Re:You're Lucky you even got hired for Java!
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Finding a Linux Job
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· Score: 1
> From what you've told us, I think the major thing that counts against you is your age. With 17 years of professional work experience must place you close to 40 years old. I've heard of a great deal of discrimination in California of older workers. California would rather hire young foreigners on visas than anyone over 40.
That may be the case, but the companies I interviewed didn't seem to see my age as a handicap. Instead, they seemed to see my experience as a benefit. I guess I did get lucky in that the company that hired me has a much older development staff than you would expect from an average startup. They are a group of older, very talented people who it is a joy to work with. They also have lives and understand that working super long hours is counterproductive.
>In the Linux area, it seems like a lot of the 40+ set spend their time writing books on Linux and not working in Linux jobs.
I was looking for a new job recently and I had some interesting experiences. I have been a C and C++ programmer for about 15 years (mostly C, only a little C++), with about 17 years of professional programming experience. My last two jobs, a total of 11 years of work, have been doing Unix work. My first Linux kernel was 1.2.8, back in about 1996. I live in San Francisco and was looking for work near home - I did not want a car-only commute. At my last job I used almost all the popular commercial Unicies - AIX, HP, Solaris, SCO, Digital, NCR and so on.
I was looking for Linux work, and got two hits on my resume from Linux-related companies. The first was a company making a Linux-based product. I had a somewhat unusual phone interview - the guy who was the chief tech wanted to know how much Debian experience I had. My preferred ditribution is Slackware but had installed Debian twice. I really didn't use it with any regularity, or have any specific experience. He semed to be interested in Debian install packages, and didn't seem to think that my experience building install packages for seven different Unix native installers meant much. I guess my lack of Debian-specific experience counted quite a bit against me, but I also got the impression that because I didn't use Debian I was somehow politically incorrect. The other problem I had was that I could not offer any code samples from my last job. All the code was proprietary and even though I am quite proud of my coding skills I could not prove anything. I have not had time to work on any outside of work Open Source projects so I could not show any code from that source. I think that this also counted against me in the "politically incorrect" category. The thing that most annoyed me was that after the phone interview, I never even got a call back from the company or their in house recruiter. I figure if you bother to do a phone interview, you should at least have someone call back and say "Sorry, we are not interested."
The other job was with a big name Linux distributor who was interested in doing alot of new kernel feature work, plus some interesting user space stuff. They were a much more professional operation, but once again I felt that the fact that I had not contributed to any open source projects counted against me to some extent. I felt I had a good shot at a position there because I had skills that matched one of their specific needs fairly well. Their main drawback was that they were a very bad car-only commute from my place.
In the end, I decided to take a non-Linux job doing Java Programming. This was because the vast majority of jobs I saw listed were Java jobs and I decided that I better pick up some new skills so I could continue working for the next few years. Also, a good friend works with me at my new company, and the staff is mostly older people who have a good sense for "quality of life" issues and are more interested in experience and proven skills than flash.
There were not many really good looking Linux jobs, from my rather narrow perspective, but this will change over time. The current jobs seem to prefer a certain amount of Open Source credibility. In the end I think I made the correct decision for my future, but I would have liked to have a job in the community. Maybe next time!
FreePC failed for the same reason that any number of web startups are going to fail. They gave away PCs to just anybody, hoping that the add click through rates would pay to support the business. There is no way this will work unless you either have a truly gigantic audience, or a small targeted audience that you can also target adds to. You really have to have adds that your targets are likely to click on, rather than just radom stuff you are trying to sell them. An execellent discussion of this is in one of Robert Cringley's recent columns at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000203. html
He describes a company he consulted with that had a very similar business model to FreePC and failed in a very similar way.
Releasing the specs does not make it an open implementation. Third party implementors will always be a generation behind Microsoft. Microsoft is free to release an incompatible version at any time, or make changes to the specs with out any consultation with any third party vendors. Those vendors would then be screwed. Microsoft can release changes to the specs to its internal developers long before they are available to the rest of the world, giving the internal groups a huge jump on the rest of the world. In addition, Microsoft's changes to the spec does not have to be made for any other reason than their own narrow interests - a change could be made simply to make the lives of third party implementors difficult, not necessarily for any specific technical reason. Unless there is a cooperative process to develop specifications the fact that they eventually get published does not make them open.
