I'll give one management schmuck's experience with my apple watch.
I got it about a year ago as a toy. Expecting nothing. However, somewhere around 4ish months ago when I went on a trip to south america without it, how much I missed it. And realized that dumb watches were just... dumb. For me.
Again, I'm a people leader in IT. My day is meetings, email, and texts. For that, having a glance and quick canned reply to texts and emails while I'm sitting in meetngs with VPs is a lot less disruptive than pulling out my phone. All fine and good. But that still just makes it a toy, right?
Well, not quite. It tells me where my next meeting is at a glance, right there on the face. It tells me how many to-dos I have for today, again right there. It tells me how I'm doing on my fitness goals.
It tracks my heart rate and exercise, which really came in handy when I discovered I have high blood pressure. I just handed my iphone to my doctor with the health app open. I've since got a blood pressure cuff that also syncs to health, and that really helps my cardiologist.
When I'm at home, I leave my iphone on my desk or wherever, and just go around the house or yard getting stuff done. When you're on wi-fi, it does a decent enough job pinging you with your texts and reminders... and even phone calls. Right there on your wrist, without your phone nearby, as long as you're in wi-fi range.
Something I've started doing is using it to wake me up it the morning instead of my alarm. A silent tap on the wrist that does't wake my wife up. I also use it to track my sleep habits, which I've found useful.
When I travel, I take it with me now. Switch the face to show the time at home, the local weather, and the local sunrise/sunset. If your airline has an app for it, it will alert you if your plane is delayed, or changes gates. I can even use it for some airlines as my boarding pass.
Apple pay works pretty good. I usually pull out my phone to do it, but when I'm in the self checkout line, it's easier just to put my wrist up to the device to pay.
At the end of the day, it's not an earth shattering device. But for me, it has become a pretty useful one, and I'd say I've gotten my $400 use out of it. It's tough now to go back to a watch that just tells the time.
I'm a dedicated linux user for the past 5 years and I'm thinking of dumping it all and going to macs.
Instead I'm a dedicated mac user and I'm thinking of dumping it all and going to linux.;)
I spend way too much time fiddling and screwing around trying to get normal things to work. The other day for example my wife wanted a sound to come on when she got an email in thunderbird. Should be easy, no? Doesn't work on ubuntu without some serious googling/screwing around. Google earth which for some reason vanished from the medibuntu repository... same deal. For some reason the installer set the symlink to point somewhere else. And still the fonts are screwed up, don't know why.
I spend way too much time fiddling and screwing around trying to get normal things to work. And Apple keeps deleting my posts when I whine on their support forums. The other day for example I wanted to connect my Android phone to my macbook. Should be easy, no? Doesn't work on a mac at all because "RNDIS is a Microsoft protocol".
Or one of my favorites? Kdenlive, a great video editor, can't export to h.264 out of the box on ubuntu because it uses lame so you have to put your own custom export in.
After I switched to linux, kdenlive exported to h.264 out of the box simply by choosing "H.264" from the format list (which included HDV, DV, MPEG2, MPEG4, Xvid, Flash, RealVideo, Theora and Webm). Of course, that only worked after I enabled the restricted codecs, which aren't "restricted" by any technical reason, but only by the illiberal laws of some countries which sacrifice civil liberties to create monopolies for the profit of big enterprises. Thankfully I don't live in one of them.
Agreed but there's a point where you get tired of ideologies for the sake of not getting something done.
Or a recent clean install of Kubuntu 10.10 that left the master mixing channel muted (not through kmix but through alsamixer).
Effectively I have some problems with that %$&%# PulseAudio which keeps eating all of my CPU just to play an MP3:D...
Pulseaudio... the bane of my KDE life. It's 2010 and we're f'ing around with sound?
Or the fact that the newest ubuntu amarok packages kill it's ability to talk to my wife's ipod.
...but I'm happy anyway because I switched to a non-Apple mp3 player which doesn't require me to either use a closed, buggy, heavy, alien, limited application or to rely on amateur reverse-engineered libraries just to transfer music on it. It also costed much less and does have a removable battery.
I hear you and know why you feel that way but the fact of the matter is that the old packages work, and if you manually download and forbid-upgrade the packages they work again. Some package manager screwed up and it's another half an hour on google and mucking on the command line to get a couple songs on my wife's ipod.
Look, I loves me linux, but I have 3 kids, a wife, a job, and a life.
Look, I love Apple devices, but I have an underpaid IT job, so I can't afford to spend 3x the money to buy underpowered hardware.
Hey man I really appreciate the counterpoint before I jump in to the apple realm. My mind's not set and your points are exactly what's holding me back. Especially the last one.
It just seems to me that the amount of f'ing around with desktops to do basic things should have gone down over the past 5 years on linux, and it seems to have gone up instead. Lots of fanciness but lotsa bugs. I was hoping in the apple realm that because you pay more maybe you get what you pay for. I've had family, friends, etc go this way and all proclaim this. But you've got me thinking. Maybe I'll hackintosh one of my linux machines and see how it goes.
I'm a dedicated linux user for the past 5 years and I'm thinking of dumping it all and going to macs.
I spend way too much time fiddling and screwing around trying to get normal things to work. The other day for example my wife wanted a sound to come on when she got an email in thunderbird. Should be easy, no? Doesn't work on ubuntu without some serious googling/screwing around. Google earth which for some reason vanished from the medibuntu repository... same deal. For some reason the installer set the symlink to point somewhere else. And still the fonts are screwed up, don't know why.
