Actually, as someone from Wisconsin who now lives in Seattle, I can tell you the difference is in the pronounciation.
In Wisconsin, it is "you-double-you" In Seattle it is "you-dub"
I have no opinion on why Washingtonians are too lazy to pronounce abbreviations fully.
Additionally, as a proud alum, the University of Washington was still a mud pit when the University of Wisconsin was shaping the minds of influential thinkers.
It's interesting to see this (hopefully) become more well-known in mainstream society. Having grown up in a family of teachers (both parents, one step-parent, three aunts, two grandparents, and a sibling all taught public school), the fact that school wasn't about educating but rather socializing youth (in the adapting to society sense, not small-talk). Preparing them for what would be expected of them as adults, which for the most part is TPS reports.
It's also worth noting that of the whole herd of relatives I listed, not one still teaches. About half retired, and the rest moved into other jobs.
I imagine this on/. is a lot like running a piece critical of Microsoft in a teacher's magazine. A lot of people will agree with it based on their own experiences but had never come up with the conclusions before.
College is the ideal place to pick up these skills as well. Not as a part of the ciriculum, but as a student employee.
At the university I attended, there were a lot of tech jobs that were only open to students. These generally started at a desktop support level or helpdesk work, but had the opportunity to advance fairly rapidly as other students switched jobs or graduated. Student wages were far below competitive for tech jobs, but the experience and exposure to real systems more than made up for it.
I did finish my B.S. in C.S. and am glad that I did, but that was only part of the whole "college experience". Being able to get my hands on Big Iron at the age of twenty was a part of it that no classroom environment could provide.
What exactly are the author's qualifications, beyond being a consumer? Here are a few points I'd like to see addressed:
Statements about signal penetration indicate some knowledge of RF Engineering. Has the author ever worked in Radio Frequency engineering?
Statements of coverage area indicate a knowledge of how the wireless companies have deployed sites. Which carriers have shared this information with the author?
Is there any evidence that isn't anecdotal in the author's statements?
Since no credentials are given for the author, I am quite curious to see if this is an amateur opinion or an educated one. Being a technical field, only the latter matters.
There are a lot of things to dislike about wireless companies - the weak regulatory bodies that have failed to force standardization or universal coverage, or the amount the industry is steered by market analysts with no experience or knowledge of the field both spring to mind. But the adoption of digital technologies is not one of them.
How do incoming calls make a pay phone profitable? An incoming call for which the pay phone user pays nothing doesn't really seem like much of a cash cow.
Exactly. I got my information from my boss and co-workers, most of whom spent time with the Great Telephone Expiriment in the seventies and eighties. They all dreaded calls to repair pay phones, and knew the score then.
Most pay phones lost money like a sieve. The decline of the enclosed phone booth came about due to the high incidence of they being used as toilets; the local Bell technicians wanted nothing to do with repairing a smashed phone in a small enclosure reeking of urine.
In general, pay phones were mandated by public safety regulations, not profit motive. Problems ranging from smashed handsets to stolen phone books to smashed window glass plagued public phones constantly.
If pay phones were profitable, why did the Baby Bells allow anyone to start running them? It would have been a very strange business decision given their history of profiteering in the post Ma Bell era.
Game companies exist to sell product. Online game companies exist to sell first the shrink-wrapped box, and then sustain by selling the online service. Their goal is to have a product which keeps users coming back, not to make them happy. Happy does not necessarily equate with profits; Sony's only goal is to make money for its shareholders. The idea that a company would try to cut customer service costs, even to the detriment of existing customers, is not even vaguely newsworthy.
I can't seem to find any sympathy for those enthralled with online gaming. Try not writing Sony that check every month - your withdrawl symptoms won't come close to the stress of trying to quit smoking or kicking hard drugs. Leave your imaginary accomplishments behind and try being something in the real world.
