Hi Ben. Your knowledgable comments on this topic are greatly appreciated (trini's too!). You guys have a lot of hardware to support from multiple vendors (some proprietary, some rare, some that you don't even own, etc...), and you do a helluva good job in keeping up with the frequent changes. We greatly appreciate the effort. I'm a PPC user myself. I have a 7500/100 with a G3 in it at my former employer's that is a mirror for LPPC, YD, etc... ("was" I should say. It's has to come down soon.:( ). I use a beige G3 tower at work as my personal server. My cable firewall at home is a 7350. On my desk in front of me is a G4 500MP, and two G4 400's (AGP). My LPPC 2k Q4 box arrived just today and it will be going on the MP tonight.
Basically what all this means is that I use Linux on a PPC machine every day. It's an indespensible tool for me. I couldn't do my job without it. Keeping up with the latest greatest kernel is something I have to do at times. For me, I really don't mind rsyncing the Paul's latest source (I don't really like bk). It is annoying to have to explain to someone why they (or I) can't just use the official Linus kernel. Granted, it is a pain. It's a pain not having an "official" 2.4.1 tarball that works on PPC machines. I would love it if you guys could roll a final version of 2.2.18, tarball it, and leave it be. I understand that the bug fixing process is neverending but there never seems to be an end to it, or an official release. Sure I could snag the latest pmac-stable but that's not a complete release. That's not the final 2.2.18. That's a little annoyance for me personally.
Another annoyance for me is that I can't find a 3rd-party IDE controller that will work in my machines. The onboard Apple controller will work but none of the 3rd-party controllers seem to. 3rd-party SCSI driver support is also sketchy. Having that would be a big boon for me.
I don't want this to sound like I'm nit-picking. I'm not a kernel hacker myself. I do a nominal amount of programming, that's it. You guys do a great job and don't really get much for it. These are just a couple of thing I've noticed and wouldn't mind seeing changed. Keep up the great work!
Doesn't Superman have enough shit to deal with already? First his evilside knocked up that one chick in the hotel room and he got blamed for it. Then he lost the ability to walk while riding some damned horse (now called Alpo). Now they're jacking around in his Mexican condo. Give the guy a break already!
Who ever said telling the blatently honest truth is arrogant? Personally I admire people that don't try to blow sunshine up my ass by telling me what I want to hear. Tell me what you're thinking, even if it isn't what I want to hear.
Unless of course you're using telnet on an Irix box, thanks to that telnetd sploit (buffer overflow I believe) from August '00. It's a breeze to crack and I've used it myself a number of times to try to fix a few lab machines from another department.
Yes, people skills are usually built upon by years in the workforce. However that doesn't directly correlate to age. Say for example that I'm 21, a child prodigy, and have been doing computer tech support for years. Some middle-aged (40's) woman looking for a new job read "MCSE in 21 Days" or "MCSE For Idiots" and managed to get that cert. Before she did something totally unrelated, like exotic dancing or house painting. She's older than I am obviously. Does that mean she's a better people person than I am, especially in the tech support arena? No. Well, maybe her exotic dancing gave her a leg or two up in certain areas but that doesn't mean she has good people skills.
Q: I'm having problems with my new computer.
A: Tell me what you're wearing...
Here's another thought for you. What if the job you're trying to gain respect in has no direct or immediate reflection on the business side of company you work for? What if you don't actually have to deal with the users?--someone else's phone rings when something breaks and they e-mail you. What then? For example, a netadmin in a institution large enough to have a dedicated tech support team that fields the calls. Sure he has to keep the network alive and secure and all that, but he doesn't have to have great people skills. CowboyNeal could do that. These two simple scenarios demonstrate that age is not directly correlated with skills or the respect you deserve.
