The story says the kid was in trouble last year for bringing up innapropriate web sites. I'm trying to paint a MO here, just a theory..
A few years back Mr Columbo recomends site blocking software A. Kid breaks through software. Mr Columbo looks like an ass because some 14 year old kid comprimised his recomended security. Rather than be a professional about it and say "gee ok maybe I should ask this kid what we should use" He probably spent his time thinkin of ways to get back at him.
Over the course of the next year, Mr Columbo does his best to alienate this kid from the rest of the population. Prolly embarasses him in front of the class, continually tries to opress his free though.
Eventually the kid gets to a state where no matter what he tries, he knows Mr Columbo (god i love saying that) does not like him, he wants to do good in school so he's willing to do whatever it takes to get back in his good graces.
Mr Columbo makes a joke, telling the students to crack the file security system. Kid is so desperate to get on his good side he takes it literally, so he begins his work.
After comprimising system, kid goes back to Mr Columbo hoping he will acknowledge his work. Mr Columbo acknowledges it, then turns around and reports to the school "hey this kid is a 3v1l h4ck3r" to get the kid who made him look bad a year ago out of his hair.
The whole thing smells like entrapment if you ask me. Just like the corporate world except if a job is this bad, at least you can quit.
I'm willing to donate $100 bucks to this kids legal defense fund. It's not much, but its all I can offer right now. Let me know where to send the check, maybe the rest of us/..'rs should do the same. I had teachers fuck with me because I was too smart in school. It's nothing but peasant mentality on the part of the school district. Then again, I've been to washington, back in the 80's when I listened to the cure and dressed funny, I remember kids from my cousins HS in their farmer overalls asking me, "What are you some kind of faggot?" I guess things haven't changed much.
Funny, before this story came out I was talking to my freind about the very same subject, did videogames help us get to where we are today.
He was very admimate about it, I asked him, "What does playing zelda have to do with being a sysadmin?" His reply, "Remember when you had to get the key, to get the flute, to get the tornado to get to gannon?" "Yes", I replied. "Well, that was troubleshooting skills being nurtured there" All of the sudden, the lightbulb went on in my head and I got it! We started tracing back our video games to our skillset.
Nintendo, most games taught us problem solving skills. Also when the damn cartrige wouldn't work we'd do what would be compared to a ctrl-alt-delete today, blow on the cartridge!
Barren Realms Elite, started to teach us the basics of networked systems, well fidonet anyways.
Doom, We wanted to play it multiplayer so we had to learn about things like loading 3c90x.exe and dosodi.com ect. ect, we were learning IPX networking in a novell enviroment.
Quake, This would start teaching us about lag, bandwidth, and all sorts of nifty things about tcp/ip networking.
And many years later we're both sysadmins making a good livin, all thanks to uuddlrlrab:_)
I've seen a bad trend here in Silicon Valley, companies hiring pernament employee's to do 1 or 2 major tasks then firing them.
Last job I worked at I was supposed to get a VPN solution running for the company, unfortunately the guy running the boxes down at GLBX could never make the time to give me some guidance. When I complained to management they excused his lack of co-operation.
So I tried my best, after a month they started giving me the look of death, and low and behold the company got restructured. I was told they would let me keep my job until I found another, fortunate for me I found a better job.
Over the course of the last two years i've seen companies like this several times, its been quite a roller coaster ride just to stay employed.
Another nameless company hired me to convert word documents to HTML back in '95. I showed them the word 95 to html converter and I was fired the next day.
Yet another nameless company hired me to automate their windows98 installs and integrate their software distribution with SMS. It took me 3 months to complete, and a week after it was tested and verified I got fired again.
Point i'm trying to make here is this. Companies know that contracters are expensive, temp agencies are a pain in the ass, not to mention there is a loss of control. It's easier for them to have a HR person fill out all that paperwork, hire who you need for a job, then fire them. I've been a victim to it enough times to have a tolerance. Here is my advice...
Make Freinds with a lawer.
Send e-mail to lawer stating "i think they are going to fire me lets sue"
make sure you disable screen savers and power saving for your monitor.
Bad sysadmins fix stuff all day, good sysadmins keep everything runnning so they can read your e-mails and make jokes umongst themselves. Chances are if your gonna get fired they're sniffing your packets, reading your e-mails, and a bunch of stuff you don't wanna know about. Just make sure to have 1 corrospondance a day with your lawer and they'll let you keep your job till you find a new one.
EEEEWWWEe that earth creature just stole my plutonium 238 space modulator. Ahh yeah I can see this thing now, all gold with a frilly red crest on top and a green metal skirt:)
--toq
Exchange server can be a nightmare to restore from backup, but the main reason the powers that be want to use it is because it is a groupware solution that helps facilitate things like meetings, document collaboration, public folders, ect, ect.
