Why does everyone hate IT? Same reason everyone hates customer service, call centers, and law enforcement: You usually don't think about them until something's already gone wrong.
It's why I got out of sysadmin jobs. Management hated me because "Well, if they had done their job right, there shouldn't be problems for them to fix" and everyone else in the company was "Doesn't matter if I don't know what I'm doing, they aren't doing it for me. So I'm always going to save them as my excuse for why I had to miss a deadline: 'My system wasn't working and the IT guys couldn't get it working fast enough'"
I stopped reading it a long time ago, but it's why BOFH was funny.
Kept wanting to do this, but never find time to do a working implementation, so here's an idea if someone wants to run with it.
Use Git for the backend (so everything stays nice and distributed), then write a front-end in perl (or whatever). Store all the data as XML, work out sort of a red/black separation for public and private data. Seems pretty straightforward?
More to the point, as a software engineer, or code monkey, or code master, whatever, you should be well aware that if it's code you didn't write, don't use it until you're clear as to the ramifications.
I avoid using any example code I see unless I can understand it and there's a clear statement of "Hey, this is example code, by writing this tutorial, we kind of expect you'll be making a derivative of it."
Treating GPL-licensed code (or some open source license) under the same regard is poor thinking. Passing it off that some manager will catch it is worse.
That strikes a little too close to "Sure, I plagiarized my college essays, but I didn't get caught, so I must've done the right thing." Unfortunately, fair use has not been well-defined with source code (or, anything, really), so where you could poke a hole in that analogy with "But I made appropriate reference!" (i.e., telling the person that paid you to do the work), becomes very fuzzy, very fast.
So after reading many years' worth of Microsoft talking about how the GPL is the worst thing ever, I'll give them credit for dealing with this situation appropriately.
Granted, their risk profile of releasing the source for such utility is pretty minimal, but I'll give them credit for going the user-friendly route of complying with the GPL instead of trying to quash all distribution of the tool they were distributing.
It doesn't bring them up high on my measure of regard, but I'll give them the tip of the hat for aiming the right way on this one.
This is an article based on a Raytheon press release. What hardware does said application run on? Even the article suggested there's no established contract yet.
I like the idea that open source/free software is getting more traction in this area, but no platform, no contract suggestes this is just fluff. Whether or not your bullshit meter started twitching that they've been working on this for two years is up to you.
Bonus BS points that they throw in the "Oh, and it could also be a biometric scanner". Feature creep comes early.
Seriously? Magnetricity? That's the best name they could come up with? Really?
I hope if they can't do better figuring out what term to measure in it, they at least pander to the attention it would gather and call the unit "Colbert"
And here I was worried that I could play games without an annual contract to pay a telco every month. I mean, yeah, I could get an ipod touch, but wouldn't that be just like getting a DSi? Who would I pay every month? Gosh!
Everyone agrees that flatulence apps are not only worth paying for, they make having the AT&T contract worthwhile. Look how many people play WoW, clearly games are only fun if you're paying month to month, right?
Hopefully the email recipient gets notice before they lose all of their email.
And more hopefully, they find the offending message and forward it to the judge that made this ruling with a note akin to "Thank you for punishing me for having an email address. Here is the poison message, please order your accounts deactivated as well."
Redhat seems to do a pretty steady business with a lot of GPL'd code, and while I don't care for their main product lines, you'd think them being listed on the S&P 500 suggest that they're at least doing something right business-wise.
Just because the standard "let's hide the secret sauce" model doesn't work well in the context of using GPL'd code, doesn't mean that a business can't adapt to it.
The stock price doubled since the initial rumors? Really...so who stands to benefit from this? Are Sun and IBM execs pals enough to hint at talks (without committing to any deal)
Understanding that IBM has invested quite a bit in java, I can see how they'd like to acquire Sun. However, it's a bit odd that they'd offer a significant premium (unconfirmed) and then bail on the possibility of another company getting to bid. Yeah, I can see how they'd not want to get into a bidding war over this, but I would've thought they'd retracted their offer as soon as a hint of the possibility of acquisition became news/gossip without something legally binding in place. This is IBM, they aren't known for bold initiatives, after all.
Something about this sounds off, regardless of the rest of this article's speculation on who would be a better Sun benefactor.
Your signature suggests a bias. Might look into changing that.