Remember, fellow/.ers, that the only proper way to celebrate Ground Hog Day is with a large meal of pork sausage. All those poor pigs died so that you could have ground hog today, Its the least you can do to honor their passing!
> explain to an ignorant european what Groundhog Day is all about?
Ground Hog is also known as Pork Sausage. Today is the day old time Americans slaughtered the last winter pig and made their last batch of sausage before spring. So all Americans clebrate by having a feast of pork sausages and other kinds of pork. More sausage is consumed on Ground Hog day than on any other single day of the year.
> They don't move teams around, because their fans can stop it, and because every city already has several professional teams which would not want a new team to move in.
I think that in an area with a much higher density of teams, the simple fact that every market has one or more teams probably prevents management from considering a move than any fan or club pressure. If there is no place to move to, there is no incentive to move. Part of the problem with this in the US is that the potential number of markets is huge - probably at least as large as the entire number of European football teams. I simply do not think that there is sufficient talent in any of the American major sports for the quality of sport to be professionally viable. A football team has a roster of about 45, baseball about 25 and with those numbers the injury rate in football would guarantee that none of the teams was ever that good. There probably are not enough players interested in pursuing a professional career to stock as many football or baseball teams as there are European soccer teams.
>... thanks to promotion and relegation, the 1st Division or Premier League really does contain the best teams.
With the proliferation of professional franchises in all the American professional sports, I think a multi-tiered league with promotion and relegation would be an ideal arrangement. Each league could have its own championship series, so there would be plenty of playoffs to keep the greedy owners happy, and the level of competition between teams would be kept pretty even. You could divide the league levels into two divisions to provide the appropriate rivalries and to make the playoff matchups meaningful.
Before people engage in all out attacks on the company mentioned in this spam, stop and think that they might not be responsible for it. It could be a disgruntled customer, ex-employeee or whatever. If you feel the need to complain, please try not to flame execessively. Since it was posted by an AC, there is no way to know exactly who did it.
>As I understand it, they may (like Pacific HiTech) have some ability to provide tech support in native languages to certain asian communities. Or FAQs or HowTos. Any of those might be useful.
In case you didn't know, Pacific HiTech has changed its name to TurboLinux.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - in The Papers of Ben Franklin, ed. L.W. Labaree
this was at http://cgi.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/6517/361.ht m
Another webpage at: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7970/jefpco 13.htm
discusses spurious Jefferson quotes, mentions the one in question as a paraphrase of the Franklin quote.
This accident, which occurred at Tenerife in the Canary Islands on March 27, 1977 is truly a tragedy. Both 747s were fully fueled, and the fireball that ensued when the KLM plane crashed into the PanAm plane was huge. A total of 583 people from both planes were killed, including everyone on the KLM plane. I saw a fascinating series on The Learning Channel on air disaters, and they interviewed the pilot and a flight attendant from the PanAm plane. Their descriptions were terrifying. The investigations were complicated by KLM's refusal to admit that their chief training pilot could have made such an error.
> i like the way someone had also left their car on the bridge.
There were two vehicles on the bridge at the time of the collapse, a car owned by a reporter and a truck. Both cars went into the water when the bridge collapsed. The only victim of the collapse was the reporter's daughter's cocker spaniel which refused to leave the car when the reporter abandoned it. Engineers had been quite concerned with the bridge's motions in the months prior to the collapse. They had tried several things to fix the problem, but nothing had worked, and the did not really understand the nature of the problem. At least three other suspension bridges had suffered similar failures - the Ohio river bridge in Wheeling Ohio in 1854, the Brighton Chain Pier in 1836, and the Niagra-Clifton bridge in 1889. The bridge lacked sufficient dampening to resist the wind-driven oscillations. The Tacoma Narrows was a very narrow bridge in relation to its length, and it used plate girder stiffening trusses. These stiffeners did not allow wind to blow through them, unlike the stiffeners on bridges like the Golden Gate or the George Washington. If the Tacoma Narrows had been wider, or used different stiffeners, it probably would not have collapsed. After the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, the Golden Gate bridge had additional stiffening trusses added to reduce wind-driven oscillations.
There is an interesting books called "Why Buildings Fall Down" by Matthys Levy an Mario Salvadori that describes this bridge collapse and many other structural failures in detail.
> Linux ranks so far behind MacOS and Windows in installed base it's laughable. They are about even with OS/2...maybe...