Or one of my favorites? Kdenlive, a great video editor, can't export to h.264 out of the box on ubuntu because it uses lame so you have to put your own custom export in. Or a recent clean install of Kubuntu 10.10 that left the master mixing channel muted (not through kmix but through alsamixer). Or the fact that the newest ubuntu amarok packages kill it's ability to talk to my wife's ipod. On and on. I'm not pointing fingers here, the devs and packagers do a fab job for the most part but it's always just shy of the goal line it seems.
Look, I loves me linux, but I have 3 kids, a wife, a job, and a life. And I won't do windows not for the least part because of the safety factor for my kids and wife not downloading shite. So do I want to come home from my IT job and have a nice safe controlled environment for my wife and kids to hop on, do email, surf the web, etc in a reasonably safe way where I don't need to spend hours on end fiddling when something doesn't work? Sounds f'ing great to me.
I cheated my ass off in university in two classes. They both had the same prof, were required courses, and the prof was known to be a dick. He would give these wicked exams (which I never cheated on) that would be so ridiculous that my 45% would be graded a B+. He would also give mandatory assignments once every other week that took ~60 hours to do and would be worth 1% of your grade. But they're mandatory so if you don't do one, or fail it, you're done. I cheated big time on these with a group of other guys... even wrote a parser/compiler that would take someone else's code, refactor it in random ways, and recompile it. We never got caught. And I didn't give a shit about cheating.
But in my discrete math course I struggled big time. Was a straight C+ student, and even though I was fascinated by the course, couldn't "get it."
I completely gave up on the final which was worth the bulk of the course. The prof was very good and helpful but I just couldn't do it. So I went out and got completely wasted the night before the exam. Stumbled my way in on a couple hours sleep, still drunk, sat down in front of the prof and aced the course. The prof was so flabbergasted by my exam that he told me that if he didn't know me and hadn't watched me write the final he would've accused me of cheating. He stopped me on the way out of the exam and offered to have me do post-grad work under him. I didn't.
But you know what? I've done just fine in my IT career. One of my most valuable skills I think is knowing when work isn't worthwhile doing, and when shortcuts are going to work.
In my opinion Songbird became irrelevant anyway the moment it dropped ipod support. I don't know how they think they can gain any semblance of marketshare, or cred for that matter, by dropping key features from it's codebase. It ran like crap anyway. Who builds a music player on top of mozilla?
Say "No" gracefully. My strategy in my household: All 3 systems run Ubuntu. 5 users, some 4 years old. Only I have admin. Problem solved.
In the office I'm forced to use XP. However most of the extended family now has issues with Vista... and since I've never run it I can quite honestly say that I have no idea how to fix a Vista machine. So, I say as gently as possible: "I can't help you."
For the ones I have a real soft spot for, like my mom: - XP machine isn't running any non-licensed software. No WGA hassles (hopefully!) - AVG installed & autoupdates. - Windows autoupdates. - Firewall enabled. - Behind a cheap $20 router (surprising how much this helps) - Use only FF (hid the IE icon and warned her about using it)... make sure you set FF to the default browser. - As little local apps as possible... only openoffice and picasa. - She doesn't get an admin account. Only myself and my brother in law do.
Surprisingly, the only time I've had to fix it is when my 14 year old nephew was on the box trying to install some hacked game he downloaded...
Once it's released you may be able to Install from a PPA such as this https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive/ppa. It's currently for 3.1.1 in 9.04 which I'm using. More instructions here: http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-1-on-Ubuntu-9-04-111105.shtml. However you'll probably have to wait for a little while after 3.2 is actually released in November.
...isn't the technology, the UI, or anything else.
Granted, it loads slower than Vista from a cold boot, looks fuglier than outlook using 8-bit colors, and has usability problems up the wazoo (try explaining to a vp wtf replication is).
It's that execs don't get it. Is it email, a shared spreadsheet, a bunch of discussion databases... why spend millions on it?
This is why I got out of the notes game years ago. Sure, I could monitor a 10K user system distributed world-wide from home over a modem. But I sure couldn't sit at the boardroom table and get them to understand the value prop.
Now the SAP folks, they know how to market to the c-level folks.
Apple iTunes - Using open source music program "Amarok". Result? Software does not annoy (and works much better than iTunes as well).
For Linux, Agreed. But when is Amarok going to work in Windows or with people's iPods? Oh. Never ?? So what alternateive choice does a person using windows have ?
When is the Windows version out: Now, if you're willing to try a dev version. (http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/374-Amarok2-builds-on-Windows.html)
Ipod: been working since Oct 2001. Just install libgpod. (http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Media_Device:IPod)
Been there, done that. Always fought with insomnia and when I was going through a separation and divorce it was terrible.
The following things helped: 1. Exercise and plenty of it. Did martial arts and weight training 5+ times a week (had plenty of time on my hands anyway). 2. Treat yourself really well. Mellow out in the tub with a good book and cigar. You'll feel like a king. Especially because there's no wife around to complain about the stinky cigar. 3. Discover single malt scotch. They say not to drink before bed but a couple of drams did wonders for me. 4. Meditate. Especially just before bed.
Seriously. As soon as they can use the controller/mouse.
I have 3 kids, a 4 yr old, a 2 yr old and a 7 mo old.
The older kids play wii sports and mario galaxy with me at least 2-3 times a week for half an hour or so. They love it. What's the harm? We're playing together as a family, and it's better than watching Dora or whatever mindlessly.