Medicine is a field which requires certification. Writing code is not a profession in that sense. There is no body analagous to the American Medical Association or the IEEE that regulates best practices, standards,ethics. There is no journal of the American Coders Association
Certification is a tricky business for technical, rapidly changing fields; any sysadmin aware of the SAGECertification program should know about the long, hard road to determining what makes a certified sysadmin.
The low barriers to entry for coders make regualtion damn near impossible. It's a lot like the repeated attempts to unionize sex workers: there's always another eighteen year old waiting in the wings to take the work and do a miserable job. I have way more respect for the average sex worker than coders - competetion makes them good at what they do. Most coders get paid either way. But that's a different rant.
Who determines the public good? This is ostensibly the work of the government, but occasionally falls to non-governmental organizations like the AMA. This is not a job for the self-righteous/. community. Is spyware harmful? I think so, but most people either aren't aware or are indifferent. This isn't a technocracy, which despite what some readers might think is a good thing - technical people can't govern any better than anyone else, and frequently do worse.
Nice idea, but you can't get there from here.
Some days it's horribly obvious that too many/. readers really don't know any serious computer professionals. These aren't new issues, but they've never been brought to the attention of this community.
"I find myself putting all my energy, both mental and emotional, into a project only to be disappointed by decisions made by management."
I have a little saying I like to use in meetings or with co-workers who are taking things too seriously: "we're not curing cancer here". (needless to say, I'm not working in cancer research). Work is work - it's something I do to pay my rent, keep food on the table, and support my other interests. If you find yourself putting all your emotional energy into work, you should seriously re-evaluate the priorities in your life.
I am fortunate in that I generally like what I do, but I will not drain myself emotionally for any job - the sum of money required to turn me into an emotional wreck far exceeds the market's willingness to compensate me.
This is a debate that continually occurs amongst the faculty of reputable institutions. Should Computer Science departments become vocational institutions, or remain academic in the traditional sense?
The university where I did my CS degree maintains that CS majors, like other students in the college of Letters & Sciences, take a majority of classes outside the major - 80 credits of the 120 needed for a baccalaureate degree must be outside the declared major. As a result, CS grads need to have a decent background in literature, history, hard sciences, and social sciences. This does a lot for critical thinking skills. The opposing view is that CS students should be "prepared for industry", which essentially boils down to teaching some vendor's tools exclusively - Oracle DBA classes, MS programming tools, Cisco certifications.
I'm firmly of the opinion that CS students should be kept in the traditional academic program. Good analytical skills are worth more in the long run than knowing how to use vendor tools right out of the box. Bear in mind that the average adult goes through seven career changes in a lifetime - a general education will still be useful to me when the paradigms of today come crashing down.
Since the color was also changed for the second edition, another color change should be no surprise. I like to think that this was intentional on the part of the author so that a beleagured sysadmin can reach for the book by color and get the most current edition easily.
Novell has lost all the customers they're going to lose, either to Windows NT, Linux, or other vendors. There are still Novell shops, and believe me, they are committed to Novell for the long term. They probably won't win back any ground, but they should be able to stay afloat supporting the remaining clients they have.
As the ISP market has changed, many larger providers don't want to offer shell or other niceities. Since primarily only these larger providers are offering high-speed access, I'd recommend a secondary ISP, one which does not focus on connecting to the customer via cable/DSL/modem/carrier pigeon, but rather one which is concerned with privacy and security. These services are relatively inexpensive (I pay $50/six months for what you describe), and those running them are usually very interested in privacy. There is the added feature that when a new high-speed provider begins providing services in your area, you won't be tied down.
I don't use any of the accounts provided with my cable modem, since they only provide insecure POP access and no shell. Instead, I pay the Data Haven Project for a shell, a reasonable expectation of privacy, and a stable address that will survive my next change of bandwidth providers.
The large telco I work for has the following policy: Waged employees get a bonus of $125/week plus time worked for after-hours work. This can be counted towards overtime once a total of forty hours has been worked.
