At the end of the day, the customer is the one paying the bills and dealing with the success or failure of the exercise. A contractor/consultant merely follows along, and can/will be discarded when such action is appropriate.
As a consultant myself, I make sure that the people I report to directly get used to clear, concise, detailed communication (this is not a contradiction). I make sure that I investigate the pros and cons of both my suggested solution and any solutions that the customer suggests -- but once the customer has selected a solution, it is my job to make every (contracted) effort to ensure the success of their chosen solution. Especially if it differs with the one I would have chosen. The customer must call the shots. In writing.
And no matter what, never, ever say to the customer "I told you so" in so many words. You must make it a "how can we fix this situation we are in?"
Customers do aparrently stupid things for reasons which are unknown to us -- one customer I had balked at spending $5K to have a particular problem solved, but had no problem paying me $3K a week for three months band-aiding things. I discovered later that the company in question had a hard freeze on capital spending, but since I was "overhead" it was better on the balance sheet to keep me around.
It seems to me that the last developer type is what Linux is targetting. Maybe it's a little short-sighted to target the least-common of developer types?
Who's doing the bulk of the writing this?... are you seriously wondering why they scratch their own itches first?
Most of the noise about Linux being a platform for world domination is just that, noise. If you have a complaint, either fix it or find another solution.
Aunt Tilly doesn't want that. She just wants to: surf the net; write letters;... she wants just one tool for each task, she wants them to all work together; she doesn't want to learn new tools every 2 years.
Actually, Aunt Tilly's requirements are more insiduous than this -- not only does she want a standard set of tools which work in a standard way, but she doesn't want anyone else to have the ability to do anything differently. She feels hard done by when someone does something different with their non-standard application. She feels threatened when someone tries to send her something in a format she can't read.
The biggest problem with Aunt Tilly proponents is that they assume that Aunt Tilly's requirements should be the be-all and end-all of the criteria for such-and-such a function (like distributions, windowmanager configurability, or kernel builds). They assume that my requirements should be subjugated to hers.
Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard.
Sing along, kids: direct, participatory democracy does not scale.
I've been saying this for years; Clay provides some excellent scientific evidence showing it, and writes about it a whole lot better than I can. Must be why he's further up the curve than I am.
I'm surprised that people are still running RH6.0 [...] but there's really no excuse for a server to be running it.
Let me see:
through ipmasq, it transfers bits from one interface to the other;
it logs the connections, giving us a view of who is connecting to what and how often;
it doesn't run any vunerable services;
and best of all, it runs on the same P90 it has been running on for the last three years or so.
Pretty compelling reasons for us, especially that last one -- let's see RH8 even load on a 32Mb P90.
See, friend, we have a different priority from you -- we want to get work done, not piss away our time trying to stay 'current'. And we've managed to avoid deadly upgrages like that time that RH dropped a distro on us made from a completely unsupported compiler rev (2.96, was it?).
The rule of thumb should be: if it works, don't fuck with it.
I have a question for all those who are advocating blocking outbound port 25 from ISP networks except from authorized SMTP hosts.
Suppose I have my own SMTP server because I own my own domain. It is inside, behind the firewall, not accepting inbound mail from the internet, because I have a hosting provider which accepts mail on my behalf (from which I grab mail to my home systems by using fetchmail, but that's irrelevant).
So. If I have to use my ISP's SMTP server, which requires use of a username and password, how do I tell my local sendmail to authenticate itself to my ISP's system when sending outbound email? And ideally, how do I do it through the M4 configuration method, since I'm not a.cf wizard?
People are tired of searching and hunting through folders and heirarchies full of oddly named files and temp folders that can confuse Joe User.
Hilarious, considering Joe User is probably the one who set up the oddly named files and temp folders. I for one doubt that Joe User will be able to put in enough relevant metadata to make his document management system searches any better than his current system.
Smart tools can't make up for dumb users who insist on remaining ignorant.