Also Exchange server provide many more ways of getting your e-mail than just POP. You have
1. POP/SMTP
2. Outlook web access
3. MS exchange protocol
So basically all the mac/*nix/win people can use it. Nothing wrong with that.
Rather than try and fight Lord Gates and his armada of Deathstars, take the battle somewhere else. Outsouce it! Currently my company uses united messaging, you can find them at http://www.ummail.com. If you go with a outsourced solution it accomplishes three things.
1. Its not on your lan, no security problems there.
2. If it breaks, you aint gotta fix it.
3. Centrally locates your server so remote users and offices have access to it.
So now you can completely leave all the politics of the situation outta the loop, its not on your lan, to the non-outlook clients its just another pop server, and best of all, if there are any support issues, your users can call united messaging for support!!
The school system just straight out failed my needs as a human more than anything. Just 1 bit of empathy from everyone I knew could have straightened things out, but alas, never came..
My gradeschool years were rough, not because of anything I did. I went to a school where all the parents made 6figure+ salaries and were married. Me? I only went there because my single divorced father worked in the neighborhood. Needless to say this was looked upon as strange by most of the faculty and students. Just because my parents were divorced I was singled out by the administration, my mental health was constantly being evaluated. They would have me talk to counselers at least once a week to "Find out how I was feeling" Did I mention this was 1979 before stuff like hopping kids up on ritalin was around? Oh yeah this was gradeschool too, first grade.
Anyways so yeah, other students would see me going into these counseling sessions, automatically I was deemed "crazy" by some of the other students. It took the other kids 5 years to get to know me to the point where they stopped.
Courts placed me with my mom right at the end of 5'th grade. New school, but now I had to start over in making freinds. Again because the courts placed me it sent up a red flag to the administration that I needed counseling. Difference was, now I was in junior high, whole new school without many freinds. Social structure in JH is a lot different than elementry, more about who you know and how you act/dress. I again had the label of "crazy" on me. Fourtunatly there was a group of non-mainstream people that let me into their social group. This provided me with the support I needed because all the social workers, psychiatrists, and school counselers were really bummin me out. If somebody tells you something for a long enough period of time, you start to belive it. All these "professionals" kept trying to convince me I needed to be put on lithium, and when I objected, would take offense to it and punish me by alienating me in school. One paticular thing I remember is the school principal coming into the woodshop class and instructing the teacher that I was crazy and not to let me use sharp/power tools in class because I might turn it on somebody.
This moniker of being crazy followed me all throughout my adolecent life, not because I did anything, but because my parents got divorced. Eventually when I got into HS I was instructed by the principal to drop out because of grades, then he added that the school didn't have the facilities to take care of a person with my special needs.
Screw them now, i'm 27, allmost making 6 figures as a system admin and living life on my own terms. I ended up here from solitararly playing around with computers till I understood them, they also served as a place to go back in the school days where nobody called me crazy.
I guess the point i'm trying to make here is this, you don't nessacarily have to be a geek, behave strangly, to be alienated in the school system. Things that are completely out of your control can occur that puts you on a pernament black list of counseling, forced medication, remidial special kids classes, and other harrassment techniques that i've seen the other kids post here. My case in point was a divorce. It makes me wonder how many other kids got the same treatment as myself.
Weird I was actually playing frogger on my TV last night, was wayyy cool. Even though the 800 was little more than a gaming machine with a keyboard on it, this gave way to many many innovative programming techniques on the atari. Possibly this is a way for the sony developers to find out just what can be done with the system, sorta free R&D if you will. Its going to be interesting to see what Freeware games come from this.
The school system just straight out failed my needs as a human more than anything. Just 1 bit of empathy from everyone I knew could have straightened things out, but alas, never came..
My gradeschool years were rough, not because of anything I did. I went to a school where all the parents made 6figure+ salaries and were married. Me? I only went there because my single divorced father worked in the neighborhood. Needless to say this was looked upon as strange by most of the faculty and students. Just because my parents were divorced I was singled out by the administration, my mental health was constantly being evaluated. They would have me talk to counselers at least once a week to "Find out how I was feeling" Did I mention this was 1979 before stuff like hopping kids up on ritalin was around? Oh yeah this was gradeschool too, first grade.
Anyways so yeah, other students would see me going into these counseling sessions, automatically I was deemed "crazy" by some of the other students. It took the other kids 5 years to get to know me to the point where they stopped.