I am the Network & Systems Manager at a moderately sized University. Even with that lengthy title I still get absolutely no respect from my supervisor or boss and little from a number of my peers. I'm also 21. I have more applicable experience under my belt than a number of people there, including the woman directly under the boss (who's one of the people I butt heads with the most often). I have more networking experience (especially designing, building, and maintaining) than my supervisor, boss, and most of my co-workers and yet every time I answer a networking question, my answer instantly gets questioned. It is the most unnerving thing I've ever had to deal with. They also love to set me up too. Someone will ask a question, curious about how some obscure thing works. If I can't answer it exactly perfectly, reciting from a textbook, that person (or an accomplish) will instantly shot me down as being wrong and not knowing anything and then they regurgitate something they memorized earlier. Granted that this University, and especially my department, have more politically screwed up issues than imaginable but still I get no respect. That president of the University even called for an investigation a for years back, and from what I've heard from people here during the investigation, nothing has really changed. They hired me based on my knowledge and extensive experience and yet they question everything I do or say (I don't have my Computer Engineering degree yet but I am not a student either). Obviously they don't think I know what I'm doing. If so than they should be questioning their own unanimous decision to hire me. That would require them to admit that they actually made a mistake. I admit that I am very bullheaded, but that's also something that all my past employers have praised. They praised that bullheadedness and stubbornness because that's what always made sure the job got done and was done right. I'm a perfectionist and if I do something, it will be done right and documented.
During my 6 months there I've noticed that most of the people working there are sitting on their cans, drawing a paycheck. If someone asks them to do something, they'll do it but they won't suggest things themselves because they know it will come back to haunt them. People that haven't been there much longer than myself are still learning this and has been very useful for their insight. I don't like sitting on my duff though. That's not me.
My age gets brought up very often as a reason for me not knowing what I'm doing and the person I'm talking knowing everything about what I'm doing. It feels very degrading. I can honestly say that I now know what minorities or women in the work force have to go through thanks to racism and sexism (not that I can compare to what some have gone through). This is ageism. Instead of being told I'm too old to learn something new or remember things from day to day I'm told I'm too young to understand how things work in the "real world" or "at this university". I can't even get keys to the wiring closets and cabinets to administer the devices I'm supposed to manage. I have to check out keys on an advance notice basis. I'm sure glad network outages can be predicted days in advance. I might as well be filling out carbon copy forms in triplicate (that will probably start next week). I'm really been tempted to respond to the next age-related remark in a meeting with a threat. A threat that simply states "if you make another age-based remark towards me, I'll haul your ass into court with a age discrimination suit". A threat, pure and simple. I have been _really_ tempted to do take that step. They may say something like "that's showing your age", which it may very well be, but it is a tempting step nonetheless. If anyone has any advice on this, I would personally love to hear it. E-mail me please. I've already had better job offers elsewhere. That bullheadedness steps in again and keeps me from quitting.
A co-worker of mine reads/. (so he's not that bad of a guy obviously...). I wonder if this post will get back to the powers-that-make-my-working-life-hell... If it does, oh well. I'm ready for a good fight.
Gee, I wonder what they would have thought of our name for our little Quake group (I don't all it a clan). We fondling referred to ourselves as the CrackWhores. No, we don't do shit like that. I'm not sure who came up with it but it stuck. Funnier than shit too. Of course if we have that in our name, we must be users and since we display it so proudly we must be big time dealers dealing to little kids on the street corner, oh and providing them with guns, and and banging little sisters for admittance into the gang. Yeah right. You know shit like this pisses me off. If this were to happen to me, I'd exhaust every possible resource to sue the law enforcement agency that violated my civil rights, and to make it as public as can possibly be. I'd write letters to the media, put up posters, mass mail (wait, I'm not that sick), everything. I'd be certain to also list the names of the officers, DA, and judge involved in the violation for reference purposes. Can't say anything about that. Expressing my opinion is my first admendment right. Bastards.
