This is important. My 5-year old loves her computer and the ability to just go to the browser and type in "animal planet" and have the right page come up. What's scary is all the ads she sees. She ignores ads on TV most of the time, but a simple banner ad draws her in. She's been one mistake away from getting NetNanny installed for a while. (I just wish there was a good open-source solution for this that didn't mean going back to a Linux/BSD firewall/proxy).
Then we just caught her looking around the house for a credit card to complete her order on an online candy store. We'd noticed her filling up a shopping cart there but thought it was cute. A $500 candy order wouldn't have been so cute.
I'd need a really good argument to not use Java. A decent Java developer is harder to find than a C++ or even a C# guy. Tools like Eclipse are free and there is a lot of free online documentation. And it's easier to build a quick GUI in Java than C++.
Has anyone actually played Paranoia? It's got a reputation for being entertaining to read but that's about it. I was set to run a game at a con once but we dropped it for some new game at the last minute.
The hospital line is a good one. My daughter was in a children's wing recently and they had two N64's, each with exactly one cartridge. She had a GameCube in her room, but they didn't have a single game for it anymore. (By the way, thanks you jerk-offs for ripping off donations from a hospital). If she'd stayed any longer, I was gonna go buy a couple older or used games and just donate them when we left.
When we hired a few months ago, I Googled (and looked at past employers, domain registries, etc.) for the 5 serious candidates and got significant results for two of them. They both looked much worse as a result of their online rants and other activities.
This is exactly why I use this and other disjoint usernames. I have managed to get almost all of my old usenet postings pulled from DejaNews / Google Groups. Only one of my 3 blogs has my name on it and my website's essentially blank, though I'm close to putting up a nice vanilla inoffensive site just to promote my resume.
Of course, you could turn the tables and use it to plant information. Make blog posts about how hard you worked this quarter, the big sale you closed, etc. Or even fake a background like making Usenet posts with a forged email address. Or whole fake company web sites listing you as CTO.
Tandem has a Unix-like "OSS" side now. It and especially the C++ compiler are not as rock-solid as the NSK side of the OS.
I'm really not sure of the value of running Linux. Any value on a Tandem is gained by running under NSK and accessing Gaurdian files, not OSS files. They'd probably gain more by just improving the OSS side and fixing that C++ compiler.
Mainframe culture and rigorous "change control,"...
In my experience, mainframe developers / system programmers are just as much "cowboys" as unix or Windows guys. They just have an OS and sysadmins that protect them from their mistakes. Turn an old mainframer loose on a Linux box as root or a Windows box as Administrator and he'll destroy it. Then while you reload the OS, he'll tell you all about how RACF security and proper file locking would have prevented this.
Another huge difference is that for non-mainframe people, a file is a file. You say file and I know I can just fopen it and read it, either byte by byte or line by line if it's text. It's never that simple for a mainframer. Is is fixed-block or variable block, what's the record length, etc. Then when you think you get that, they throw new file types at you like VSAM or FBA / VBA. It takes a while for a ascii-fed distributed geek to understand their obsession with a bazillion file types.
Then there's the accountability factor. When someone runs a unix app and it dies, you have them run it again to see the error message. A mainframer? He'll pull up sysout from a job that ran last week and show you the code from the ABEND.
I've also been surprised that, in the mainframe world, CPU cycles are still "expensive" and they really care about optimization more than any other platform. I mean, everyone wants performance to be acceptable, but mainframers tend to push past "acceptable". I constantly hear things like "you're using !FIVE PERCENT! of the CPU when you're processing transactions."
I know plenty of guys that leave their desk set up so you'd have no idea they left for the day. A jacket on the back of their chair, a cup of coffee next to the keyboard, an open document, keys on the desk, etc.
One I discovered is that you can take a full-sized screenshot and use Windows XP's built-in slideshow screensaver to display that as a locked screensaver. Hide your clock, take a shot of a Word document, and your locked, idle PC looks like you're in the middle of work.
I can see Solaris and Linux, but FreeBSD and OSX? What about AIX and HP-UX? There are surely many more developers working on AIX and HP-UX than FreeBSD and OSX combined unless you just count PHP web-heads.
For smaller stuff like that, I stack them on in/out box trays like this and run the wiring out the back. For larger stuff like systems, I use wire shelving like this. You can adjust the shelves to fit towers or rack-mount size boxes. Or at least, that's what I used to do. Now I have exactly one desktop with a UPS. The cable modem and WAP/router are hidden in the entertainment center.
Stop hiring Elementary Ed majors as teachers. Raise the standards for teachers and pay and you'll attract better teachers. I'd love to teach but there's no way I'll take a 60% pay cut to do it. I know a lot of bright people that are in the same situation. Well, that and they wouldn't put up with school administrators.