Courts placed me with my mom right at the end of 5'th grade. New school, but now I had to start over in making freinds. Again because the courts placed me it sent up a red flag to the administration that I needed counseling. Difference was, now I was in junior high, whole new school without many freinds. Social structure in JH is a lot different than elementry, more about who you know and how you act/dress. I again had the label of "crazy" on me. Fourtunatly there was a group of non-mainstream people that let me into their social group. This provided me with the support I needed because all the social workers, psychiatrists, and school counselers were really bummin me out. If somebody tells you something for a long enough period of time, you start to belive it. All these "professionals" kept trying to convince me I needed to be put on lithium, and when I objected, would take offense to it and punish me by alienating me in school. One paticular thing I remember is the school principal coming into the woodshop class and instructing the teacher that I was crazy and not to let me use sharp/power tools in class because I might turn it on somebody.
This moniker of being crazy followed me all throughout my adolecent life, not because I did anything, but because my parents got divorced. Eventually when I got into HS I was instructed by the principal to drop out because of grades, then he added that the school didn't have the facilities to take care of a person with my special needs.
Screw them now, i'm 27, allmost making 6 figures as a system admin and living life on my own terms. I ended up here from solitararly playing around with computers till I understood them, they also served as a place to go back in the school days where nobody called me crazy.
I guess the point i'm trying to make here is this, you don't nessacarily have to be a geek, behave strangly, to be alienated in the school system. Things that are completely out of your control can occur that puts you on a pernament black list of counseling, forced medication, remidial special kids classes, and other harrassment techniques that i've seen the other kids post here. My case in point was a divorce. It makes me wonder how many other kids got the same treatment as myself.
MS did this a lonnnnnng time ago in dos.
device=emm386 -exclude 0fff-ffff
or something like that. Of course this doesn't work for the first 640k but hey just another example of how m$ innovates
--toq
Maybe microsoft will buy it! I mean heck they bailed apple out, why not Xerox? I see this as a perfect marrige.
MS-makes product that breaks alot and requires a new industry to support it.
Xerox-Same
Woop another score for my lord Bill Gates!
--toq
Prolly gonna get moderated as flamebait but "Oh Well"
You blabbering idiot! WTF do you know about inheratance tax, farming or the like? First off let me tell you who I am so when I start to rant it paints a clearer picture.
In Silicon Valley, San Jose, next to Evergreen valley college there is a soon to be demolished cherry orchard that belongs to my family, We have lived here for over 100 years, we watched San Jose go from a nice little town of 30k people to over 800k in less than 30 years. I know firsthand a thing or two about farming and inheratance tax. Any./'r from that area will back me up on that.
First let me tackle your comment about "Oh, don't talk to me about "family businesses & family farms"
This isn't debunked you twit! Most farms that are not in the central valley are owned by families, i'm not sure about the rest of the country. The central valley farms are run by HUGE corporations. Those operations run 247 because of the sheer magnitude of the farms. Go ahead, drive down i-5 sometime and see what im talking about.
This has been the trend for the last 20 years. Small family farm's being bought out by large corporate firms like ADM. Yes the goverment has tried to give small farms a break, but with fuckheads like ADM finding loopholes in the laws to use to their advantage, the money just gets sucked up fast, and by the time the goverment realises what happened, who's left in the cold without help? The small family farmers that run fruit stands on the side of the roads.
One common tax exemption for farmers was to put all their families on the books as property owners. My family 40-50 people. ADM 40k-50k. So in addition to sucking up all the assistance money the big time farmers are basically PAYING LITTLE OR NO TAXES.
So to end my first part of my rant, you haven't a clue how hard its been for family farmers to stay in business. Cost of everything has gone up, we were promised tax breaks and monies that never came. All the tax breaks and assistance went to large firms like ADM. End of story. My family has given up on farming, now we do property which is going to be the second rant.
THAT is why the effort to revoke the Inheritance Tax is so frantic and urgent right now. It is why the bosses of the GOP have made it their number one priority. A trillion or two, taken away from bold foundations and slipped into the pockets of new lords. What a cool agenda!
Ok this one really gets my goat. First off every member of my family has put in some time into the business. When I mean time i'm not talking about sitting behind some lush desk, playing grab ass with a pretty admin that daddy hired for me (I do know people like that, they make me sick) I'm talking spending 12 hours a day in the orchards with a hoe digging out weeds from around the trees because the uncles are too cheap to buy some roundup. Hard cheap labor, thats what makes farming work. Due to a loophole in the minumum wage laws your family is not required to pay you minimum wage. So you work your ass off from the time you can hold a shovel till your old enough to get out on your own FOR LESS MONEY THAN THE MIGRANT FARM WORKERS!!! The only two reasons for doing this is A. Help the family out & B. Someday you'll inherrite the farm. Bad enough I had to work less than minimum wage, and now I have to pay more because some baboon behind a monitor who's never had to do a real day of hard labor in his life doesn't like the fact that i'm going to be inherreting a large some of money? I remember my elders telling me what people said when they were gonna move to the valley, everyone said stuff like "its a floodplane there better buy a boat" and "Oh california has earthquakes and its gonna slide into the ocean." Well fuck, 100 years later, we're still here. Now that its no longer the "Valley of hearts delights" and its known as "Silicon Valley" its suddenly cool. This really pisses me off! My family and other farming families were the ones that built all the flood control for silicon valley. If that flood control wasn't there downtown SJ would be under 12ft of water every year. So for all our hard work we can't pass it down to the next generation without heavy taxes? We helped make the property safer and more livable so all you technocrats could live here.