I think what bothers a lot of people is that we were told for many years "Oh, no. We have to have free markets. We must deregulate everything!", and then many decided to take an unethical approach to how they go about their business and it turned out that they might not have been trustworthy after all. In the last days of the previous administration, they reversed course into a "worst of both worlds" scenario: Remove all limitations and then fund them to keep them afloat when their machinations didn't pan out. (I don't know where the new administration is going with this, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that a huge policy swing towards "No more federal aid" might not make as much sense as a gradual approach towards change.)
But, to answer your question, heavily-regulated markets in Europe didn't keep them from investing outside of their local market. We fucked up, and so the impact doesn't stop at our borders, every foreign investor gets to feel the pinch as well.
it's these sort of fanboy conversations that keep me from caring. Were Berman & Braga bad for the Star Trek universe? Probably, but was that universe all that phenomenal to begin with?
You like it or you don't. All this dick-waving about what was best just makes me dislike all of it.
Where does it come from? As I posted (#8 on the mashable thread), the link that you'd expect to back up the claims links to overlay ads on youtube.
Either I'm incredibly dense, or this is an elaborate experiment to see how far and wide people will push completely unattributed statistics. Well, maybe both.
No, the app-store is important to the kool-aid drinkers that believed Apple when they said "No, we only reject apps from our device/profit model to keep you safe."
The same kool-aid enthusiasts that shuffled off from the shareware-hell that was the Windows/DOS environment for the last 15 years or so.
There was once a world that didn't recognize this as logical. These days, they are keeping themselves busy with actual problems, enough so that even raising a 1-finger salute to your line of thinking is likely unworthy of their effort.
But hey, consume, consume, consume, man. I'm sure someone appreciates it.
For an article interested in the "Secret Origins of Clippy", they did a good job noting that this all started with the failed Microsoft Bob ("I see you've mistyped your password. Would you like to change it?"
But for all the secrecy they've uncovered in these public patent filings, they seemed to have missed that the program manager of MS Bob was Melinda French, who later became Melinda Gates. I understand she later worked with the team that gave the world the MS Office Assistant (clippy) as well as the Search animations that show up starting around Windows XP.
I guess it's anyone's guess whether there was any nepotism driving this as a marketable feature, even when it was regularly reviled by their users.
After the last articles about whether or not he'd get to keep his Blackberry, would any other device with non-volatile memory mean anything?
Not to go tinfoil hat, but shouldn't we be just a bit concerned about donated devices to the politically influential that may phone home? (Sure, who cares what the recipients listen to, but if any of these are personally identifiable, it wouldn't be a huge technological leap to read just a little extra info during a the next firmware update check.)
I'd guess that this has something to do with why the NSA tends to lean towards certifications (white-lists) rather than trying to shut out iffy devices (black-lists)
The graphs on page 2 ("Browser Extensions") don't make much sense. Look at the values shown vs. the tickmarks at the bottom.
Additionally, you might note the omission of how the timing was done in the first section, Testing Methodology. That the author claimed to use their home broadband connection for the tests doesn't suggest a controlled environment...at best, sort of a "If you happen to be on one of these machines at my house at the same time of day that I was, you might see similar results."
I'm sure everyone has a preferred browser by now, I know I've got mine. But these benchmarks strike me as bogus, regardless of the results.
Ok, maybe it's just me, but when I see accomplishments such as "Gartner Fellow" bandied about, I tend to think "Mindless Drivel"
I skimmed the article. I may have missed a clause where the entire interview was taken downwind of a chemical plant. However...
Citing the announced Wii Motionplus dongle? Really? We were all ignoring things like the gyromouse and other presentation devices/gimmicks for years because all us desk slaves just didn't have the accuracy we would need that a couple extra accelerometers would afford us?
Facial recognition? That deserves a big "whiskey tango foxtrot", as the only thing I've heard of that is for authentication (granted, it tends to get foiled by showing the camera a picture, but that's a different argument) This is a replacement for the mouse, how?
Touchscreens..because pen computing begat tablet computing begat whatever this new thing is. Did someone fix the problem of gorilla arm and forget to inform the rest of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone hate IT? Same reason everyone hates customer service, call centers, and law enforcement: You usually don't think about them until something's already gone wrong.
It's why I got out of sysadmin jobs. Management hated me because "Well, if they had done their job right, there shouldn't be problems for them to fix" and everyone else in the company was "Doesn't matter if I don't know what I'm doing, they aren't doing it for me. So I'm always going to save them as my excuse for why I had to miss a deadline: 'My system wasn't working and the IT guys couldn't get it working fast enough'"
I stopped reading it a long time ago, but it's why BOFH was funny.