The oldest 2 also have their own accounts on the computer, know how to log in, and have custom start pages I've created with links to kid's websites like discoverykids... they can surf as soon as they use the mouse. They're always monitored tho, and I have dansguardian running just in case, but let your kids have fun. Just make sure it's a treat and not a spend all day every day kind of thing. Under linux it's actually no sweat, there's very little they can break and I do weekly backups... so let them play around.
I'd rather have them growing up loving technology like I did than sitting brain dead in front of a TV.
Work/life boundaries are artificial, anyway. I love my blackberry, and I only work 35-45 hours any given work week.
Many, many people give me a hard time when they see me using/wearing it. Frequent comments are that I'm chained to it, that I can never leave work, etc. These couldn't be further from the truth: it's a liberation.
It's just a tool. Like any other tool, the secret is in how you use it. Here's some benefits/advice:
1. Forward your desk phone to it. Answer all email and phone calls using it. This way, everyone learns to expect a response from you using your blackberry. Now nobody knows where you are. You could be in a meeting, in your office, at the pub, or on the bus home. You now operate in stealth mode and have great freedom of movement and schedule.
2. Days off become less stressful. If you're in a similar position than I am, taking time off is problematic. I frequently come back to more chaos and work after I take a day off, and it's very stressful worrying about what goes wrong when you're not there. No more. A glance at the 'berry and you can head problems off at the pass. I'd rather spend 30 seconds emailing a corrective note off than 4 hours fixing a problem that's reached upper management the next day.
3. You can blend work and home life. Many people don't like this, but I do. Sometimes I come in late or leave early, if this means I have to spend a couple of hours on the weekend firing off a few emails when I have a clear head, so be it.
4. Typically, you can use it for personal use, as long as you don't get out of hand. This means that you don't need to pay for a personal cell phone.
5. It forces brevity. You don't want to write multiple page emails or have long conversations on the 'berry. Get you message crafted and out there in a short period of time.
6. Google maps rock on a blackberry. Especially with the "location" feature, which doesn't need GPS.
Agreed. Let's not forget that Judaism has had 2500ish years to grow up and Christianity has had 2000. Islam's a young 1500 years old, so in another 500 years or so maybe it will have mellowed as much as Christianity has. Of course, given the fundamentalism shown by the evangelical Christian movement in the US, I'm not sure how grown up it is.
I've gone through this in the past year or two. It's been a bumpy ride, and I can't say it's been easy on me or my direct reports. However, I have found some success with the following:
1. Let go of development. Do it at home if you have to... if you're like me, it's in your blood. I've been writing code since I was 11, so I can't give up a 25 year old habit that quickly. But you need to let go of it at work -- that's not what you're there to do any longer. If you dive back into code, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. And you'll probably piss the developers off.
2. Change your appearance and mannerisms. As a developer, your clothes, body language, and manner of speech didn't matter so much. Now it matters a lot. Take a look around at leaders that you admire and use them as a template. This is not to detract from your personality, it's to enhance your credibility and change other's perception of you. If you get stuck in the "developer" mold you won't be successful.
3. Find a mentor that is at your level or above. Pick someone that is successful in going the direction you want to go in and one that you trust. Use him or her as a sounding board.
4. Stay close to your direct reports and buddies that are still developing. Not only will they give you honest feedback and perspective but they will give you intel at the ground level. These relationships must not be lost.
5. Talk to each and every one of your direct reports every day. Visit their desk for 5 minutes in the morning. Don't start off with work discussions, talk about their life. Let them know you think of them as people. Work issues will then be naturally forthcoming and honest and you need to know if there are things in their personal life affecting their work. An example from my own experience... one of my new direct reports was a junior developer. He was very eager for the first week or two under me, but then his productivity, interest, and quality rapidly dropped off. Turns out he was going through a bad break-up. A couple of weeks later everything came back work-wise with an added bonus: he really appreciated that I cut him some slack while he was going through a rough ride and told me that he owes me one. This came in handy a couple of months later when I needed an OT volunteer.
6. Don't be afraid to kick some ass. You've been in the trenches, you know who the slackers and poor leaders are. You now have some influence to change things, and this is probably part of the reason for your promotion. You know what needs to be done, so do it already.
7. Get yourself a productivity system. You're about to be inundated with email, meeting requests, and reports. I like Bill Jensen's "Simplicity Survival Handbook" but there are many others that will suit your personality. Just find one.
want to kill every man that is not a muslim Not really... Koran 5:32:
"For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah's sovereignty), but afterwards lo! Many of them become prodigals of the earth."
and rape every woman that is not a muslim Nope, not that either...
"A person who commits this act (sexual intercourse outside of marriage) is not a true believer of their faith" Imam Bukhari and Muslim (See Ibn Al-Atsir, Jami al-Ushul, XII/329 no. 9330).
What they want is the non-believers out of the Arabian Peninsula. "The only reward for those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom..." Koran 5:33
Are they willing to distort and corrupt their own religion to do it? Sure. Are they evil? You bet -- our lives mean very little to them.
But you've gotta ask yourself two questions... #1 why are we on their land? #2 why are we creating more terrorists every day by acting just like them? (http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/07/15/marines.iraq .ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories)
Exactly what I was going to say... that's what I do. By the time I get into work, I've caught up on the urgent email collected over the night before on by blackberry so I know if there's a panic going on. The first thing I do is grab a cup of coffee and visit each of my staff at their cube for five minutes. But I would add that the first thing I ask them isn't about work, it's "how was your night/weekend," "how's the family", etc. Especially if they have something important going on in their personal life, I ask about that. Knowing their birthdays is a good idea too. Then I dive into the work questions.