I like most of it, especially the part about automatically released to the public after a certain period of time. I would say two weeks is enough. When the bug is discovered they allow two weeks to create and test a fix for the problem. They also use that time to fix the root servers. If they have everything ready before the two weeks is up, go ahead and release it. At the end of the two weeks, the private CVS and private mailing list archives are made public. The level of Checks and Balances could very well keep them honest, not that they aren't or wouldn't be honest but temptation is Man's worst enemy.
Now just how the hell can you moderate a reply to somone's point as offtopic? This is completely ontopic as far as the post it was replying to. Buy a clue moderator.
Just think about this, you're a driving in your geeky, economical VW to another computer store sellout and you buddy sitting in the passenger's seat has he's Linux laptop with a cellular uplink and pulls up this kick ass MPG he found the night before of Debbie Does Spock. You're so engrossed in the movie that you forget you're driving through the middle of Chicago on I90. Whoops. So much for that car. I could easily see how pron could be costly. What about all those doctors bills for a sprained or twisted dick. Sports injuries are costly...
Well, I don't know if they could make it a requirement by just clicking on a banner in say it's ALT tag. I would think that would be like adding something to you TCP/IP stack that responded to every SYN packet with a simple ICMP echo-request and in that ICMP packet put the text of a license agreement. The typical user would never know there was an agreement.
As for the opt-in part, I imagine they could take certain answers from any survey to say that you opted-in. Say for an example you filled out some form to sign up for free web space (like geocities). On that survey you answered a question saying that on of your interests is hamster sex. Later on down the road the survey results get sold to DoubleClick. I can honestly see them twisting the results of that survey. In the end you've said your interested in hamster sex and they have spam customized to your sick desires. It's like NetworkWorld having you fill out a survey about the ads in their mag. They use those results to customize the ads in the mag and in many cases sell your info to groups that specialize in whatever you said you liked. Takes a twist or two but in today's world....
It should be called the Titanic 2001 and should have an AI named HAL which is powered by WindowSE (Space Edition). We should rescue all important people like Bush, Tripp, Ashcroft, and Richard Geere. (sp?) What do you think?
They see bugs being exploited in mass causing huge problems for the Internet world at large and they want to minimize the number of people that here about the bugs before they're fixed. Understandable. I don't think security through temporary obscrutiny is the way to go though. My $.02.
I feel that it is my sworn duty as a charter member of the male (and sometimes geek) society to voice my ultimate and undying opinion for the good of all (man|geek)kind.... Can we clone Natalie Portman first?:^)
I see a PPC update from Cortd for pre10. God I sure hope they got all the PPC fixs merged in. Unfortunately it's very rare when we PPC users can take a stock kernel from kernel.org and make it compile correctly with all the fixes. Maybe it's just me but it seems that Linus never waits for our fixes. They merge everyone else's crap in at the last second which almost always breaks some PPC thing. Then they release it before the PPC developers can get it fixed. It's really annoying to feel unimportant. This doesn't just affect Mac users but the RS/6000's, Amigas, embedded machines, even Tivo! Like I said, I sure hope they merged in all the PPC fixes this time.
Me too. I was in 1st grade at the time. I don't think the rest of the kids understood what happened. They were all like "oh wow!" "Big boom!" crap like that. I understood what happened though. Sad. It hit a personal note for me. Christa McAuliffe, one of 7 that died in the Challenger tragedy, was a high school teacher. I come from a long line of teachers (although I went the computer engineering route I could teach). My mother (a teacher in my small elementary school--40 some kids), was sitting on the other side of the room. I may have been young but I knew the impact of what had happened. Someday I would like to see another teacher go into space (did see get high enough to qualify as being in space?). I think the first manned mission to Mars would be an appropriate choice. CNN has a good tribute to Christa McAuliffe. They also have another good article about NASA considering the methods of escape for shuttle crews. My $.02 of sentiment. Don't forget them.
I have been granted a trademark for "8======D". That's right. I've patented the ACSII Jimmy. I've also been granted a trademark for a series of X's and O's. ie, xoxoxoxo. Here me oh porn sites. Pay up now or suffer my wrath!