Perhaps you could bother to provide some evidence for this opinion? I have no clue how many Linux users there actually are, but I could pick numbers out of the air just as easily as you or anyone else. Until I find some solid number backed by reasonable research, I'll keep my mouth shut. I *believe* the number must be more than 10 million, but I can't back it up any more than any else can their guess.
> My mother is an architect who spends 12 hours a day building houses in California for folks of all income ranges, from the extremely rich to housing for folks >on welfare. Are you suggesting that she should drop her job (losing a ton of money in the process) because you and I as computer programmers are too >damned lazy to do our job?
>I'm constantly amazed at the attitude of the software development industry: "I'm too lazy to make it easy to use, so I'm demanding that >the rest of the world learn something that I only spent a few years of high school and college learning."
No, I don't think he was suggesting that your mother should become a full time computer expert. I also do not think he was suggesting that all people should become as proficient with computers as I am, as he is , or as you are.
The fundamental problem is that computers are very complicated systems. The exact level of complication (and usability, for that matter) depends on who the system is designed an implemented. Many of the people contributing to this thread seem to think that making Linux as "Windows like" as possible is the proper way of shielding users without sufficient knowledge of the details from the complication and the implementation. Unfortunately Windows, both NT and Win9x, have done what seem to be a poor job of system implementation, resulting in system instability, repeated reboots, BSODs, etc. Microsoft has also done such a good job of shielding users from the complication of the system that even experienced sysadmins have difficulty finding the appropriate configuration information. On Linux systems, there is a general trend in the other direction - not only are users not shielded from anything, it is put right out in front of them in a way Windows systems never do. Many contributors to this thread have argued this side - that we should make systems as configurable as possible, regardless of the complication presented to the users. In addition, users frequently have to deal with Unix conventions that seem natural once you know them, but are incredibly cryptic and arcane if you don't. For example, the top level directory names include/usr/var/tmp/lib/bin/sbin/home and/etc. If I listed these off to an experienced computer user without Unix knowledge, I doubt that they could guess with any accuracy what files, command and libraries would go where and why, even though there are excellent reasons for distributing files and directories as they have been. Linux makes all these thinsg visible and accesible to the users, which requires more knowledge on their part. Windows hides most of this stuff, making the system less stable, less administrable and less configurable. Its not lazy programmers, its programmers who ask more of a user, in order to give them more options in the long run.
If it were up to me to decide the way the software world worked, I would throw away the entire Unix directory structure and the entire command structure. Essentially all of "userland" would be re-organized and redesigned as an integrated system. Many directories and commands and software systems that work with them exist in their current form because of quirks in obscure systems lost in the mists of time. The Kernel could remained unchanged - the APIs could stay the same, but the user programs would be rearranged. If we could decide that we don't care to be 100% compatible with old systems, we could design a system taht would be much easier to understand and work with, and one that would be easier to wrap layers around to hide the complicated details from newbies without frustrating experts. Most of the details of how a modern Unix works could even be retained with very little modification - the way shared libraries work, the way daemons work, the user ID and accounting systems, and so on. It just seems to me that the way systems are organized right now makes it exceedingly difficult for people to learn some simple tasks that they need to do everyday work. Its not that programmers are "too damned lazy to do their job" its that the organization of current Unix systems make their job very very difficult to do without dumbing down systems to an unacceptable level.
It should have been called the Quinquium....
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News on Pentium IV
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· Score: 1
Or something like that, according to a former cow-orker of mine who knew a bit about classical languages. Penta- is from the Greek for five, and -ium is Latin. So it should have been Quinquium, or the Pentos, or something like that. On the other hand, the word "automobile" has the same problem.
I would not begin to guess exactly how many hits getting mentioned on/. would get you. I would expect that the number would vary depending on exactly what level of "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that Matters" your site really is. I would expect that the real effect of/. is peaking of demand vs how much bandwidth it takes to serve the page, with CPU demands for dynamic content thrown in. Just think about how many people arrive at work between 8:00 am and 9:30am PST, start up their PCs, and spend a few minutes scanning/. and related links while they drink their morning coffee. If your webpage has 10 300k pictures on it, the queue of people waiting for pictures could get quite long, even if you have a high bandwidth net connection. If you run some CGI to generate dynamic content, your CPU could get pegged by that if you don't design it right. On the other hand, if you only have 2K of static text, the same number of requests might be easy to handle. Hits, bytes, hit rates, CPU, it makes for an interesting combo. Remember,/. handles the/. effect pretty well, most of the time.
