I have been TAC'd "around the world" literally with Cisco support; One TAC case lasted 32 hours, all on the phone. We went from California, to the East Cost, to Brussels/Belgium, to Egypt, to Asia then Asia-Pacific and back to California. We had several problems that basically caused us to create a new core network from other pieces of equipment, tear down and rebuild the original router from the chassis up after a bad power supply ate the old one, and each and every card in it. This was a few years ago before everyone could afford or manage completely redundant network infrastructure, and things like 2 hour turnaround on hardware was supposed to alleviate things like this. The problem was, some of the cards would pass first level diags, but not run for long. Each part got there in less than 2 hours tho! It was one of those 'one in a million' cases, but the rep on the other end of the phone was cooperative the whole time.
That said, I've also had low priority cases where they don't respond for weeks; It's almost to the point at times that anything I've opened gets opened at Medium priority (business impact) or higher.
Here's some quick facts and info for the people who are curious.
You get a complete system image running (in my case) SUSE, complete with all the normal apps and packages (Apache, compilers, MySQL, Perl, etc) and some special IBM packages and things they provide.
The engineering staff has been quick to respond, and they're obviously enthusiastic and knowledgeable.
There's a mailing list setup now, but they expect that to grow a lot when the public registration opens.
You can enable or disable services, reboot the machine, etc. Anyone who's used a Linux box will be very comfortable, and the only 'indication' of being a virtual machine I've had so far (besides the unusual dmesg output, since it is after all a completely different architecture from most peoples' experience on a PC, PowerPC, Sun, or Alpha) was related to the system clock (things like 'hwclock --systohc' don't work, since you can't munge the main system's clock) and needing a bit more drive space since a lot of the 'generic' stuff is mounted read-only (which has been fixed as they reworked the images). If you've watched the page at http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/li nux/lcds/ you've prolly seen most of this, as they keep putting up little blurbs in red text at the bottom of the page. I've seen some posts wondering what IBM's ulterior motives are, and I think everyone knows they want to sell as many servers as possible, and we also know they're here to sell the high-margin ones, as well. But that doesn't mean the machines aren't an excellent resource; I work for a paycheck, too, but I feel pretty good about the level of service I provide to my employers, and I think the same applies here to IBM. You don't make a billion dollar investment in something for charities sake, but you also don't do it if you don't intend to back it up with some quality products.
This is why I drive a 4 door 4 cylinder family car
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
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· Score: 5
I can afford it:-) Sure, I work for a 'dotcom', and we're doing pretty darned well, but I'm not stupid enough to go out and spend a lot of money I don't have. Heck, I'm about to take a honeymoon, and it's all paid for. Now, did that come from money from the 'dotcom' craze?
No! I saved this money into a savings account and some stocks for YEARS, just for either a honeymoon or a serious vacation. Go figure, I have a lot of 'dotcom' friends the repo man will meet, while I have no bills I can't handle on much above minimum wage, and I've even gotten ahead on most of the payments on stuff I do have (car insurance, house insurance, etc) so if I DO have to get a new job, I'm not scrambling for cash.
I have zero sympathy for 'dotcom' geniuses who dug themselves into a hole. Dad worked in a factory his whole life, and I learned what it means to have a backup plan for when it all goes to hell! Thanks dad!
At some places I've worked, and as far as I know this was per federal and state law (YMMV, IANAL, etc) since we checked it out along with HR and a wage attorney, salaried workers can be held as 'primary on-call' workers as a portion of their jobs with no added benefits or monetary compensation. Hourly workers must be paid standard rates (or overtime if by being on call they exceed the limiting number of hours) for times when they are 'primary on-call' workers, meaning that they MUST respond to a page. However, hourly workers CAN be held as 'optional' on-call workers where they can be paged in for extra work, but not paid until they report in, so long as they cannot be held accountable for not responding.