I can kinda see where the ACLU is going with this. Personally if I was a kid in one of those schools, I'd refuse to give them my fingerprint. I don't want anyone to have my fingerprint. To date, no one has officially taken my fingerprint (except once when I was abducted by aliens in Texas but that's another story). I think there should be an opt-out option for those students. Assuming that they'll only fingerprint one finger, what will they do when they can't get that finger's finger print? For example, when I was in high school I broke my hand (not like CowboyNeal falling off the toilet). My hand was in a complete cast, covering the finger tips. Hand to fingerprint plaster. I also had a number of bad cuts for wood and metal shop classes. During wrestling my eigth grade year I had my right sholder wrenched from its socket in wreslting. It tore a muscle and stretched a nerve badly. I couldn't feel my right hand for a month (CowboyNeal isn't ambidextrous from what I hear so he'd probably take his life if he couldn't pleasure himself, or talk Katz into doing it for him). Since I tore that muscle, I couldn't hardly move my right arm when it had to bend at that shoulder, let along raise my arm and hand to place my non-functioning hand and finger in a particular spot. What would they do then?
In the early years we used tickets to get our lunches. Occasionally someone would forget their ticket and I'd give them one of mine and they'd make up for it the next day. Later on we had these cards we'd scan. Occasionally someone would forget their card and I'd either have the person running the machine scan mine twice or I'd pass my card back and let that person scan it themselves (depending on who was manning the machine). What would they do with a fingerprinting system? I know some principals that would rather the student not get any lunch, regardless of the numerous studies that show how not having a full stomach can affect the learning process, and make them "learn a lesson" than let me pay twice. Sure the kid forgot but give him/her a break.
To sum it up, I think the school district should provde another option for those students that don't want to give out that fingerprint. One other thought, public institutions are required to make public the information they gather from their students (sounds shity but remember that lawsuit against a school from a parent that wanted to see the schools firewall logs and the school refused? That's what the judge found). If that's the case, than would they have to make my fingerprint public? If that isn't the case, since the school is also a state institution, would they be required to give out my fingerprint to law enforcement (another state agency) if I'm accused of a crime, even without proof that I commited that crime? If they got my fingerprint and found me innocent, would they destroy that fingerprint record for me?
Slashdot Mirror
Basically what all this means is that I use Linux on a PPC machine every day. It's an indespensible tool for me. I couldn't do my job without it. Keeping up with the latest greatest kernel is something I have to do at times. For me, I really don't mind rsyncing the Paul's latest source (I don't really like bk). It is annoying to have to explain to someone why they (or I) can't just use the official Linus kernel. Granted, it is a pain. It's a pain not having an "official" 2.4.1 tarball that works on PPC machines. I would love it if you guys could roll a final version of 2.2.18, tarball it, and leave it be. I understand that the bug fixing process is neverending but there never seems to be an end to it, or an official release. Sure I could snag the latest pmac-stable but that's not a complete release. That's not the final 2.2.18. That's a little annoyance for me personally.
Another annoyance for me is that I can't find a 3rd-party IDE controller that will work in my machines. The onboard Apple controller will work but none of the 3rd-party controllers seem to. 3rd-party SCSI driver support is also sketchy. Having that would be a big boon for me.
I don't want this to sound like I'm nit-picking. I'm not a kernel hacker myself. I do a nominal amount of programming, that's it. You guys do a great job and don't really get much for it. These are just a couple of thing I've noticed and wouldn't mind seeing changed. Keep up the great work!
--Justin
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Arrogance != Honesty
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Q: I'm having problems with my new computer.
A: Tell me what you're wearing...
Here's another thought for you. What if the job you're trying to gain respect in has no direct or immediate reflection on the business side of company you work for? What if you don't actually have to deal with the users?--someone else's phone rings when something breaks and they e-mail you. What then? For example, a netadmin in a institution large enough to have a dedicated tech support team that fields the calls. Sure he has to keep the network alive and secure and all that, but he doesn't have to have great people skills. CowboyNeal could do that. These two simple scenarios demonstrate that age is not directly correlated with skills or the respect you deserve.