I was wondering recently if there are any HURD servers out there connected to the net doing real production work - serving web pages, an FTP site, a news or mail server, CVS serving, or anything else. Does anyone know of one? Is anyone willing to subject theirs to the/. effect? The original release of the HURD was a long time ago - 0.2 was released in June of 1997. I would expect that by now there would be a usable production system. I don't intend this as a slam against GNU/FSF/Stallman or the HURD developers. I am just wondering how much momentum the HURD has, and whether people are using it.
> Iused to work for Office Depot and all internal memos had Staples clearly printed on the top. I was told when I was working there that Staples owns Office Depot. Meaning it seems odd that they got there panties in a wad for something so minor.
Staples and Office Depot attempted to merge a couple of years ago, but the Federal trade commission stopped it because the combined company would have held some huge percentage of the market in some areas. Also, the proved that prices were lower in areas that had both stores than areas that had only one. But the merger got pretty far before it was killed, so I'm not surprised you saw what you did.
>...a group of hippies...hodge-podge mix of students and "labour union" supporters - union stiffs...
It is easy to attack the protesters by characterizing them as a group of "Hippies students and union stiffs" without bother to ever understand or address any real issues they might bring up. I find this attack on the character of the protesters a cheap attempt to discredit them without actually addressing any of their reasons for protesting.
> That logo is awful. Reminiscent of Soviet Russia or Red China. It's gotta go. It's scaring people away. It's hurtin' the mozilla project.
I don't really know if it is scaring people away - I think its a brilliant pastiche - a combination of Russian mid-century art styles, bad Japanese sci-fi movies, and modern computer technology. If people are so incredibly dogmatic that they are frightened by a simple logo, maybe they should stand up and say so. The logo is wonderful satire, if you ask me. Satire is often lost on the dogmatic or narrow minded. Just think of what Mozilla really IS, not what the logo reminds you of. If you don't get the joke, its really too bad:-)
Not lying. Be careful in your choice of words. Simply expressing an opinion, which you do not agree with. Its a standard tactic of a poor rhetoritician to call a disagreement a lie. I personally do not agree with you either. I have spent many, many hours seaching MSDN CDs and the online Knowledgebase for information, without finding what I want. The information may indeed be there, but it is so poorly organized that it is impossible to find. Often, what I was looking for simply was not there. On the other hand, I can ALWAYS find what I want in online Linux resources - Usenet, HOWTO's, webpages, etc.
> Basically, the only hope for Linux is provided by KDE team. Eveything else is pretty much uncoordinated mess...
Once again, your OPINION. I am not a fan of MS's IDEs and development tools. There are plenty of well coordinated and organized development teams in the Open Source world. There are even COMMERCIAL alternatives that run on Open Source platforms.
> 2. Most people who are not STUPID want their business servers to run an OS that is COMMERICAL so someone is liable if something ever goes wrong!
So, you think you can actually sue Microsoft, Sun, or ANY other software vendor when their software crashes and screws up your business? Have you ever bothered to read the licences for this software? They specifically state the manufacturer is NOT liable for any losses that might occur when the software fails. Have you ever heard of such a case? They simply do not happen, because of the licences. If I had someone working under me who proposed using any software because we could sue if something went wrong, I would consider firing them, because they would clearly be ignorant and incapable.
> Just take a look at Star Trek, or any other SF series: the computers just work. No ifs, buts or device drivers. They work. That's what most people will want anyways.
I would just like to take the time to point out that Star Trek is ***FICTION***. It is the mere speculation of a bunch of scientifically and technically ignorant Hollywood scriptwriters. I bet most of them wouldn't know a device driver if they saw one. To suggest that the writers have any more insight into how technology will work in several hundred years than I do, or any other person in the world does, is utterly ridiculous. It is just as likely, if you ask me, that these more complex systems will have more complex problems, and those problems are likely to occur at least as often as they do already.
Yeah, but for a very long time I worked in a noisy office with few barriers between people's workspaces. I would pick up whatever conversation was going on nearby, and that would destroy whatever concentration I had. What worked best for me for intense conversation was music I liked so much that I had listened to it a zillion times. It formed a background I could both absorb and ignore, while it silenced all the external distractions. Some CDs I could get all the way through without really hearing at all, which was perfect for what I was looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
> From what you've told us, I think the major thing that counts against you is your age. With 17 years of professional work experience must place you close to 40 years old. I've heard of a great deal of discrimination in California of older workers. California would rather hire young foreigners on visas than anyone over 40.
