Uh, right, this is why I, as a college student on summer break, am doing my sysadmin schtick right now. (Actually, I *should* be setting up someone's modem, but sweet sweet Slashdot beckons...)
Your attitude smacks of extreme arrogance. Trust me, kid. There's a whole world of difference between ``Oh, I can fix that!'' and ``We need to have internal email this week.'' In the Real World, the bucks stops with you. The necktie means *responsibility*.
Hey, my boss has been an IT tech for going on twenty years, and seems hopelessly out of his depth. (Yes, the buck still stops with me. No one even *expects* him to fix anything. I don't know why they retain him.)
It may look easy, but being an admin means taking the *whole* job, boring-ass warts and all.
When I was fifteen, myself and my (then-)best friend started a corporation.
He sucked at technical stuff; I sucked at sales. (I can't stand ripping people off, I empathize too much.) He said I wasn't pulling my weight, I said he was a pompous ass (not in those words), he told me he wanted me out, I went to the bank and withdrew everything but $0.25 from the checking account (about eight hundred dollars) and went home.
He took me to small claims court, where the judge spent five minutes on the case before throwing it out because we weren't a legal partnership---neither of us was old enough; he'd just known some people in the town hall.
I bought my first computer with that money (first that I owned; I'd been using my father's), and we never spoke to each other again.
He glared a lot, though.
Anyhoo, we set up a small NT network while we were in business. Charged a shitload of money. I don't think I'd even *heard* of Linux. Had played with SCO Unix, but just the/usr/games directory. Ah, fickle youth...
Point is, we were both immature assholes with technical expertise. Well, *I* had technical expertise. He had... salesmanship.
and its important to be able to integrate into society with other people that, actually, you're not better than.
Come *on*. Not only are [geeks] smarter than most other people, they don't watch as much TV. And as we all know, that makes you a better person. Not watching TV, that is.
Damn it, moderators, not everything that mentions goatse.cx is a fucking troll!
I believe that pop media and talking heads are more offensive than silly smut. Is that trolling? I believe that offending the nobility of the human spirit is much more serious than offending your sense of sexual proportion.
And I *feel* like a professional while wearing a tie. I've even mostly gotten used to it over the summer. I look like me, not like a kid stuffed into a monkey suit.
And I get mistaken for a manager in the grocery store if I stop for munchies on the way home. Sigh.
There is **really** nothing to do. Average income here is $8K a year. (I work at an urban AIDS clinic. Yes, I'm the techie guy. Very socially responsible of me. I don't really see any patients, though.) A lot of these folks get started on heroin/crack/whatever when they're not yet high school age. The rest of their life is then spent slowly circling the drain...
I didn't say black people were all poor. But the vast, vast majority of people here are, in fact, black. We used to have a nice ethnic mix, but then everyone who *could* leave, did.
The people here are fucking scared. No one goes out at night, except for those who don't care if they live or die---junkies and dealers. There are good, decent people living here. But they don't go out much. And no matter how many dealers you send to the state pen, there are hundreds more waiting to take their place, simply because there is a *market*. As long as that money keeps rolling in, there *will* be dealers on the other end.
To conclude: young blacks here can either make eight dollars an hour flipping burgers, or make a thousand dollars---green cash money---in twenty-four hours, selling drugs and/or sex. It's a pretty obvious choice, from that perspective. Yes, I do blame coke/heroin-addicted whites for rolling through and dumping cash on the most ruthless and violent living here.
On the other hand, they all end up having kids before they're twenty because of the stupid machismo thing that runs rampant in the black and Hispanic cultures. It's not like we don't have condoms *everywhere*...
On the other hand, the president is regularly called a fidiot by the press. Not so before the sixties.
It's okay for women to be single. Not so before the sixties.
Hot man sex is a wholesome family thing. Not so before the sixties.
In general, we don't trust our government. Not quite so before the sixties.
Men don't have to wear ties on the weekends. You won't get beat up for long hair (as often.) *Definitely* not so before the sixties.