I'm on my second Palm (a Zire 71 now). I don't use it for email or web browsing now because this model isn't great for WiFi. But I have done both with it on dialup and it does work. I'd still rather have a full keyboard and large screen.
On my Palm, I keep my non-work calendar, read ebooks, listen to MP3s, edit text files and play games. I regularly hand it to my kids to keep them occupied for 10 minutes or so (the older one with games, the younger one with a rip of a Sesame Street video). I keep a large SD card in it that also acts as my USB key (with a Bonzai SD card reader).
I travelled recently for work for the first time in years and I couldn't believe I used to travel without a device like this. Wakeup call? My Palm alarm wakes me up every time. A long delay in Atlanta? I spent it listening to MP3's and reading Return of the King. In-flight I could use my Palm and enjoy a drink without even putting down the tray table.
I've met Joe, AB2M, and he's being an idiot and sharing some bitter grapes with his article. He came to Punta Gorda / Port Charlotte a week after landfall when major services were getting restored. He went to the idle "section manager" (Dave Armbrust, AE4MR) who was such an idiot that he's since been voted out (part of the reason Joe's so bitter). The post-Charley response was a clusterf-ck. Essentially all of the "leaders" yahoo-ed it down to the affected area and made a mess. Without coordination there were a lot of wasted ham resources. Their mismanagement had a lot to do with changes in the ham radio emergency structure in Florida.
I was in Punta Gorda 8 hours after landfall and hams were plenty busy for the first 72 hours. I later found out I was literally operating within half a mile of Dave, who was camped out on some air-conditioned communications trailer, turning hams away because he didn't have any tasks for them. Meanwhile, I have Red Cross and Salvation Army operating with no communications except volunteers driving between locations.
I know the hams that set up the Forestry trailer and Joe's again full of it. Those hams got a sheriff's department back on the air and kept them working. Those particular hams and others train and practice setting up those communication trailers. Sure emergency services folks could have set it up, but they were a little busy and short-handed at the time. It freed up at least an extra battalion chief and an engine company.
As Jeanne passed, a local ambulance company (not fire-rescue but BLS) lost their repeater for about an hour. I personally know two of about five hams that worked together to pass messages and dispatch some of ambulances from the shelters they were located at.
I'll agree that the subsequent hurricanes left little for hams to do because of all the resources that had swarmed to Florida by then. I hope a lot of those resources stayed. Personally, I'd love it if a hurricane could come through and hams are never needed.
Slashdot Mirror
The physical media might be near death, but I work on modern C++ code that reads and writes fixed block EBCDIC files.
I think he's shooting for the ultimate goal: a dupe right after the original.
Hate to break it to you, but Craigslist has been there first. Heck, localized Usenet groups were around before Craig even got email.
Just use "me" as the username, without the @gmail.com. I got on with GAIM just fine.
Is that like a Debian package format or something? Anyone have a link to an RPM?
I hate to Slashdot them, but there are some really good collections of radar and other products here and here
This is important. My 5-year old loves her computer and the ability to just go to the browser and type in "animal planet" and have the right page come up. What's scary is all the ads she sees. She ignores ads on TV most of the time, but a simple banner ad draws her in. She's been one mistake away from getting NetNanny installed for a while. (I just wish there was a good open-source solution for this that didn't mean going back to a Linux/BSD firewall/proxy).
Then we just caught her looking around the house for a credit card to complete her order on an online candy store. We'd noticed her filling up a shopping cart there but thought it was cute. A $500 candy order wouldn't have been so cute.
I'd need a really good argument to not use Java. A decent Java developer is harder to find than a C++ or even a C# guy. Tools like Eclipse are free and there is a lot of free online documentation. And it's easier to build a quick GUI in Java than C++.
We always found Car Wars funny enough.
The hospital line is a good one. My daughter was in a children's wing recently and they had two N64's, each with exactly one cartridge. She had a GameCube in her room, but they didn't have a single game for it anymore. (By the way, thanks you jerk-offs for ripping off donations from a hospital). If she'd stayed any longer, I was gonna go buy a couple older or used games and just donate them when we left.
This is exactly why I use this and other disjoint usernames. I have managed to get almost all of my old usenet postings pulled from DejaNews / Google Groups. Only one of my 3 blogs has my name on it and my website's essentially blank, though I'm close to putting up a nice vanilla inoffensive site just to promote my resume.
Of course, you could turn the tables and use it to plant information. Make blog posts about how hard you worked this quarter, the big sale you closed, etc. Or even fake a background like making Usenet posts with a forged email address. Or whole fake company web sites listing you as CTO.
I think I'll su and "kill -9 0" on one of the offsite AIX boxes that we can't remotely reboot. That way they get to leave early.