:-) I hope to programming for a while yet.
That may be the case, but the companies I interviewed didn't seem to see my age as a handicap. Instead, they seemed to see my experience as a benefit. I guess I did get lucky in that the company that hired me has a much older development staff than you would expect from an average startup. They are a group of older, very talented people who it is a joy to work with. They also have lives and understand that working super long hours is counterproductive.
>In the Linux area, it seems like a lot of the 40+ set spend their time writing books on Linux and not working in Linux jobs.
Not me
I was looking for a new job recently and I had some interesting experiences. I have been a C and C++ programmer for about 15 years (mostly C, only a little C++), with about 17 years of professional programming experience. My last two jobs, a total of 11 years of work, have been doing Unix work. My first Linux kernel was 1.2.8, back in about 1996. I live in San Francisco and was looking for work near home - I did not want a car-only commute. At my last job I used almost all the popular commercial Unicies - AIX, HP, Solaris, SCO, Digital, NCR and so on.
I was looking for Linux work, and got two hits on my resume from Linux-related companies. The first was a company making a Linux-based product. I had a somewhat unusual phone interview - the guy who was the chief tech wanted to know how much Debian experience I had. My preferred ditribution is Slackware but had installed Debian twice. I really didn't use it with any regularity, or have any specific experience. He semed to be interested in Debian install packages, and didn't seem to think that my experience building install packages for seven different Unix native installers meant much. I guess my lack of Debian-specific experience counted quite a bit against me, but I also got the impression that because I didn't use Debian I was somehow politically incorrect. The other problem I had was that I could not offer any code samples from my last job. All the code was proprietary and even though I am quite proud of my coding skills I could not prove anything. I have not had time to work on any outside of work Open Source projects so I could not show any code from that source. I think that this also counted against me in the "politically incorrect" category. The thing that most annoyed me was that after the phone interview, I never even got a call back from the company or their in house recruiter. I figure if you bother to do a phone interview, you should at least have someone call back and say "Sorry, we are not interested."
The other job was with a big name Linux distributor who was interested in doing alot of new kernel feature work, plus some interesting user space stuff. They were a much more professional operation, but once again I felt that the fact that I had not contributed to any open source projects counted against me to some extent. I felt I had a good shot at a position there because I had skills that matched one of their specific needs fairly well. Their main drawback was that they were a very bad car-only commute from my place.
In the end, I decided to take a non-Linux job doing Java Programming. This was because the vast majority of jobs I saw listed were Java jobs and I decided that I better pick up some new skills so I could continue working for the next few years. Also, a good friend works with me at my new company, and the staff is mostly older people who have a good sense for "quality of life" issues and are more interested in experience and proven skills than flash.
There were not many really good looking Linux jobs, from my rather narrow perspective, but this will change over time. The current jobs seem to prefer a certain amount of Open Source credibility. In the end I think I made the correct decision for my future, but I would have liked to have a job in the community. Maybe next time!
FreePC failed for the same reason that any number of web startups are going to fail. They gave away PCs to just anybody, hoping that the add click through rates would pay to support the business. There is no way this will work unless you either have a truly gigantic audience, or a small targeted audience that you can also target adds to. You really have to have adds that your targets are likely to click on, rather than just radom stuff you are trying to sell them. An execellent discussion of this is in one of Robert Cringley's recent columns at. html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000203
He describes a company he consulted with that had a very similar business model to FreePC and failed in a very similar way.
Releasing the specs does not make it an open implementation. Third party implementors will always be a generation behind Microsoft. Microsoft is free to release an incompatible version at any time, or make changes to the specs with out any consultation with any third party vendors. Those vendors would then be screwed. Microsoft can release changes to the specs to its internal developers long before they are available to the rest of the world, giving the internal groups a huge jump on the rest of the world. In addition, Microsoft's changes to the spec does not have to be made for any other reason than their own narrow interests - a change could be made simply to make the lives of third party implementors difficult, not necessarily for any specific technical reason. Unless there is a cooperative process to develop specifications the fact that they eventually get published does not make them open.
Remember, fellow /.ers, that the only proper way to celebrate Ground Hog Day is with a large meal of pork sausage. All those poor pigs died so that you could have ground hog today, Its the least you can do to honor their passing!
> explain to an ignorant european what Groundhog Day is all about?
