>Why isn't Linux tested in the report? Its >certainly more common than many of the other >selections. > >Should we assume Linux matches *BSD or some other >flavor? or do I need to read more carefully:-)
You need to read more carefully.
In this section, we review a number of operating systems that were either identified as not satisfactory in the original publication, or were not covered by our research at the time. Several systems, such as Linux, use the same, satisfactory ISN generator as the one used a year ago, and because of that, are not covered here in any more detail.
>Companies like IBM have a large contingent of >people that loathe Microsoft and aren't afraid to >speak out about it, yet IBM seems to be able to >deal with both Microsoft and its customers just >fine, and IBM is able to deliver a wide variety of >systems.
I sort of get the impression that there's a faction of IBM mainframe guys who hate everything that isn't an IBM mainframe, including IBM AS/400s, IBM AIX boxes, and IBM PCs.
I'm sure there's a faction of AS/400 guys who hate mainframes, AIX, and PCs.
IBM is a big company, there's room for some rivalry between divisions. It might even be healthy, in small doses.
(Contrast the above with the new HP "thought police". Hmmm.)
>Where I work, stability and cost efficiency has >nothing to do with our choice of OS. We need >something that will run all those damned legacy >apps we still have left over from the DOS 6.22 >days. It's so much easier, it seems, to accomodate >these old apps then to replace or upgrade them. >A lot of other big companies probably stay on >Windows for the same reason.
OK, that's the client side, but you could still start turfing NT/2000 in your server room.
HP/Compaq (or Dell or IBM) would love to sell you some servers.
If it was written recently, I haven't read it. I
read a bunch of books like that awhile back, but I
suspect that was not one of them.
Fairly new, first out in hardcover Jan 2001.
Can you give me a short summation as to what he
means by the work ethic?
Urk. It's a fairly deep book by a Ph.D. in philosophy...
He talks a lot about Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and compares the "Protestant Work Ethic" to the "Hacker Work Ethic".
Protestant Ethic
I identify strongly with my work (Hi, I'm Bob, I'm a sysadmin). Work is a duty, not just a job.
Life rotates around work, and everything else is stuffed into evenings and weekends
If I'm not working (get laid off etc), I feel lost, uprooted, useless
Hacker ethic:
sort of like the above, but one takes more joy in one's work, to the point where the line between work and play blur.
I'm afraid the above is not a very good summary. I hope it's enough to pique your curiousity and get you to read the book:)
BTW,
here's a Slashdot book review and discussion.
>That is true, but at least you get *some* kudos for >doing a good job.
OMFG, ROTFLMAO!
OK, you've hit a nerve, and now you're going to get a rant.
I just got laid off from a contract to a Really Big Private Sector Company.
I did a very good job during the term of my contract. You can ask anyone I worked with, I was helpful, solved problems, followed the silly policies and procedures, I was a model employee^Wcontractor.
My kudos? They didn't renew my contract because of "tough economic times".
The waste that went on there (and still goes on) is absolutely insane, but to save money they turfed all the contractors because that's a very easy way to save $$$ without losing face.
>Before you start work with a gov entity, rip out >the part of your brain that likes to see real >progress on real projects, for you will never use >it, or get into trouble when you do. You have to be >happy to go with the flow and navigate the maze of >politics and rot-heads it contains.
squick! Squick! SQUICK!
I'm having serious flashbacks to a couple of private-sector companies I used to work for.
Seriously though, there's lots of rigid proceduralism and CYA outside of government.
>While both have red tape, the corps are less likely >to get bogged down in it.
No offence, but what's the biggest company you've ever worked for?
True story from my days at Very Big Oil Company: At my office, someone bent over to pick up a pen, and when they stood up, they bumped their head on a thermometer mounted on the wall. This was officially written up as a "safety incident", meetings were held, and the thermometer was remounted to a higher position on the wall.
Dilbert isn't a comedy, it's a documentary of the Fortune 500.