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PS==> Don't look at my grammar. I was in a hurry over lunch. :)
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During my 6 months there I've noticed that most of the people working there are sitting on their cans, drawing a paycheck. If someone asks them to do something, they'll do it but they won't suggest things themselves because they know it will come back to haunt them. People that haven't been there much longer than myself are still learning this and has been very useful for their insight. I don't like sitting on my duff though. That's not me.
My age gets brought up very often as a reason for me not knowing what I'm doing and the person I'm talking knowing everything about what I'm doing. It feels very degrading. I can honestly say that I now know what minorities or women in the work force have to go through thanks to racism and sexism (not that I can compare to what some have gone through). This is ageism. Instead of being told I'm too old to learn something new or remember things from day to day I'm told I'm too young to understand how things work in the "real world" or "at this university". I can't even get keys to the wiring closets and cabinets to administer the devices I'm supposed to manage. I have to check out keys on an advance notice basis. I'm sure glad network outages can be predicted days in advance. I might as well be filling out carbon copy forms in triplicate (that will probably start next week). I'm really been tempted to respond to the next age-related remark in a meeting with a threat. A threat that simply states "if you make another age-based remark towards me, I'll haul your ass into court with a age discrimination suit". A threat, pure and simple. I have been _really_ tempted to do take that step. They may say something like "that's showing your age", which it may very well be, but it is a tempting step nonetheless. If anyone has any advice on this, I would personally love to hear it. E-mail me please. I've already had better job offers elsewhere. That bullheadedness steps in again and keeps me from quitting.
A co-worker of mine reads /. (so he's not that bad of a guy obviously...). I wonder if this post will get back to the powers-that-make-my-working-life-hell... If it does, oh well. I'm ready for a good fight.
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Don't mod me down just because I'm asking this schmuck a question. Thanks.
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Be more specific Taco man. You want Natalie Portman to be the genius that combines those two technologies, or at least brings them to your bedroom. :)
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As for the opt-in part, I imagine they could take certain answers from any survey to say that you opted-in. Say for an example you filled out some form to sign up for free web space (like geocities). On that survey you answered a question saying that on of your interests is hamster sex. Later on down the road the survey results get sold to DoubleClick. I can honestly see them twisting the results of that survey. In the end you've said your interested in hamster sex and they have spam customized to your sick desires. It's like NetworkWorld having you fill out a survey about the ads in their mag. They use those results to customize the ads in the mag and in many cases sell your info to groups that specialize in whatever you said you liked. Takes a twist or two but in today's world....
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I guess it's a damn good thing someone ported the PalmOS to my 1Ghz x86 box so I'm not completely out in the cold!
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BTW, first?
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In the early years we used tickets to get our lunches. Occasionally someone would forget their ticket and I'd give them one of mine and they'd make up for it the next day. Later on we had these cards we'd scan. Occasionally someone would forget their card and I'd either have the person running the machine scan mine twice or I'd pass my card back and let that person scan it themselves (depending on who was manning the machine). What would they do with a fingerprinting system? I know some principals that would rather the student not get any lunch, regardless of the numerous studies that show how not having a full stomach can affect the learning process, and make them "learn a lesson" than let me pay twice. Sure the kid forgot but give him/her a break.
To sum it up, I think the school district should provde another option for those students that don't want to give out that fingerprint. One other thought, public institutions are required to make public the information they gather from their students (sounds shity but remember that lawsuit against a school from a parent that wanted to see the schools firewall logs and the school refused? That's what the judge found). If that's the case, than would they have to make my fingerprint public? If that isn't the case, since the school is also a state institution, would they be required to give out my fingerprint to law enforcement (another state agency) if I'm accused of a crime, even without proof that I commited that crime? If they got my fingerprint and found me innocent, would they destroy that fingerprint record for me?
My $.02
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