Ground Hog is also known as Pork Sausage. Today is the day old time Americans slaughtered the last winter pig and made their last batch of sausage before spring. So all Americans clebrate by having a feast of pork sausages and other kinds of pork. More sausage is consumed on Ground Hog day than on any other single day of the year.
> They don't move teams around, because their fans can stop it, and because every city already has several professional teams which would not want a new team to move in.
... thanks to promotion and relegation, the 1st Division or Premier League really does contain the best teams.
I think that in an area with a much higher density of teams, the simple fact that every market has one or more teams probably prevents management from considering a move than any fan or club pressure. If there is no place to move to, there is no incentive to move. Part of the problem with this in the US is that the potential number of markets is huge - probably at least as large as the entire number of European football teams. I simply do not think that there is sufficient talent in any of the American major sports for the quality of sport to be professionally viable. A football team has a roster of about 45, baseball about 25 and with those numbers the injury rate in football would guarantee that none of the teams was ever that good. There probably are not enough players interested in pursuing a professional career to stock as many football or baseball teams as there are European soccer teams.
>
With the proliferation of professional franchises in all the American professional sports, I think a multi-tiered league with promotion and relegation would be an ideal arrangement. Each league could have its own championship series, so there would be plenty of playoffs to keep the greedy owners happy, and the level of competition between teams would be kept pretty even. You could divide the league levels into two divisions to provide the appropriate rivalries and to make the playoff matchups meaningful.
Before people engage in all out attacks on the company mentioned in this spam, stop and think that they might not be responsible for it. It could be a disgruntled customer, ex-employeee or whatever. If you feel the need to complain, please try not to flame execessively. Since it was posted by an AC, there is no way to know exactly who did it.
>As I understand it, they may (like Pacific HiTech) have some ability to provide tech support in native languages to certain asian communities. Or FAQs or HowTos. Any of those might be useful.
In case you didn't know, Pacific HiTech has changed its name to TurboLinux.
According to a web page I found....
t m
o 13.htm
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - in The Papers of Ben Franklin, ed. L.W. Labaree
this was at http://cgi.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/6517/361.h
Another webpage at:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7970/jefpc
discusses spurious Jefferson quotes, mentions the one in question as a paraphrase of the Franklin quote.
This accident, which occurred at Tenerife in the Canary Islands on March 27, 1977 is truly a tragedy. Both 747s were fully fueled, and the fireball that ensued when the KLM plane crashed into the PanAm plane was huge. A total of 583 people from both planes were killed, including everyone on the KLM plane. I saw a fascinating series on The Learning Channel on air disaters, and they interviewed the pilot and a flight attendant from the PanAm plane. Their descriptions were terrifying. The investigations were complicated by KLM's refusal to admit that their chief training pilot could have made such an error.
> i like the way someone had also left their car on the bridge.
There were two vehicles on the bridge at the time of the collapse, a car owned by a reporter and a truck. Both cars went into the water when the bridge collapsed. The only victim of the collapse was the reporter's daughter's cocker spaniel which refused to leave the car when the reporter abandoned it.
Engineers had been quite concerned with the bridge's motions in the months prior to the collapse. They had tried several things to fix the problem, but nothing had worked, and the did not really understand the nature of the problem.
At least three other suspension bridges had suffered similar failures - the Ohio river bridge in Wheeling Ohio in 1854, the Brighton Chain Pier in 1836, and the Niagra-Clifton bridge in 1889. The bridge lacked sufficient dampening to resist the wind-driven oscillations. The Tacoma Narrows was a very narrow bridge in relation to its length, and it used plate girder stiffening trusses. These stiffeners did not allow wind to blow through them, unlike the stiffeners on bridges like the Golden Gate or the George Washington. If the Tacoma Narrows had been wider, or used different stiffeners, it probably would not have collapsed.
After the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, the Golden Gate bridge had additional stiffening trusses added to reduce wind-driven oscillations.
There is an interesting books called "Why Buildings Fall Down" by Matthys Levy an Mario Salvadori that describes this bridge collapse and many other structural failures in detail.
> Linux ranks so far behind MacOS and Windows in installed base it's laughable. They are about even with OS/2...maybe...
Perhaps you could bother to provide some evidence for this opinion? I have no clue how many Linux users there actually are, but I could pick numbers out of the air just as easily as you or anyone else. Until I find some solid number backed by reasonable research, I'll keep my mouth shut. I *believe* the number must be more than 10 million, but I can't back it up any more than any else can their guess.