>It's possible that you could get a great sense of >accomplishment from working in the public sector. >However, here in Canada, government services are >heavily unionized. I fear that most attempts at >accomplishing anything could be burried under >government and union red tape.
Oh yeah, there's no red tape in the private sector, right?
I worked for a Very Big Oil Company, and I've also had a couple of provincial government jobs.
Compared to Big Oil, my experience in government was the essence of thrift, accountability, planning, empowerment, and clueful use of technology.
Working for the government did indeed suck, they certainly did have a lot of problems in need of fixing, but that's not unique to.gov.
All right, a chance for everyone to make the same "jokes" all over again! I can't wait! Maybe I can Godwinate this discussion with the most famous editor advocacy post of all time. The original can be found (here), I've been forced to do some reformating to get around the fscking lameness filter. -=-=-=-
From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)
Subject: The True Path (long)
Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor. ---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED! "Ed is the standard text editor." And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929/bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970/usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990/usr/bin/emacs
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor." Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
--- Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. "Ed is the standard text editor." Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!! TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
-=-=-=- Oh, and here's another advocacy gem from Usenet:
"My system" is technical purity incarnate and the embodiment of all that is good in the universe. "Your system" is a loose collection of hacks done by experimental gerbil subjects on amphetamines. Remember those two constants in any debate of this nature and much of what gets said will come into the proper perspective. -- John Hubbard, in c.o.l.m
-=-=-=- Since I'm still fighting to get my lines long enough to satisfy the lameness filter, I might as well throw in another this old joke while I'm at it.
>Go to parties, get laid, but be responsible! Know
>if you are the kind of person who is prone to
>abuse, and if so, address the issue. otherwise,
>do some drinking, or whatever
Your very first objective should be to find the right balance of partying and studying - have as much fun as possible without flunking out.
Find out how much you can drink without getting sick should also be a high priority.
If you drink a litre of water before going to bed, you will be less hung over, or not at all.
Have fun, it's the most freedom and fun you'll probably ever have.
>Don't be overconfident. Don't be underconfident. >Just try to go through things and evaluate as you >go what exactly is required of you.
Ah, brings back memories of my very first CS class. The prof tells the class "OK, everyone look at the person to your left. Now look at the person to your right. One of those people won't be here after Christmas."
This was an "advanced" CS class, i.e. everyone in the room had passed a test and was taking 2 first year CS courses squeezed into 1.
We all thought we were pretty smart, and the prof was trying to shake us out of it. His little lecture didn't work for me, it wasn't until the second or third assignment that I got scared and started to actually do work:)
Anyway, uni isn't killer hard, but you actually have to do some work, i.e. you can't sleepwalk thru like high school. If you show up for class and do the assignments, you'll pass.
Oh, and BTW, at Christmas time, the prof was proven right - about half of that "advanced" class had [failed|dropped] out.
> I wonder if there has ever been an instance of an > 800 number being slashdotted?
Oh yeah.
I used babysit the computers at a call center, and it's very easy to get overloaded.
There are a finite number of trunks (voice lines) coming into a call center. If they are all occupied, you get a fast busy signal when you call that 800 number.
The voice telling you to press 1 for this and 2 for that is being generated by a computer running IVR (interactive voice response) software. The IVR box can only handle a finite # of conversations, depending on the h/w and how it's set up.
And of course there are a finite # of bums in seats, i.e. the people who take the calls. If they're short of agents, you can wait in queue a long time, as I'm sure you've experienced.
>Hairy geeks, slimy geeks, overweighted geeks.... >yes! That's exactly what we want to see! I'm sure >nobody like those pictures [inscyber.net] taken at >Microsoft's booth, they are very unprofessional.
Here's another guy who chooses his OS based on the quality of the booth babes:
>Where I work (a large corporation), we never began >the rollover from NT to 2000. We still run NT 4.0 >on the desktop, and have no plans to move. We also >use Office 97 . . . .
2 months ago, I completed a rollout of WinNT4 SP6 + Office 97, replacing Win95 + Office 97 for all of the desktops at our site.