And even though music *from* the sixties mostly sucked, much good stuff is descended from it. (Well, not punk. That came from England. And not blues or jazz or funk or hip-hop, that came from Harlem and, later, the ghetto. Which leaves... Britney. Never mind.)
Ha! Colocation is what the ASSTR moved to after being kicked off the university at which they were previously eating bandwidth!
See? You *can* learn everything from pr0n.
Anyhoo, I'm halfway through undergraduate school; currently administering a network of fifty or so computers, eighty or so employees. My `boss' makes charts. They're important (for some reason), but I do the actual administering.
And you know what? Most of it is reading documentation and, failing that, asking questions of admins senior to me. All I needed, really, was basic familiarity with networking and the willingness to read and learn a lot.
Eh, that's my experience. I'm older than fifteen, though. And I don't pretend to be a senior admin of some kind. But I am a professional.
I dunno, maybe I'm just pointing to this because my parents were never particularly wealthy, and so I can jump up and down an say that Katz doesn't define me.
Then again, they were never particularly poor, either.
And anyways, pop culture is mindless drivel whether you're seven, seventeen or seventy. The real power of the internet is that youngsters can see the wholesome image of the goatse.cx guy opening his anus to accomodate a fire hose, instead of the shockingly immoral crap they put on the fidiot box.
Hey, I'm serious. At least the goatse.cx guy doesn't tell me to die of anorexia or beat on those weaker than me. Sodomize, perhaps... Ahem. I'm serious. Really.
It's an interesting comentary on the state of American culture that even after the shroud of anonymity is lifted, people still prefer the teenage pseudo-expert, to the formally trained real thing... For this phenomenon, I have no explanation.
Not really, if you consider that these are the same Americans who scream "FRANKENFOODS!!" at genetically engineered tomatoes, but rish to snort, inhale, chew and rub on their genitals anything with the words `organic' and `natural' in it.
And the same Americans who won't go in a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance device, unless it's called an MRI. (Go to a physics department and ask what the non-accelerator device with the huge magnet is called. It's NMR.)
And the same Americans who are violently against cloning humans, but are **flabbergasted** to hear that identical twins are as identical as clones. (This one from a roommate of mine. He was *not* a science major.)
They're a bunch of useless bloody morons. Especially with regards to science, technology and anything more complicated than watching television.
Because of our ludicrous War On (some) Drugs, drugs are a source of incredible potential profit. They are, in fact, the **only** way to not be poor and miserable for a lot of young, poor black men.
Well, they become poor and miserable once they're in jail, but it's not really all about forethought.
To sum up: if white boys wouldn't waltz into the hood and wave hundred dollar bills around, the locals wouldn't shoot each other over them.
No, silly, so windows clients and linux clients can connect to a windows or linux server running NON-CRAPULENT NON-OBFUSCATED OPEN SOURCE SAMBA woo hoo yeah.
As in, you're no longer dependent on MS for your filesharing needs; there's a free fileserver that's a drop-in replacement.
While the situation may seem to call for hyperbole, we should all remain cognizant of the fact that one must be black, poor and smoke crack to be sent to the gulags here...
I think Winston was a little tweaked about America ignoring the incipient rise of a Real Live Evil Empire in Europe until Pearl Harbor got us into `War Mode', where we still are today.
``Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has **always** been at war with Eastasia...''
Churchill was experienced with idiot leaders---his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, was quite famous for appeasing Hitler. Of course, once he did his little Arthurian thing and saved England from the `Naaaawzis' (as he said it), the good folk of Britain promptly de-elected him. Schmucks.
You know, if France had had a Churchill, World War II would have probably been a lot shorter.
But to summarize: Churchill had good reason for calling the Americans slow to action---they were.
Wait... someone hosting an expensive backup system over a PUBLIC NETWORK that they AREN'T PAYING FOR is complaining that they don't control it? Spare me!