As an example, at one place of employment, an employer might require his hourly workers to stay in the building during lunch hours in case of emergency. In that case, they legally GET a lunch break as they are not on standard job activities and can go eat lunch, but it must be PAID break. So, they might work 9 hours in one shift, and the company is legally allowed to do this so long as that certain period is designated as a lunch break, so long as the hourly employee is paid for being 'on-call'.
At another place of employment, the same kind of workers can be held as 'optional' on-call workers, allowed to leave the building during lunch, and are not paid extra unless they get paged and respond. However, if they do not respond, they cannot be held accountable, as they were on a 'not on primary call' lunch break. However, if they do, they are then paid standard or overtime pay for any time normally on lunch break that was spent working on the problem.
Spend $8 grand on a decent RAID array, and see how the numbers stack up. They compared the thing to a single U2 drive! For $8K, I can get 2 RAID card w/ battery backup and 32 MB Cache (Ultra160 Mylex Cards for $500-700 each), 6 faster drives (10K RPM Ultra160 9.1 GB for $175 each), a data Silo SCSI box, run a mirror set between the 2 Striped RAID volumes (1 connected each to a card), and an extra UPS each for my server and the RAID boxen ($1000). Then see how the speed compares! Oh darn, I still saved some money...
With the ICMP data segment allowed up to 64K, can we just code the raw data into the ICMP chunk? Then, just use a raw socket pinger outbound to a machine, and have it respond with the DeCSS code in the segment in place of the data sent inbound.
If you had to sign over IP, then they rate you as being 'signifigant' in the creation of the idea. That means you DO have some control over its FORM, if not how they pursue it. IE, if they see you as an inventor, you are obviously qualified to an expert opinion on the extent of the idea. If they try to claim you aren't an expert on the patent, then they wouldn't have tried to get you to so\ign off on it! Legal Catch 22, but in your favor.
I'd get ahold of a IP lawyer, explain the scenario, and see what your options are. No doubt, you have personally lost any rights to the patent other than bragging rights by signing over the IP whever way back, but you still have at least partial control over the description.
One of the basic tenants of this is not HOW to do it. I'm mostly just wondering what it means *if* the technology is there to allow it?
See, from what I can tell, people are now expecting their news and reports to be live online. During the Concorde crash, a lot of good information about it was available online before the television media really had a chance to get their hands into it. When there are conflicts and wars, online video and media is often the only way for some information to get out of an affected area.
The main followup isn't really "Why does the IOC have complete control over the media at an internation event that is supposed to celebrate the athletic ability of as many nations as possible in a community atmosphere?", but rather is "How plausible is it to think that any entity can allow information to be broadcast locally, but expect that info to be withheld from the public at large, with legalities being the sole prevention, even though people are now accustomed to getting all their information live and from the source?"
So what level of quality would be considered acceptable to most people (geeks, mostly, because I still don't think too many normal people find out about freenet and gnutella and such easily)?
I just looked at the freenet page on sourceforge.net, and I wonder about the scalability. However, I'm not an expert on this kind of math, so I'll leave that alone.
Is there currently some kind of email -> freenet gateway? It seems that one way to let data enter freenet could be in email that had been sent through an anonymizer.
I am not a lwayer, but I think in the US at least, certain carriers are declared not liable for the content delivered over them (ISP's not liable for delivering a harassing email to their user from another ISP, since the ISP only acted as a carrier; the Phone company not being liable for harassing calls, etc). So if a video server was just a 'carrier' for whatever data entered it, what if they accepted data in email form, regardless of if it came from a verifiable address?
Seems to me this sort of setup would let people in countries/careers concerned about particular issues make sure their video got out into the wild, while still being as assured of privacy as you can get (the example that springs to mind might be video from the riots in Seattle, where so many people thought the video was being supressed or doctored on the normal news media).
In my last incarnation as a ssyadmin for a national ISP/telco, we used quite a few VA boxen, and got great responses. We had one ship w/ a bad drive, and they overnighted a new machine to us. The tech support guys are great (Hey Cron!) and didn't mind me asking weird-ass questions like "What's the byte-ordering on the data that comes back from/proc/temp?" when I was having toruble using a temp sensor card.