What would be better would be a context-sensetive content indexer where the user could search directly against the content of the documents, not on some nebulously-ill-defined 'metadata'. I belive that the dreaded Microsoft Office Fast Find was an attempt at this.
Nobody wants to do the bitch work... all the hardest stuff to get started. They just wanna join in and help after it gets goin.
Ahhh, young grasshopper, it sounds like you don't want to do the 'bitch' work either. You have obviously not learned the lesson of Mozilla. Go and learn.
To summerize, the point is that until you have something that builds and mostly works, there's no point in shopping it around for opensource help -- people want to be able to build something, use it, make a small change (like changing the splash screen to have their name on it) and then build and use it with their change. That's what sucks your helpers in -- immediate, positive feedback. Until you can get the project (by yourself or with a motivated small group of people) you are better off by yourself, since you'll only get armchair quarterbacking until then.
But you see, that's the beauty of unix like systems in general, and Linux in particular: if you find a combination of environments and tools that pleases you and lets you get things done, well then that's great, and you can keep on using them. And it has absolutely no effect on the l33t d00d in the cubical next to you who is breathlessly chasing the latest and greatest bell and/or whistle currently being bounced around. And his chasing has no effect on you!
For myself, I like olvwm. Simple, clean, and stays the fsck out of my way. I also use Konsoles (currently, but I'm trialling multi-gnome-terminals), Mozilla, and a mixture of other tools to do what I need to do. Every so often I'll build up the latest K or Gnome or something else, play with it for a week, and then go back to the tools I know and am productive with. All this on the same system that my co-workers use and do similar playing around on (one guy swears by Gnome, one guy uses K, one guy uses AfterStep). All this has little effect on each other's work environments.
So stick to your tools if they make you happy. Let the hackers chase after some holy grail they will never actually catch -- I wager they will make some interesting things as side-effects and learn some lessons that will profit us all.
Oh, you walk right past the answer, and miss it completely:
They (record industry) said the price high price of CD was because of the manufacturing process, as well as supply and demand.
(emphasis mine)
Capitalism is wonderful. It says that if you can sell enough of an item at $25, then that article is worth $25 -- even if it only costs you $2.50 to make and distribute. You are under no obligation to sell the item at a price reflecting the cost, it only reflects the supply of the item, and the demand for the item. If you can find enough people to buy that item at that cost, then that is what it is worth. If it costs you more to make an item than you get back by selling it, you go out of business (or demand government subsidies).
The demand is there; and the RIAA's members make a tidy sum selling CDs at a higher price than the cost of manufacturing them. And it won't change one bit until people stop buying CDs at the inflated prices.
Ain't America great!
Motivation, not actions.
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
His devil's advocate attempts at looking at things from Sauron's view were quite weak IMO. It more or less ignores what is most important in determining if Sauron was evil: his actions.
Actually, this is one of the first times I've seen this kind of thought -- one that I had back in 1977 watching Star Wars: why did all the Stormtroopers have to die? Lucas helps the average viewer avoid caring for the cannon fodder required for the story by making them look all the same (faceless, matching drones). But if it was a real encounter you would know that there would be a real story behind each of those masks, people with families and histories and hopes and dreams and aspirations and fears which are probably not that different from those belonging to the Heroic Rebel (we know he's a good guy, we can see his face) gunning him down.
Hell, even Hitler probably loved his dog.
Back to Sauron, what really determines whether he is evil is not so much his actions, but the motivation behind those actions.
Humor me with another thought experiment. If I were to shoot you, most people would consider that evil. If I was to expand on things to say that I burst through your door without warning and shot you as you stood there, even more people would consider that evil. However, if I say that you were about to press the detonate button on a nuclear device (hidden beneith the obligatory orphanage on Christmas Eve), my actions suddenly seem less evil, and more heroic.
I didn't read Lord of the Rings -- I found the first book to be long, boring, and full of unneccesary sing-alongs, and after suffering through it I couldn't stomach the thought of two more books of similar length. So I don't know if Sauron's motives are ever explored in any detail (beyond the implied I'm evil therefore I do evil things seen thus far). However, it is the motivation behind the actions we see which makes one evil or not.