Agreed. It's a tool, folks. It's impact on your life depends on how you use it.
For me, it's been a great liberator. My office phone is constantly forwarded to it. I use it for all short email, which for me is about 90% of it. It tells me when to show up for meetings. I use it for task management, too.
Net result -- nobody knows where I am or what I'm doing except when they need to (like when I need to show up for meetings or I have a deliverable). This means that I'm extremely flexible -- if I have nothing requiring me to be in the office late in the afternoon, I go home. I can answer emails/phone calls as effectively on the bus as I can in the office. I can pop into other's offices and network at work without being chained to my desk. I can go for lunch with colleagues and get a read on work situations without needing "official updates" in meetings which are usually too little and too late. I can pay attention to my staff, spending time at their desk helping with issues. Etc, etc...
I can also take days off without sweating it -- one glance at the 'berry and I know things are good or coming apart at the seams.
It's all in how you use it. I work the same amount of time, but I have a lot more flexibility in how I do it. Judging by my performance reviews since I've got it, I'd say I'm a whole lot more effective at work too, and a whole lot happier.
You're basically using the same argument as everyone in the 50's that believed in them: since we could imagine going to some other world and doing experiments on them, why not aliens?
Now you're stating that we're more sophisticated and can now imagine a different hypothesis -- therefore they can't be here. You're still anthropomorphizing this.
Imagine this sequence: they've already "computroniumized" several systems and are now reaching the limits of physical existence/intelligence a-la Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Perhaps they are as smart as they're gonna get for some computational limit we don't understand and are far more interested in new intelligent species for the simple reason that they are *new*. We may be primitive, but may think of things in an entirely different fashion than, say, a collective consciousness. And therefore be interesting. And perhaps worth provoking responses, like, say, showing up at a large international airport and trying to figure out why nobody seemed to notice.
Maybe even the fact that we don't know everything yet is interesting -- maybe they're so old and bored that's all they have left.
Amarok. Linux (KDE) only, but it would alone be a reason to switch for me. Does all the stuff itunes does (minus the music store) -- podcasting, ipod synching, etc. Does a whole lot more, including lyric support, tons of plugins, etc. The killer portion -- last.fm support. I don't use too many playlists anymore -- I queue up a few tracks to set the mood and let it suggest the rest. Kind of like pandora, but only with the music in your library. If you're looking for new tunes, you can listen to your last.fm neighbour radio. Great stuff. I discovered it while looking for a replacement for itunes when I switched to Linux. Now I wouldn't go back to itunes if they paid me to.
Definitely. My first wife walked out on me 1 1/2 years out of university. The reasons (as far as I understand): 1.It was during the.com boom and my wife expected me to be making $100K my first year out. The paltry $50K wasn't enough. Talk about unrealistic expectations. 2.IT is stressful, especially for those that seem to be good at it -- if there's a bug that you can't fix, even a minor one, can you go home at night and not think about it? When I was young, I couldn't. They don't teach you that one in "algorithm optimization 305". 3.I couldn't talk to my wife about my work problems. Try explaining that I haven't come home for 48 hours because I forgot to malloc an array before using it and the damn thing randomly starts spewing out weird data after 20 hours of continuous use. 4.Guys that like IT like to play with computers. You generally have one at home. Do the math. Ever spent 3 hours optimizing your 2 minute boot up time down to 1 minute 45 seconds? Me too. Run multiple web servers/database engines/operating systems at home "just for fun?" Me too. Do you think that's fun for the wife? 5. Unrealistic project deadlines. It always seems that IT gets the shaft on projects. You estimate 8 weeks to deliver something without working overtime, and the business delays until 2 weeks before you need it. Of course the home life suffers.
Agreed. Like many of you, I'm not a support tech but I do have a rather large group of friends and family that rely on me for support. When I have to fix a windows machine, I will typically tell them that for me to support them, I will be doing the following: 1. Installing firefox, setting it up as the default browser, importing the ie bookmarks and installing the adblock plugin. I remove the ie icon from the desktop. 2. Removing outlook express and installing thunderbird. 3. Installing openoffice. 4. Removing macaffee/norton and install avg free. I know it's not OSS but it's fast and free. If they don't agree, I don't fix the box. That's cool by me, I just don't have the time to continually fix virus and spyware ridden machines. I don't set them up because of a sense of eliteness or social movement, but because they have far fewer problems for most.
Thanks, I'd like to believe I'm qualified, at least for the work I have to do;) The book that actually changed the way I work is The Power of Full Engagement. It has it's problems, but got me thinking about working in harmony with the rythms of the day and how I feel rather than just pushing through it and burning myself out.
"The best programmers are between 20 and 100 times more productive than the worst" At least 10 times, if not 100. I also lead a small team of developers and I can say that the best developers I've seen could replace the entire team and do other projects on the side. The others keep a steady, solid, reliable pace but never "peak" and seem to find the kind of flow that the high performers are capable of. Not that I'm criticizing their work; everyone has their niche.
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I'll give one management schmuck's experience with my apple watch.
I got it about a year ago as a toy. Expecting nothing. However, somewhere around 4ish months ago when I went on a trip to south america without it, how much I missed it. And realized that dumb watches were just... dumb. For me.