Salried employees used to be eligble for the $125/week bonus, but this was discontinued about a year ago. No bonus, and no overtime.
I'm not too angry about this, despite being a salaried worker.
This was done in several pre-Unix operating systems, and a few post-Unix systems; however, it went by the wayside. If I recall correctly, the omission of this particular feature earned its own chapter in the UNIX Hater's Handbook.
Of course, there's no reason why this feature couldn't be added to a source-available Unix, but no one seems to have yet.
"Big companies" is not the term that I would use to describe VA Linux, Red Hat, or any of the other players in the Linux business. While they do have high market capitalization values, they are dwrfed by real "Big Corporations" such as GE, IBM, AT&T, GM, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, and other giants of industry. Most of the companies on that list have laid off more people in a single wave than Red Hat currently employs.
While corporate interests in Linux are a valid concern, calling them "Big Companies" is a horrible exageration.
It used to be on their web site that all the data would be backed up to their network. It was a feature; no worries if your unit dies! They've got all your e-mail!
That they would mine the data was not stated openly anywhere I saw.
First of all, it's only free if you buy a new Sun server. Not if you're already a multi-million dollar per year Sun customer. Thanks for that one, Sun. Also, the alleged "$1500 value" isn't what they'll charge you if you try to purchase it - they get you for a lot more. Still, these aren't technical issues, so if it was a truly great product I'd forget about it.
However, it has several strange design issues. The worst one, in my opinion, is that it can't get user information out of NIS, NIS+, LDAP, or any other scheme - only/etc/passwd and/etc/shadow are supported. This is simply ludicrous for Sun, the people who originated NIS and NIS+. We run several other information services, but PC Netlink can only use those old classics. Note to any Sun programmers: it's called getpwnam() and can be found in your C library!/etc/nsswitch.conf is worth looking into for this sort of thing.
As noted above, I'm at a big Sun shop, and we still went with Samba. Of course, I don't speak for my unnamed employer, and all my opinions are my own. My opinion of Sun is that while they make excellent hardware, and the best commercial Unix currently available, their sales and service divisions are little better than criminals.
After the official rights to Unix were given to the OpenGroup by SCO, any operating system that could pass the POSIX tests could be legally branded. This is a change from the bad old days when only products licensed form the official copyright holders could be called Unix - Solaris was licensed from AT&T originally, so it could call itself Unix; HP-UX was implemented independently and could not call itself Unix. Thankfully, those days are over.
As for making WIndows NT into a Unix, it's already been done; for a while it was being sold as Open NT. Essentially, Windows NT has the capabilityto have different subsystems; the 16 bit Windows 3.1 compatability stuff is one, the Win32 level another. By adding a complete POISX subsystem, Windows NT can be considered Unix. Bill Gates was once quoted "In some ways, NT is a Unix". For more on the history of Unix, I recommend the book A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, the USENIX bookworm. It has an excellent explanation of the geneology of Unix and Unix-alike systems.
No serious enterprise company should allow any automated tool to install any software without human intervention. While I am not aquainted with the security precautions in autorpm, if any, placing an amount of trust in a network-provided resource is the sort of error that gets system administrators fired for incompetance. That aside, I prefer having several small updates, which allows me a finer granularity of which patches I install. Take for example a Sun patch cluster. Each patch is a in a subdirectory all its own, and the order in which they are to be installed is listed in a single text file. While the current recommended patches are available as a single tarfile, there is a fine level of control available.
Re:2.0.38? What happened to the 2.2 tree?
on
Kernels Galore
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· Score: 2
It's not simply a matter of stability. Take, for example, my firewall/router at home. It's a mere 386/33SX, with qute a small hard drive, and a very mature IP masquerading/NAT setup. I'm not in a big hurry to migrate to all of the various packages that 2.2 requires; the box works, and works well. A minor revison to 2.0 is quite sufficient. This is one of the strengths of Linux - unlike commercial Unices, in which products are marked as "End of Life" and abandoned, there is no reason to give up an older version of Linux if it still performs the required task.
