"Don't test UI ideas on your users. As long as you do that, Linux will never be ready for the desktop, because non-geek users hate that."
Geek users hate it even more. If I wanted regular paradigm shifts in my environment, I'd scramble my FVWM config file. Since the last paradigm shift to Unity, I'd sooner run Windows than run Ubuntu. Literally, I can get more functionality out of FVWM2 than Gnome or Unity these days.
Yep, I had to save up for a 6 month "vacation" when I last switched jobs in the SF Bay area. I had been working for one of the data center providers that serviced most of the companies in the region. Tied to their hosting contract, was a do not hire clause with a six month window, and I was told by HR that the only reason it wasn't "illegal" was because the agreement wasn't between the employee and company directly. It has been an open secret for some time that most of the major players also have these agreements in place. It is particularly frustrating, and effectively the same as a black list (which is illegal in CA), so I'm glad the practice is finally being investigated.
I thought that was K through 8? At least, that is what my kid is doing in K-8...
My thought is that high schools should be providing a foundation for starting an apprenticeship *or* a basis for entering college. I feel that high schools have been dumbed down to a role that isn't very functional for our society. Shop, basic drafting and engineering, and other trade skills (including basic IT certification training) offer excellent opportunities to integrate learning and life skills, and also provide an opportunity to qualify for a junior level position or as an apprentice carrying a union card. I have no problem with a high school that focuses on integrating education with a goal of being employable as, say, a junior java developer, upon receiving a high school diploma, and I wish more school districts would spend the time and effort to provide the level of education that had been a standard in the past.
Not everybody needs to go to college. Most software "engineers", and IT people in general, don't need a college degree. I say this with about 8 years of college under my belt, AND having done an apprenticeship out of high school- a sole college prep focus is not needed, and can even make it harder on students to matriculate into the real world where they will likely be working to pay for that college diploma. College prep is desirable for some (who have parents who can pay for their kid's college costs), yes, but not needed for most. I'd prefer high schools not confuse the two.
Even more so, someone should be checking state laws to ensure that the software written isn't going to be considered property of the business anyways.
That being said, it would seem to me that there are only a couple of routes available to the poster, whether the software is open or closed source:
1. Market the software, and have the trade college come on board as a "development/gold/whatever partner". They get the software for free, poster gets a free test env. What does matter is any contractual agreement for support, as poster is still an employee, and that could raise a number of conflict of interest issues in the future. This might get management and/or HR really twitchy fast.
2. Market the software, and ignore the trade college. Probably a safer bet from the liability angle. Also, as poster says he has plenty of free time (enough to write an entire support project!), spending a little extra time on email and forum based support isn't a bad thing. Position the product for sale to an upstream vendor. Take some time to go to tradeshows (unpaid time off from the company, possibly), and market the product.
Oh, I say ironically because I was using it in the 90s, and since then there have been these huge projects with thousands of work hours spent to correct the deficiencies of something as "complicated" as FVWM... which have resulted in DEs that are FAR more complicated to fully customize. In the end, I keep coming back to FVWM(2), and I find that ironic and amusing.
Back issues of the Linux Journal are helpful. Looking at FVWM config files of DEs that you like the appearance of. OpenBSD deploys with FVWM, and quite a few people use it or FVWM2 (those who don't convert over to cwm, that is). Spending hours on the man pages for FVWM2 and doing a lot of experimentation is what worked for me. Often, I had given up on FVWM, and was trying to use another DE, and then found myself wondering why I couldn't get X feature to do what I wanted it to do. Every time, to get all of the features I wanted, it ended up being FVWM2, but it meant I had to experiment with my features and fix my scripting.
In the long run, it help me learn a lot about planning, bug documentation, and writing good requirements. I had to do all of that for myself so I wouldn't go back and keep repeating things I'd already done, but had forgotten why I had dropped them in favor of the next task.
That would have been Aptera, which was focusing on the market for lower price cars, but they had to close shop before they could get their sedan model off the ground due to not getting Federal funding to complete final testing and get production set up.