I'm just gonna wrap this up now. You are way off base on your comments, unless you've come from a family that has worked its ass off to get where they are you just have no place shitting on the rich. You gotta remember, when we first moved here italians were still being called niggers, wops, and dago's. Against all odds we persavered and we became a success. I compare you to George Bush, some guy with lots of ideas, but no fucking clue as to how it really is out there. I think its really bad that cmdrtaco has turned./ into a place where his unedumacated buddies can't post some trollbait like that.
We ran into the same problem over at my company, then we decided to outsource everything except for internal 9-5 support. Check out http://www.ummail.com . They're a pretty large scale Exchange server outsourcing shop, they take care of all the account creation, backups, restore s, ect.
For backups try connected online backup. No complaints from my users yet!
I remember reading something about a SGI LCD display being the best. Maybe not to informative but at least you got a place to start looking.
--t0q.
ps. BTW are you guys really rich now or something? You talked about buying that LCD like 3k is a meanial amount of money to spend "because your monitor got blurry" I dunno, I would have done more research before spending money like that but I guess for me 3k is a lot of money so i think before i spend that much. err 3k isn't an impulse buy.
Lets not forget,
Microsoft shipping early beta releases of their software causes crashes, which means more troubletickets for me and more justification for my job as a NT admin.
--t0qer
what the hell are the moderators on crack? this is a perfectly good point. Of course im a windows believer but still why should only windows/mac users be able to see this flick?
--t0qer
How does it not? Quake pushes your machine to its limits. So if a app that pushes your machine to its limits runs better on M$ than linux then logically any app should run better. Including webservers you silly linux zeolots.
--t0q
Yes yet another comment from that wonderful NT admin t0qer.
I love windows. If it wasn't for all those crappy winboxes breaking down al the time i'd be outta a job. Thats another story in itself.
Since the release of windows 2000 i've seen alot of people who once said "Oh big meanie bill M$ makes a crappy o/s" change their tune to "OMFG M$ finally got it right with a OS"
Yes folks win2k can smoke a similiarly configured linux box on web services. How do you ask? Well instead of boring you with hits per minute lets look at something we can all agree to. Quake 3 benchmarks.
Quake3 win2k runs circles around Q3 linux. So if it can do well there, it can do even better with web services, since it isn't drawing complex 32bit textured mapped 3d eye candy.
Yes I know you linux guys don't want to admit it, but thats a fact baby.
Bah move over you old timer slashdotter. You may have been here first but remember the american indians? You may have smarts but us MS people definetly have numbers.
You all should be damn thankful M$ is around. If it wasn't for all them damn winboxen breaking down all the time 'ol toq wouldn't have a job. Yeah thats right I FRICKEN love M$. I'm not a M$ apologetic either.
So why does the goverment have to screw with a good thing? I dunno, I think the US doesn't like the idea of a dynasty lasting over 20 years. If M$ were allowed to continue they'd be around another 100 years I bet.
You buy a car right? It has a radio. There are presets on that radio. Is the car company doing unfair practices by steering customers towards a paticular radio station? No. Oh wait a minute, the radio was manufactured by the automaker. Does that make it a monopoly? No. Go out and put a different radio in the car if it bothers you so much.
The same thing applies to computers. You don't like it? Go out and install linux and quit whining about M$. Its that simple. You don't wanna pay for M$? Tough shit either pirate it or buy it. You don't like closed source software? Tough shit go use Linux. Just because you don't like something it doesn't mean everyone else has to think like you do.
What value is there in M$? If something breaks, doesn't work, ect,ect I know I can call them and if support can't figure it out it'll be escalated all the way to the programmer that wrote the code. Linux? No such thing. So yeah let M$ have their appeal. I just hope it gives them enough time to come up with a good case to have the breakup turned around.
Slashdot Mirror
The story says the kid was in trouble last year for bringing up innapropriate web sites. I'm trying to paint a MO here, just a theory..
/..'rs should do the same. I had teachers fuck with me because I was too smart in school. It's nothing but peasant mentality on the part of the school district. Then again, I've been to washington, back in the 80's when I listened to the cure and dressed funny, I remember kids from my cousins HS in their farmer overalls asking me, "What are you some kind of faggot?" I guess things haven't changed much.
