.... but this is the same government that says we should have backdoors on all civilian encryption schemes and they'd keep those perfectly safe. Right. I'm sure nothing bad could happen from that.
It's a tough situation. If you incentivize fixing "problem accounts", then you create the perverse incentive for people to create problems so that they can fix them and earn more.
Any incentive program needs oversight to watch for the most common abuses, which means that it needs to be simple enough to spot, and managed by people smart enough to maintain it.
I manage the incentive program for my department where I work, and I can tell you that it falls into what I feel is the 3-leg stool equation.
1. It has to benefit the customers 2. It has to benefit the employees 3. It has to benefit the company
If you can pull this off, you're good, but a BIG PART of this is human understanding.
Example. Last month one of my teams spent the entire month dealing with a messy bunch of clients from an acquisition. As such, their productivity (by the raw numbers) were way below the minimum thresholds for participation in the incentive program.
Their supervisor brought this concern to me. I'm not about to punish one of the best teams I have because they busted their asses to provide good service to clients we just gained from another company we purchased (and want to retain!!!).
So I said fine, those techs get an average of the 3 previous months' performance for bonus payouts for the month of August.
The techs were very happy with this (and continue to not shy away from work just because it's "difficult" or may detract from the raw numbers everyone is bonused on), their supervisor is the hero because he looked out for his troops, and I'm the understanding manager because I understand that no numbers for any incentive program can exist in a vacuum.
Productivity continues so the company benefits, the customers benefited and will continue to do so, and the employees benefited -- but only because human understanding made for reasonable exceptions.
If you don't run an incentive program with these kinds of approaches, you deserve the mess you inevitably get.
4. Be smart and keep a separate/home partition. Mine has been through about 5 iterations over two different distros now, and still going strong. I keep two different OS install partitions, and when it's time to install a new OS, I blow away the older one and replace it with the new install. That way I can still fall back on my current setup if need be. And yes, I have done that. Disk is cheap. Use it to your advantage.
This, for the love of Torvalds, THIS.
I can't count how many times having a separate/home partition has saved my ass.
And now, rather than deal with the constant re-installing, I switched over to Linux Mint Debian Edition. Rolling releases are where it's at.
Even though I'm a diehard Mint user nowadays, I agree with this.
I started out with Slackware, and I used it for 8 years before moving on to Ubuntu, and finally Linux Mint Debian Edition.
Slackware, while it has a learning curve, is also (as odd as it may sound), actually quite simple. It does what you tell it to do. No more, no less.
It's rock-solid stable.
It's fast.
It forces you to learn about how Linux works, because you have to tell it what to do and how to do it. It isn't as much work to get running as Gentoo, but it makes you think about things like kernel versioning, what's going on in/etc and where your system logs are, and how to compile applications from source from time to time.
I've taken what I've learned from Slackware and found that it's applicable to every other Linux I've knocked around.
I use Linux Mint more like a "casual desktop user" these days, but if I need something rock solid stable and reliable, I will go back to Slackware, because I trust it. It's not a Cadillac like Mint is, but a stock car that has everything accessible and tweakable, so you can bend it to your will and it'll serve whatever purpose you have in mind for it.
So, to sum up, while it doesn't sound like a newbie distro, I still think Slackware is a great way to cut one's teeth in the Linux world, especially if one is truly setting out to learn Linux, not just using it as a launch platform for a browser and an email client.
Do you really think that that's the stuff he's talking about?
If that's all government did, I think a lot of us anti-government types wouldn't have much to complain about. Unfortunately, that's really not the problem.
Or, since people prefer (*smirk*) car analogies, tabs on top in a browser is like a major car manufacturer deciding to replace the steering wheel with a tiller in all of its designs.
And rejecting at least half of customers' cries of how awkward and cumbersome that is for steering the vehicle.
It's a simple matter of a checkbox, in a browser, not a fricking vehicle redesign, in the case of a car.
If it weren't for the lack of that simple checkbox in Chrome, that's the browser I'd be using right now, but without it, it's a dealbreaker for me, and as the comments on the linked bug report demonstrate, I'm not the only one.
It's very fast, very lightweight, cloud-oriented, but still very usable as a conventional desktop/laptop OS. It uses Lubuntu as its main upstream, so apt-get still works, and it has some really nice features.
Slashdot Mirror
.... but this is the same government that says we should have backdoors on all civilian encryption schemes and they'd keep those perfectly safe. Right. I'm sure nothing bad could happen from that.
... not a product.
It's a tough situation. If you incentivize fixing "problem accounts", then you create the perverse incentive for people to create problems so that they can fix them and earn more.
Any incentive program needs oversight to watch for the most common abuses, which means that it needs to be simple enough to spot, and managed by people smart enough to maintain it.
I manage the incentive program for my department where I work, and I can tell you that it falls into what I feel is the 3-leg stool equation.
1. It has to benefit the customers
2. It has to benefit the employees
3. It has to benefit the company
If you can pull this off, you're good, but a BIG PART of this is human understanding.
Example. Last month one of my teams spent the entire month dealing with a messy bunch of clients from an acquisition. As such, their productivity (by the raw numbers) were way below the minimum thresholds for participation in the incentive program.