I've put my own DE together with FVWM2, which is pretty much designed for that sort of thing. It has the ability to take Perl scripting for almost every feature you want, and works well with integrating services to the DE. I've been able to create dynamic menus from it, with button options for other activities (ex, listing and acting on mail, for one; also, popping up new dynamic DEs based on nagios messages for host troubleshooting, complete with relevant schematic on the root window, etc). The great thing about it is that you can program in the behavior of pretty much any other desktop feature you want, mixing Windowmaker features with XFCE, etc. Plenty of apps out there will work with it as well.
I agree. I think that getting a drivers license (the ability to pilot more than 1500 pounds of fast, dangerous machinery) should be limited to those who can *prove* capable of that responsibility. I'm thinking drivers test courses without safety rails, and containing potentially fatal real world hazards. It is much better to find out someone isn't capable there, rather than a few years later in a crowd of pedestrians.
I agree, I just have a different point of view, in that the 4.0 debacle could have been avoided by, well, not releasing it before it was ready. Early on in KDE, the focus was on features over documentation, stability, or speed. Well before 4.0, I had submitted bugs to kde devs, only to have them acrimoniously closed or denied, subsequently opened up again by others filing the same reports, watching those get closed, and then opened up again when a dev was forced to fix it because it finally stopped the show for *him*. If that focus on continuously adding unstable features (without fixing them!) had changed direction during 3.x, I would still be using KDE, and actively hunting down and testing bugs for them. Instead, I stopped contributing, stopped tracking down issues, and eventually went away from KDE entirely.
The screenshots from the site are beautiful. I really like how they are *finally* taking focus on performance for lower end systems, and I hope it translates to better performance on lower end laptops as well.
But I also wish they had taken this focus more than 5 years ago. It would have made a huge difference for me, and other people who have since migrated away from KDE because of performance issues.
Instead, they would be in an encoded form that could not be decoded without special software and the carriers don't have access to the contents of the messages either.
Yeah, first they say they don't sniff your traffic, then they say this, then that, then they pull the "not without our secret magic decoder ring" argument. If they are working with government agencies to use this software (and it may not be the FBI), they wouldn't even have the ability to admit to it- those kinds of agreements require the company to deny everything in perpetuity.
First thing this new year, I'm migrating my phone over to cyanogenmod. I'd do it now, but I just don't have the time.
As an addendum to the really great explanation above, I would also say that if you have NO experience, then you will need some other kind of portfolio of work to start the conversation in an interview. There are three things you can offer that will get instant interest, because most candidates don't do this but it does garner attention:
1. Think of every thing you do IT related as "your job". Then go volunteer. When you start, come in the door with a negotiated set of requirements to complete what it is the non-profit needs, which should include a letter of recommendation from the program director or head of the non-profit discussing the quality of your work. Complete those items, and make them happy. Then get your written recommendations. If anybody in interviews questions your work, you can always inform them that work is work, even if you are paid or not, and quality is what counts. I still volunteer regularly at non-profits doing this, and I've been in the IT field for over 20 years.
2. Find a need, and start an open source project to fill it. This will serve as an example of your ability to create and organize around projects, and will give potential interviewers a publicly verified example of your code, which for them is also an insight into how you structure your thoughts and documentation.
3. Build a lab at home. Test your environment, rebuild it, make it more manageable. Also make it accessible to interviewers- most interviewers never get to see hands on work environments of the people they are considering hiring. Something like this is rarely done by interviewees, but it is akin to providing a portfolio in other fields where bodies of work show proof of experience and capability.
Having lived with being oncall for most of my career, there are two things that will help your partner sleep through the night:
1. Divorce.
2. Fix the chatty monitoring.
3. Career change.
The first one is easier, but it can be costly.
The second one means taking a hard look at how you work, and changing everything which involves you putting hands on a keyboard. If you have to do it three times to fix a problem, it should be automated. The ONLY stuff you should be getting a notification for is something that cannot be dealt with procedurally. If that is coming up more than once or twice a month, then refactor your work. Most monitoring systems have a scriptable API. Doing this for a year or two under a moderate to heavy workload should get you back most of that sleep you've been missing out on.