A few years back Mr Columbo recomends site blocking software A. Kid breaks through software. Mr Columbo looks like an ass because some 14 year old kid comprimised his recomended security. Rather than be a professional about it and say "gee ok maybe I should ask this kid what we should use" He probably spent his time thinkin of ways to get back at him.
Over the course of the next year, Mr Columbo does his best to alienate this kid from the rest of the population. Prolly embarasses him in front of the class, continually tries to opress his free though.
Eventually the kid gets to a state where no matter what he tries, he knows Mr Columbo (god i love saying that) does not like him, he wants to do good in school so he's willing to do whatever it takes to get back in his good graces.
Mr Columbo makes a joke, telling the students to crack the file security system. Kid is so desperate to get on his good side he takes it literally, so he begins his work.
After comprimising system, kid goes back to Mr Columbo hoping he will acknowledge his work. Mr Columbo acknowledges it, then turns around and reports to the school "hey this kid is a 3v1l h4ck3r" to get the kid who made him look bad a year ago out of his hair.
The whole thing smells like entrapment if you ask me. Just like the corporate world except if a job is this bad, at least you can quit.
I'm willing to donate $100 bucks to this kids legal defense fund. It's not much, but its all I can offer right now. Let me know where to send the check, maybe the rest of us
--Toq
Funny, before this story came out I was talking to my freind about the very same subject, did videogames help us get to where we are today.
:_)
He was very admimate about it, I asked him, "What does playing zelda have to do with being a sysadmin?" His reply, "Remember when you had to get the key, to get the flute, to get the tornado to get to gannon?" "Yes", I replied. "Well, that was troubleshooting skills being nurtured there" All of the sudden, the lightbulb went on in my head and I got it! We started tracing back our video games to our skillset.
Nintendo, most games taught us problem solving skills. Also when the damn cartrige wouldn't work we'd do what would be compared to a ctrl-alt-delete today, blow on the cartridge!
Barren Realms Elite, started to teach us the basics of networked systems, well fidonet anyways.
Doom, We wanted to play it multiplayer so we had to learn about things like loading 3c90x.exe and dosodi.com ect. ect, we were learning IPX networking in a novell enviroment.
Quake, This would start teaching us about lag, bandwidth, and all sorts of nifty things about tcp/ip networking.
And many years later we're both sysadmins making a good livin, all thanks to uuddlrlrab
--Toq
I've seen a bad trend here in Silicon Valley, companies hiring pernament employee's to do 1 or 2 major tasks then firing them.
Last job I worked at I was supposed to get a VPN solution running for the company, unfortunately the guy running the boxes down at GLBX could never make the time to give me some guidance. When I complained to management they excused his lack of co-operation.
So I tried my best, after a month they started giving me the look of death, and low and behold the company got restructured. I was told they would let me keep my job until I found another, fortunate for me I found a better job.
Over the course of the last two years i've seen companies like this several times, its been quite a roller coaster ride just to stay employed.
Another nameless company hired me to convert word documents to HTML back in '95. I showed them the word 95 to html converter and I was fired the next day.
Yet another nameless company hired me to automate their windows98 installs and integrate their software distribution with SMS. It took me 3 months to complete, and a week after it was tested and verified I got fired again.
Point i'm trying to make here is this. Companies know that contracters are expensive, temp agencies are a pain in the ass, not to mention there is a loss of control. It's easier for them to have a HR person fill out all that paperwork, hire who you need for a job, then fire them. I've been a victim to it enough times to have a tolerance. Here is my advice...
Make Freinds with a lawer.
Send e-mail to lawer stating "i think they are going to fire me lets sue"
make sure you disable screen savers and power saving for your monitor.
Bad sysadmins fix stuff all day, good sysadmins keep everything runnning so they can read your e-mails and make jokes umongst themselves. Chances are if your gonna get fired they're sniffing your packets, reading your e-mails, and a bunch of stuff you don't wanna know about. Just make sure to have 1 corrospondance a day with your lawer and they'll let you keep your job till you find a new one.
--Toq
EEEEWWWEe that earth creature just stole my plutonium 238 space modulator. Ahh yeah I can see this thing now, all gold with a frilly red crest on top and a green metal skirt:) --toq
Exchange server can be a nightmare to restore from backup, but the main reason the powers that be want to use it is because it is a groupware solution that helps facilitate things like meetings, document collaboration, public folders, ect, ect.
Also Exchange server provide many more ways of getting your e-mail than just POP. You have
1. POP/SMTP
2. Outlook web access
3. MS exchange protocol
So basically all the mac/*nix/win people can use it. Nothing wrong with that.
Rather than try and fight Lord Gates and his armada of Deathstars, take the battle somewhere else. Outsouce it! Currently my company uses united messaging, you can find them at http://www.ummail.com. If you go with a outsourced solution it accomplishes three things.