Again, I'm a people leader in IT. My day is meetings, email, and texts. For that, having a glance and quick canned reply to texts and emails while I'm sitting in meetngs with VPs is a lot less disruptive than pulling out my phone. All fine and good. But that still just makes it a toy, right?
Well, not quite. It tells me where my next meeting is at a glance, right there on the face. It tells me how many to-dos I have for today, again right there. It tells me how I'm doing on my fitness goals.
It tracks my heart rate and exercise, which really came in handy when I discovered I have high blood pressure. I just handed my iphone to my doctor with the health app open. I've since got a blood pressure cuff that also syncs to health, and that really helps my cardiologist.
When I'm at home, I leave my iphone on my desk or wherever, and just go around the house or yard getting stuff done. When you're on wi-fi, it does a decent enough job pinging you with your texts and reminders... and even phone calls. Right there on your wrist, without your phone nearby, as long as you're in wi-fi range.
Something I've started doing is using it to wake me up it the morning instead of my alarm. A silent tap on the wrist that does't wake my wife up. I also use it to track my sleep habits, which I've found useful.
When I travel, I take it with me now. Switch the face to show the time at home, the local weather, and the local sunrise/sunset. If your airline has an app for it, it will alert you if your plane is delayed, or changes gates. I can even use it for some airlines as my boarding pass.
Apple pay works pretty good. I usually pull out my phone to do it, but when I'm in the self checkout line, it's easier just to put my wrist up to the device to pay.
At the end of the day, it's not an earth shattering device. But for me, it has become a pretty useful one, and I'd say I've gotten my $400 use out of it. It's tough now to go back to a watch that just tells the time.
I'm a dedicated linux user for the past 5 years and I'm thinking of dumping it all and going to macs.
Instead I'm a dedicated mac user and I'm thinking of dumping it all and going to linux. ;)
I spend way too much time fiddling and screwing around trying to get normal things to work. The other day for example my wife wanted a sound to come on when she got an email in thunderbird. Should be easy, no? Doesn't work on ubuntu without some serious googling/screwing around. Google earth which for some reason vanished from the medibuntu repository... same deal. For some reason the installer set the symlink to point somewhere else. And still the fonts are screwed up, don't know why.
I spend way too much time fiddling and screwing around trying to get normal things to work. And Apple keeps deleting my posts when I whine on their support forums.
The other day for example I wanted to connect my Android phone to my macbook. Should be easy, no? Doesn't work on a mac at all because "RNDIS is a Microsoft protocol".
Or one of my favorites? Kdenlive, a great video editor, can't export to h.264 out of the box on ubuntu because it uses lame so you have to put your own custom export in.
After I switched to linux, kdenlive exported to h.264 out of the box simply by choosing "H.264" from the format list (which included HDV, DV, MPEG2, MPEG4, Xvid, Flash, RealVideo, Theora and Webm).
Of course, that only worked after I enabled the restricted codecs, which aren't "restricted" by any technical reason, but only by the illiberal laws of some countries which sacrifice civil liberties to create monopolies for the profit of big enterprises. Thankfully I don't live in one of them.
Agreed but there's a point where you get tired of ideologies for the sake of not getting something done.
Or a recent clean install of Kubuntu 10.10 that left the master mixing channel muted (not through kmix but through alsamixer).
Effectively I have some problems with that %$&%# PulseAudio which keeps eating all of my CPU just to play an MP3 :D ...
Pulseaudio... the bane of my KDE life. It's 2010 and we're f'ing around with sound?
Or the fact that the newest ubuntu amarok packages kill it's ability to talk to my wife's ipod.
...but I'm happy anyway because I switched to a non-Apple mp3 player which doesn't require me to either use a closed, buggy, heavy, alien, limited application or to rely on amateur reverse-engineered libraries just to transfer music on it. It also costed much less and does have a removable battery.
I hear you and know why you feel that way but the fact of the matter is that the old packages work, and if you manually download and forbid-upgrade the packages they work again. Some package manager screwed up and it's another half an hour on google and mucking on the command line to get a couple songs on my wife's ipod.
Look, I loves me linux, but I have 3 kids, a wife, a job, and a life.
Look, I love Apple devices, but I have an underpaid IT job, so I can't afford to spend 3x the money to buy underpowered hardware.
Hey man I really appreciate the counterpoint before I jump in to the apple realm. My mind's not set and your points are exactly what's holding me back. Especially the last one.
It just seems to me that the amount of f'ing around with desktops to do basic things should have gone down over the past 5 years on linux, and it seems to have gone up instead. Lots of fanciness but lotsa bugs. I was hoping in the apple realm that because you pay more maybe you get what you pay for. I've had family, friends, etc go this way and all proclaim this. But you've got me thinking. Maybe I'll hackintosh one of my linux machines and see how it goes.
I'm a dedicated linux user for the past 5 years and I'm thinking of dumping it all and going to macs.
I spend way too much time fiddling and screwing around trying to get normal things to work. The other day for example my wife wanted a sound to come on when she got an email in thunderbird. Should be easy, no? Doesn't work on ubuntu without some serious googling/screwing around. Google earth which for some reason vanished from the medibuntu repository... same deal. For some reason the installer set the symlink to point somewhere else. And still the fonts are screwed up, don't know why.