Did you just try to call corporate espionage ethical in the name of "improve your offering to give the customers what they want"?
Kept wanting to do this, but never find time to do a working implementation, so here's an idea if someone wants to run with it.
Use Git for the backend (so everything stays nice and distributed), then write a front-end in perl (or whatever). Store all the data as XML, work out sort of a red/black separation for public and private data. Seems pretty straightforward?
-transiit
I turned the ringer off on my office phone a couple years ago. Nobody's complained yet. Funny how that works.
More to the point, as a software engineer, or code monkey, or code master, whatever, you should be well aware that if it's code you didn't write, don't use it until you're clear as to the ramifications.
I avoid using any example code I see unless I can understand it and there's a clear statement of "Hey, this is example code, by writing this tutorial, we kind of expect you'll be making a derivative of it."
Treating GPL-licensed code (or some open source license) under the same regard is poor thinking. Passing it off that some manager will catch it is worse.
That strikes a little too close to "Sure, I plagiarized my college essays, but I didn't get caught, so I must've done the right thing." Unfortunately, fair use has not been well-defined with source code (or, anything, really), so where you could poke a hole in that analogy with "But I made appropriate reference!" (i.e., telling the person that paid you to do the work), becomes very fuzzy, very fast.
So after reading many years' worth of Microsoft talking about how the GPL is the worst thing ever, I'll give them credit for dealing with this situation appropriately.
Granted, their risk profile of releasing the source for such utility is pretty minimal, but I'll give them credit for going the user-friendly route of complying with the GPL instead of trying to quash all distribution of the tool they were distributing.
It doesn't bring them up high on my measure of regard, but I'll give them the tip of the hat for aiming the right way on this one.
This is an article based on a Raytheon press release. What hardware does said application run on? Even the article suggested there's no established contract yet.
I like the idea that open source/free software is getting more traction in this area, but no platform, no contract suggestes this is just fluff. Whether or not your bullshit meter started twitching that they've been working on this for two years is up to you.
Bonus BS points that they throw in the "Oh, and it could also be a biometric scanner". Feature creep comes early.
Seriously? Magnetricity? That's the best name they could come up with? Really?
I hope if they can't do better figuring out what term to measure in it, they at least pander to the attention it would gather and call the unit "Colbert"
Is that what's called a "flame" these days? How times have changed.
"Th-th-think of it this way."
Wow, you actually typed in your stutter? Really?
And here I was worried that I could play games without an annual contract to pay a telco every month. I mean, yeah, I could get an ipod touch, but wouldn't that be just like getting a DSi? Who would I pay every month? Gosh!
Everyone agrees that flatulence apps are not only worth paying for, they make having the AT&T contract worthwhile. Look how many people play WoW, clearly games are only fun if you're paying month to month, right?
Hopefully the email recipient gets notice before they lose all of their email.
And more hopefully, they find the offending message and forward it to the judge that made this ruling with a note akin to "Thank you for punishing me for having an email address. Here is the poison message, please order your accounts deactivated as well."
Redhat seems to do a pretty steady business with a lot of GPL'd code, and while I don't care for their main product lines, you'd think them being listed on the S&P 500 suggest that they're at least doing something right business-wise.
Just because the standard "let's hide the secret sauce" model doesn't work well in the context of using GPL'd code, doesn't mean that a business can't adapt to it.
It struck me when I read this article at MSNBC
The stock price doubled since the initial rumors? Really...so who stands to benefit from this? Are Sun and IBM execs pals enough to hint at talks (without committing to any deal)
Understanding that IBM has invested quite a bit in java, I can see how they'd like to acquire Sun. However, it's a bit odd that they'd offer a significant premium (unconfirmed) and then bail on the possibility of another company getting to bid. Yeah, I can see how they'd not want to get into a bidding war over this, but I would've thought they'd retracted their offer as soon as a hint of the possibility of acquisition became news/gossip without something legally binding in place. This is IBM, they aren't known for bold initiatives, after all.
Something about this sounds off, regardless of the rest of this article's speculation on who would be a better Sun benefactor.
Your signature suggests a bias. Might look into changing that.