The third makes sense if you can't get the buy-in on the second. I'd either change jobs, or find something else entirely different to do that requires you to be onsite to work, because that is the only way your partner is going to get a good night's sleep.
"Siga's drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints — and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans."
The disease has a lot of characteristics that make it a good weaponized agent. In fact, this has been one of the most studied diseases in that regard. To my knowledge, there is no known treatment/cure for smallpox- you either get vaccinated before symptoms show, or you suffer through it and possibly die. Its means of infection are well known, and I would hazard a guess that someone in the US DoD would find a smallpox *treatment/cure* that works after an infection has taken hold something worth studying for other purposes. It would also seem to me that the military is hedging its bets my making sure other nations don't get this technology as well.
So? Everybody needs to make money to pay for the servers. Ubuntu makes it on selling SAAS tools for exorbitant rates. Since Mint isn't taxing the users that way they have to get their funding from somewhere, and pointing out which search services aren't willing to share revenue streams with the vendors who make their search products available isn't unfair. I presume you can always add them back in and remove them from the adblock block list.
If she is in a home, she only has so much time left. Get her something nice, like a fully featured IPad, and spend a few days with her showing her how to use it. She will appreciate the extra time spent, and her learning to use Facebook, Twitter, and other apps will give her that extra interaction with the lives of others outside of her home that she may be craving. Heck, she might even start getting more visitors if she can get in touch with them more often!
Also, working out the speech to text features for her might be beneficial so she is not spending all of her time hunting and pecking to compose a messages.
But, man, she only has so much time left, so give her a little extra. You may see that Ipad back in your hands sooner than you think. And if not, the bright spot in your life you will make for her will mean that much more as one of her last memories.
Actually, the founding fathers were very concerned that Liberty might be conflated with Freedom, and today it seems they were right. Liberty, basically, is a sum of non-contradictory rights held in common. Freedom is just an exemption of control, and often can conflict with other freedoms. Mostly, the founding fathers were concerned that liberties should be clearly enshrined, and that freedoms were mostly up to localities to implement or disagree upon as they saw fit.
The problem I see is that we have forgotten the meaning and importance of liberty in American culture, and have been distracted by chasing after whatever freedom is dangled in front of our collective faces as a distraction.
Seeing as I have gone through the consolidation route in the last few years, I'll add my 2cents.
First, I got rid of no less than 14 machines from my house. I had a small data center running in there, including routers, switches, and the like. However, keeping those systems up to date was getting expensive over time, and so was the electrical bill. I now try to keep my hardware footprint low, and to hardware that I know will be stocking replacements 3 years from now.
So, I consolidated down to 2 somewhat powerful boxes, an OpenBSD firewall, a wifi AP, and laptops for the family. One box served as a media server and backup host, the other box served alternately as 1) a vmware server, then 2) an OpenBSD system running jailed environments, and finally 3) a Xen box. It was a choice between KVM and Xen, as VMWare tends to want lots of resources and is persnickety as heck about how things will run. Xen seems to want to work with anything, and I believe Amazon cloud is based on something similar. BTW, using the free VMWare server is nothing like running a production VMWare environment, so just focus on the concepts rather than the tools at home (again, my opinion, but since I have yet to see 2 shops run VMWare the same way, this is why I said what I said).
Eventually, I started running VMs on my laptop, and stopped using the VM box entirely. When my media server died a horrible death, the VM box became the media server. I just don't use it for virtual hosts often enough to warrant keeping it in its old role. As of now, I'm investing heavily in a laptop with multiple cores, plenty of RAM, and a fast disk. When I'm not actively running something, virtual hosts stay off. In the near future, I will be getting rid of ALL of my server and network hardware in favor of a beefed up mac mini with OS X Lion Server on it, which will serve as media center, wifi ap, firewall, alternate VM server, and backups host.