Or one of my favorites? Kdenlive, a great video editor, can't export to h.264 out of the box on ubuntu because it uses lame so you have to put your own custom export in. Or a recent clean install of Kubuntu 10.10 that left the master mixing channel muted (not through kmix but through alsamixer). Or the fact that the newest ubuntu amarok packages kill it's ability to talk to my wife's ipod. On and on. I'm not pointing fingers here, the devs and packagers do a fab job for the most part but it's always just shy of the goal line it seems.
Look, I loves me linux, but I have 3 kids, a wife, a job, and a life. And I won't do windows not for the least part because of the safety factor for my kids and wife not downloading shite. So do I want to come home from my IT job and have a nice safe controlled environment for my wife and kids to hop on, do email, surf the web, etc in a reasonably safe way where I don't need to spend hours on end fiddling when something doesn't work? Sounds f'ing great to me.
If someone using a laptop or a screensaver kicking in a few rows away distracts you that much, then you are *fucked* in real life.
I cheated my ass off in university in two classes. They both had the same prof, were required courses, and the prof was known to be a dick.
He would give these wicked exams (which I never cheated on) that would be so ridiculous that my 45% would be graded a B+. He would also give mandatory assignments once every other week that took ~60 hours to do and would be worth 1% of your grade. But they're mandatory so if you don't do one, or fail it, you're done. I cheated big time on these with a group of other guys... even wrote a parser/compiler that would take someone else's code, refactor it in random ways, and recompile it. We never got caught. And I didn't give a shit about cheating.
But in my discrete math course I struggled big time. Was a straight C+ student, and even though I was fascinated by the course, couldn't "get it."
I completely gave up on the final which was worth the bulk of the course. The prof was very good and helpful but I just couldn't do it. So I went out and got completely wasted the night before the exam. Stumbled my way in on a couple hours sleep, still drunk, sat down in front of the prof and aced the course. The prof was so flabbergasted by my exam that he told me that if he didn't know me and hadn't watched me write the final he would've accused me of cheating. He stopped me on the way out of the exam and offered to have me do post-grad work under him. I didn't.
But you know what? I've done just fine in my IT career. One of my most valuable skills I think is knowing when work isn't worthwhile doing, and when shortcuts are going to work.
In my opinion Songbird became irrelevant anyway the moment it dropped ipod support. I don't know how they think they can gain any semblance of marketshare, or cred for that matter, by dropping key features from it's codebase. It ran like crap anyway. Who builds a music player on top of mozilla?
Say "No" gracefully.
My strategy in my household: All 3 systems run Ubuntu. 5 users, some 4 years old. Only I have admin. Problem solved.
In the office I'm forced to use XP. However most of the extended family now has issues with Vista... and since I've never run it I can quite honestly say that I have no idea how to fix a Vista machine. So, I say as gently as possible: "I can't help you."
For the ones I have a real soft spot for, like my mom:
- XP machine isn't running any non-licensed software. No WGA hassles (hopefully!)
- AVG installed & autoupdates.
- Windows autoupdates.
- Firewall enabled.
- Behind a cheap $20 router (surprising how much this helps)
- Use only FF (hid the IE icon and warned her about using it)... make sure you set FF to the default browser.
- As little local apps as possible... only openoffice and picasa.
- She doesn't get an admin account. Only myself and my brother in law do.
Surprisingly, the only time I've had to fix it is when my 14 year old nephew was on the box trying to install some hacked game he downloaded...
Once it's released you may be able to Install from a PPA such as this https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive/ppa.
It's currently for 3.1.1 in 9.04 which I'm using.
More instructions here:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-1-on-Ubuntu-9-04-111105.shtml.
However you'll probably have to wait for a little while after 3.2 is actually released in November.
...isn't the technology, the UI, or anything else.
Granted, it loads slower than Vista from a cold boot, looks fuglier than outlook using 8-bit colors, and has usability problems up the wazoo (try explaining to a vp wtf replication is).
It's that execs don't get it. Is it email, a shared spreadsheet, a bunch of discussion databases... why spend millions on it?
This is why I got out of the notes game years ago. Sure, I could monitor a 10K user system distributed world-wide from home over a modem. But I sure couldn't sit at the boardroom table and get them to understand the value prop.
Now the SAP folks, they know how to market to the c-level folks.
They take the same damned program, move shit around, rename other shit, add fluff and eye candy...
Sounds like Amarok 2.
For Linux, Agreed. But when is Amarok going to work in Windows or with people's iPods? Oh. Never ?? So what alternateive choice does a person using windows have ?
When is the Windows version out: Now, if you're willing to try a dev version. (http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/374-Amarok2-builds-on-Windows.html)Ipod: been working since Oct 2001. Just install libgpod. (http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Media_Device:IPod)
According to netcraft, they're running Apache/2.0.52 on Red Hat.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.marvel.com
Terrorists.
Been there, done that. Always fought with insomnia and when I was going through a separation and divorce it was terrible.
The following things helped:
1. Exercise and plenty of it. Did martial arts and weight training 5+ times a week (had plenty of time on my hands anyway).
2. Treat yourself really well. Mellow out in the tub with a good book and cigar. You'll feel like a king. Especially because there's no wife around to complain about the stinky cigar.
3. Discover single malt scotch. They say not to drink before bed but a couple of drams did wonders for me.
4. Meditate. Especially just before bed.
Seriously. As soon as they can use the controller/mouse.
I have 3 kids, a 4 yr old, a 2 yr old and a 7 mo old.