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Actually, as someone from Wisconsin who now lives in Seattle, I can tell you the difference is in the pronounciation.
In Wisconsin, it is "you-double-you"
In Seattle it is "you-dub"
I have no opinion on why Washingtonians are too lazy to pronounce abbreviations fully.
Additionally, as a proud alum, the University of Washington was still a mud pit when the University of Wisconsin was shaping the minds of influential thinkers.
In Wisconson, "UW" refers to Madison. "UW-M" usually refers to Milwaukee.
It's also worth noting that of the whole herd of relatives I listed, not one still teaches. About half retired, and the rest moved into other jobs.
I imagine this on /. is a lot like running a piece critical of Microsoft in a teacher's magazine. A lot of people will agree with it based on their own experiences but had never come up with the conclusions before.
College is the ideal place to pick up these skills as well. Not as a part of the ciriculum, but as a student employee.
At the university I attended, there were a lot of tech jobs that were only open to students. These generally started at a desktop support level or helpdesk work, but had the opportunity to advance fairly rapidly as other students switched jobs or graduated. Student wages were far below competitive for tech jobs, but the experience and exposure to real systems more than made up for it.
I did finish my B.S. in C.S. and am glad that I did, but that was only part of the whole "college experience". Being able to get my hands on Big Iron at the age of twenty was a part of it that no classroom environment could provide.
- Statements about signal penetration indicate some knowledge of RF Engineering. Has the author ever worked in Radio Frequency engineering?
- Statements of coverage area indicate a knowledge of how the wireless companies have deployed sites. Which carriers have shared this information with the author?
- Is there any evidence that isn't anecdotal in the author's statements?
Since no credentials are given for the author, I am quite curious to see if this is an amateur opinion or an educated one. Being a technical field, only the latter matters.There are a lot of things to dislike about wireless companies - the weak regulatory bodies that have failed to force standardization or universal coverage, or the amount the industry is steered by market analysts with no experience or knowledge of the field both spring to mind. But the adoption of digital technologies is not one of them.
In general, pay phones were mandated by public safety regulations, not profit motive. Problems ranging from smashed handsets to stolen phone books to smashed window glass plagued public phones constantly.
If pay phones were profitable, why did the Baby Bells allow anyone to start running them? It would have been a very strange business decision given their history of profiteering in the post Ma Bell era.
I can't seem to find any sympathy for those enthralled with online gaming. Try not writing Sony that check every month - your withdrawl symptoms won't come close to the stress of trying to quit smoking or kicking hard drugs. Leave your imaginary accomplishments behind and try being something in the real world.
Nice idea, but you can't get there from here.
Some days it's horribly obvious that too many /. readers really don't know any serious computer professionals. These aren't new issues, but they've never been brought to the attention of this community.
"I find myself putting all my energy, both mental and emotional, into a project only to be disappointed by decisions made by management."
I have a little saying I like to use in meetings or with co-workers who are taking things too seriously: "we're not curing cancer here". (needless to say, I'm not working in cancer research). Work is work - it's something I do to pay my rent, keep food on the table, and support my other interests. If you find yourself putting all your emotional energy into work, you should seriously re-evaluate the priorities in your life. I am fortunate in that I generally like what I do, but I will not drain myself emotionally for any job - the sum of money required to turn me into an emotional wreck far exceeds the market's willingness to compensate me.
The university where I did my CS degree maintains that CS majors, like other students in the college of Letters & Sciences, take a majority of classes outside the major - 80 credits of the 120 needed for a baccalaureate degree must be outside the declared major. As a result, CS grads need to have a decent background in literature, history, hard sciences, and social sciences. This does a lot for critical thinking skills. The opposing view is that CS students should be "prepared for industry", which essentially boils down to teaching some vendor's tools exclusively - Oracle DBA classes, MS programming tools, Cisco certifications.