Dunno about you, but that goes above and beyond. If the machine booted w/ RedHat and their CD's, as far as I'm concerned you brought any liability on yourself when it failed.
"who wants to sit in a craft as it is fired from a gun, or risk getting stranded in the middle of the ocean if it slows down too much?"
This has to be one of the stupidest things I've read in a scientific article. HELLO!!!
Think about airplanes. Hey, what happens if *they* slow down too much? Ever heard of stall speed? Hey, if this sucker slows down, and loses it's ability to supercavitate, as long as it doesn't hit too much turbulence, then at least with a minimum of equipment it'd simply maintain ballast or float up. Beats dropping into the ocean from 30,000 feet in that Concorde!
And if someone mentions the fact that going that fast is dangerous due to turbulence, go look up what happened on the first dozen or so style of planes when they went supersonic. If the leading and trailing edges are incorrectly engineered, they create 'ripples' of compression and vapors that can develop un-equal forces on the plane's control surfaces, literally throwing it into a spin or ripping it into pieces. It's an engineering issue, sure, but so was Mach in the air.
I have read articles by 'experts' of the time saying man would never go above 50 miles an hour in an open vehicle as the 'air pressure' would prevent him from breathing. *sheesh*
It looks like they've updated the EULA:-) Trust me, the clarification about the software wasn't there when I started to order a NIC. Lemme see if I can pull a copy off the drive or out of squid or whatnot.
Well, honestly, I think I was pretty damn clear in the submission that I couldn't TELL what the EULA was saying, and since it is legal mumbo-jumbo (even the GPL is at times) that the experts should look at it.
Sheesh. I don't see a lot of posts attacking ThinkNIC as a knee-jerk; almost everything I have seen has been well thought out and looked at the EULA and the license. So, how about PLEASE reading the posts carefully before you post a knee-jerk flame about non-existant knee-jerk flames?
I haven't received a NIC yet, but it seems like there's a pretty small chance of making a decent and unique OS on this box without making some neat additions to GPL'd software. And there's no mention of the software anywhere EXCEPT the little blurb about how it runs Linux in the FAQ. *shrug* It'd be nice if they had a link to the GPL from the EULA to let you know what was involved, I dunno.
Duh, I'm an idiot. After posting that, I realized it sounded like I mean I had JUST THEN emailed her; I meant "I simply emailed her" as soon as I read the EULA:-) Slap me for previewing and STILL getting it wrong! Negative karma for stupidity *sigh*
I just emailed Gina Smith asking her if she was aware of the potential issues around the software. Heck, the last thing I want to do is scare a company off of using Linux/Gnu software, etc but it just seemed the best thing to do was ask:-)
Herein, seems to mean allowances made within this document, the EULA, which doesn't mention the GPL at all. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but the things I have read about this issue make me want to ask the opinion of people who do know.
I *really* did re-read the thing three or four times, and it still seems that ThinkNIC is attempting to 'hold onto' the software. This may be accidental, like Timothy says 'boilerplate'
Now, I DID email Gina (the CEO) asking about this, but I haven't heard anything back yet. I'll post if I do (I want to give them time; I LIKE the idea of the NIC, I just wanted to make sure all licenses were fairly respected).
So, why isn't the system disk included on a RAID config, mirrored or something? Not that much mroe expensive (1 drive is less than a grand, LVD or not), and could save you quite a bit of downtime. I mean, until the super-secret Odessey is done, you'd still have to copy across a new system disk, or swap it out, etc. Since it is a co-lo'd server, and I don't know what kind of service you're getting from Exodus, RAID could keep you from having to do more than go "Drat, lost a disk, Hrm." Just a question why the tech decision was made like this, with all the whomp-ass hardware involved.
