But it would be much better if you kept on his good side for the reference and ability to keep this as positive work experience on your resume.
I disagree with these statements. Nothing you can do right now will change the value of the work experience you have so far gained. As for the reference, bosses usually make very poor references anyway. This is especially true of myopic startup bosses that get peeved when their techies leave.
Do you have any friendly co-workers that would give you a good reference? Most of the time the HR of a new job will call whomever you put on your reference list, and they'll ask what the relationship is if they care. My experience is that even if it's just someone you worked closely with, they'll take that as a good reference. I've gotten away with that countless times when I didn't feel comfortable with putting down a direct manager or boss as a reference. I've even put down people under my leadership as references, and it turns out that HR likes that even better when it applies.
In short, you have a lot of options when it comes to references, and it does sound like your boss is being extremely unreasonable. Walk away softly and don't touch anything, but don't worry about the references; you can be creative about those to good effect.
I have a Keyspan presentation remote, and it acts like both a mouse and a keyboard. The key combo it uses is Page Up and Page Down for slides so it should work fine with Impress, but you can also use left and right mouse clicks. It works in Linux and on the Mac.
I use mine to click through my LaTeX Beamer slides in Acrobat, and it works like a charm.
The benefit of using a presentation remote over a wireless mouse is that you also get a laser pointer. While some people use them very poorly (follow the moving dot -- through the entire presentation!), they are very handy when used correctly.
Even if the price is zero, then I'm personally likely to be angry enough as it is. This is all about accepting that SCO is in the right...
Actually, it's a bit more than that. Since nothing has yet been proven and all of this is allegation, isn't this just a form of blackmail? Isn't that illegal? Here is a definition of "blackmail", which I find very interesting indeed:
Extortion of money or something else of value from a person by the threat of exposing a criminal act or discreditable information.
It isn't much of a stretch to see how today the threat of "exposing a criminal act or discreditable information" has the same effect as "threatening to sue the pants off of someone for alleged and unproven wrongdoing."
Perhaps even more interesting is the relationship of this next definition to SCO's current approach:
Tribute formerly paid to freebooters along the Scottish border for protection from pillage.
(All of these from dictionary.com)
That last one is all about what SCO wants: "We're the pirates, pay us and we won't harm you."
I may be wrong (hey, it's happened before), but I find it interesting that the people who shout most loudly about their legal rights are often those quickest to disregard the rights of others.
Unix doesn't belong on the desktop, it wasn't designed for that purpose. It's like racing a hummer against a ferrari.
I suppose that Mac OS X doesn't belong on the desktop, then?
In my experience, it's very slick and very easy to use, certainly more like a Ferrari than a Hummer. My wife had no trouble adapting to it, and she has serious misgivings about learning to use Linux. Unix appears to work quite well on the desktop.
I suppose that I should have mentioned that when I was fired, so was the entire development team, except for the chairman's nephew, who wasn't a programmer.
The company folded, then the incubator stole the furniture from the building and set up "shop" in an old warehouse. Then they sold the furniture.
The counter offer sure was sweet, though. They couldn't even afford two days worth of it!
I also did that once. My staying power lasted 2 days after that.
It's amazing how they felt that my expressing misgivings about my position in the company invoked a nice counter offer and a simultaneous feeling that I was "arrogant", a "loose cannon", and "unmanageable".
They really needed me to stay, and I was not even using that as leverage. I was simply stating some misgivings I had about how things were going, and they offered more money to keep me on. Then they fired me.
At two different companies, I was in charge of a team of programmers and pretty close to the offer decision process. At both of them, the feeling was that a counter offer was a temporary resort, and that cheaper labor was surely available.
I'll place my two cents on the "don't take it" bet.
"As an American, I like doing things the easiest way possible."
I think it's a little off, though. What should have been said is, "As an American, I only like doing easy things."
Seriously, I'm all for getting rid of the pesky mouse, but not because I don't want to have to move any limbs to interact with the computer. It's mostly because I get tired of moving my hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back again. As a programmer I can see this would be very useful (though I'm pretty good at getting around without a mouse these days). I can also see how this would be useful for handicapped folks. I cannot, however, see the point in getting one of these just so that you can be more sedentary.:)
One point that I felt this author completely missed the boat on was that developing to the desktop is a "waste of time" because the war is lost.
Even if the war is lost (a point which I am not necessarily conceding, but...), it is not a waste of developer resources to develop a desktop.