> My mother is an architect who spends 12 hours a day building houses in California for folks of all income ranges, from the extremely rich to housing for folks
/usr /var /tmp /lib /bin /sbin /home and /etc. If I listed these off to an experienced computer user without Unix knowledge, I doubt that they could guess with any accuracy what files, command and libraries would go where and why, even though there are excellent reasons for distributing files and directories as they have been.
>on welfare. Are you suggesting that she should drop her job (losing a ton of money in the process) because you and I as computer programmers are too
>damned lazy to do our job?
>I'm constantly amazed at the attitude of the software development industry: "I'm too lazy to make it easy to use, so I'm demanding that
>the rest of the world learn something that I only spent a few years of high school and college learning."
No, I don't think he was suggesting that your mother should become a full time computer expert. I also do not think he was suggesting that all people should become as proficient with computers as I am, as he is , or as you are.
The fundamental problem is that computers are very complicated systems. The exact level of complication (and usability, for that matter) depends on who the system is designed an implemented. Many of the people contributing to this thread seem to think that making Linux as "Windows like" as possible is the proper way of shielding users without sufficient knowledge of the details from the complication and the implementation. Unfortunately Windows, both NT and Win9x, have done what seem to be a poor job of system implementation, resulting in system instability, repeated reboots, BSODs, etc. Microsoft has also done such a good job of shielding users from the complication of the system that even experienced sysadmins have difficulty finding the appropriate configuration information.
On Linux systems, there is a general trend in the other direction - not only are users not shielded from anything, it is put right out in front of them in a way Windows systems never do. Many contributors to this thread have argued this side - that we should make systems as configurable as possible, regardless of the complication presented to the users. In addition, users frequently have to deal with Unix conventions that seem natural once you know them, but are incredibly cryptic and arcane if you don't. For example, the top level directory names include
Linux makes all these thinsg visible and accesible to the users, which requires more knowledge on their part. Windows hides most of this stuff, making the system less stable, less administrable and less configurable. Its not lazy programmers, its programmers who ask more of a user, in order to give them more options in the long run.
If it were up to me to decide the way the software world worked, I would throw away the entire Unix directory structure and the entire command structure. Essentially all of "userland" would be re-organized and redesigned as an integrated system. Many directories and commands and software systems that work with them exist in their current form because of quirks in obscure systems lost in the mists of time. The Kernel could remained unchanged - the APIs could stay the same, but the user programs would be rearranged. If we could decide that we don't care to be 100% compatible with old systems, we could design a system taht would be much easier to understand and work with, and one that would be easier to wrap layers around to hide the complicated details from newbies without frustrating experts. Most of the details of how a modern Unix works could even be retained with very little modification - the way shared libraries work, the way daemons work, the user ID and accounting systems, and so on. It just seems to me that the way systems are organized right now makes it exceedingly difficult for people to learn some simple tasks that they need to do everyday work. Its not that programmers are "too damned lazy to do their job" its that the organization of current Unix systems make their job very very difficult to do without dumbing down systems to an unacceptable level.
Or something like that, according to a former cow-orker of mine who knew a bit about classical languages. Penta- is from the Greek for five, and -ium is Latin. So it should have been Quinquium, or the Pentos, or something like that. On the other hand, the word "automobile" has the same problem.
I would not begin to guess exactly how many hits getting mentioned on /. would get you. I would expect that the number would vary depending on exactly what level of "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that Matters" your site really is. I would expect that the real effect of /. is peaking of demand vs how much bandwidth it takes to serve the page, with CPU demands for dynamic content thrown in. Just think about how many people arrive at work between 8:00 am and 9:30am PST, start up their PCs, and spend a few minutes scanning /. and related links while they drink their morning coffee. If your webpage has 10 300k pictures on it, the queue of people waiting for pictures could get quite long, even if you have a high bandwidth net connection. If you run some CGI to generate dynamic content, your CPU could get pegged by that if you don't design it right. On the other hand, if you only have 2K of static text, the same number of requests might be easy to handle. Hits, bytes, hit rates, CPU, it makes for an interesting combo. Remember, /. handles the /. effect pretty well, most of the time.
I was wondering recently if there are any HURD servers out there connected to the net doing real production work - serving web pages, an FTP site, a news or mail server, CVS serving, or anything else. Does anyone know of one? Is anyone willing to subject theirs to the /. effect? The original release of the HURD was a long time ago - 0.2 was released in June of 1997. I would expect that by now there would be a usable production system. I don't intend this as a slam against GNU/FSF/Stallman or the HURD developers. I am just wondering how much momentum the HURD has, and whether people are using it.