They figure the other sites should be completely rolled out by Xmas.
This is an extremely large company, I've never seen inertia on this scale.
In some ways I approve of this, i.e. don't upgrade if we don't need the features. But working here certainly makes it hard to put impressive buzzwords on my resume.
>But what were they going to bitch about? Anything >in particular? I guess that's what I am curious >about. Is it anything significant, or is it just >another excuse to bitch?
>Months after the threat from General Motors, we >pointed the domain at various competitors of GM. >It was our eventual plan either to find or put >together a site that would provide a forum for >people critical of the company. While that was >being done, we pointed the domain to other sites >that might be of interest to people who weren't >big fans of General Motors. One of these (it made >sense to us then and it still does now, albeit >less so after what we've learned) was Ford.
> Sig Reply: Wow. That's from a C64, right?
> Load "$",8,1
> LOADING
> READY.
> list
That actually doesn't do what you think it does...
The final ",1" argument will attempt to load the directory listing as a machine code file instead of a BASIC program, so you won't get a useable directory listing.
What you really want is LOAD "$", 8.
(For anyone who cares, the Commodore machines made the directory table of a tape or diskette available as a special file called "$". You LOADed the special file from a device (1 for tape, 8 for diskette), and the names of the files were loaded into memory, in the form of a BASIC program that you could then LIST.)
Heh heh, fond memories. Those were good days, I adored my C64, but I sure wouldn't want to go back!
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to see how tracking your config from CVS would look, the BSD folks have the entire source for their systems in CVS.
/etc/crontab since OpenBSD was forked.
Here's the complete history of all changes to the default
OpenBSD webCVS interface
>Look at the salary surveys
I don't think those surveys reflect the current economy. A lot of people can't find work, period.
I know a lot of MCSEs working crappy shifts at call center hell desks. They earn a helluva lot less then $55K.
>you do have to admit that they have a good system
>that can give entry level people a foot in the door.
Entry level people getting their foot in the door don't make big bucks.
The dotcom boom is over.If you want big money, computers aren't the right choice. Go to law school or go to med school.
>In the REAL WORLD, IT experience is difficult to
>*measure*.
Definitely.
>In the REAL WORLD, A Cisco or MCSE etc
>certification gives more bang for the buck than any
>possible college degree.
I disagree.
I can't speak to the Cisco certs, but I speak from personal experience when I say the MCSE is crap.
Quick! What's the maximum allowed length of a thicknet ethernet cable??!?!?!?!?!?
Clover Kicker, BCS, CNE, MCSE
>certainly more common than many of the other
>selections.
>
>Should we assume Linux matches *BSD or some other
>flavor? or do I need to read more carefully
You need to read more carefully.
My favorite is True in a Nutshell.
>Companies like IBM have a large contingent of
>people that loathe Microsoft and aren't afraid to
>speak out about it, yet IBM seems to be able to
>deal with both Microsoft and its customers just
>fine, and IBM is able to deliver a wide variety of
>systems.
I sort of get the impression that there's a faction of IBM mainframe guys who hate everything that isn't an IBM mainframe, including IBM AS/400s, IBM AIX boxes, and IBM PCs.
I'm sure there's a faction of AS/400 guys who hate mainframes, AIX, and PCs.
IBM is a big company, there's room for some rivalry between divisions. It might even be healthy, in small doses.
(Contrast the above with the new HP "thought police". Hmmm.)
>Where I work, stability and cost efficiency has
>nothing to do with our choice of OS. We need
>something that will run all those damned legacy
>apps we still have left over from the DOS 6.22
>days. It's so much easier, it seems, to accomodate
>these old apps then to replace or upgrade them.
>A lot of other big companies probably stay on
>Windows for the same reason.
OK, that's the client side, but you could still start turfing NT/2000 in your server room.
HP/Compaq (or Dell or IBM) would love to sell you some servers.
Fairly new, first out in hardcover Jan 2001.