Think of the people who write code for these servers running Linux. Think of all of the web developers. Personally, as a Linux developer, I find that a good desktop system helps me to do my work. Someone, somewhere, is going to need (or at least find useful) a desktop on Linux if that person is developing for Linux.
Sure, you can develop in the console all the time, but isn't it much nicer to open up GVim or XEmacs and use multiple windows? Isn't it helpful to have a good window manager?
So, while Linux may never win the desktop "war", I completely disagree that writing desktop applications and management software is a waste of time. I use it. I love it. Kudos to the GNOME, KDE, WindowMaker, et al. folks for taking the time to build things that get used, even if they aren't winning any wars.
AccessData did that all the time. We could break files in a matter of microseconds (depending on the "protection" of the file) but my boss told me to make sure that they took around 10 seconds or so to break. So, we put up a progress bar that took some number of seconds plus or minus a random margin to get to 100%.
Apparently the customers were concerned that they weren't getting their money's worth, even though the product worked as advertised.
Because this worked like a charm, he also had us do the same thing for demos. We would put up a progress bar and then show pregenerated data.
This would have been fine (albeit a bit annoying), except that because he had something to demo, he actually convinced himself that it worked, and then we got in trouble when it didn't. Sigh.
Personally, I think that GAIM, since they seem to have a solid footing legally, should only change the name if AOL agrees to pay them for it.
AOL is using its legal muscle to do this, but I believe that they are counting on the fact that most project leaders will take it lying down. The "Implicit License" argument is actually a very strong legal position in this case, and I am certain that they know that.
What AOL really wants is to preserve their brand. They want people to associate the name AIM with their own product, not with some nebulous service out there that can chat with Yahoo and Jabber and MSN as well as AOL.
So, they should be willing to make a strategic financial move instead of a bullying legal one, especially since they can't win this particular case.
I say go ahead and change the name, but first offer to do it as part of a contract -- you relinquish their brand name and they pay you to do it.
You certainly lose nothing by trying that approach first, and you could potentially gain quite a bit.
Not only that, but he mistakenly used the word perverted instead of perverse. There is a significant difference in meaning, and I am quite sure that the Turing Machine implemented in Life is not perverted, unless you construe every vertical line to be a phallic symbol.
What would make more sense (and what it sounds more like, reading the article) is that links are used where content is identical, and links are replace by `real data' when the content becomes non-identical.
This triggered a thought. This is mostly supposed to save space, I imagine, in user directories that are on a file server. It would probably work great for stuff that people like to download and email around a lot (like that mpeg that somehow gets into everyone's mailbox in a company, taking up an extra 30 MB per user almost overnight).
If it were applied to documents, especially those created by our beloved MS Office applications, then it would be absolutely useless. It would also be useless for databases and other binary formats. Many of us are used to the *nix world where most things are text files, so the idea of consolidating files into one location and distributing patch formats makes sense to us. In the proprietary binary world (MS) this does not apply and would not work.
How many people here have seen a Word document grow by 30 KB and change binary format significantly because of one corrected misspelling? It happens all the time. The savings from a consolidated file system would immediately disappear in this case, and there is no way to effectively or efficiently make a patch format for a change like that, not in a proprietary binary world.
That's right. There are two basic points I would like to touch on here.
1) There's a lot of talk here. Evidently there are those who are willing to put forth money, but who do not have the expertise or understanding (or whatever) to get this STARTED.
2) I don't think any purchase is required. How many of us own stock through an investment firm, like Fidelity? How many of us make 401K contributions through these people? That means that we own some stock and have a voice.
Investment companies would be stupid to invest in businesses that do not make serious money. I remember asking at a 401K presentation whether we could decide NOT to invest in people like Microsoft. They said, "No." That choice was not given to me. I give them money, tell them what kinds of investment I want and how high of a risk I am willing to take, and they deal with the details.
That means that they almost certainly invest in media companies. I would have to take a closer look at my list, but I would be really very surprised if people like Disney are not on it.
Also, tech stocks are the darlings of the market right now, so I have almost certainly invested in companies that can affect this particular case. Again, I will have to check my list, and I intend to do so.
So, back to my two points: most of us that have a retirement plan and that actually work for a living (and I bet it's many more of us than those who would brand us "hackers" without knowing what that means would give us credit for) own some stock and have some voice. It's a matter of clicking around for a few minutes on 401k.com or wherever you go for that sort of thing in order to find out where your stock is.
