Here, let me send you something useful that you can't use without violating the license on the front. How can you evaluate a book without opening it (other than virtually opening it at amazon)? I evaluate non-fiction books, like most people, by several criteria: availability of a table of contents, the existance of an index, whether the index actually works to find the things I need to know, and sample content of one or more pages for the first and last chapters. The physician can't even evaluate the book without agreeing to the legalese stipulated by the shrink-wrap agreement.
The first report of this phenomena to The Gripe Line came a few months ago when a reader who is a physician received an unsolicited tome in the mail entitled Geriatric Pharmaceutical Care Guidelines, 2002 Edition, from Omnicare. "This book arrived wrapped in plastic with a shrinkwrap license on the front," the doctor wrote. "It plainly says that by breaking the seal you agree to the terms of the license and if you don't agree you should return the book unopened. Is this what software licensing has led us to? This license says the book remains the property of Omnicare. Will they come up with a way to remotely disable the book if someone else reads it?"
What's sad is that it's probably a somewhat useful book, and then Omnicare's overactive legal department decided to get involved. What's really sick is that I can think of several ways to remotely disable a book if someone doesn't agree to the license. [Of course, not agreeing would have to trip a physical switch, but... ]
And yes, this is exactly what software licensing has led us to. Information, it would seem, wants to be shrink-wrapped.
My fiancee is not a good cook. There are a few things she cooks pretty well, but she just doesn't have the talent of someone who really knows how to cook....
How can a pretty bad cook learn the essentials of good cooking?
By spending time with her fiance, discussing cooking? By talking about the things that make her cooking good/bad/indifferent? By not having an a-hole of a fiance complain about her cooking publicly? *cursing*
Relationships are built on trust and communication. Not "Honey, you make the worst crap I've ever tasted" communication, but "I know you worked hard on this dish, but it's [too salty|got mushrooms|kinda funny looking]." Although sometimes, walking into the kitchen and saying "What did you do to that rice?" is needed.
Cooking is an art. It takes imagination and self-confidence. If the cookbook says one thing, and you want to do another, and your bf/gf has bitched about your cooking in the past, you won't feel free to experiment.
Disclaimer: I am a pretty good cook, and so is my bf. We actually discuss what makes the meal that we're eating good, so that we both learn. Sometimes I screw up, sometimes he screws up, but we still learn in the process. We learn things like the ginger jar has no shaker top so be careful, cayenne and chili powder make everything taste better, and it's really hard to screw up a burrito.
Maybe you'll just have to do the lion's share of the cooking. Maybe your next vacation can include a trip to a cooking school for you and your fiancee.
Tried BSD. Was too used to default settings (BASH, basic fs structure, etc) from Linux, decided relearning or reconfiguring that was too much trouble for essentially the same software as a result.
A lot of BSD (and Solaris) geeks react the same way to Linux. You were asking what the selling points of OS X were over Linux, and for a BSD fan, one of those selling points is "it's not Linux."
What's a geek who refuses to learn something new? Dead. Especially with the job market as tight as it is. If you can afford the luxury of deciding not to learn a new skill, you probably can't afford to graduate from high school/college and move out of your parents' house.
ichimunki is why I don't talk OS's with people. "I'm used to it my way! I'm obviously right! You don't know what you're talking about! I'm so leet!" Where's the expected geek curiosity? Where's the expected "Hey, this is new and shiny, I want to tear it apart to see the insides"?
Maybe I'm just too old (at 26) to deal with the younger geeks without a chuckle at their naive view of operating systems. Now if only I had some official UNIX suspenders (I can't grow the beard).
Golias is perfectly justified in the points given; of course, I'm a bit biased, as I'm saving my pennies for an ibook at the time... and not one running Yellow Dog Linux.;)
Amen. Investors are really the least-impacted by this. Waah, your 401k dropped through the floor.
The people who work for worldcom, the people who work for companies that contract to worldcom, their families, their communities will be affected more negatively than 99.9% of the investors.
Having just survived a RIF, where we lost/are losing 1/2 of our staff (three waves: now, September, and January), I've gotta say that all in all, it sucks. I 'lost' two good friends in layoffs, and the only reason I was kept is because my skillset covers two other peoples' skillsets. As I've never stayed anywhere long enough for options to vest, it doesn't concern me too much that all of my options are so far underwater that they're rolling down into the marianas trench.
Investing is speculation. It's gambling, as much as playing blackjack at a Las Vegas casino is gambling. If you haven't diversified enough to protect your assets, it's your own fault.
If you've invested in your company because you believe in it, just remember that it's the higher-ups who know exactly how much money your company has or doesn't have. Remember that you should keep a diversified portfolio in case Enron or WorldCom happens to your company. You never know where the next surprise is coming from.
In style it is similar to Smail 3, but its facilities are more extensive, and in particular it has some defences against mail bombs and unsolicited junk mail in the form of options for refusing messages from particular hosts, networks, or senders.