Their supervisor brought this concern to me. I'm not about to punish one of the best teams I have because they busted their asses to provide good service to clients we just gained from another company we purchased (and want to retain!!!).
So I said fine, those techs get an average of the 3 previous months' performance for bonus payouts for the month of August.
The techs were very happy with this (and continue to not shy away from work just because it's "difficult" or may detract from the raw numbers everyone is bonused on), their supervisor is the hero because he looked out for his troops, and I'm the understanding manager because I understand that no numbers for any incentive program can exist in a vacuum.
Productivity continues so the company benefits, the customers benefited and will continue to do so, and the employees benefited -- but only because human understanding made for reasonable exceptions.
If you don't run an incentive program with these kinds of approaches, you deserve the mess you inevitably get.
There was no declaration of war in either US invasion of Iraq. World War II was the last time the United States actually declared war.
..... I'll trade my Macbook Air in for a Surface Pro 3!" .... said no one, ever.
This. I had something similar happen to me while I was in 9th grade.
And it all stopped when I said "fuck it!" and got into a fight with the most obnoxious of the bullies.
We fought very publically to a draw.
And from that day on, it was over.
Violence ends bullying. Nothing else, in my experience anyway, ever does.
LOL, not with Hyper-V it wouldn't be. ;)
Thank you, for this.
All they have to do is pass a law stating that there is oxygen there, and there will be. Easy as that.
What.
The Constitution is the highest law in the land. If it is not Constitutional, it cannot, by definition, be lawful.
4. Be smart and keep a separate /home partition. Mine has been through about 5 iterations over two different distros now, and still going strong. I keep two different OS install partitions, and when it's time to install a new OS, I blow away the older one and replace it with the new install. That way I can still fall back on my current setup if need be. And yes, I have done that. Disk is cheap. Use it to your advantage.
This, for the love of Torvalds, THIS.
I can't count how many times having a separate /home partition has saved my ass.
And now, rather than deal with the constant re-installing, I switched over to Linux Mint Debian Edition. Rolling releases are where it's at.
This. ^
There's little that is as dangerous as "effective government". The more gridlock, the better, I always say.
And that's why I ultimately ended up adopting Mint Debian Edition. Rolling releases, no wipe-and-upgrade. Best of both worlds!
Even though I'm a diehard Mint user nowadays, I agree with this.
I started out with Slackware, and I used it for 8 years before moving on to Ubuntu, and finally Linux Mint Debian Edition.
Slackware, while it has a learning curve, is also (as odd as it may sound), actually quite simple. It does what you tell it to do. No more, no less.
It's rock-solid stable.
It's fast.
It forces you to learn about how Linux works, because you have to tell it what to do and how to do it. It isn't as much work to get running as Gentoo, but it makes you think about things like kernel versioning, what's going on in /etc and where your system logs are, and how to compile applications from source from time to time.
I've taken what I've learned from Slackware and found that it's applicable to every other Linux I've knocked around.
I use Linux Mint more like a "casual desktop user" these days, but if I need something rock solid stable and reliable, I will go back to Slackware, because I trust it. It's not a Cadillac like Mint is, but a stock car that has everything accessible and tweakable, so you can bend it to your will and it'll serve whatever purpose you have in mind for it.
So, to sum up, while it doesn't sound like a newbie distro, I still think Slackware is a great way to cut one's teeth in the Linux world, especially if one is truly setting out to learn Linux, not just using it as a launch platform for a browser and an email client.
Someone needs to mod this up.
And me with no mod points today. :(
Do you really think that that's the stuff he's talking about?
If that's all government did, I think a lot of us anti-government types wouldn't have much to complain about. Unfortunately, that's really not the problem.
Since I find them worse and less user friendly on top, I think you are misinformed.
Well, that is an articulate, logical, and well-reasoned argument, so clearly you have won this round and are 100% right.
Good day, to you sir!
Agreed.
Or, since people prefer (*smirk*) car analogies, tabs on top in a browser is like a major car manufacturer deciding to replace the steering wheel with a tiller in all of its designs.
And rejecting at least half of customers' cries of how awkward and cumbersome that is for steering the vehicle.
It's a simple matter of a checkbox, in a browser, not a fricking vehicle redesign, in the case of a car.
If it weren't for the lack of that simple checkbox in Chrome, that's the browser I'd be using right now, but without it, it's a dealbreaker for me, and as the comments on the linked bug report demonstrate, I'm not the only one.
Yeah, except all three are in a race to copy each other.
For about the last two years, I've been in a continuous cycling between Opera, Firefox, Chrome.... back to Opera, back to Firefox, try Chrome again.
Each one of them sucks in its own particular way, and all three suck in some of the same ways.
I for one am getting sick to death of it.
I don't have a browser that is my "favorite". I just have a list of "which browsers suck the least, in this order".
They're pretty close to doing just that. It's already almost too late. Unless someone forks FF 3.6.
"Matradee": A bullfighter who seats you at a restaurant.
THIS.
I always get rid of it by installing the Google SSL search add-on, and then I use that as my default search engine in Firefox.
You might give Peppermint a try.
It's very fast, very lightweight, cloud-oriented, but still very usable as a conventional desktop/laptop OS. It uses Lubuntu as its main upstream, so apt-get still works, and it has some really nice features.