One final note. I have seen over and over again the power of many, many people submitting a petition to get what they want. It is amazing to me how the Internet has made this even more powerful, giving us the ability to unite voices that previously knew nothing of each other.
With that in mind, it is also amazing to me how NOTHING HAPPENS until one person with the right knowledge gets stuff together. Once that single entity is in place (even a website: "Go here and submit your signature!") then people tend to flock to it.
Slashdot is a great place. It is even greater because there are enough people here that we can probably find that one person who is able to begin the process spoken of in the article. I can't say that I understood the whole thing. Financial stuff is not my forte, but of all of us here, there is surely someone who is both willing and able to start what could be an avalanche, and I hope he/she will surface soon.
I see a lot of people here willing to give money and time to the effort. I would be willing to bet that most of them (us) are just waiting for some place to send their regards, their stock, and their vote. I know that's the ONLY thing holding me back right now. I just need someone to start driving the truck, and I'll hop in and give my support in whatever way I can.
I agree. I tried to get Windows installed on a clean drive only to realize that they didn't ship a floppy with CD ROM drivers! The drivers, of course, are on the CD, so I guess they figured they had it covered.
Then I had to get my modem working. That is never an easy task under Windows (at least, if you use a real modem, not a WinModem).
I was able to get things going by using an old DOS diskette I had hanging around, but even then the trouble wasn't over. It took me three full installs to get everything working right. That can take a long time with all of the "Please reboot your computer for the 80th time" crap going on. For some reason their hardware locator crap (that sits at 90% for 5 minutes) works in a random fashion.
This is not the first Windows box I have ever set up from scratch, either. They are all difficult. I agree that getting Linux prepackaged on shipping hardware will greatly improve its market image. Heck, once I have Linux configured well, even my roommates can use it, and they are all Windoze heads.
Slashdot Mirror
But it would be much better if you kept on his good side for the reference and ability to keep this as positive work experience on your resume.
I disagree with these statements. Nothing you can do right now will change the value of the work experience you have so far gained. As for the reference, bosses usually make very poor references anyway. This is especially true of myopic startup bosses that get peeved when their techies leave.
Do you have any friendly co-workers that would give you a good reference? Most of the time the HR of a new job will call whomever you put on your reference list, and they'll ask what the relationship is if they care. My experience is that even if it's just someone you worked closely with, they'll take that as a good reference. I've gotten away with that countless times when I didn't feel comfortable with putting down a direct manager or boss as a reference. I've even put down people under my leadership as references, and it turns out that HR likes that even better when it applies.
In short, you have a lot of options when it comes to references, and it does sound like your boss is being extremely unreasonable. Walk away softly and don't touch anything, but don't worry about the references; you can be creative about those to good effect.
I have a Keyspan presentation remote, and it acts like both a mouse and a keyboard. The key combo it uses is Page Up and Page Down for slides so it should work fine with Impress, but you can also use left and right mouse clicks. It works in Linux and on the Mac.
I use mine to click through my LaTeX Beamer slides in Acrobat, and it works like a charm.
The benefit of using a presentation remote over a wireless mouse is that you also get a laser pointer. While some people use them very poorly (follow the moving dot -- through the entire presentation!), they are very handy when used correctly.
Agreed. Sounds like what they're doing over at SCO....
SCO: "What is this pattern matching of which you speak?"
Secret Tutor (Bill G): "Profit!"
"Holy rusted metal, Batman!"
Never was it more appropriate.
For those of us using a newer version of RPM, use:
> rpmbuild --rebuild openssh-3.7p1-1.src.rpm
Are you kidding? He's getting his MBA. He wants to be SCO!
Actually, it's a bit more than that. Since nothing has yet been proven and all of this is allegation, isn't this just a form of blackmail? Isn't that illegal? Here is a definition of "blackmail", which I find very interesting indeed:
It isn't much of a stretch to see how today the threat of "exposing a criminal act or discreditable information" has the same effect as "threatening to sue the pants off of someone for alleged and unproven wrongdoing." Perhaps even more interesting is the relationship of this next definition to SCO's current approach:
(All of these from dictionary.com) That last one is all about what SCO wants: "We're the pirates, pay us and we won't harm you."
I may be wrong (hey, it's happened before), but I find it interesting that the people who shout most loudly about their legal rights are often those quickest to disregard the rights of others.
The closest thing to Snood under Linux is called Frozen Bubble. It's also got a really fun two-player mode that my wife and I enjoy together.
What do you think this will do to the future of space travel?
