarily costly. IMO the best approach is gradual integration of open source (or any technology someone thinks is beneficial).
Re:There have always been 2 types of engineers
on
Engineer in a Box?
·
· Score: 1
Didn't Rob from plan9 say something similar to this? That (at least in computing) real research was (is) dead because of over-commercialization and too much buzz word compliancy?
This concern also exists within the computing industry at large. Perhaps one of the most insane things I ever heard someone say was It is a good thing they are teaching microsoft in colleges now so students will be up to speed - I am not kidding, I heard someone say that.
The schools I went to for Electronics, Digital Electronics, and then programming all stressed understanding how to do things the old way and made me do them that way, a few times. Not unlike learning how to divide by using subtraction (ironically how most ALUs do it), understanding how principles work goes a long way.
A case in point, I am very familar (as are most of us) with how chips work. I understand the sparc, ultra, and intel chips, how their registers work, how to use them, and what they are for, so, the insight that gives people like us is when we read technical documentation about a new chip, we can discern the capabilities down to a very low level.
In a nutshell, if it is still taught and practiced (not used necessarily) then it is fine by me.
I have to admit I agree with this perspective. I have written a book, worked on two, done endless hours of writing and hackery all while I was trying (for the third time) to get a degree. My job was also killing me, I realized some changes had to come. My advice is be ad-hoc, go take 1 class you think you will like, then another later, then if you can stand it, 2 in one semester you like. As for me, I made several changes in my life that were quite rewarding. I stopped commercial writing (I sucked at it anyway), dropped out of school for now, and I shifted my hours so I am home with my family more. I also get to do volunteer hackery in my work spare time (something I am happy about, believe me). I do not regret it all and am still looking at ways to make things better.
A freind of mine said this and I am sure it has been said elsewhere, answer is "Weapons of Mass Education", everything else (such as tolerance) gradually falls in line.
Terminal access and shared access to a server can be used to perform the same attack on a server from a client. If the Shatter attack is as easy as he makes it out to be, practically anyone could do it within the company fence, for those who install ms on the wire I am not sure what attacks could be performed. If a system on the wire has shares activated or terminal services running, it is only a matter of time before they can use this attack.
And to add to your statement, you do not see the other contributors in rant mode, actually, if you look at the BSD License ranting of this nature is counterproductive.
Many people will tell you many things. Rest assured what I am going to say will not seem unique, but it bears thought.
Many managers often are caught up by commercialism in magazines or even the tele (altho, to their credit, even most tech managers see the folly in TV). I am assuming you would not be such a manager, so let me say a few things now that my snappy headline has caught your attention.
Do not try to have a solution looking for a problem, please. Consult your people and listen to them, even the longhairs. Too often management folks, and not say just you but say your boss, sees something and thinks - wow, this will end all of our problems. Yeah.... right. Don't be that guy. Fight, remember, you can move your family in with relatives if the going gets tough!
Think clearly, while someone might say here that m$ is wrong, who is to say Linux is better? Or BSD for that matter? your job is to match the problem. Sometimes that calls for something completely different.
Think outside of the company. Many people have a tendancy to look strictly at the needs of or the ideals of particular corporate culture, whether a college or dildo factory. Okay, the latter is probably a little more limited in scope compared to the former but you get the idea. Think about the technology you are implementing, how long will it last? Is it extensible? Can my staff MAKE it extensible? How much am I paying and for how long, is the return really worth it?
Last but not least, and I cannot stress this more, paying for a higher quality staff will result in long term gains. Filling air-beather slots will kill you. I am living proof of that idea. I am paid slightly above the average SA salary (the old carrot deal) and people have no idea who I am even though I have around 200 command line users and around 1000 abstract users across roughly 10 systems. I rarely, if ever, get called. The same goes for our backbone engineer who can setup a VPN with his eyes closed.
Invest in people, and you will have nothing to lose. Invest in products, regardless of the vendor, and you are fucked.
Well, I was pretty sure it would go unnoticed (I did a search on the page first) I do know one piece of software that actually emulates, yes your eyes are not lying, emulates punchcard technology. The company spss (spss.com) uses a software suite originally developed by Quantime (whom they bought as part of their Market Research Division) that uses ansi/c with an abberent twist of their own source plus c-shell scripts (again - your eyes are NOT lying) to emulate punchcard technology. This technology was used for collecting and tabulating survey results.