Ha! Big businesses hide behind "Free market! Invisible hand!" in meatspace, but they're sorely outmatched inside the network. So they clamor for control to be handed over to them on a silver platter. Fuckwits.
The internet is like the telephone? Uh, try keeping up a correspondence with your buds in Sweden and Germany from California on twenty bucks a month.
"neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line" -- really? If by "run", they mean "tended by unpaid labor", then *maybe*.
If these corporations want a reliable network, they can build their own. No fucking way is control of the public net getting turned over to them for a pittance.
I'm *outraged* about this. You should be too, every one of you.
I dunno... at least on the competition front, I've been sending in diffs to HOWTOs that have typos or errors in them. I don't tend to do that with most books, because I assume it's been corrected anyway...
And you neglected that, while the FDL may or may not be good business, it's definitely good documentation -- remember, not all documentation comes from O'Reilly...
(Okay, the really good stuff does. But the HOWTOs have been indispensible at my job, cutting learn-this and learn-that times in half, at least.)
Remember, publically created documentation has a place, too.
They released the source, but I still say they should harness the power of the LDP and include a bunch of their books with every distribution. (The relevant ones, y'know. I suppose I'd be uninterested in this book if I hadn't installed the kernel sources, for instance...)
It's just rather frustrating to see all these fragmented documentation efforts. It can be so much more effective if we work together... [insert patriotic chord here]
Slashdot Mirror
It's a symbol; a badge of office, if you will.
And I just tuck it into my shirt between the second and third buttons when I have to go spelunking under someone's desk.
-grendel drago
`fidiot' is short for `fucking idiot', much the same way `fugly' is short for `fucking ugly'.
It's gained common usage around me, so I use it here...
Besides, I'm American, too. I'm just annoyed that The People appear to be... well, morons.
-grendel drago
Uh, right, this is why I, as a college student on summer break, am doing my sysadmin schtick right now. (Actually, I *should* be setting up someone's modem, but sweet sweet Slashdot beckons...)
Your attitude smacks of extreme arrogance. Trust me, kid. There's a whole world of difference between ``Oh, I can fix that!'' and ``We need to have internal email this week.'' In the Real World, the bucks stops with you. The necktie means *responsibility*.
Hey, my boss has been an IT tech for going on twenty years, and seems hopelessly out of his depth. (Yes, the buck still stops with me. No one even *expects* him to fix anything. I don't know why they retain him.)
It may look easy, but being an admin means taking the *whole* job, boring-ass warts and all.
And learning a little humility.
-grendel drago
When I was fifteen, myself and my (then-)best friend started a corporation.
/usr/games directory. Ah, fickle youth...
He sucked at technical stuff; I sucked at sales. (I can't stand ripping people off, I empathize too much.) He said I wasn't pulling my weight, I said he was a pompous ass (not in those words), he told me he wanted me out, I went to the bank and withdrew everything but $0.25 from the checking account (about eight hundred dollars) and went home.
He took me to small claims court, where the judge spent five minutes on the case before throwing it out because we weren't a legal partnership---neither of us was old enough; he'd just known some people in the town hall.
I bought my first computer with that money (first that I owned; I'd been using my father's), and we never spoke to each other again.
He glared a lot, though.
Anyhoo, we set up a small NT network while we were in business. Charged a shitload of money. I don't think I'd even *heard* of Linux. Had played with SCO Unix, but just the
Point is, we were both immature assholes with technical expertise. Well, *I* had technical expertise. He had... salesmanship.
-grendel drago
-grendel drago
Damn it, moderators, not everything that mentions goatse.cx is a fucking troll!
I believe that pop media and talking heads are more offensive than silly smut. Is that trolling? I believe that offending the nobility of the human spirit is much more serious than offending your sense of sexual proportion.
Damn it, I was *serious*. And *not trolling*.
Assholes.
-grendel drago
Actually, I complained about my electrical engineering textbook because all of the reviews on Amazon said things like
``Professors! Do not use this book unless the screams of tortured students rest well upon your pillow!''
and
``This book brings only pain and suffering into the life of a student.''