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't test UI ideas on your users. As long as you do that, Linux will never be ready for the desktop, because non-geek users hate that."
Geek users hate it even more. If I wanted regular paradigm shifts in my environment, I'd scramble my FVWM config file. Since the last paradigm shift to Unity, I'd sooner run Windows than run Ubuntu. Literally, I can get more functionality out of FVWM2 than Gnome or Unity these days.
Yep, I had to save up for a 6 month "vacation" when I last switched jobs in the SF Bay area. I had been working for one of the data center providers that serviced most of the companies in the region. Tied to their hosting contract, was a do not hire clause with a six month window, and I was told by HR that the only reason it wasn't "illegal" was because the agreement wasn't between the employee and company directly. It has been an open secret for some time that most of the major players also have these agreements in place. It is particularly frustrating, and effectively the same as a black list (which is illegal in CA), so I'm glad the practice is finally being investigated.
I thought that was K through 8? At least, that is what my kid is doing in K-8...
My thought is that high schools should be providing a foundation for starting an apprenticeship *or* a basis for entering college. I feel that high schools have been dumbed down to a role that isn't very functional for our society. Shop, basic drafting and engineering, and other trade skills (including basic IT certification training) offer excellent opportunities to integrate learning and life skills, and also provide an opportunity to qualify for a junior level position or as an apprentice carrying a union card. I have no problem with a high school that focuses on integrating education with a goal of being employable as, say, a junior java developer, upon receiving a high school diploma, and I wish more school districts would spend the time and effort to provide the level of education that had been a standard in the past.
Not everybody needs to go to college. Most software "engineers", and IT people in general, don't need a college degree. I say this with about 8 years of college under my belt, AND having done an apprenticeship out of high school- a sole college prep focus is not needed, and can even make it harder on students to matriculate into the real world where they will likely be working to pay for that college diploma. College prep is desirable for some (who have parents who can pay for their kid's college costs), yes, but not needed for most. I'd prefer high schools not confuse the two.
Even more so, someone should be checking state laws to ensure that the software written isn't going to be considered property of the business anyways.
That being said, it would seem to me that there are only a couple of routes available to the poster, whether the software is open or closed source:
1. Market the software, and have the trade college come on board as a "development/gold/whatever partner". They get the software for free, poster gets a free test env. What does matter is any contractual agreement for support, as poster is still an employee, and that could raise a number of conflict of interest issues in the future. This might get management and/or HR really twitchy fast.
2. Market the software, and ignore the trade college. Probably a safer bet from the liability angle. Also, as poster says he has plenty of free time (enough to write an entire support project!), spending a little extra time on email and forum based support isn't a bad thing. Position the product for sale to an upstream vendor. Take some time to go to tradeshows (unpaid time off from the company, possibly), and market the product.
Oh, I say ironically because I was using it in the 90s, and since then there have been these huge projects with thousands of work hours spent to correct the deficiencies of something as "complicated" as FVWM... which have resulted in DEs that are FAR more complicated to fully customize. In the end, I keep coming back to FVWM(2), and I find that ironic and amusing.
Back issues of the Linux Journal are helpful. Looking at FVWM config files of DEs that you like the appearance of. OpenBSD deploys with FVWM, and quite a few people use it or FVWM2 (those who don't convert over to cwm, that is). Spending hours on the man pages for FVWM2 and doing a lot of experimentation is what worked for me. Often, I had given up on FVWM, and was trying to use another DE, and then found myself wondering why I couldn't get X feature to do what I wanted it to do. Every time, to get all of the features I wanted, it ended up being FVWM2, but it meant I had to experiment with my features and fix my scripting.
In the long run, it help me learn a lot about planning, bug documentation, and writing good requirements. I had to do all of that for myself so I wouldn't go back and keep repeating things I'd already done, but had forgotten why I had dropped them in favor of the next task.
That would have been Aptera, which was focusing on the market for lower price cars, but they had to close shop before they could get their sedan model off the ground due to not getting Federal funding to complete final testing and get production set up.