It's not just a spam filter, it's a GPL'ed MTA. Perhaps that's why no one mentioned it. It works, though. Well, for the most part. I just re-activated my hotjobs account, and now I'm getting resume spam, but the offers to enlarge my penis (erm, yeah, that won't work at all), enlarge my breasts (uh.... that's not useful. I don't want to have to wear a back brace, or buy custom-made undies), re-finance my house, sell my children to Zimbabwe, or CHECK OUT THESE HOT TEEN SLUTS have actually stopped appearing in my inbox.
Do you know what construction workers get paid? I didn't know anything about road construction expenses until I found out that wages in road construction are similar (per hour) to sysadmin-ing. Sometimes more.
My aunt (who is a business teacher) used to say that if you don't learn computers, the only job you'll be prepared for is to stand in the middle of the road and hold the 'stop|slow' sign. After my bf explained how much an hour people who do that make, she has re-examined her example.
Construction workers don't get calls in the middle of the night, or on weekends, or holidays. Construction workers don't have people whining at them that the nail they put in is at an 87 degree angle, etc. or that their 'users' can't figure out how to use their new wall.
fifth, parents should spy on there children from time to time.
spy: to watch secretly usually for hostile purposes
Wow. You keep saying that parents should spy on their kids. That's not exactly true. Parents should talk to their kids about where they went, with whom, etc. Parents should know their childrens' friends, and their friends' parents, but spying is just an invasion of privacy which gets parents nowhere. How many sitcoms have episodes where the teen gets pissed off because the parent reads their diary/finds their stash of pr0n/finds their whatever they're not allowed to have? Why so many? Because that's how teens react.
I agree that new drivers (no matter their age) are inherently bad drivers, because they lack experience. Some drivers learn the rules of the road faster than others. Some drivers never learn. Putting a box like this in the car would be beneficial to new drivers, and as long as the data were collected ethically, for reasons specified in the data-collection contract, fine.
I drive a GM car that has a black box in it. If I get into an accident with someone stupid enough to blame me for it (AGAIN), and I have the proof to vindicate myself, why wouldn't I want to use it?
>Double Bonus: Chicks dig it -- you've got to give them a reason to look past your double-thick glasses, right?
Erm, yeah. Chicks dig guys who cook. I find this as amusing as when my bf told my brother "Chicks like stuffed animals."
If you haven't caught on by now, not all chicks dig guys who <insert activity here>. While it's true that some chicks like guys who cook, and guys who bring them stuffed animals, it's not a singular activity that "chicks" like. Most "chicks" like guys who are interesting, and who enjoy life.
Of course, my guy cooks, cleans, vacuums, mops, sews, does woodwork, metalwork, road construction, and sysadmins and codes on the side.
On that note, we're two of a kind; I sysadmin, script and code some, but I also quilt, crochet, draw, and of course, cook.
The cat, however, is the least talented of us, by simply being an expert in sleeping and chasing his tail.
More to the topic of Alton Brown, I think he's pretty cool, and his shows are always interesting. He's found a way to present pretty dry information (like how to cook fish, or fry chicken) that's been done by everyone and their brother, from Emeril to Martin Yan, and make it funny, interesting, and educational. I always learn something, even if it's not what the main topic's about.
If Alton Brown (or his script writer) put as much of himself into the book as he does for the show, it's probably worth buying. I'm not a big cookbook fan, myself. I prefer to cook by smell and taste, and by the "what's in the cupboard" rule. I eat simply, which is what I like about how Alton presents things. He usually doesn't cook food that requires its own weird set of utensils. Who owns olive forks or asparagus tongs or boullion spoons these days anyway?
>I have Solaris for my servers, Linux for my firewall/router, and Windows for games and office stuff. And, I can still beat the $1100 price of the Mac you quoted. I have a hard time justifying buying a propriatary OS that runs on propriatary hardware.
Me too, kinda. At home, between the two of us (myself and my
otherperson),
we have 11 machines. Most of them are SUN boxen. Old SUN boxen (U1, SS5, SS20, IPX, IPC), but the hardware still works fast enough for our needs. For those interested, we also have an HP workstation, an SGI Indigo, and a Fujitsu SPARC-based server.
Currently, we only have 5 machines up on our network, 6 when I bring home my laptop from work. The SS5 runs OpenBSD, the SS20 is my otherperson's workstation, he plays with Yahoo! Messenger on his laptop (and views pages that don't work in Galeon), the U1 is where our home directories live, and my PC is where I check my mail and surf the web. I run Windows 98. My laptop is Win2k, because it's work's, and that's what they run.
Why do I run windows? Not because it's "A Good Thing" as Martha Stewart would say, but because it's good enough. All I really do at home is surf the web and send email. If I want to work on scripts, code, etc. I have puTTY to any of the unix boxen. I also have the Win98 system because my family/less adept friends like to send Microsoft Office documents every now and again, and it's nice to be able to read them.