I think what bothers a lot of people is that we were told for many years "Oh, no. We have to have free markets. We must deregulate everything!", and then many decided to take an unethical approach to how they go about their business and it turned out that they might not have been trustworthy after all. In the last days of the previous administration, they reversed course into a "worst of both worlds" scenario: Remove all limitations and then fund them to keep them afloat when their machinations didn't pan out. (I don't know where the new administration is going with this, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that a huge policy swing towards "No more federal aid" might not make as much sense as a gradual approach towards change.)
But, to answer your question, heavily-regulated markets in Europe didn't keep them from investing outside of their local market. We fucked up, and so the impact doesn't stop at our borders, every foreign investor gets to feel the pinch as well.
it's these sort of fanboy conversations that keep me from caring. Were Berman & Braga bad for the Star Trek universe? Probably, but was that universe all that phenomenal to begin with?
You like it or you don't. All this dick-waving about what was best just makes me dislike all of it.
I keep seeing this number of 23000%
Where does it come from? As I posted (#8 on the mashable thread), the link that you'd expect to back up the claims links to overlay ads on youtube.
Either I'm incredibly dense, or this is an elaborate experiment to see how far and wide people will push completely unattributed statistics. Well, maybe both.
No, the app-store is important to the kool-aid drinkers that believed Apple when they said "No, we only reject apps from our device/profit model to keep you safe."
The same kool-aid enthusiasts that shuffled off from the shareware-hell that was the Windows/DOS environment for the last 15 years or so.
There was once a world that didn't recognize this as logical. These days, they are keeping themselves busy with actual problems, enough so that even raising a 1-finger salute to your line of thinking is likely unworthy of their effort.
But hey, consume, consume, consume, man. I'm sure someone appreciates it.
For an article interested in the "Secret Origins of Clippy", they did a good job noting that this all started with the failed Microsoft Bob ("I see you've mistyped your password. Would you like to change it?"
But for all the secrecy they've uncovered in these public patent filings, they seemed to have missed that the program manager of MS Bob was Melinda French, who later became Melinda Gates. I understand she later worked with the team that gave the world the MS Office Assistant (clippy) as well as the Search animations that show up starting around Windows XP.
I guess it's anyone's guess whether there was any nepotism driving this as a marketable feature, even when it was regularly reviled by their users.
It's been my experience that reading too much into an implied tone in the slashdot summaries just gets me in trouble, so in brief:
Thanks, Bruce, for your efforts and contributions over the years and may your next project(s) be successful and fulfilling.
After the last articles about whether or not he'd get to keep his Blackberry, would any other device with non-volatile memory mean anything?
Not to go tinfoil hat, but shouldn't we be just a bit concerned about donated devices to the politically influential that may phone home? (Sure, who cares what the recipients listen to, but if any of these are personally identifiable, it wouldn't be a huge technological leap to read just a little extra info during a the next firmware update check.)
I'd guess that this has something to do with why the NSA tends to lean towards certifications (white-lists) rather than trying to shut out iffy devices (black-lists)
YMMV
The graphs on page 2 ("Browser Extensions") don't make much sense. Look at the values shown vs. the tickmarks at the bottom.
Additionally, you might note the omission of how the timing was done in the first section, Testing Methodology. That the author claimed to use their home broadband connection for the tests doesn't suggest a controlled environment...at best, sort of a "If you happen to be on one of these machines at my house at the same time of day that I was, you might see similar results."
I'm sure everyone has a preferred browser by now, I know I've got mine. But these benchmarks strike me as bogus, regardless of the results.
But for the average use, is it really that useful?
Hey, I'm all for the idea of lounge computing, but for the rest of the time, it seems like it's worthy of living within its niche.
wait a second. not a single person sees that first picture which smacks of two boxes taped together and thinks to call "bullshit"?
I'm not defending stupid packing process, but really? Really?
Ok, maybe it's just me, but when I see accomplishments such as "Gartner Fellow" bandied about, I tend to think "Mindless Drivel"
I skimmed the article. I may have missed a clause where the entire interview was taken downwind of a chemical plant. However...
Citing the announced Wii Motionplus dongle? Really? We were all ignoring things like the gyromouse and other presentation devices/gimmicks for years because all us desk slaves just didn't have the accuracy we would need that a couple extra accelerometers would afford us?
Facial recognition? That deserves a big "whiskey tango foxtrot", as the only thing I've heard of that is for authentication (granted, it tends to get foiled by showing the camera a picture, but that's a different argument) This is a replacement for the mouse, how?
Touchscreens..because pen computing begat tablet computing begat whatever this new thing is. Did someone fix the problem of gorilla arm and forget to inform the rest of the world?