This SOUNDS good, but think about how M$ had said they'll 'open up' the kerberos extensions, and how Apple was 'opening' all of their development, and how long it took to get the Mozilla license straight, along with the hundreds of other examples. Right now, it's good political karma to claim you are opening the development, but until the license is approved by the people with known intentions and experience dealing with licensing issues, I'll stick to lesstif/QT/GTK, since we know of any associated licensing evils there. Now, if the license turns out to be good, I'll be more than happy to support Motif development again.
Let's see, since I left my last job because I was on call 24/7 for months, let's check my new job (which is MUCH less stressful), since it'd logically follow I'm working less and happier:
Theoretical Workday: 8 AM till 5 PM, 1 hour lunch
Real World: Starts at 7:30 AM (I have a 8 AM conference call to discuss the daily schedule with employees in other phyical locations, and I HAVE to have read email and checked calendars by then. How else would I know what's changed since I quit work the day beofre?).
I get about 15 minutes for a lunch, since my lunch hour is usually sucked up by other employees hunting me down and saying "Hey, since you have a few minutes...". Oh, and I generally eat in front of my computer.
Then I work straight thru till the end of the business day. Then things get interesting. I have to check emails throughout the evening to see if people in other timezones are finally replying to my emails or voice mails from earlier in the day, since I need that info for the next morning's call.
And of course I carry a business cell phone/pager, which means my phone rings anytime up until 11 PM or so as some other employee who's working late realizes they need something from me, or someone wants to complain that their email is running slow (It's NOT the email server! It's a 4 MB Powerpoint doc, and you are on a 56k modem!!!).
33 hours a week? I wish. Notice, I didn't even MENTION weekends! See, there's that cell phone, and powerpoint docs don't download any faster on weekends...
Yup; I got nailed for using this one. I had a large MySQL server sitting next to our Sybase boxes, and since this one was a free piece of software, I named the initial install 'freebase'. It didn't go over too well:-)
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I have been TAC'd "around the world" literally with Cisco support; One TAC case lasted 32 hours, all on the phone. We went from California, to the East Cost, to Brussels/Belgium, to Egypt, to Asia then Asia-Pacific and back to California. We had several problems that basically caused us to create a new core network from other pieces of equipment, tear down and rebuild the original router from the chassis up after a bad power supply ate the old one, and each and every card in it. This was a few years ago before everyone could afford or manage completely redundant network infrastructure, and things like 2 hour turnaround on hardware was supposed to alleviate things like this. The problem was, some of the cards would pass first level diags, but not run for long. Each part got there in less than 2 hours tho! It was one of those 'one in a million' cases, but the rep on the other end of the phone was cooperative the whole time.
That said, I've also had low priority cases where they don't respond for weeks; It's almost to the point at times that anything I've opened gets opened at Medium priority (business impact) or higher.
- You get a complete system image running (in my case) SUSE, complete with all the normal apps and packages (Apache, compilers, MySQL, Perl, etc) and some special IBM packages and things they provide.
- The engineering staff has been quick to respond, and they're obviously enthusiastic and knowledgeable.
- There's a mailing list setup now, but they expect that to grow a lot when the public registration opens.
You can enable or disable services, reboot the machine, etc. Anyone who's used a Linux box will be very comfortable, and the only 'indication' of being a virtual machine I've had so far (besides the unusual dmesg output, since it is after all a completely different architecture from most peoples' experience on a PC, PowerPC, Sun, or Alpha) was related to the system clock (things like 'hwclock --systohc' don't work, since you can't munge the main system's clock) and needing a bit more drive space since a lot of the 'generic' stuff is mounted read-only (which has been fixed as they reworked the images). If you've watched the page at http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/lI've seen some posts wondering what IBM's ulterior motives are, and I think everyone knows they want to sell as many servers as possible, and we also know they're here to sell the high-margin ones, as well. But that doesn't mean the machines aren't an excellent resource; I work for a paycheck, too, but I feel pretty good about the level of service I provide to my employers, and I think the same applies here to IBM. You don't make a billion dollar investment in something for charities sake, but you also don't do it if you don't intend to back it up with some quality products.