Suffice to say it is by far the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen. Unprofessional trash that, quite frankly, is embarrassing to punch cards and yes, I have loaded punch card programs, asm, switched in machine and loaded via paper tape.
Big deal.
The fact that these morons were so inept that they kludged a so called software suite based not on obsolete technology but actually obsolete method (there is a difference) is sickening.
Of course they have talked about modernizing with XML.
Yeah, alright.
BTW Im gonna write a modular kernel that won't eat your system for lunch.....
In the BSD community we pride ourself on disclosure. Besides, I do not think most administrators take as much issue with windows security as it may seem (although it seems funny at times). Here is a question, on service packs that come out, how many bugs are fixed those binary patches that could be security flaws that no one knows about?
After disclosure the next issue most people overlook is the level of granularity most UNIX systems patch to, for example, lets say there is a 1 byte overflow in the less pager. If microsoft had less (they do have more though!) would they bother posting that as a security flaw or even a possible security flaw? Most likely not, yet we see these bugs posted all the time with open source software.
Without looking at the difference in granularity and disclosures - there can never be a real comparison between windows and any other system in the world, open source or not.
I've seen both sides of this issue and it is difficult at best to wrestle with. On one side there is a lack of the customer standing a good chance of getting some feature (albeit stupid most of the time) and on the other is the capability of *most* (not all) OSS to be regressive, in other words it tends to be more backwards compatible than COTS software, yes I know there are glaring instances when this is not true but across the entire range of OSS, there is a lot more backwards compatability than COTS software.
In the end it depends on the userland philosophy. The best situation I have seen is when the OSS systems in use are abstracted from userland, such as appliances, web servers etc. In said cases I have rarely had problems deploying OSS and getting support. The worst cases I have seen are when I would rampantly dump free tools on servers that users login via SSH to and they have no idea why they cannot do a), b), c).... they just don't have the same frame of reference as the rest of the *nix world:)
The problem of opposing views aside, at this point, most administrators and developers are using a very mixed approach which (as it should be) seems to be a direct reflection of the marketplace.
No seriously, perhaps the motto should not be *HP Invent* but *HP Reinvent*, HP is seriously screwed because of the overhead of the PA RISC line of systems. Customers are sick of paying so much for them plus the support.
Now, I am not saying they're PA RISC line is bad, some of the systems kick major ass running HP-UX && HP-UX 11.XX and 11i have some pretty cool stuff - but the operating costs are just too bloody high - esp. now.
What cracks me up is HP is really using the Linux branding to get a head, unlike IBM who sort of made their branding from Linux which almost seems to indicate they (IBM) has greater faith in their core product.
Of course this is all hogwash until the Dist. hits the streets:)
Yes but the odd thing is it really started well before the economic problems. Recall that what happened to me happened over a year ago when things were just peachy. I think KR is the problem, but he was a problem well before the economic slouch, it just took the downturn to draw him a little further out.
For me to get out and add a bit to this story. I worked as a freelance writer for internet.com over a period of a few months. I stuck to simple administrivial details and the occasional story about programming. For the most part my articles were not that great but they were of technical nature.
I worked for Kevin directly. I also submitted invoices to him directly as well.
As time went on, communications between Kevin and I diminished slowly. I did not mind because that was during the summer of 2000 and a lot was happening. I wrote it off as he was busy.
Finally, towards the end of last summer, I was beginning to get worried, I had submitted 2 rather large articles which they had in their possession but had done nothing with. It worried me since technically the material was mine until they decided to print it and (for some reason) I feared they were never going to do anything with it.
As time went on, I tried to make contact again and again (a few times I used some choice words I probably should not have). Finally I contacted Kevin's boss about the issue after waiting almost 2 months.
I was fired the next day. Interestingly, I was only ever harsh with Kevin, so I sort of did not understand why I was fired since I had been pretty professional in the email to his boss. Needless to say my confidence dropped thru the floor and I sort of walked away from the whole issue - citing myself as being a luser.
It was shortly after that I was offered work in books with a well respected publisher (whom I still work for every now and again). I began to feel a little better about my writing, but was still confused as to why I had been let go from internet.com.