Urk. It's a fairly deep book by a Ph.D. in philosophy...
He talks a lot about Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and compares the "Protestant Work Ethic" to the "Hacker Work Ethic".
Protestant Ethic- I identify strongly with my work (Hi, I'm Bob, I'm a sysadmin). Work is a duty, not just a job.
- Life rotates around work, and everything else is stuffed into evenings and weekends
- If I'm not working (get laid off etc), I feel lost, uprooted, useless
Hacker ethic:I'm afraid the above is not a very good summary. I hope it's enough to pique your curiousity and get you to read the book :)
BTW, here's a Slashdot book review and discussion.
Have you read Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic ?
:)
He talks extensively about the "work ethic".
You seem to have strong opinions about the topic. I predict you'll either really enjoy the book or else totally hate it
>That is true, but at least you get *some* kudos for
>doing a good job.
OMFG, ROTFLMAO!
OK, you've hit a nerve, and now you're going to get a rant.
I just got laid off from a contract to a Really Big Private Sector Company.
I did a very good job during the term of my contract. You can ask anyone I worked with, I was helpful, solved problems, followed the silly policies and procedures, I was a model employee^Wcontractor.
My kudos? They didn't renew my contract because of "tough economic times".
The waste that went on there (and still goes on) is absolutely insane, but to save money they turfed all the contractors because that's a very easy way to save $$$ without losing face.
Kudos indeed.
>Before you start work with a gov entity, rip out
>the part of your brain that likes to see real
>progress on real projects, for you will never use
>it, or get into trouble when you do. You have to be
>happy to go with the flow and navigate the maze of
>politics and rot-heads it contains.
squick!
Squick!
SQUICK!
I'm having serious flashbacks to a couple of private-sector companies I used to work for.
Seriously though, there's lots of rigid proceduralism and CYA outside of government.
>Documenting as much as possible can help prevent
>this kind of fraud.
No fraud in this case, i.e. no time off or anything, this was a non-issue.
But once something gets reported, the paperwork starts, and things get silly.
>While both have red tape, the corps are less likely
>to get bogged down in it.
No offence, but what's the biggest company you've ever worked for?
True story from my days at Very Big Oil Company: At my office, someone bent over to pick up a pen, and when they stood up, they bumped their head on a thermometer mounted on the wall. This was officially written up as a "safety incident", meetings were held, and the thermometer was remounted to a higher position on the wall.
Dilbert isn't a comedy, it's a documentary of the Fortune 500.
>It's possible that you could get a great sense of
.gov.
>accomplishment from working in the public sector.
>However, here in Canada, government services are
>heavily unionized. I fear that most attempts at
>accomplishing anything could be burried under
>government and union red tape.
Oh yeah, there's no red tape in the private sector, right?
I worked for a Very Big Oil Company, and I've also had a couple of provincial government jobs.
Compared to Big Oil, my experience in government was the essence of thrift, accountability, planning, empowerment, and clueful use of technology.
Working for the government did indeed suck, they certainly did have a lot of problems in need of fixing, but that's not unique to
-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-
Oh, and here's another advocacy gem from Usenet:
-=-=-=-
Since I'm still fighting to get my lines long enough to satisfy the lameness filter, I might as well throw in another this old joke while I'm at it.
From the linked BBC article:
>Linux is gaining corporate fans is because it is
>cheap, easy to maintain and much more secure than
>Microsoft software.
You can't buy advertising like that.
>if you are the kind of person who is prone to
>abuse, and if so, address the issue. otherwise,
>do some drinking, or whatever
- Your very first objective should be to find the right balance of partying and studying - have as much fun as possible without flunking out.
- Find out how much you can drink without getting sick should also be a high priority.
- If you drink a litre of water before going to bed, you will be less hung over, or not at all.
Have fun, it's the most freedom and fun you'll probably ever have.>Don't be overconfident. Don't be underconfident.
:)
>Just try to go through things and evaluate as you
>go what exactly is required of you.