In any case, the real reason why all these Hero based stories are so popular is because everyone, deep down, wants to be the hero. We want to believe that when Evil rises, we will personally be the one to do Heroic Things and save the world and get the [girl/guy]. We want to believe we are Special.
More realistically, when you see the text "and then millions died..." that's us. That's you and me and every other boob reading Slashdot. We ain't special, we make up the ranks. LotR is merely more escapist entertainment which helps us forget that for a little while.
If you set up your farm correctly, the farm itself becomes a single machine. None of the users care about any individual nodes; all they know is that their jobs go in, and the results come out.
If your users care about individual machines in the farm, you have set it up incorrectly.
You look at the situation as one who has passed through the hell that is the teenage years. These books are aimed at readers somewhat younger than you -- the author knows that what small children want is to be special. Harry is the perfect type of character for them -- a child stuck in a mundane existance, and then is informed that he is actually the holder of special powers, and faces a special destiny, one not shared by those around him.
It is exactly for this reason that you probably liked *cough* *cough* Star Wars when you were small -- Luke Skywalker is exactly the same character and plays to the same wants and desires.
I'm not sure how many comanies out there only need "a little" time on a "supercomputer" though...
It all depends what they are doing with their computers the rest of the time. If they have a scenario where they need supercomputing power but only for two weeks a quarter, it could be very cost-effective for them to buy into a metered system instead of buying, operating, and maintaining a supercomputer (or cluster) of their own which will stand idle more than 90% of the time. Think animation shops who could then concentrate capital on other things than compute farms for final renderings.
Personally, I've seen many companies in the chip-design world who would have jumped at the chance to outsource management of simulation cycles.
This is coming (back), no doubt about it. IBM is just the latest to try to make a splash with it.
Linux 2.4.x nfs server performance is incredibly bad compared to Solaris x86. That's the main reason why I ditched Linux on my ide-driven PII/350. I'm not using it as a desktop OS, I'm using it as a server, and there it shines.
Different tools for different jobs. Linux is a good general purpose
OS with lots of software available for it.
On the other hand,
I need an OS to serve NFS to my sparc. (IDE disks are cheaper than
SCSI.) To put it mildly, Linux (with kernels 2.2 and
2.4) sucked, so I run Solaris/x86. I don't need any of
the other crap that comes with Linux -- no, I need an NFS file
server.
I probably should have tried a BSD, but I had Solaris/X86 and found it to
do what I needed it to.
I for one am glad to see a general availability of Solaris 9 for x86.
Slashdot Mirror
As a consultant myself, I make sure that the people I report to directly get used to clear, concise, detailed communication (this is not a contradiction). I make sure that I investigate the pros and cons of both my suggested solution and any solutions that the customer suggests -- but once the customer has selected a solution, it is my job to make every (contracted) effort to ensure the success of their chosen solution. Especially if it differs with the one I would have chosen. The customer must call the shots. In writing.
And no matter what, never, ever say to the customer "I told you so" in so many words. You must make it a "how can we fix this situation we are in?"
Customers do aparrently stupid things for reasons which are unknown to us -- one customer I had balked at spending $5K to have a particular problem solved, but had no problem paying me $3K a week for three months band-aiding things. I discovered later that the company in question had a hard freeze on capital spending, but since I was "overhead" it was better on the balance sheet to keep me around.
Who's doing the bulk of the writing this?... are you seriously wondering why they scratch their own itches first?
Most of the noise about Linux being a platform for world domination is just that, noise. If you have a complaint, either fix it or find another solution.
Actually, Aunt Tilly's requirements are more insiduous than this -- not only does she want a standard set of tools which work in a standard way, but she doesn't want anyone else to have the ability to do anything differently. She feels hard done by when someone does something different with their non-standard application. She feels threatened when someone tries to send her something in a format she can't read.