Around that time I also noticed that the internet.com kludge was getting worse, external sites were not being linked to, forums were obviously being heavily edited/censored - basically it was going down the crapper. Also many internet.com stories were changing from technical to more inflamatory (go figure).
In the end, a little bird told me my firing had been arranged. I no longer fit the content model of internet.com. Most likely my contract would have been discontinued anyway whether I had lobbed a few balls at internet.com or not.
I had asked Kevin not too speak of what happened, I also asked if he would be a reference for me, which he never responded to. I wanted not to have it come up again because my charachter/credibility could possibly come under fire. In retrospect after working on several books and writing for other sites I think it is quite possible that I was not the one with the credibility/professionalism issues.
I still do not speak to Kevin and frankly I do not ever want to see/hear anything about him again unless it concerns his resignation from internet.com and perhaps the field in general.
I would like to say there are still many good editors and writers at internet.com, I do not know how deep seeded this problem is within their management, but I suspect it starts and ends with Kevin.
I am certain someone else brought this up but . . .
I don't even like advanced wms, but, after going after an artistic deluge with enlightenment - man - I am sorry. Some of the designs IMHO were f*cking beautiful. All the way from the space saving classic Absolute-E to BlueSteel the art was fantastic even if it was not _all_their_own_ they (the theme designers) could glue it together in a way that was shockingly ecclectic.
Screw usability and contemporary art. These guys (e.g. tigert and the rest) are looking somehwere else, a place so called artists have never crossed, the line between man, machine and society and I don't know about you but the first time I unatarred Cyrus for E I was stunned.
As for your friends and general pop-art cultuure (or whatever) - screw them.
This is by far one of the best trolls I have ever seen, try following the link to wagnerconsulting.com. The usa.com is a freebee mail or fake (I remember another troll who used usa.com and my favorite bgates@hell.com).
Unfortunately the expert gave himself away early on with the non US crap and later again with the auditing - I think the auditing remark was intentional, in any case, a very creative little troll.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO is asserting that because a BSD/USL agreement was somehow not honored that SCO is entitled to recompense. Here is the problem, SCO therfore implies that it was making an eanest effort to improve the core operating system, SCO UNIX, during said time.
I know for a fact that SCOs system has bugs in it that other systems and projects fixed years ago, instead, SCO was busy making up, for the most part, utterly useless, products. Their userland is horrible, the kernel clunky, and the system is riddled with bugs that should have been fixed.
SCO claims, "they did their best" but the world owes them something.
Sorry, you can't make money for being incompetent and then blaming someone else's good fortune.
I think this is true for the majority of people in general, not just men. I do, however, have a case that is completely opposite, my wife and I. When my wife became pregnant, we were both technicians and not very experienced (in many things), I was about 22. We decided not to get married based soley on a child, instead, we chose to live together and raise the child together first and basically, see how things went. It was a rocky road at first.
:) but we are a small group.
We found out that we were not just compatible but complemented personalities. So we got married. During that time, we made some evolutionary leaps ourselves. My wife went back to school and eventually got a dual degree in Anhtroplolgy and Archaology. I got into UNIX systems, big time. I scored a great job, we got a great place, all was well.
With my wife's amazing school work, it became evident that I needed to return to school and continue to hone my skills. All the while raising a bright daughter who is quite well balanced.
I returned to school and my career got better, I learned more, got better at my job and got excellent raises. I was also contributing to the NetBSD project. Of course, I did this late at night, often on weekends.
I was eventually invited to join the Foundation, my career took a staggering boost when I was relocated to corporate.
I have continued to learn, stay in shape and still have time for my family, chores, and hackery. So, it can be done, when two very motivated people get together and have a child, great things can happen.
My wife was recently awarded a scholarship to attend the Unicersity of Cincinnati's Geology Program (with a focus on GIS systems) after working for the Natural History Museum. I am now re-rentering college, again, pursuing an Engineering Degree. Our daughter (going into second grade) was placed at 3rd grade math and 4rth grade reading. In my role with NetBSD, I helped design a new way to check binaries in the kernel, I had been married for 4 years.
I also contributed chapters to two books, co authored one and ran a (mildly) successful ezine about UNIX for several years. All started prior to marriage and lasting throughout.
Is it most likely people lose focus on their other interests when they become married? Sure, but not always.