Forget the future of space travel! One-line come-ons will reach new heights! "Hey, baby, wanna join the 35-mile-high club?"
Unix doesn't belong on the desktop, it wasn't designed for that purpose. It's like racing a hummer against a ferrari.
I suppose that Mac OS X doesn't belong on the desktop, then?
In my experience, it's very slick and very easy to use, certainly more like a Ferrari than a Hummer. My wife had no trouble adapting to it, and she has serious misgivings about learning to use Linux. Unix appears to work quite well on the desktop.
I suppose that I should have mentioned that when I was fired, so was the entire development team, except for the chairman's nephew, who wasn't a programmer.
The company folded, then the incubator stole the furniture from the building and set up "shop" in an old warehouse. Then they sold the furniture.
The counter offer sure was sweet, though. They couldn't even afford two days worth of it!
Don't take it.
I also did that once. My staying power lasted 2 days after that.
It's amazing how they felt that my expressing misgivings about my position in the company invoked a nice counter offer and a simultaneous feeling that I was "arrogant", a "loose cannon", and "unmanageable".
They really needed me to stay, and I was not even using that as leverage. I was simply stating some misgivings I had about how things were going, and they offered more money to keep me on. Then they fired me.
At two different companies, I was in charge of a team of programmers and pretty close to the offer decision process. At both of them, the feeling was that a counter offer was a temporary resort, and that cheaper labor was surely available.
I'll place my two cents on the "don't take it" bet.
"As an American, I like doing things the easiest way possible."
I think it's a little off, though. What should have been said is, "As an American, I only like doing easy things."
Seriously, I'm all for getting rid of the pesky mouse, but not because I don't want to have to move any limbs to interact with the computer. It's mostly because I get tired of moving my hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back again. As a programmer I can see this would be very useful (though I'm pretty good at getting around without a mouse these days). I can also see how this would be useful for handicapped folks. I cannot, however, see the point in getting one of these just so that you can be more sedentary. :)
Who can tell one extra from another?
Now, that gives a whole new meaning to the title of the movie!
The only movement which changes your hands position is regularly pressing ESC to enter command mode.
Actually, I never stray from "home row" at all using Vi or VIM. I use the CTRL-[ combination instead of hitting ESC. Much faster.
One point that I felt this author completely missed the boat on was that developing to the desktop is a "waste of time" because the war is lost.
Even if the war is lost (a point which I am not necessarily conceding, but...), it is not a waste of developer resources to develop a desktop.
Think of the people who write code for these servers running Linux. Think of all of the web developers. Personally, as a Linux developer, I find that a good desktop system helps me to do my work. Someone, somewhere, is going to need (or at least find useful) a desktop on Linux if that person is developing for Linux.
Sure, you can develop in the console all the time, but isn't it much nicer to open up GVim or XEmacs and use multiple windows? Isn't it helpful to have a good window manager?
So, while Linux may never win the desktop "war", I completely disagree that writing desktop applications and management software is a waste of time. I use it. I love it. Kudos to the GNOME, KDE, WindowMaker, et al. folks for taking the time to build things that get used, even if they aren't winning any wars.
I read this yesterday on linuxtoday.com. How is this news?
On a side note, the article was poorly written and betrayed some serious misunderstandings about the purpose of Linux and its "need" to be a desktop.
AccessData did that all the time. We could break files in a matter of microseconds (depending on the "protection" of the file) but my boss told me to make sure that they took around 10 seconds or so to break. So, we put up a progress bar that took some number of seconds plus or minus a random margin to get to 100%.
Apparently the customers were concerned that they weren't getting their money's worth, even though the product worked as advertised.
Because this worked like a charm, he also had us do the same thing for demos. We would put up a progress bar and then show pregenerated data.
This would have been fine (albeit a bit annoying), except that because he had something to demo, he actually convinced himself that it worked, and then we got in trouble when it didn't. Sigh.
Maybe it's time for an Open Source Instant Messaging protocol, client, and server combo to avoid the whole mess.
You mean like the Jabber/Gaim/jabber.org combination?
http://jabber.org
Personally, I think that GAIM, since they seem to have a solid footing legally, should only change the name if AOL agrees to pay them for it.
AOL is using its legal muscle to do this, but I believe that they are counting on the fact that most project leaders will take it lying down. The "Implicit License" argument is actually a very strong legal position in this case, and I am certain that they know that.
What AOL really wants is to preserve their brand. They want people to associate the name AIM with their own product, not with some nebulous service out there that can chat with Yahoo and Jabber and MSN as well as AOL.