1. Its not on your lan, no security problems there.
2. If it breaks, you aint gotta fix it.
3. Centrally locates your server so remote users and offices have access to it.
So now you can completely leave all the politics of the situation outta the loop, its not on your lan, to the non-outlook clients its just another pop server, and best of all, if there are any support issues, your users can call united messaging for support!!
Beutiful aint it?
--Toq
This comment is freely distrutable under the GPL.
Oh man, where do I begin....
The school system just straight out failed my needs as a human more than anything. Just 1 bit of empathy from everyone I knew could have straightened things out, but alas, never came..
My gradeschool years were rough, not because of anything I did. I went to a school where all the parents made 6figure+ salaries and were married. Me? I only went there because my single divorced father worked in the neighborhood. Needless to say this was looked upon as strange by most of the faculty and students. Just because my parents were divorced I was singled out by the administration, my mental health was constantly being evaluated. They would have me talk to counselers at least once a week to "Find out how I was feeling" Did I mention this was 1979 before stuff like hopping kids up on ritalin was around? Oh yeah this was gradeschool too, first grade.
Anyways so yeah, other students would see me going into these counseling sessions, automatically I was deemed "crazy" by some of the other students. It took the other kids 5 years to get to know me to the point where they stopped.
Courts placed me with my mom right at the end of 5'th grade. New school, but now I had to start over in making freinds. Again because the courts placed me it sent up a red flag to the administration that I needed counseling. Difference was, now I was in junior high, whole new school without many freinds. Social structure in JH is a lot different than elementry, more about who you know and how you act/dress. I again had the label of "crazy" on me. Fourtunatly there was a group of non-mainstream people that let me into their social group. This provided me with the support I needed because all the social workers, psychiatrists, and school counselers were really bummin me out. If somebody tells you something for a long enough period of time, you start to belive it. All these "professionals" kept trying to convince me I needed to be put on lithium, and when I objected, would take offense to it and punish me by alienating me in school. One paticular thing I remember is the school principal coming into the woodshop class and instructing the teacher that I was crazy and not to let me use sharp/power tools in class because I might turn it on somebody.
This moniker of being crazy followed me all throughout my adolecent life, not because I did anything, but because my parents got divorced. Eventually when I got into HS I was instructed by the principal to drop out because of grades, then he added that the school didn't have the facilities to take care of a person with my special needs.
Screw them now, i'm 27, allmost making 6 figures as a system admin and living life on my own terms. I ended up here from solitararly playing around with computers till I understood them, they also served as a place to go back in the school days where nobody called me crazy.
I guess the point i'm trying to make here is this, you don't nessacarily have to be a geek, behave strangly, to be alienated in the school system. Things that are completely out of your control can occur that puts you on a pernament black list of counseling, forced medication, remidial special kids classes, and other harrassment techniques that i've seen the other kids post here. My case in point was a divorce. It makes me wonder how many other kids got the same treatment as myself.
--Toq
here
gave me a garage full of atari stuff.Weird I was actually playing frogger on my TV last night, was wayyy cool. Even though the 800 was little more than a gaming machine with a keyboard on it, this gave way to many many innovative programming techniques on the atari. Possibly this is a way for the sony developers to find out just what can be done with the system, sorta free R&D if you will. Its going to be interesting to see what Freeware games come from this.
--toq
This comment is freely distrutable under the GPL.
Oh man, where do I begin....
The school system just straight out failed my needs as a human more than anything. Just 1 bit of empathy from everyone I knew could have straightened things out, but alas, never came..
My gradeschool years were rough, not because of anything I did. I went to a school where all the parents made 6figure+ salaries and were married. Me? I only went there because my single divorced father worked in the neighborhood. Needless to say this was looked upon as strange by most of the faculty and students. Just because my parents were divorced I was singled out by the administration, my mental health was constantly being evaluated. They would have me talk to counselers at least once a week to "Find out how I was feeling" Did I mention this was 1979 before stuff like hopping kids up on ritalin was around? Oh yeah this was gradeschool too, first grade.
Anyways so yeah, other students would see me going into these counseling sessions, automatically I was deemed "crazy" by some of the other students. It took the other kids 5 years to get to know me to the point where they stopped.
Courts placed me with my mom right at the end of 5'th grade. New school, but now I had to start over in making freinds. Again because the courts placed me it sent up a red flag to the administration that I needed counseling. Difference was, now I was in junior high, whole new school without many freinds. Social structure in JH is a lot different than elementry, more about who you know and how you act/dress. I again had the label of "crazy" on me. Fourtunatly there was a group of non-mainstream people that let me into their social group. This provided me with the support I needed because all the social workers, psychiatrists, and school counselers were really bummin me out. If somebody tells you something for a long enough period of time, you start to belive it. All these "professionals" kept trying to convince me I needed to be put on lithium, and when I objected, would take offense to it and punish me by alienating me in school. One paticular thing I remember is the school principal coming into the woodshop class and instructing the teacher that I was crazy and not to let me use sharp/power tools in class because I might turn it on somebody.