Now, the other side. Not too long ago a really close friend of mine got divorced. Once the fallout ended, he got into BSD bigtime. He purchased several systems with the intent to begin hackery. He had a fair amount of experience with UNIX, so I helped him out. The day he hooked up with another woman, it ended. He has done next to nothing since, even after dropping the first one and moving to a second (I at least expected him to hack a little in between).
I agree with this statement, in general. But there certainly are exceptions. I can list the names of developers off the top of my head who have made breakthroughs in technology after being married for years (I should know, they are my friends
It can be done, it just takes the right companion.
I have to agree with this. I am the Sr. Sysadmin where I work (and the only one for my region). I had to train someone to do my job while I was out getting a tumor removed. I covered only the most basic tasks: using our (very simple) backup software, adding users etc. and told him "Call Support for anything else ..."
Well, he lapsed in many of his tasks and others he did not do correctly. I feel the training was adequate since I had done it before with someone who has a very different *personality*.
On a side note, I also liked how he disregarded certifications. Most people I have met with these always seem to have an answer looking for a problem instead of spending time actually fixing stuff and making it run better.
On a bunch of things. A small company that turns a good profit can get away with paying high salaries for a few experts, inversely, this may not work in a large company that is not tightly incorporated. It can work in a large company, but often it does not because of politics. Most of the time, what one ends up with is a mix. Some open source here, some proprietary there, and our favorite, a strange mix. I would venture to say that a small company that can handle paying high salaries can grow well using open source, but simply dropping it on a large one could prove extraordinarily costly. IMO the best approach is gradual integration of open source (or any technology someone thinks is beneficial).
Didn't Rob from plan9 say something similar to this? That (at least in computing) real research was (is) dead because of over-commercialization and too much buzz word compliancy?
This concern also exists within the computing industry at large. Perhaps one of the most insane things I ever heard someone say was It is a good thing they are teaching microsoft in colleges now so students will be up to speed - I am not kidding, I heard someone say that.
The schools I went to for Electronics, Digital Electronics, and then programming all stressed understanding how to do things the old way and made me do them that way, a few times. Not unlike learning how to divide by using subtraction (ironically how most ALUs do it), understanding how principles work goes a long way.
A case in point, I am very familar (as are most of us) with how chips work. I understand the sparc, ultra, and intel chips, how their registers work, how to use them, and what they are for, so, the insight that gives people like us is when we read technical documentation about a new chip, we can discern the capabilities down to a very low level.
In a nutshell, if it is still taught and practiced (not used necessarily) then it is fine by me.
Hire Arthur Anderson to do your taxes . . .
I have to admit I agree with this perspective. I have written a book, worked on two, done endless hours of writing and hackery all while I was trying (for the third time) to get a degree. My job was also killing me, I realized some changes had to come. My advice is be ad-hoc, go take 1 class you think you will like, then another later, then if you can stand it, 2 in one semester you like. As for me, I made several changes in my life that were quite rewarding. I stopped commercial writing (I sucked at it anyway), dropped out of school for now, and I shifted my hours so I am home with my family more. I also get to do volunteer hackery in my work spare time (something I am happy about, believe me). I do not regret it all and am still looking at ways to make things better.
A freind of mine said this and I am sure it has been said elsewhere, answer is "Weapons of Mass Education", everything else (such as tolerance) gradually falls in line.
Terminal access and shared access to a server can be used to perform the same attack on a server from a client. If the Shatter attack is as easy as he makes it out to be, practically anyone could do it within the company fence, for those who install ms on the wire I am not sure what attacks could be performed. If a system on the wire has shares activated or terminal services running, it is only a matter of time before they can use this attack.
How does one QC a binary package everyday?
Besides, the comprimised server is sunOS 4.1, not openbsd brainiac.
I heard there is another company with that problem, the uri: is here.
And to add to your statement, you do not see the other contributors in rant mode, actually, if you look at the BSD License ranting of this nature is counterproductive.
You cannot key a system statically. Nuff said.
Many people will tell you many things. Rest assured what I am going to say will not seem unique, but it bears thought.
.... right. Don't be that guy. Fight, remember, you can move your family in with relatives if the going gets tough!
Many managers often are caught up by commercialism in magazines or even the tele (altho, to their credit, even most tech managers see the folly in TV). I am assuming you would not be such a manager, so let me say a few things now that my snappy headline has caught your attention.