I can afford it :-) Sure, I work for a 'dotcom', and we're doing pretty darned well, but I'm not stupid enough to go out and spend a lot of money I don't have. Heck, I'm about to take a honeymoon, and it's all paid for. Now, did that come from money from the 'dotcom' craze?
No! I saved this money into a savings account and some stocks for YEARS, just for either a honeymoon or a serious vacation. Go figure, I have a lot of 'dotcom' friends the repo man will meet, while I have no bills I can't handle on much above minimum wage, and I've even gotten ahead on most of the payments on stuff I do have (car insurance, house insurance, etc) so if I DO have to get a new job, I'm not scrambling for cash.
I have zero sympathy for 'dotcom' geniuses who dug themselves into a hole. Dad worked in a factory his whole life, and I learned what it means to have a backup plan for when it all goes to hell! Thanks dad!
At some places I've worked, and as far as I know this was per federal and state law (YMMV, IANAL, etc) since we checked it out along with HR and a wage attorney, salaried workers can be held as 'primary on-call' workers as a portion of their jobs with no added benefits or monetary compensation. Hourly workers must be paid standard rates (or overtime if by being on call they exceed the limiting number of hours) for times when they are 'primary on-call' workers, meaning that they MUST respond to a page. However, hourly workers CAN be held as 'optional' on-call workers where they can be paged in for extra work, but not paid until they report in, so long as they cannot be held accountable for not responding.
As an example, at one place of employment, an employer might require his hourly workers to stay in the building during lunch hours in case of emergency. In that case, they legally GET a lunch break as they are not on standard job activities and can go eat lunch, but it must be PAID break. So, they might work 9 hours in one shift, and the company is legally allowed to do this so long as that certain period is designated as a lunch break, so long as the hourly employee is paid for being 'on-call'.
At another place of employment, the same kind of workers can be held as 'optional' on-call workers, allowed to leave the building during lunch, and are not paid extra unless they get paged and respond. However, if they do not respond, they cannot be held accountable, as they were on a 'not on primary call' lunch break. However, if they do, they are then paid standard or overtime pay for any time normally on lunch break that was spent working on the problem.
Spend $8 grand on a decent RAID array, and see how the numbers stack up. They compared the thing to a single U2 drive! For $8K, I can get 2 RAID card w/ battery backup and 32 MB Cache (Ultra160 Mylex Cards for $500-700 each), 6 faster drives (10K RPM Ultra160 9.1 GB for $175 each), a data Silo SCSI box, run a mirror set between the 2 Striped RAID volumes (1 connected each to a card), and an extra UPS each for my server and the RAID boxen ($1000). Then see how the speed compares! Oh darn, I still saved some money...
With the ICMP data segment allowed up to 64K, can we just code the raw data into the ICMP chunk? Then, just use a raw socket pinger outbound to a machine, and have it respond with the DeCSS code in the segment in place of the data sent inbound.
Shouldn't be too hard to add this as a patch...
If you had to sign over IP, then they rate you as being 'signifigant' in the creation of the idea. That means you DO have some control over its FORM, if not how they pursue it. IE, if they see you as an inventor, you are obviously qualified to an expert opinion on the extent of the idea. If they try to claim you aren't an expert on the patent, then they wouldn't have tried to get you to so\ign off on it! Legal Catch 22, but in your favor.
I'd get ahold of a IP lawyer, explain the scenario, and see what your options are. No doubt, you have personally lost any rights to the patent other than bragging rights by signing over the IP whever way back, but you still have at least partial control over the description.
One of the basic tenants of this is not HOW to do it. I'm mostly just wondering what it means *if* the technology is there to allow it?
See, from what I can tell, people are now expecting their news and reports to be live online. During the Concorde crash, a lot of good information about it was available online before the television media really had a chance to get their hands into it. When there are conflicts and wars, online video and media is often the only way for some information to get out of an affected area.