I've put my own DE together with FVWM2, which is pretty much designed for that sort of thing. It has the ability to take Perl scripting for almost every feature you want, and works well with integrating services to the DE. I've been able to create dynamic menus from it, with button options for other activities (ex, listing and acting on mail, for one; also, popping up new dynamic DEs based on nagios messages for host troubleshooting, complete with relevant schematic on the root window, etc). The great thing about it is that you can program in the behavior of pretty much any other desktop feature you want, mixing Windowmaker features with XFCE, etc. Plenty of apps out there will work with it as well.
I agree. I think that getting a drivers license (the ability to pilot more than 1500 pounds of fast, dangerous machinery) should be limited to those who can *prove* capable of that responsibility. I'm thinking drivers test courses without safety rails, and containing potentially fatal real world hazards. It is much better to find out someone isn't capable there, rather than a few years later in a crowd of pedestrians.
I agree, I just have a different point of view, in that the 4.0 debacle could have been avoided by, well, not releasing it before it was ready. Early on in KDE, the focus was on features over documentation, stability, or speed. Well before 4.0, I had submitted bugs to kde devs, only to have them acrimoniously closed or denied, subsequently opened up again by others filing the same reports, watching those get closed, and then opened up again when a dev was forced to fix it because it finally stopped the show for *him*. If that focus on continuously adding unstable features (without fixing them!) had changed direction during 3.x, I would still be using KDE, and actively hunting down and testing bugs for them. Instead, I stopped contributing, stopped tracking down issues, and eventually went away from KDE entirely.
The screenshots from the site are beautiful. I really like how they are *finally* taking focus on performance for lower end systems, and I hope it translates to better performance on lower end laptops as well.
But I also wish they had taken this focus more than 5 years ago. It would have made a huge difference for me, and other people who have since migrated away from KDE because of performance issues.
Instead, they would be in an encoded form that could not be decoded without special software and the carriers don't have access to the contents of the messages either.
Yeah, first they say they don't sniff your traffic, then they say this, then that, then they pull the "not without our secret magic decoder ring" argument. If they are working with government agencies to use this software (and it may not be the FBI), they wouldn't even have the ability to admit to it- those kinds of agreements require the company to deny everything in perpetuity.
First thing this new year, I'm migrating my phone over to cyanogenmod. I'd do it now, but I just don't have the time.
As an addendum to the really great explanation above, I would also say that if you have NO experience, then you will need some other kind of portfolio of work to start the conversation in an interview. There are three things you can offer that will get instant interest, because most candidates don't do this but it does garner attention:
1. Think of every thing you do IT related as "your job". Then go volunteer. When you start, come in the door with a negotiated set of requirements to complete what it is the non-profit needs, which should include a letter of recommendation from the program director or head of the non-profit discussing the quality of your work. Complete those items, and make them happy. Then get your written recommendations. If anybody in interviews questions your work, you can always inform them that work is work, even if you are paid or not, and quality is what counts. I still volunteer regularly at non-profits doing this, and I've been in the IT field for over 20 years.
2. Find a need, and start an open source project to fill it. This will serve as an example of your ability to create and organize around projects, and will give potential interviewers a publicly verified example of your code, which for them is also an insight into how you structure your thoughts and documentation.
3. Build a lab at home. Test your environment, rebuild it, make it more manageable. Also make it accessible to interviewers- most interviewers never get to see hands on work environments of the people they are considering hiring. Something like this is rarely done by interviewees, but it is akin to providing a portfolio in other fields where bodies of work show proof of experience and capability.
Having lived with being oncall for most of my career, there are two things that will help your partner sleep through the night:
1. Divorce.
2. Fix the chatty monitoring.
3. Career change.
The first one is easier, but it can be costly.
The second one means taking a hard look at how you work, and changing everything which involves you putting hands on a keyboard. If you have to do it three times to fix a problem, it should be automated. The ONLY stuff you should be getting a notification for is something that cannot be dealt with procedurally. If that is coming up more than once or twice a month, then refactor your work. Most monitoring systems have a scriptable API. Doing this for a year or two under a moderate to heavy workload should get you back most of that sleep you've been missing out on.