This moniker of being crazy followed me all throughout my adolecent life, not because I did anything, but because my parents got divorced. Eventually when I got into HS I was instructed by the principal to drop out because of grades, then he added that the school didn't have the facilities to take care of a person with my special needs.
Screw them now, i'm 27, allmost making 6 figures as a system admin and living life on my own terms. I ended up here from solitararly playing around with computers till I understood them, they also served as a place to go back in the school days where nobody called me crazy.
I guess the point i'm trying to make here is this, you don't nessacarily have to be a geek, behave strangly, to be alienated in the school system. Things that are completely out of your control can occur that puts you on a pernament black list of counseling, forced medication, remidial special kids classes, and other harrassment techniques that i've seen the other kids post here. My case in point was a divorce. It makes me wonder how many other kids got the same treatment as myself.
--Toq
MS did this a lonnnnnng time ago in dos. device=emm386 -exclude 0fff-ffff or something like that. Of course this doesn't work for the first 640k but hey just another example of how m$ innovates --toq
All it shows is excel running. There is no X desktop at all. I'd say this is a forgery of sometype. --toqer
Maybe microsoft will buy it! I mean heck they bailed apple out, why not Xerox? I see this as a perfect marrige. MS-makes product that breaks alot and requires a new industry to support it. Xerox-Same Woop another score for my lord Bill Gates! --toq
You blabbering idiot! WTF do you know about inheratance tax, farming or the like? First off let me tell you who I am so when I start to rant it paints a clearer picture.
In Silicon Valley, San Jose, next to Evergreen valley college there is a soon to be demolished cherry orchard that belongs to my family, We have lived here for over 100 years, we watched San Jose go from a nice little town of 30k people to over 800k in less than 30 years. I know firsthand a thing or two about farming and inheratance tax. Any ./'r from that area will back me up on that.
First let me tackle your comment about "Oh, don't talk to me about "family businesses & family farms"
This isn't debunked you twit! Most farms that are not in the central valley are owned by families, i'm not sure about the rest of the country. The central valley farms are run by HUGE corporations. Those operations run 247 because of the sheer magnitude of the farms. Go ahead, drive down i-5 sometime and see what im talking about.
This has been the trend for the last 20 years. Small family farm's being bought out by large corporate firms like ADM. Yes the goverment has tried to give small farms a break, but with fuckheads like ADM finding loopholes in the laws to use to their advantage, the money just gets sucked up fast, and by the time the goverment realises what happened, who's left in the cold without help? The small family farmers that run fruit stands on the side of the roads.
One common tax exemption for farmers was to put all their families on the books as property owners. My family 40-50 people. ADM 40k-50k. So in addition to sucking up all the assistance money the big time farmers are basically PAYING LITTLE OR NO TAXES.
So to end my first part of my rant, you haven't a clue how hard its been for family farmers to stay in business. Cost of everything has gone up, we were promised tax breaks and monies that never came. All the tax breaks and assistance went to large firms like ADM. End of story. My family has given up on farming, now we do property which is going to be the second rant.
THAT is why the effort to revoke the Inheritance Tax is so frantic and urgent right now. It is why the bosses of the GOP have made it their number one priority. A trillion or two, taken away from bold foundations and slipped into the pockets of new lords. What a cool agenda!
Ok this one really gets my goat. First off every member of my family has put in some time into the business. When I mean time i'm not talking about sitting behind some lush desk, playing grab ass with a pretty admin that daddy hired for me (I do know people like that, they make me sick) I'm talking spending 12 hours a day in the orchards with a hoe digging out weeds from around the trees because the uncles are too cheap to buy some roundup. Hard cheap labor, thats what makes farming work. Due to a loophole in the minumum wage laws your family is not required to pay you minimum wage. So you work your ass off from the time you can hold a shovel till your old enough to get out on your own FOR LESS MONEY THAN THE MIGRANT FARM WORKERS!!! The only two reasons for doing this is A. Help the family out & B. Someday you'll inherrite the farm. Bad enough I had to work less than minimum wage, and now I have to pay more because some baboon behind a monitor who's never had to do a real day of hard labor in his life doesn't like the fact that i'm going to be inherreting a large some of money? I remember my elders telling me what people said when they were gonna move to the valley, everyone said stuff like "its a floodplane there better buy a boat" and "Oh california has earthquakes and its gonna slide into the ocean." Well fuck, 100 years later, we're still here. Now that its no longer the "Valley of hearts delights" and its known as "Silicon Valley" its suddenly cool. This really pisses me off! My family and other farming families were the ones that built all the flood control for silicon valley. If that flood control wasn't there downtown SJ would be under 12ft of water every year. So for all our hard work we can't pass it down to the next generation without heavy taxes? We helped make the property safer and more livable so all you technocrats could live here.