The main followup isn't really "Why does the IOC have complete control over the media at an internation event that is supposed to celebrate the athletic ability of as many nations as possible in a community atmosphere?", but rather is "How plausible is it to think that any entity can allow information to be broadcast locally, but expect that info to be withheld from the public at large, with legalities being the sole prevention, even though people are now accustomed to getting all their information live and from the source?"
So what level of quality would be considered acceptable to most people (geeks, mostly, because I still don't think too many normal people find out about freenet and gnutella and such easily)?
I just looked at the freenet page on sourceforge.net, and I wonder about the scalability. However, I'm not an expert on this kind of math, so I'll leave that alone.
Is there currently some kind of email -> freenet gateway? It seems that one way to let data enter freenet could be in email that had been sent through an anonymizer.
I am not a lwayer, but I think in the US at least, certain carriers are declared not liable for the content delivered over them (ISP's not liable for delivering a harassing email to their user from another ISP, since the ISP only acted as a carrier; the Phone company not being liable for harassing calls, etc). So if a video server was just a 'carrier' for whatever data entered it, what if they accepted data in email form, regardless of if it came from a verifiable address?
Seems to me this sort of setup would let people in countries/careers concerned about particular issues make sure their video got out into the wild, while still being as assured of privacy as you can get (the example that springs to mind might be video from the riots in Seattle, where so many people thought the video was being supressed or doctored on the normal news media).
Really? I've seen a decent PC handle real audio, but I'm not sure how much more intensive video is, never hacing encoded any. Anyone have experience?
In my last incarnation as a ssyadmin for a national ISP/telco, we used quite a few VA boxen, and got great responses. We had one ship w/ a bad drive, and they overnighted a new machine to us. The tech support guys are great (Hey Cron!) and didn't mind me asking weird-ass questions like "What's the byte-ordering on the data that comes back from /proc/temp?" when I was having toruble using a temp sensor card.
Dunno about you, but that goes above and beyond. If the machine booted w/ RedHat and their CD's, as far as I'm concerned you brought any liability on yourself when it failed.
"who wants to sit in a craft as it is fired from a gun, or risk getting stranded in the middle of the ocean if it slows down too much?"
This has to be one of the stupidest things I've read in a scientific article. HELLO!!!
Think about airplanes. Hey, what happens if *they* slow down too much? Ever heard of stall speed? Hey, if this sucker slows down, and loses it's ability to supercavitate, as long as it doesn't hit too much turbulence, then at least with a minimum of equipment it'd simply maintain ballast or float up. Beats dropping into the ocean from 30,000 feet in that Concorde!
And if someone mentions the fact that going that fast is dangerous due to turbulence, go look up what happened on the first dozen or so style of planes when they went supersonic. If the leading and trailing edges are incorrectly engineered, they create 'ripples' of compression and vapors that can develop un-equal forces on the plane's control surfaces, literally throwing it into a spin or ripping it into pieces. It's an engineering issue, sure, but so was Mach in the air.
I have read articles by 'experts' of the time saying man would never go above 50 miles an hour in an open vehicle as the 'air pressure' would prevent him from breathing. *sheesh*
It looks like they've updated the EULA :-) Trust me, the clarification about the software wasn't there when I started to order a NIC. Lemme see if I can pull a copy off the drive or out of squid or whatnot.
I'm glad the info is in there now!
Well, honestly, I think I was pretty damn clear in the submission that I couldn't TELL what the EULA was saying, and since it is legal mumbo-jumbo (even the GPL is at times) that the experts should look at it.
Sheesh. I don't see a lot of posts attacking ThinkNIC as a knee-jerk; almost everything I have seen has been well thought out and looked at the EULA and the license. So, how about PLEASE reading the posts carefully before you post a knee-jerk flame about non-existant knee-jerk flames?