The older kids play wii sports and mario galaxy with me at least 2-3 times a week for half an hour or so. They love it. What's the harm? We're playing together as a family, and it's better than watching Dora or whatever mindlessly.
The oldest 2 also have their own accounts on the computer, know how to log in, and have custom start pages I've created with links to kid's websites like discoverykids... they can surf as soon as they use the mouse. They're always monitored tho, and I have dansguardian running just in case, but let your kids have fun. Just make sure it's a treat and not a spend all day every day kind of thing. Under linux it's actually no sweat, there's very little they can break and I do weekly backups... so let them play around.
I'd rather have them growing up loving technology like I did than sitting brain dead in front of a TV.
Work/life boundaries are artificial, anyway. I love my blackberry, and I only work 35-45 hours any given work week.
Many, many people give me a hard time when they see me using/wearing it. Frequent comments are that I'm chained to it, that I can never leave work, etc. These couldn't be further from the truth: it's a liberation.
It's just a tool. Like any other tool, the secret is in how you use it. Here's some benefits/advice:
1. Forward your desk phone to it. Answer all email and phone calls using it. This way, everyone learns to expect a response from you using your blackberry. Now nobody knows where you are. You could be in a meeting, in your office, at the pub, or on the bus home. You now operate in stealth mode and have great freedom of movement and schedule.
2. Days off become less stressful. If you're in a similar position than I am, taking time off is problematic. I frequently come back to more chaos and work after I take a day off, and it's very stressful worrying about what goes wrong when you're not there. No more. A glance at the 'berry and you can head problems off at the pass. I'd rather spend 30 seconds emailing a corrective note off than 4 hours fixing a problem that's reached upper management the next day.
3. You can blend work and home life. Many people don't like this, but I do. Sometimes I come in late or leave early, if this means I have to spend a couple of hours on the weekend firing off a few emails when I have a clear head, so be it.
4. Typically, you can use it for personal use, as long as you don't get out of hand. This means that you don't need to pay for a personal cell phone.
5. It forces brevity. You don't want to write multiple page emails or have long conversations on the 'berry. Get you message crafted and out there in a short period of time.
6. Google maps rock on a blackberry. Especially with the "location" feature, which doesn't need GPS.
Agreed. Let's not forget that Judaism has had 2500ish years to grow up and Christianity has had 2000. Islam's a young 1500 years old, so in another 500 years or so maybe it will have mellowed as much as Christianity has.
Of course, given the fundamentalism shown by the evangelical Christian movement in the US, I'm not sure how grown up it is.
I've gone through this in the past year or two. It's been a bumpy ride, and I can't say it's been easy on me or my direct reports. However, I have found some success with the following:
1. Let go of development. Do it at home if you have to... if you're like me, it's in your blood. I've been writing code since I was 11, so I can't give up a 25 year old habit that quickly. But you need to let go of it at work -- that's not what you're there to do any longer. If you dive back into code, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. And you'll probably piss the developers off.
2. Change your appearance and mannerisms. As a developer, your clothes, body language, and manner of speech didn't matter so much. Now it matters a lot. Take a look around at leaders that you admire and use them as a template. This is not to detract from your personality, it's to enhance your credibility and change other's perception of you. If you get stuck in the "developer" mold you won't be successful.
3. Find a mentor that is at your level or above. Pick someone that is successful in going the direction you want to go in and one that you trust. Use him or her as a sounding board.
4. Stay close to your direct reports and buddies that are still developing. Not only will they give you honest feedback and perspective but they will give you intel at the ground level. These relationships must not be lost.
5. Talk to each and every one of your direct reports every day. Visit their desk for 5 minutes in the morning. Don't start off with work discussions, talk about their life. Let them know you think of them as people. Work issues will then be naturally forthcoming and honest and you need to know if there are things in their personal life affecting their work. An example from my own experience... one of my new direct reports was a junior developer. He was very eager for the first week or two under me, but then his productivity, interest, and quality rapidly dropped off. Turns out he was going through a bad break-up. A couple of weeks later everything came back work-wise with an added bonus: he really appreciated that I cut him some slack while he was going through a rough ride and told me that he owes me one. This came in handy a couple of months later when I needed an OT volunteer.
6. Don't be afraid to kick some ass. You've been in the trenches, you know who the slackers and poor leaders are. You now have some influence to change things, and this is probably part of the reason for your promotion. You know what needs to be done, so do it already.
7. Get yourself a productivity system. You're about to be inundated with email, meeting requests, and reports. I like Bill Jensen's "Simplicity Survival Handbook" but there are many others that will suit your personality. Just find one.
8. Have fun. It's still just a job.
Uh, no. Not really.
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want to kill every man that is not a muslim
Not really... Koran 5:32:
"For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah's sovereignty), but afterwards lo! Many of them become prodigals of the earth."
and rape every woman that is not a muslim
Nope, not that either...
"A person who commits this act (sexual intercourse outside of marriage) is not a true believer of their faith" Imam Bukhari and Muslim (See Ibn Al-Atsir, Jami al-Ushul, XII/329 no. 9330).
What they want is the non-believers out of the Arabian Peninsula.
"The only reward for those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom..." Koran 5:33
Are they willing to distort and corrupt their own religion to do it? Sure. Are they evil? You bet -- our lives mean very little to them.
But you've gotta ask yourself two questions...
#1 why are we on their land?