Do not try to have a solution looking for a problem, please. Consult your people and listen to them, even the longhairs. Too often management folks, and not say just you but say your boss, sees something and thinks - wow, this will end all of our problems. Yeah
Think clearly, while someone might say here that m$ is wrong, who is to say Linux is better? Or BSD for that matter? your job is to match the problem. Sometimes that calls for something completely different.
Think outside of the company. Many people have a tendancy to look strictly at the needs of or the ideals of particular corporate culture, whether a college or dildo factory. Okay, the latter is probably a little more limited in scope compared to the former but you get the idea. Think about the technology you are implementing, how long will it last? Is it extensible? Can my staff MAKE it extensible? How much am I paying and for how long, is the return really worth it?
Last but not least, and I cannot stress this more, paying for a higher quality staff will result in long term gains. Filling air-beather slots will kill you. I am living proof of that idea. I am paid slightly above the average SA salary (the old carrot deal) and people have no idea who I am even though I have around 200 command line users and around 1000 abstract users across roughly 10 systems. I rarely, if ever, get called. The same goes for our backbone engineer who can setup a VPN with his eyes closed.
Invest in people, and you will have nothing to lose. Invest in products, regardless of the vendor, and you are fucked.
In the arse I might add.
Thats my penny ante for you, I hope it helps.
Well, I was pretty sure it would go unnoticed (I did a search on the page first) I do know one piece of software that actually emulates, yes your eyes are not lying, emulates punchcard technology. The company spss (spss.com) uses a software suite originally developed by Quantime (whom they bought as part of their Market Research Division) that uses ansi/c with an abberent twist of their own source plus c-shell scripts (again - your eyes are NOT lying) to emulate punchcard technology. This technology was used for collecting and tabulating survey results.
.....
Suffice to say it is by far the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen. Unprofessional trash that, quite frankly, is embarrassing to punch cards and yes, I have loaded punch card programs, asm, switched in machine and loaded via paper tape.
Big deal.
The fact that these morons were so inept that they kludged a so called software suite based not on obsolete technology but actually obsolete method (there is a difference) is sickening.
Of course they have talked about modernizing with XML.
Yeah, alright.
BTW Im gonna write a modular kernel that won't eat your system for lunch
In the BSD community we pride ourself on disclosure. Besides, I do not think most administrators take as much issue with windows security as it may seem (although it seems funny at times). Here is a question, on service packs that come out, how many bugs are fixed those binary patches that could be security flaws that no one knows about?
After disclosure the next issue most people overlook is the level of granularity most UNIX systems patch to, for example, lets say there is a 1 byte overflow in the less pager. If microsoft had less (they do have more though!) would they bother posting that as a security flaw or even a possible security flaw? Most likely not, yet we see these bugs posted all the time with open source software.
Without looking at the difference in granularity and disclosures - there can never be a real comparison between windows and any other system in the world, open source or not.
I've seen both sides of this issue and it is difficult at best to wrestle with. On one side there is a lack of the customer standing a good chance of getting some feature (albeit stupid most of the time) and on the other is the capability of *most* (not all) OSS to be regressive, in other words it tends to be more backwards compatible than COTS software, yes I know there are glaring instances when this is not true but across the entire range of OSS, there is a lot more backwards compatability than COTS software.
.... they just don't have the same frame of reference as the rest of the *nix world :)
In the end it depends on the userland philosophy. The best situation I have seen is when the OSS systems in use are abstracted from userland, such as appliances, web servers etc. In said cases I have rarely had problems deploying OSS and getting support. The worst cases I have seen are when I would rampantly dump free tools on servers that users login via SSH to and they have no idea why they cannot do a), b), c)
The problem of opposing views aside, at this point, most administrators and developers are using a very mixed approach which (as it should be) seems to be a direct reflection of the marketplace.
step one, recompile the kernel (that documentation is still up to date :) and enable everything related to it.
:))
You should find the exact driver you need (hopefully
No seriously, perhaps the motto should not be *HP Invent* but *HP Reinvent*, HP is seriously screwed because of the overhead of the PA RISC line of systems. Customers are sick of paying so much for them plus the support.
Now, I am not saying they're PA RISC line is bad, some of the systems kick major ass running HP-UX && HP-UX 11.XX and 11i have some pretty cool stuff - but the operating costs are just too bloody high - esp. now.