Apache Geronimo is probably going to gain a lot of ground, especially with IBM backing it.
I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and none of the grad schools I looked at required a GRE Computer Science score.
Next someone will actually start arming bears.
Tandem has a Unix-like "OSS" side now. It and especially the C++ compiler are not as rock-solid as the NSK side of the OS.
I'm really not sure of the value of running Linux. Any value on a Tandem is gained by running under NSK and accessing Gaurdian files, not OSS files. They'd probably gain more by just improving the OSS side and fixing that C++ compiler.
In my experience, mainframe developers / system programmers are just as much "cowboys" as unix or Windows guys. They just have an OS and sysadmins that protect them from their mistakes. Turn an old mainframer loose on a Linux box as root or a Windows box as Administrator and he'll destroy it. Then while you reload the OS, he'll tell you all about how RACF security and proper file locking would have prevented this.
Another huge difference is that for non-mainframe people, a file is a file. You say file and I know I can just fopen it and read it, either byte by byte or line by line if it's text. It's never that simple for a mainframer. Is is fixed-block or variable block, what's the record length, etc. Then when you think you get that, they throw new file types at you like VSAM or FBA / VBA. It takes a while for a ascii-fed distributed geek to understand their obsession with a bazillion file types.
Then there's the accountability factor. When someone runs a unix app and it dies, you have them run it again to see the error message. A mainframer? He'll pull up sysout from a job that ran last week and show you the code from the ABEND.
I've also been surprised that, in the mainframe world, CPU cycles are still "expensive" and they really care about optimization more than any other platform. I mean, everyone wants performance to be acceptable, but mainframers tend to push past "acceptable". I constantly hear things like "you're using !FIVE PERCENT! of the CPU when you're processing transactions."
I know plenty of guys that leave their desk set up so you'd have no idea they left for the day. A jacket on the back of their chair, a cup of coffee next to the keyboard, an open document, keys on the desk, etc.
One I discovered is that you can take a full-sized screenshot and use Windows XP's built-in slideshow screensaver to display that as a locked screensaver. Hide your clock, take a shot of a Word document, and your locked, idle PC looks like you're in the middle of work.
I can see Solaris and Linux, but FreeBSD and OSX? What about AIX and HP-UX? There are surely many more developers working on AIX and HP-UX than FreeBSD and OSX combined unless you just count PHP web-heads.
For smaller stuff like that, I stack them on in/out box trays like this and run the wiring out the back. For larger stuff like systems, I use wire shelving like this. You can adjust the shelves to fit towers or rack-mount size boxes. Or at least, that's what I used to do. Now I have exactly one desktop with a UPS. The cable modem and WAP/router are hidden in the entertainment center.
Stop hiring Elementary Ed majors as teachers. Raise the standards for teachers and pay and you'll attract better teachers. I'd love to teach but there's no way I'll take a 60% pay cut to do it. I know a lot of bright people that are in the same situation. Well, that and they wouldn't put up with school administrators.
I always put my "Intel Inside" stickers on the trash cans. We were a SPARC lab back then.
On my Palm, I keep my non-work calendar, read ebooks, listen to MP3s, edit text files and play games. I regularly hand it to my kids to keep them occupied for 10 minutes or so (the older one with games, the younger one with a rip of a Sesame Street video). I keep a large SD card in it that also acts as my USB key (with a Bonzai SD card reader).
I travelled recently for work for the first time in years and I couldn't believe I used to travel without a device like this. Wakeup call? My Palm alarm wakes me up every time. A long delay in Atlanta? I spent it listening to MP3's and reading Return of the King. In-flight I could use my Palm and enjoy a drink without even putting down the tray table.
I was in Punta Gorda 8 hours after landfall and hams were plenty busy for the first 72 hours. I later found out I was literally operating within half a mile of Dave, who was camped out on some air-conditioned communications trailer, turning hams away because he didn't have any tasks for them. Meanwhile, I have Red Cross and Salvation Army operating with no communications except volunteers driving between locations.
I know the hams that set up the Forestry trailer and Joe's again full of it. Those hams got a sheriff's department back on the air and kept them working. Those particular hams and others train and practice setting up those communication trailers. Sure emergency services folks could have set it up, but they were a little busy and short-handed at the time. It freed up at least an extra battalion chief and an engine company.
As Jeanne passed, a local ambulance company (not fire-rescue but BLS) lost their repeater for about an hour. I personally know two of about five hams that worked together to pass messages and dispatch some of ambulances from the shelters they were located at.
I'll agree that the subsequent hurricanes left little for hams to do because of all the resources that had swarmed to Florida by then. I hope a lot of those resources stayed. Personally, I'd love it if a hurricane could come through and hams are never needed.
2004 hurricane season in Florida.