I haven't received a NIC yet, but it seems like there's a pretty small chance of making a decent and unique OS on this box without making some neat additions to GPL'd software. And there's no mention of the software anywhere EXCEPT the little blurb about how it runs Linux in the FAQ. *shrug* It'd be nice if they had a link to the GPL from the EULA to let you know what was involved, I dunno.
Duh, I'm an idiot. After posting that, I realized it sounded like I mean I had JUST THEN emailed her; I meant "I simply emailed her" as soon as I read the EULA :-) Slap me for previewing and STILL getting it wrong! Negative karma for stupidity *sigh*
I just emailed Gina Smith asking her if she was aware of the potential issues around the software. Heck, the last thing I want to do is scare a company off of using Linux/Gnu software, etc but it just seemed the best thing to do was ask :-)
Herein, seems to mean allowances made within this document, the EULA, which doesn't mention the GPL at all. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but the things I have read about this issue make me want to ask the opinion of people who do know.
I *really* did re-read the thing three or four times, and it still seems that ThinkNIC is attempting to 'hold onto' the software. This may be accidental, like Timothy says 'boilerplate'
Now, I DID email Gina (the CEO) asking about this, but I haven't heard anything back yet. I'll post if I do (I want to give them time; I LIKE the idea of the NIC, I just wanted to make sure all licenses were fairly respected).
WTF is the idea of using RH 6.1? 6.2's been out for how long? And the newer kernels from the 'updates' tree, like 2.2.16?
Sheesh.
So, why isn't the system disk included on a RAID config, mirrored or something? Not that much mroe expensive (1 drive is less than a grand, LVD or not), and could save you quite a bit of downtime. I mean, until the super-secret Odessey is done, you'd still have to copy across a new system disk, or swap it out, etc. Since it is a co-lo'd server, and I don't know what kind of service you're getting from Exodus, RAID could keep you from having to do more than go "Drat, lost a disk, Hrm." Just a question why the tech decision was made like this, with all the whomp-ass hardware involved.
This SOUNDS good, but think about how M$ had said they'll 'open up' the kerberos extensions, and how Apple was 'opening' all of their development, and how long it took to get the Mozilla license straight, along with the hundreds of other examples. Right now, it's good political karma to claim you are opening the development, but until the license is approved by the people with known intentions and experience dealing with licensing issues, I'll stick to lesstif/QT/GTK, since we know of any associated licensing evils there. Now, if the license turns out to be good, I'll be more than happy to support Motif development again.
Go gnutella! Backtick
Let's see, since I left my last job because I was on call 24/7 for months, let's check my new job (which is MUCH less stressful), since it'd logically follow I'm working less and happier:
Theoretical Workday: 8 AM till 5 PM, 1 hour lunch
Real World: Starts at 7:30 AM (I have a 8 AM conference call to discuss the daily schedule with employees in other phyical locations, and I HAVE to have read email and checked calendars by then. How else would I know what's changed since I quit work the day beofre?).
I get about 15 minutes for a lunch, since my lunch hour is usually sucked up by other employees hunting me down and saying "Hey, since you have a few minutes...". Oh, and I generally eat in front of my computer.
Then I work straight thru till the end of the business day. Then things get interesting. I have to check emails throughout the evening to see if people in other timezones are finally replying to my emails or voice mails from earlier in the day, since I need that info for the next morning's call.
And of course I carry a business cell phone/pager, which means my phone rings anytime up until 11 PM or so as some other employee who's working late realizes they need something from me, or someone wants to complain that their email is running slow (It's NOT the email server! It's a 4 MB Powerpoint doc, and you are on a 56k modem!!!).
33 hours a week? I wish. Notice, I didn't even MENTION weekends! See, there's that cell phone, and powerpoint docs don't download any faster on weekends...
Yup; I got nailed for using this one. I had a large MySQL server sitting next to our Sybase boxes, and since this one was a free piece of software, I named the initial install 'freebase'. It didn't go over too well :-)