What cracks me up is HP is really using the Linux branding to get a head, unlike IBM who sort of made their branding from Linux which almost seems to indicate they (IBM) has greater faith in their core product.
Of course this is all hogwash until the Dist. hits the streets :)
Yes but the odd thing is it really started well before the economic problems. Recall that what happened to me happened over a year ago when things were just peachy. I think KR is the problem, but he was a problem well before the economic slouch, it just took the downturn to draw him a little further out.
For me to get out and add a bit to this story. I worked as a freelance writer for internet.com over a period of a few months. I stuck to simple administrivial details and the occasional story about programming. For the most part my articles were not that great but they were of technical nature.
I worked for Kevin directly. I also submitted invoices to him directly as well.
As time went on, communications between Kevin and I diminished slowly. I did not mind because that was during the summer of 2000 and a lot was happening. I wrote it off as he was busy.
Finally, towards the end of last summer, I was beginning to get worried, I had submitted 2 rather large articles which they had in their possession but had done nothing with. It worried me since technically the material was mine until they decided to print it and (for some reason) I feared they were never going to do anything with it.
As time went on, I tried to make contact again and again (a few times I used some choice words I probably should not have). Finally I contacted Kevin's boss about the issue after waiting almost 2 months.
I was fired the next day. Interestingly, I was only ever harsh with Kevin, so I sort of did not understand why I was fired since I had been pretty professional in the email to his boss. Needless to say my confidence dropped thru the floor and I sort of walked away from the whole issue - citing myself as being a luser.
It was shortly after that I was offered work in books with a well respected publisher (whom I still work for every now and again). I began to feel a little better about my writing, but was still confused as to why I had been let go from internet.com.
Around that time I also noticed that the internet.com kludge was getting worse, external sites were not being linked to, forums were obviously being heavily edited/censored - basically it was going down the crapper. Also many internet.com stories were changing from technical to more inflamatory (go figure).
In the end, a little bird told me my firing had been arranged. I no longer fit the content model of internet.com. Most likely my contract would have been discontinued anyway whether I had lobbed a few balls at internet.com or not.
I had asked Kevin not too speak of what happened, I also asked if he would be a reference for me, which he never responded to. I wanted not to have it come up again because my charachter/credibility could possibly come under fire. In retrospect after working on several books and writing for other sites I think it is quite possible that I was not the one with the credibility/professionalism issues.
I still do not speak to Kevin and frankly I do not ever want to see/hear anything about him again unless it concerns his resignation from internet.com and perhaps the field in general.
I would like to say there are still many good editors and writers at internet.com, I do not know how deep seeded this problem is within their management, but I suspect it starts and ends with Kevin.
Thought folks might like that little addition.
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I am certain someone else brought this up but . . .
I don't even like advanced wms, but, after going after an artistic deluge with enlightenment - man - I am sorry. Some of the designs IMHO were f*cking beautiful. All the way from the space saving classic Absolute-E to BlueSteel the art was fantastic even if it was not _all_their_own_ they (the theme designers) could glue it together in a way that was shockingly ecclectic.
Screw usability and contemporary art. These guys (e.g. tigert and the rest) are looking somehwere else, a place so called artists have never crossed, the line between man, machine and society and I don't know about you but the first time I unatarred Cyrus for E I was stunned.
As for your friends and general pop-art cultuure (or whatever) - screw them.
we appreciate you.
have a nice day :)
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This is by far one of the best trolls I have ever seen, try following the link to wagnerconsulting.com. The usa.com is a freebee mail or fake (I remember another troll who used usa.com and my favorite bgates@hell.com).
Unfortunately the expert gave himself away early on with the non US crap and later again with the auditing - I think the auditing remark was intentional, in any case, a very creative little troll.
I remember the old days, you know 8 or 9 years ago, when porn was good and free,
There was no need to ask an ID of me.
Downloading with mosaic, ftp, archie and gopher galore,
I could surf all I wanted, I was a regular E-whore.
Then the day came, "yo we can make money"
locked up were the sites, man it was not funny.
But there is a bright side, as to all things there are,
The multimedia advances in porn have outstripped the rest by far.
if i have offeneded you in anyway, made u feel repressed, angry or hurt your feelings. . . i am sure u will get over it eventually.
-------Man what is in this coffee?