I have to admit, the book *was* rather poorly written. Everyone complained about it. So there. Amazon reviews were right.
-grendel drago
Not so. We have casual Fridays here.
And I *feel* like a professional while wearing a tie. I've even mostly gotten used to it over the summer. I look like me, not like a kid stuffed into a monkey suit.
And I get mistaken for a manager in the grocery store if I stop for munchies on the way home. Sigh.
-grendel drago
IHBT. Bite me, I like a good rumble.
-grendel drago
On the other hand, the president is regularly called a fidiot by the press. Not so before the sixties.
It's okay for women to be single. Not so before the sixties.
Hot man sex is a wholesome family thing. Not so before the sixties.
In general, we don't trust our government. Not quite so before the sixties.
Men don't have to wear ties on the weekends. You won't get beat up for long hair (as often.) *Definitely* not so before the sixties.
And even though music *from* the sixties mostly sucked, much good stuff is descended from it. (Well, not punk. That came from England. And not blues or jazz or funk or hip-hop, that came from Harlem and, later, the ghetto. Which leaves... Britney. Never mind.)
And Joni Mitchell drives an SUV. Laugh and point.
-grendel drago
Ha! Colocation is what the ASSTR moved to after being kicked off the university at which they were previously eating bandwidth!
See? You *can* learn everything from pr0n.
Anyhoo, I'm halfway through undergraduate school; currently administering a network of fifty or so computers, eighty or so employees. My `boss' makes charts. They're important (for some reason), but I do the actual administering.
And you know what? Most of it is reading documentation and, failing that, asking questions of admins senior to me. All I needed, really, was basic familiarity with networking and the willingness to read and learn a lot.
Eh, that's my experience. I'm older than fifteen, though. And I don't pretend to be a senior admin of some kind. But I am a professional.
-grendel drago
Blame wealthy and overindulgent parents?
I dunno, maybe I'm just pointing to this because my parents were never particularly wealthy, and so I can jump up and down an say that Katz doesn't define me.
Then again, they were never particularly poor, either.
And anyways, pop culture is mindless drivel whether you're seven, seventeen or seventy. The real power of the internet is that youngsters can see the wholesome image of the goatse.cx guy opening his anus to accomodate a fire hose, instead of the shockingly immoral crap they put on the fidiot box.
Hey, I'm serious. At least the goatse.cx guy doesn't tell me to die of anorexia or beat on those weaker than me. Sodomize, perhaps... Ahem. I'm serious. Really.
-grendel drago
And the same Americans who won't go in a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance device, unless it's called an MRI. (Go to a physics department and ask what the non-accelerator device with the huge magnet is called. It's NMR.)
And the same Americans who are violently against cloning humans, but are **flabbergasted** to hear that identical twins are as identical as clones. (This one from a roommate of mine. He was *not* a science major.)
They're a bunch of useless bloody morons . Especially with regards to science, technology and anything more complicated than watching television.
-grendel drago
I can't believe Katz is actually comparing
a) Napster
b) Linux
as two facets of the Revolution to Gloriously Bring Down Big Corporations.
*Using* Napster and *writing* Linux are quite different. Yes, Jon Johansen is a young'un. But he's hardly typical. Most people that age care about
a) Britney Spears
b) Anna Kournikova
c) Dave Matthews
d) Counter Strike
There's no revolution, at least not the way Katz posits it. If anything, geniuses can be heard *before* they go to college.
But the common kid doesn't, never has, never should, never will change the world. And certainly not by using Napster!
-grendel drago
Err, no.
Law enforcement **is** responsible.
Because of our ludicrous War On (some) Drugs, drugs are a source of incredible potential profit. They are, in fact, the **only** way to not be poor and miserable for a lot of young, poor black men.
Well, they become poor and miserable once they're in jail, but it's not really all about forethought.
To sum up: if white boys wouldn't waltz into the hood and wave hundred dollar bills around, the locals wouldn't shoot each other over them.