#2 why are we creating more terrorists every day by acting just like them? (http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/07/15/marines.ira
Respectfully,
A rational non-Muslim
Exactly what I was going to say... that's what I do. By the time I get into work, I've caught up on the urgent email collected over the night before on by blackberry so I know if there's a panic going on. The first thing I do is grab a cup of coffee and visit each of my staff at their cube for five minutes.
But I would add that the first thing I ask them isn't about work, it's "how was your night/weekend," "how's the family", etc. Especially if they have something important going on in their personal life, I ask about that. Knowing their birthdays is a good idea too.
Then I dive into the work questions.
Agreed. It's a tool, folks. It's impact on your life depends on how you use it.
For me, it's been a great liberator. My office phone is constantly forwarded to it. I use it for all short email, which for me is about 90% of it. It tells me when to show up for meetings. I use it for task management, too.
Net result -- nobody knows where I am or what I'm doing except when they need to (like when I need to show up for meetings or I have a deliverable). This means that I'm extremely flexible -- if I have nothing requiring me to be in the office late in the afternoon, I go home. I can answer emails/phone calls as effectively on the bus as I can in the office. I can pop into other's offices and network at work without being chained to my desk. I can go for lunch with colleagues and get a read on work situations without needing "official updates" in meetings which are usually too little and too late. I can pay attention to my staff, spending time at their desk helping with issues. Etc, etc...
I can also take days off without sweating it -- one glance at the 'berry and I know things are good or coming apart at the seams.
It's all in how you use it. I work the same amount of time, but I have a lot more flexibility in how I do it. Judging by my performance reviews since I've got it, I'd say I'm a whole lot more effective at work too, and a whole lot happier.
You're basically using the same argument as everyone in the 50's that believed in them: since we could imagine going to some other world and doing experiments on them, why not aliens?
Now you're stating that we're more sophisticated and can now imagine a different hypothesis -- therefore they can't be here. You're still anthropomorphizing this.
Imagine this sequence: they've already "computroniumized" several systems and are now reaching the limits of physical existence/intelligence a-la Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Perhaps they are as smart as they're gonna get for some computational limit we don't understand and are far more interested in new intelligent species for the simple reason that they are *new*. We may be primitive, but may think of things in an entirely different fashion than, say, a collective consciousness. And therefore be interesting. And perhaps worth provoking responses, like, say, showing up at a large international airport and trying to figure out why nobody seemed to notice.
Maybe even the fact that we don't know everything yet is interesting -- maybe they're so old and bored that's all they have left.
Amarok. Linux (KDE) only, but it would alone be a reason to switch for me.
Does all the stuff itunes does (minus the music store) -- podcasting, ipod synching, etc.
Does a whole lot more, including lyric support, tons of plugins, etc.
The killer portion -- last.fm support. I don't use too many playlists anymore -- I queue up a few tracks to set the mood and let it suggest the rest. Kind of like pandora, but only with the music in your library.
If you're looking for new tunes, you can listen to your last.fm neighbour radio.
Great stuff. I discovered it while looking for a replacement for itunes when I switched to Linux. Now I wouldn't go back to itunes if they paid me to.
Definitely. .com boom and my wife expected me to be making $100K my first year out. The paltry $50K wasn't enough. Talk about unrealistic expectations.
My first wife walked out on me 1 1/2 years out of university. The reasons (as far as I understand):
1.It was during the
2.IT is stressful, especially for those that seem to be good at it -- if there's a bug that you can't fix, even a minor one, can you go home at night and not think about it? When I was young, I couldn't. They don't teach you that one in "algorithm optimization 305".
3.I couldn't talk to my wife about my work problems. Try explaining that I haven't come home for 48 hours because I forgot to malloc an array before using it and the damn thing randomly starts spewing out weird data after 20 hours of continuous use.
4.Guys that like IT like to play with computers. You generally have one at home. Do the math. Ever spent 3 hours optimizing your 2 minute boot up time down to 1 minute 45 seconds? Me too. Run multiple web servers/database engines/operating systems at home "just for fun?" Me too. Do you think that's fun for the wife?
5. Unrealistic project deadlines. It always seems that IT gets the shaft on projects. You estimate 8 weeks to deliver something without working overtime, and the business delays until 2 weeks before you need it. Of course the home life suffers.
Agreed.
Like many of you, I'm not a support tech but I do have a rather large group of friends and family that rely on me for support.
When I have to fix a windows machine, I will typically tell them that for me to support them, I will be doing the following:
1. Installing firefox, setting it up as the default browser, importing the ie bookmarks and installing the adblock plugin. I remove the ie icon from the desktop.
2. Removing outlook express and installing thunderbird.
3. Installing openoffice.
4. Removing macaffee/norton and install avg free. I know it's not OSS but it's fast and free.
If they don't agree, I don't fix the box. That's cool by me, I just don't have the time to continually fix virus and spyware ridden machines.
I don't set them up because of a sense of eliteness or social movement, but because they have far fewer problems for most.
Thanks, I'd like to believe I'm qualified, at least for the work I have to do ;)
The book that actually changed the way I work is The Power of Full Engagement. It has it's problems, but got me thinking about working in harmony with the rythms of the day and how I feel rather than just pushing through it and burning myself out.
"The best programmers are between 20 and 100 times more productive than the worst"
At least 10 times, if not 100. I also lead a small team of developers and I can say that the best developers I've seen could replace the entire team and do other projects on the side. The others keep a steady, solid, reliable pace but never "peak" and seem to find the kind of flow that the high performers are capable of. Not that I'm criticizing their work; everyone has their niche.