I'm just gonna wrap this up now. You are way off base on your comments, unless you've come from a family that has worked its ass off to get where they are you just have no place shitting on the rich. You gotta remember, when we first moved here italians were still being called niggers, wops, and dago's. Against all odds we persavered and we became a success. I compare you to George Bush, some guy with lots of ideas, but no fucking clue as to how it really is out there. I think its really bad that cmdrtaco has turned ./ into a place where his unedumacated buddies can't post some trollbait like that.
--toq
We ran into the same problem over at my company, then we decided to outsource everything except for internal 9-5 support. Check out http://www.ummail.com . They're a pretty large scale Exchange server outsourcing shop, they take care of all the account creation, backups, restore s, ect.
For backups try connected online backup. No complaints from my users yet!
--toq
M$ does not manufacture the hardware (thank goodness) Umm wait a minute, i thought they made really nice joysticks and mice
I remember reading something about a SGI LCD display being the best. Maybe not to informative but at least you got a place to start looking. --t0q. ps. BTW are you guys really rich now or something? You talked about buying that LCD like 3k is a meanial amount of money to spend "because your monitor got blurry" I dunno, I would have done more research before spending money like that but I guess for me 3k is a lot of money so i think before i spend that much. err 3k isn't an impulse buy.
Lets not forget, Microsoft shipping early beta releases of their software causes crashes, which means more troubletickets for me and more justification for my job as a NT admin. --t0qer
what the hell are the moderators on crack? this is a perfectly good point. Of course im a windows believer but still why should only windows/mac users be able to see this flick? --t0qer
I got a good question. Does NPR pay a royaltee for music played? Can webcasters that are not for profit be charged? --t0q
How does it not? Quake pushes your machine to its limits. So if a app that pushes your machine to its limits runs better on M$ than linux then logically any app should run better. Including webservers you silly linux zeolots. --t0q
Yes yet another comment from that wonderful NT admin t0qer.
I love windows. If it wasn't for all those crappy winboxes breaking down al the time i'd be outta a job. Thats another story in itself.
Since the release of windows 2000 i've seen alot of people who once said "Oh big meanie bill M$ makes a crappy o/s" change their tune to "OMFG M$ finally got it right with a OS"
Yes folks win2k can smoke a similiarly configured linux box on web services. How do you ask? Well instead of boring you with hits per minute lets look at something we can all agree to. Quake 3 benchmarks.
Quake3 win2k runs circles around Q3 linux. So if it can do well there, it can do even better with web services, since it isn't drawing complex 32bit textured mapped 3d eye candy.
Yes I know you linux guys don't want to admit it, but thats a fact baby.
--t0qer
I would have posted a vrml slashdot but cmdrtaco in all his wisdom wont allow the tag.
>
<html>
<body>
<p><embed width="128" height="128" src="http://www.zeromag.net/rob/slashdot.wrl"></p
</body>
</html>
Bah move over you old timer slashdotter. You may have been here first but remember the american indians? You may have smarts but us MS people definetly have numbers.
Here here slut muffin I second that notion! --toq
I've said this before and i'll say it again.
,ect I know I can call them and if support can't figure it out it'll be escalated all the way to the programmer that wrote the code. Linux? No such thing. So yeah let M$ have their appeal. I just hope it gives them enough time to come up with a good case to have the breakup turned around.
You all should be damn thankful M$ is around. If it wasn't for all them damn winboxen breaking down all the time 'ol toq wouldn't have a job. Yeah thats right I FRICKEN love M$. I'm not a M$ apologetic either.
So why does the goverment have to screw with a good thing? I dunno, I think the US doesn't like the idea of a dynasty lasting over 20 years. If M$ were allowed to continue they'd be around another 100 years I bet.
You buy a car right? It has a radio. There are presets on that radio. Is the car company doing unfair practices by steering customers towards a paticular radio station? No. Oh wait a minute, the radio was manufactured by the automaker. Does that make it a monopoly? No. Go out and put a different radio in the car if it bothers you so much.
The same thing applies to computers. You don't like it? Go out and install linux and quit whining about M$. Its that simple. You don't wanna pay for M$? Tough shit either pirate it or buy it. You don't like closed source software? Tough shit go use Linux. Just because you don't like something it doesn't mean everyone else has to think like you do.
What value is there in M$? If something breaks, doesn't work, ect
--toq
no that would be .wop you dumb bastard.
--Toq