The biggest problem with Aunt Tilly proponents is that they assume that Aunt Tilly's requirements should be the be-all and end-all of the criteria for such-and-such a function (like distributions, windowmanager configurability, or kernel builds). They assume that my requirements should be subjugated to hers.
Hear hear, we all know that blathering is best left to the expert commenters (such as yourself) here at Slashtdolt.
Sing along, kids: direct, participatory democracy does not scale.
I've been saying this for years; Clay provides some excellent scientific evidence showing it, and writes about it a whole lot better than I can. Must be why he's further up the curve than I am.
Perhaps what you meant to say is 'away from the center of the earth'.
I prefer olvwm, but when I use Gnome I use Ximian. It Just Works(tm).
Let me see:
through ipmasq, it transfers bits from one interface to the other;
it logs the connections, giving us a view of who is connecting to what and how often;
it doesn't run any vunerable services;
and best of all, it runs on the same P90 it has been running on for the last three years or so.
Pretty compelling reasons for us, especially that last one -- let's see RH8 even load on a 32Mb P90.
See, friend, we have a different priority from you -- we want to get work done, not piss away our time trying to stay 'current'. And we've managed to avoid deadly upgrages like that time that RH dropped a distro on us made from a completely unsupported compiler rev (2.96, was it?).
The rule of thumb should be: if it works, don't fuck with it.
It shouldn't be impossible either.
Suppose I have my own SMTP server because I own my own domain. It is inside, behind the firewall, not accepting inbound mail from the internet, because I have a hosting provider which accepts mail on my behalf (from which I grab mail to my home systems by using fetchmail, but that's irrelevant).
So. If I have to use my ISP's SMTP server, which requires use of a username and password, how do I tell my local sendmail to authenticate itself to my ISP's system when sending outbound email? And ideally, how do I do it through the M4 configuration method, since I'm not a .cf wizard?
Hilarious, considering Joe User is probably the one who set up the oddly named files and temp folders. I for one doubt that Joe User will be able to put in enough relevant metadata to make his document management system searches any better than his current system.
Smart tools can't make up for dumb users who insist on remaining ignorant.
What would be better would be a context-sensetive content indexer where the user could search directly against the content of the documents, not on some nebulously-ill-defined 'metadata'. I belive that the dreaded Microsoft Office Fast Find was an attempt at this.
Ahhh, young grasshopper, it sounds like you don't want to do the 'bitch' work either. You have obviously not learned the lesson of Mozilla. Go and learn.
To summerize, the point is that until you have something that builds and mostly works, there's no point in shopping it around for opensource help -- people want to be able to build something, use it, make a small change (like changing the splash screen to have their name on it) and then build and use it with their change. That's what sucks your helpers in -- immediate, positive feedback. Until you can get the project (by yourself or with a motivated small group of people) you are better off by yourself, since you'll only get armchair quarterbacking until then.
For myself, I like olvwm. Simple, clean, and stays the fsck out of my way. I also use Konsoles (currently, but I'm trialling multi-gnome-terminals), Mozilla, and a mixture of other tools to do what I need to do. Every so often I'll build up the latest K or Gnome or something else, play with it for a week, and then go back to the tools I know and am productive with. All this on the same system that my co-workers use and do similar playing around on (one guy swears by Gnome, one guy uses K, one guy uses AfterStep). All this has little effect on each other's work environments.
So stick to your tools if they make you happy. Let the hackers chase after some holy grail they will never actually catch -- I wager they will make some interesting things as side-effects and learn some lessons that will profit us all.
(emphasis mine)
Capitalism is wonderful. It says that if you can sell enough of an item at $25, then that article is worth $25 -- even if it only costs you $2.50 to make and distribute. You are under no obligation to sell the item at a price reflecting the cost, it only reflects the supply of the item, and the demand for the item. If you can find enough people to buy that item at that cost, then that is what it is worth. If it costs you more to make an item than you get back by selling it, you go out of business (or demand government subsidies).