``Completely unrelated''---the nerve!
-grendel drago
No, silly, so windows clients and linux clients can connect to a windows or linux server running NON-CRAPULENT NON-OBFUSCATED OPEN SOURCE SAMBA woo hoo yeah.
As in, you're no longer dependent on MS for your filesharing needs; there's a free fileserver that's a drop-in replacement.
-grendel drago
But those are **Windows** problems.
``Oh, so you mean you're a Macintosh user?''
No, no, open source geeks are very security conscious (or *should* be).
``Open source? Is that like in _Antitrust_?''
I give up.
*Thank* you!
While the situation may seem to call for hyperbole, we should all remain cognizant of the fact that one must be black, poor and smoke crack to be sent to the gulags here...
Uh, wait, that came out kind of funny.
-grendel drago
I think Winston was a little tweaked about America ignoring the incipient rise of a Real Live Evil Empire in Europe until Pearl Harbor got us into `War Mode', where we still are today.
``Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has **always** been at war with Eastasia...''
Churchill was experienced with idiot leaders---his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, was quite famous for appeasing Hitler. Of course, once he did his little Arthurian thing and saved England from the `Naaaawzis' (as he said it), the good folk of Britain promptly de-elected him. Schmucks.
You know, if France had had a Churchill, World War II would have probably been a lot shorter.
But to summarize: Churchill had good reason for calling the Americans slow to action---they were.
-grendel drago
Is anyone else chilled to the bone by the idea that AOL/Time Warner **owns** ``Happy Birthday''?
This isn't reality; this is the stuff of weird, weird dystopian fantasy.
At least they don't demand a buck from eveyone who sings is.
Can anyone provide a link to show that the song is, indeed, 0wned by AOL/Time Warner?
-grendel drago
How come everyone calls it `scrounging' or sometimes `dumpster diving'?
It was always `trashing' up at UConn...
-grendel drago
BigCorpNet: Would you like to sign up for BigCorpPremium service?
User: I already get 1Mbps DSL. Go away.
BigCorpNet: But with our PREMIUM service, your traffic will get PRIORITY!
User: Wait... you're buying bandwidth priority so you can sell me what I already had six months ago?
BigCorpNet: And all you can do is bend over and take it like a lady. Now shine my shoes, boy.
I really don't like this idea.
-grendel drago
Wait... someone hosting an expensive backup system over a PUBLIC NETWORK that they AREN'T PAYING FOR is complaining that they don't control it? Spare me!
Ha! Big businesses hide behind "Free market! Invisible hand!" in meatspace, but they're sorely outmatched inside the network. So they clamor for control to be handed over to them on a silver platter. Fuckwits.
The internet is like the telephone? Uh, try keeping up a correspondence with your buds in Sweden and Germany from California on twenty bucks a month.
"neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line" -- really? If by "run", they mean "tended by unpaid labor", then *maybe*.
If these corporations want a reliable network, they can build their own. No fucking way is control of the public net getting turned over to them for a pittance.
I'm *outraged* about this. You should be too, every one of you.
-grendel drago
I dunno... at least on the competition front, I've been sending in diffs to HOWTOs that have typos or errors in them. I don't tend to do that with most books, because I assume it's been corrected anyway...
And you neglected that, while the FDL may or may not be good business, it's definitely good documentation -- remember, not all documentation comes from O'Reilly...
(Okay, the really good stuff does. But the HOWTOs have been indispensible at my job, cutting learn-this and learn-that times in half, at least.)
Remember, publically created documentation has a place, too.
-grendel drago
Well, egg on me.
They released the source, but I still say they should harness the power of the LDP and include a bunch of their books with every distribution. (The relevant ones, y'know. I suppose I'd be uninterested in this book if I hadn't installed the kernel sources, for instance...)
It's just rather frustrating to see all these fragmented documentation efforts. It can be so much more effective if we work together... [insert patriotic chord here]
-grendel drago