Ah, brings back memories of my very first CS class. The prof tells the class "OK, everyone look at the person to your left. Now look at the person to your right. One of those people won't be here after Christmas."
This was an "advanced" CS class, i.e. everyone in the room had passed a test and was taking 2 first year CS courses squeezed into 1.
We all thought we were pretty smart, and the prof was trying to shake us out of it. His little lecture didn't work for me, it wasn't until the second or third assignment that I got scared and started to actually do work
Anyway, uni isn't killer hard, but you actually have to do some work, i.e. you can't sleepwalk thru like high school. If you show up for class and do the assignments, you'll pass.
Oh, and BTW, at Christmas time, the prof was proven right - about half of that "advanced" class had [failed|dropped] out.
Check out http://www.canonicaltomes.org/, people have entered and voted on the "best" books in a variety of categories.
> I wonder if there has ever been an instance of an
> 800 number being slashdotted?
Oh yeah.
I used babysit the computers at a call center, and it's very easy to get overloaded.
There are a finite number of trunks (voice lines) coming into a call center. If they are all occupied, you get a fast busy signal when you call that 800 number.
The voice telling you to press 1 for this and 2 for that is being generated by a computer running IVR (interactive voice response) software. The IVR box can only handle a finite # of conversations, depending on the h/w and how it's set up.
And of course there are a finite # of bums in seats, i.e. the people who take the calls. If they're short of agents, you can wait in queue a long time, as I'm sure you've experienced.
>Hairy geeks, slimy geeks, overweighted geeks....
>yes! That's exactly what we want to see! I'm sure
>nobody like those pictures [inscyber.net] taken at
>Microsoft's booth, they are very unprofessional.
Here's another guy who chooses his OS based on the quality of the booth babes:
Why BSD is superior to Linux
>Where I work (a large corporation), we never began
>the rollover from NT to 2000. We still run NT 4.0
>on the desktop, and have no plans to move. We also
>use Office 97 . . . .
2 months ago, I completed a rollout of WinNT4 SP6 + Office 97, replacing Win95 + Office 97 for all of the desktops at our site.
They figure the other sites should be completely rolled out by Xmas.
This is an extremely large company, I've never seen inertia on this scale.
In some ways I approve of this, i.e. don't upgrade if we don't need the features. But working here certainly makes it hard to put impressive buzzwords on my resume.
>But what were they going to bitch about? Anything
>in particular? I guess that's what I am curious
>about. Is it anything significant, or is it just
>another excuse to bitch?
Sounds like it was just an excuse to bitch.
From http://www.fordreallysucks.com/more_info.html
>Months after the threat from General Motors, we
>pointed the domain at various competitors of GM.
>It was our eventual plan either to find or put
>together a site that would provide a forum for
>people critical of the company. While that was
>being done, we pointed the domain to other sites
>that might be of interest to people who weren't
>big fans of General Motors. One of these (it made
>sense to us then and it still does now, albeit
>less so after what we've learned) was Ford.
> Sig Reply: Wow. That's from a C64, right?
> Load "$",8,1
> LOADING
> READY.
> list
That actually doesn't do what you think it does...
The final ",1" argument will attempt to load the directory listing as a machine code file instead of a BASIC program, so you won't get a useable directory listing.
What you really want is LOAD "$", 8.
(For anyone who cares, the Commodore machines made the directory table of a tape or diskette available as a special file called "$". You LOADed the special file from a device (1 for tape, 8 for diskette), and the names of the files were loaded into memory, in the form of a BASIC program that you could then LIST.)
Heh heh, fond memories. Those were good days, I adored my C64, but I sure wouldn't want to go back!
> Why is 2600 saying "Shove it!" to GM, though? I
> can't figure that part out.
They registered the domain name with the intention of making a site to bitch about GM.
They didn't have any content yet, so they pointed it to Ford until they got more organized.
Once Ford started legal proceedings, they almost had to keep that address pointing at Ford, anything else would have been seen as backing down.