The demand is there; and the RIAA's members make a tidy sum selling CDs at a higher price than the cost of manufacturing them. And it won't change one bit until people stop buying CDs at the inflated prices.
Ain't America great!
Actually, this is one of the first times I've seen this kind of thought -- one that I had back in 1977 watching Star Wars: why did all the Stormtroopers have to die? Lucas helps the average viewer avoid caring for the cannon fodder required for the story by making them look all the same (faceless, matching drones). But if it was a real encounter you would know that there would be a real story behind each of those masks, people with families and histories and hopes and dreams and aspirations and fears which are probably not that different from those belonging to the Heroic Rebel (we know he's a good guy, we can see his face) gunning him down.
Hell, even Hitler probably loved his dog.
Back to Sauron, what really determines whether he is evil is not so much his actions, but the motivation behind those actions.
Humor me with another thought experiment. If I were to shoot you, most people would consider that evil. If I was to expand on things to say that I burst through your door without warning and shot you as you stood there, even more people would consider that evil. However, if I say that you were about to press the detonate button on a nuclear device (hidden beneith the obligatory orphanage on Christmas Eve), my actions suddenly seem less evil, and more heroic.
I didn't read Lord of the Rings -- I found the first book to be long, boring, and full of unneccesary sing-alongs, and after suffering through it I couldn't stomach the thought of two more books of similar length. So I don't know if Sauron's motives are ever explored in any detail (beyond the implied I'm evil therefore I do evil things seen thus far). However, it is the motivation behind the actions we see which makes one evil or not.
In any case, the real reason why all these Hero based stories are so popular is because everyone, deep down, wants to be the hero. We want to believe that when Evil rises, we will personally be the one to do Heroic Things and save the world and get the [girl/guy]. We want to believe we are Special. More realistically, when you see the text "and then millions died..." that's us. That's you and me and every other boob reading Slashdot. We ain't special, we make up the ranks. LotR is merely more escapist entertainment which helps us forget that for a little while.
If you set up your farm correctly, the farm itself becomes a single machine. None of the users care about any individual nodes; all they know is that their jobs go in, and the results come out.
If your users care about individual machines in the farm, you have set it up incorrectly.
Pretty small mind, if you ask me...
It is exactly for this reason that you probably liked *cough* *cough* Star Wars when you were small -- Luke Skywalker is exactly the same character and plays to the same wants and desires.
It would also be interesting to try the various BSD variants to see if they worked any better as a NFS server.
It all depends what they are doing with their computers the rest of the time. If they have a scenario where they need supercomputing power but only for two weeks a quarter, it could be very cost-effective for them to buy into a metered system instead of buying, operating, and maintaining a supercomputer (or cluster) of their own which will stand idle more than 90% of the time. Think animation shops who could then concentrate capital on other things than compute farms for final renderings.
Personally, I've seen many companies in the chip-design world who would have jumped at the chance to outsource management of simulation cycles.
This is coming (back), no doubt about it. IBM is just the latest to try to make a splash with it.
Won't you feel silly when you find the Software Companion CD in your media kit. Install time: oh, about thirty minutes.
Or, you could download the pieces you want from Sun.
And don't knock knowing Solaris resume-wise.
On the other hand, I need an OS to serve NFS to my sparc. (IDE disks are cheaper than SCSI.) To put it mildly, Linux (with kernels 2.2 and 2.4) sucked, so I run Solaris/x86. I don't need any of the other crap that comes with Linux -- no, I need an NFS file server.
I probably should have tried a BSD, but I had Solaris/X86 and found it to do what I needed it to.
I for one am glad to see a general availability of Solaris 9 for x86.
Wasn't this the howlingly un-funny sunday cartoon?
Suddenly those Canadian jokes at the top look a lot less funny, don't they.
Unless you are (like I am) Canadian, in which case they become fucking hilarious!
Cool -- Nice to see the underpinnings of BattleMechs are coming along nicely. I'll be flying my Phoenix Hawk LAM any century now!