Cheers
Eric Geyer
> Iused to work for Office Depot and all internal memos had Staples clearly printed on the top. I was told when I was working there that Staples owns Office Depot. Meaning it seems odd that they got there panties in a wad for something so minor.
Staples and Office Depot attempted to merge a couple of years ago, but the Federal trade commission stopped it because the combined company would have held some huge percentage of the market in some areas. Also, the proved that prices were lower in areas that had both stores than areas that had only one. But the merger got pretty far before it was killed, so I'm not surprised you saw what you did.
Cheers
Eric
> ...a group of hippies...hodge-podge mix of students and "labour union" supporters - union stiffs...
It is easy to attack the protesters by characterizing them as a group of "Hippies students and union stiffs" without bother to ever understand or address any real issues they might bring up. I find this attack on the character of the protesters a cheap attempt to discredit them without actually addressing any of their reasons for protesting.
> That logo is awful. Reminiscent of Soviet Russia or Red China. It's gotta go. It's scaring people away. It's hurtin' the mozilla project.
:-)
I don't really know if it is scaring people away - I think its a brilliant pastiche - a combination of Russian mid-century art styles, bad Japanese sci-fi movies, and modern computer technology. If people are so incredibly dogmatic that they are frightened by a simple logo, maybe they should stand up and say so. The logo is wonderful satire, if you ask me. Satire is often lost on the dogmatic or narrow minded. Just think of what Mozilla really IS, not what the logo reminds you of. If you don't get the joke, its really too bad
Cheers
Eric Geyer
> Now you are lying. MSDN is the best there is.
...
Not lying. Be careful in your choice of words. Simply expressing an opinion, which you do not agree with. Its a standard tactic of a poor rhetoritician to call a disagreement a lie. I personally do not agree with you either. I have spent many, many hours seaching MSDN CDs and the online Knowledgebase for information, without finding what I want. The information may indeed be there, but it is so poorly organized that it is impossible to find. Often, what I was looking for simply was not there. On the other hand, I can ALWAYS find what I want in online Linux resources - Usenet, HOWTO's, webpages, etc.
> Basically, the only hope for Linux is provided by KDE team. Eveything else is pretty much uncoordinated mess
Once again, your OPINION. I am not a fan of MS's IDEs and development tools. There are plenty of well coordinated and organized development teams in the Open Source world. There are even COMMERCIAL alternatives that run on Open Source platforms.
Eric Geyer
> 2. Most people who are not STUPID want their business servers to run an OS that is COMMERICAL so someone is liable if something ever goes wrong!
So, you think you can actually sue Microsoft, Sun, or ANY other software vendor when their software crashes and screws up your business? Have you ever bothered to read the licences for this software? They specifically state the manufacturer is NOT liable for any losses that might occur when the software fails. Have you ever heard of such a case? They simply do not happen, because of the licences. If I had someone working under me who proposed using any software because we could sue if something went wrong, I would consider firing them, because they would clearly be ignorant and incapable.
Eric Geyer
corduroy@sfo.com
> Just take a look at Star Trek, or any other SF series: the computers just work. No ifs, buts or device drivers. They work. That's what most people will want anyways.
I would just like to take the time to point out that Star Trek is ***FICTION***. It is the mere speculation of a bunch of scientifically and technically ignorant Hollywood scriptwriters. I bet most of them wouldn't know a device driver if they saw one. To suggest that the writers have any more insight into how technology will work in several hundred years than I do, or any other person in the world does, is utterly ridiculous.
It is just as likely, if you ask me, that these more complex systems will have more complex problems, and those problems are likely to occur at least as often as they do already.
Eric Geyer
corduroy@sfo.com
Negativland!
> Effective coding requires intense concentration.
Yeah, but for a very long time I worked in a noisy office with few barriers between people's workspaces. I would pick up whatever conversation was going on nearby, and that would destroy whatever concentration I had. What worked best for me for intense conversation was music I liked so much that I had listened to it a zillion times. It formed a background I could both absorb and ignore, while it silenced all the external distractions. Some CDs I could get all the way through without really hearing at all, which was perfect for what I was looking for.
Cheers
Eric Geyer
corduroy@sfo.com