I'm firmly of the opinion that CS students should be kept in the traditional academic program. Good analytical skills are worth more in the long run than knowing how to use vendor tools right out of the box. Bear in mind that the average adult goes through seven career changes in a lifetime - a general education will still be useful to me when the paradigms of today come crashing down.
Sure, I could type it in, but it'd be nice if /. editors would make this a direct link. Sextracker could use the traffic.
Novell has lost all the customers they're going to lose, either to Windows NT, Linux, or other vendors. There are still Novell shops, and believe me, they are committed to Novell for the long term. They probably won't win back any ground, but they should be able to stay afloat supporting the remaining clients they have.
I don't use any of the accounts provided with my cable modem, since they only provide insecure POP access and no shell. Instead, I pay the Data Haven Project for a shell, a reasonable expectation of privacy, and a stable address that will survive my next change of bandwidth providers.
Waged employees get a bonus of $125/week plus time worked for after-hours work. This can be counted towards overtime once a total of forty hours has been worked.
Salried employees used to be eligble for the $125/week bonus, but this was discontinued about a year ago. No bonus, and no overtime.
I'm not too angry about this, despite being a salaried worker.
"Big companies" is not the term that I would use to describe VA Linux, Red Hat, or any of the other players in the Linux business. While they do have high market capitalization values, they are dwrfed by real "Big Corporations" such as GE, IBM, AT&T, GM, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, and other giants of industry. Most of the companies on that list have laid off more people in a single wave than Red Hat currently employs.
While corporate interests in Linux are a valid concern, calling them "Big Companies" is a horrible exageration.
The previously available laserdisc boxed set had all of this material. If I recall correctly, there are four discs in the set.
That they would mine the data was not stated openly anywhere I saw.
First of all, it's only free if you buy a new Sun server. Not if you're already a multi-million dollar per year Sun customer. Thanks for that one, Sun. Also, the alleged "$1500 value" isn't what they'll charge you if you try to purchase it - they get you for a lot more. Still, these aren't technical issues, so if it was a truly great product I'd forget about it.
However, it has several strange design issues. The worst one, in my opinion, is that it can't get user information out of NIS, NIS+, LDAP, or any other scheme - only /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow are supported. This is simply ludicrous for Sun, the people who originated NIS and NIS+. We run several other information services, but PC Netlink can only use those old classics. Note to any Sun programmers: it's called getpwnam() and can be found in your C library! /etc/nsswitch.conf is worth looking into for this sort of thing.
As noted above, I'm at a big Sun shop, and we still went with Samba. Of course, I don't speak for my unnamed employer, and all my opinions are my own. My opinion of Sun is that while they make excellent hardware, and the best commercial Unix currently available, their sales and service divisions are little better than criminals.
As for making WIndows NT into a Unix, it's already been done; for a while it was being sold as Open NT. Essentially, Windows NT has the capabilityto have different subsystems; the 16 bit Windows 3.1 compatability stuff is one, the Win32 level another. By adding a complete POISX subsystem, Windows NT can be considered Unix. Bill Gates was once quoted "In some ways, NT is a Unix". For more on the history of Unix, I recommend the book A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, the USENIX bookworm. It has an excellent explanation of the geneology of Unix and Unix-alike systems.
No serious enterprise company should allow any automated tool to install any software without human intervention. While I am not aquainted with the security precautions in autorpm, if any, placing an amount of trust in a network-provided resource is the sort of error that gets system administrators fired for incompetance.
That aside, I prefer having several small updates, which allows me a finer granularity of which patches I install. Take for example a Sun patch cluster. Each patch is a in a subdirectory all its own, and the order in which they are to be installed is listed in a single text file. While the current recommended patches are available as a single tarfile, there is a fine level of control available.
This is one of the strengths of Linux - unlike commercial Unices, in which products are marked as "End of Life" and abandoned, there is no reason to give up an older version of Linux if it still performs the required task.