So, they should be willing to make a strategic financial move instead of a bullying legal one, especially since they can't win this particular case.
I say go ahead and change the name, but first offer to do it as part of a contract -- you relinquish their brand name and they pay you to do it.
You certainly lose nothing by trying that approach first, and you could potentially gain quite a bit.
Not only that, but he mistakenly used the word perverted instead of perverse. There is a significant difference in meaning, and I am quite sure that the Turing Machine implemented in Life is not perverted, unless you construe every vertical line to be a phallic symbol.
This triggered a thought. This is mostly supposed to save space, I imagine, in user directories that are on a file server. It would probably work great for stuff that people like to download and email around a lot (like that mpeg that somehow gets into everyone's mailbox in a company, taking up an extra 30 MB per user almost overnight).
If it were applied to documents, especially those created by our beloved MS Office applications, then it would be absolutely useless. It would also be useless for databases and other binary formats. Many of us are used to the *nix world where most things are text files, so the idea of consolidating files into one location and distributing patch formats makes sense to us. In the proprietary binary world (MS) this does not apply and would not work.
How many people here have seen a Word document grow by 30 KB and change binary format significantly because of one corrected misspelling? It happens all the time. The savings from a consolidated file system would immediately disappear in this case, and there is no way to effectively or efficiently make a patch format for a change like that, not in a proprietary binary world.
That's right. There are two basic points I would like to touch on here.
1) There's a lot of talk here. Evidently there are those who are willing to put forth money, but who do not have the expertise or understanding (or whatever) to get this STARTED.
2) I don't think any purchase is required. How many of us own stock through an investment firm, like Fidelity? How many of us make 401K contributions through these people? That means that we own some stock and have a voice.
Investment companies would be stupid to invest in businesses that do not make serious money. I remember asking at a 401K presentation whether we could decide NOT to invest in people like Microsoft. They said, "No." That choice was not given to me. I give them money, tell them what kinds of investment I want and how high of a risk I am willing to take, and they deal with the details.
That means that they almost certainly invest in media companies. I would have to take a closer look at my list, but I would be really very surprised if people like Disney are not on it.
Also, tech stocks are the darlings of the market right now, so I have almost certainly invested in companies that can affect this particular case. Again, I will have to check my list, and I intend to do so.
So, back to my two points: most of us that have a retirement plan and that actually work for a living (and I bet it's many more of us than those who would brand us "hackers" without knowing what that means would give us credit for) own some stock and have some voice. It's a matter of clicking around for a few minutes on 401k.com or wherever you go for that sort of thing in order to find out where your stock is.
One final note. I have seen over and over again the power of many, many people submitting a petition to get what they want. It is amazing to me how the Internet has made this even more powerful, giving us the ability to unite voices that previously knew nothing of each other.
With that in mind, it is also amazing to me how NOTHING HAPPENS until one person with the right knowledge gets stuff together. Once that single entity is in place (even a website: "Go here and submit your signature!") then people tend to flock to it.
Slashdot is a great place. It is even greater because there are enough people here that we can probably find that one person who is able to begin the process spoken of in the article. I can't say that I understood the whole thing. Financial stuff is not my forte, but of all of us here, there is surely someone who is both willing and able to start what could be an avalanche, and I hope he/she will surface soon.
I see a lot of people here willing to give money and time to the effort. I would be willing to bet that most of them (us) are just waiting for some place to send their regards, their stock, and their vote. I know that's the ONLY thing holding me back right now. I just need someone to start driving the truck, and I'll hop in and give my support in whatever way I can.
-- Chris Monson
I agree. I tried to get Windows installed on a clean drive only to realize that they didn't ship a floppy with CD ROM drivers! The drivers, of course, are on the CD, so I guess they figured they had it covered.
Then I had to get my modem working. That is never an easy task under Windows (at least, if you use a real modem, not a WinModem).
I was able to get things going by using an old DOS diskette I had hanging around, but even then the trouble wasn't over. It took me three full installs to get everything working right. That can take a long time with all of the "Please reboot your computer for the 80th time" crap going on. For some reason their hardware locator crap (that sits at 90% for 5 minutes) works in a random fashion.
This is not the first Windows box I have ever set up from scratch, either. They are all difficult. I agree that getting Linux prepackaged on shipping hardware will greatly improve its market image. Heck, once I have Linux configured well, even my roommates can use it, and they are all Windoze heads.