The third makes sense if you can't get the buy-in on the second. I'd either change jobs, or find something else entirely different to do that requires you to be onsite to work, because that is the only way your partner is going to get a good night's sleep.
"Siga's drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints — and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans."
The disease has a lot of characteristics that make it a good weaponized agent. In fact, this has been one of the most studied diseases in that regard. To my knowledge, there is no known treatment/cure for smallpox- you either get vaccinated before symptoms show, or you suffer through it and possibly die. Its means of infection are well known, and I would hazard a guess that someone in the US DoD would find a smallpox *treatment/cure* that works after an infection has taken hold something worth studying for other purposes. It would also seem to me that the military is hedging its bets my making sure other nations don't get this technology as well.
So? Everybody needs to make money to pay for the servers. Ubuntu makes it on selling SAAS tools for exorbitant rates. Since Mint isn't taxing the users that way they have to get their funding from somewhere, and pointing out which search services aren't willing to share revenue streams with the vendors who make their search products available isn't unfair. I presume you can always add them back in and remove them from the adblock block list.
If she is in a home, she only has so much time left. Get her something nice, like a fully featured IPad, and spend a few days with her showing her how to use it. She will appreciate the extra time spent, and her learning to use Facebook, Twitter, and other apps will give her that extra interaction with the lives of others outside of her home that she may be craving. Heck, she might even start getting more visitors if she can get in touch with them more often!
Also, working out the speech to text features for her might be beneficial so she is not spending all of her time hunting and pecking to compose a messages.
But, man, she only has so much time left, so give her a little extra. You may see that Ipad back in your hands sooner than you think. And if not, the bright spot in your life you will make for her will mean that much more as one of her last memories.
Actually, the founding fathers were very concerned that Liberty might be conflated with Freedom, and today it seems they were right. Liberty, basically, is a sum of non-contradictory rights held in common. Freedom is just an exemption of control, and often can conflict with other freedoms. Mostly, the founding fathers were concerned that liberties should be clearly enshrined, and that freedoms were mostly up to localities to implement or disagree upon as they saw fit.
The problem I see is that we have forgotten the meaning and importance of liberty in American culture, and have been distracted by chasing after whatever freedom is dangled in front of our collective faces as a distraction.
Seeing as I have gone through the consolidation route in the last few years, I'll add my 2cents. First, I got rid of no less than 14 machines from my house. I had a small data center running in there, including routers, switches, and the like. However, keeping those systems up to date was getting expensive over time, and so was the electrical bill. I now try to keep my hardware footprint low, and to hardware that I know will be stocking replacements 3 years from now. So, I consolidated down to 2 somewhat powerful boxes, an OpenBSD firewall, a wifi AP, and laptops for the family. One box served as a media server and backup host, the other box served alternately as 1) a vmware server, then 2) an OpenBSD system running jailed environments, and finally 3) a Xen box. It was a choice between KVM and Xen, as VMWare tends to want lots of resources and is persnickety as heck about how things will run. Xen seems to want to work with anything, and I believe Amazon cloud is based on something similar. BTW, using the free VMWare server is nothing like running a production VMWare environment, so just focus on the concepts rather than the tools at home (again, my opinion, but since I have yet to see 2 shops run VMWare the same way, this is why I said what I said). Eventually, I started running VMs on my laptop, and stopped using the VM box entirely. When my media server died a horrible death, the VM box became the media server. I just don't use it for virtual hosts often enough to warrant keeping it in its old role. As of now, I'm investing heavily in a laptop with multiple cores, plenty of RAM, and a fast disk. When I'm not actively running something, virtual hosts stay off. In the near future, I will be getting rid of ALL of my server and network hardware in favor of a beefed up mac mini with OS X Lion Server on it, which will serve as media center, wifi ap, firewall, alternate VM server, and backups host.