Yes, I know there are cloned office suites that will open Office Docs kindasorta (some better than others). Yes, I know that there are a myriad of choices of Linux distributions and *BSD's. Yes, I know all of that, but I use Windows because I'm lazy. By the time I get home, I want to spend time with my otherperson and my cat, not spend all weekend trying to figure out why [insert hardware here] doesn't work with my [Operating System] box.
I've been through the suffering that is Galeon on Solaris, and the strange voodoo that my otherperson had to go through to get Mozilla working. I know how frustrating it is to compile something and have it not work, not work as designed, or work as designed, but not the way that you thought it was supposed to work. I play with computers as a hobby, and as a career. When I just want something to do a simple task, such as getting my e-mail, or surfing the 'net, all I want to do is click. I don't want to deal with configuring a desktop environment, learning the 12 different button combinations I have access to, etc. I just want to click, read my mail, and get on with my life.
Right now, I'm saving my pennies to get a Mac, so that I can have ease of use with the Unix I enjoy so much.
>lets see.. take perfect pristine water and then add it to ground up beans and end up drinking dirty black water...
Yeah, why do that when you can add cola syrup and get... dirty black water... Or steep tea leaves in it and get... dirty brown water. Wait, maybe just this cocoa powder... nope. Dirty brown water again, and this time it's opaque. Darn.
>and why do people drink decaf?!?!
Some people get the shakes after drinking too much caffeine, and since they've been drinking coffee every morning for the last 10 years, it's a ritual. At least, that's my theory. Personally, if I have decaf, I get really pissed off, because I get the coffee taste, but not the nice rush of a sizable dose of caffeine (decaf does have *some* caffeine left in it). Maybe it's all those video games I've been playing...
>> just "Wizard" every action the user may need to take.
>I *haaaaate* those things. I don't *want* to click
>"Next" seventeen times.
Worse is when you have instructions for administrative tasks where some lovely person (two or three teams ago) has instructed you to Click Next three times.
We're currently updating our NT- and 2K-related work instructions, and any time I come across that kind of schtuff, it gets deleted.
Of course, this also means that my WI's begin with: This WI assumes that the user has Domain Admin privilages, and has experience installing Windows applications.
If only manuals were normally written with some intended audience in mind. I think it would work much better if there were a tiered approach to manuals: Basic Tasks, Advanced Tasks, and an index where you can reference where to find the stupid thing that you're trying to do. The lack of a good index will keep me from buying a book. If only it would keep people from buying Microsoft products. <Insert "Stupid Clippy!" remark here.>
The nice thing is that it lets me get a second degree at my own pace whilst still working. Either I can just take the courses at the CC, "cash in" the credits and come out with an AA degree, or can transfer the credits over and finish up at a "full" university to get a BA, still part-time.
<AOL>METOO</AOL>I've got to admit that when I was a young pup just out of high school (not that I'm THAT old now...), I thought community college/technical college was a joke, and it's forced down students' throats in high school that if you want to get anywhere in life, you must have a college degree.
What I really needed was someone to sit me down and say, "Look. College is a bunch of stuff that's just like high school but ten times worse, and you'll be bored and disgusted with it. You won't start independant thinking courses until your Junior year. You'd be better off taking a vocational degree at a tech college"
What ended up happening was that I flunked out of one college, and got fed up with another, and started working. I built up my knowledgebase during my downtime at work, and voila! I'm doing NT administration because the job market sucks for "pure" Unix Admins where I am. So, I'm going back to college, taking a course in C at the community college near my house for US$11/Credit Unit + fees (~110 for the class I'm in), instead of taking one at the University near my work for US$400-700 + fees.
It's not too expensive, and it keeps me on my mental toes after a long day of clicking 'OK' and 'Next'.
Not only can I cash in and come out with an AA, or transfer the credits over to a university, but sometimes the community colleges offer certificate programs. The place I go offers certificates in Unix Admin, Cisco (with test prep for the Cisco certs), Database Admin, and even Video Game Programming in their CS discipline.
It's from an animated short called "Rejected" from last year's Spike and Mike, which, unfortunately, wasn't out on the last [insert video format here] last time I checked.
(anyway...) This got coverage, and the shaker we got in southern California a couple months ago... nothing. Not that I have anything against northern California, I used to live/work/eat/breathe/sleep there before the dot-bust. My last gig before layoffs was in Morgan Hill, right above Gilroy, oddly enough.
Where I work now, we have the logging, but no one checks the logs unless someone is severely screwing off.
I've worked at places where the logs were checked quarterly, or on a user-by-user basis. This kind of checking was used to add blocks to the proxy server, as well as to give warnings to users.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've worked at one site where a sysadmin was running a pr0n site on the company dime. (Server hosted at the company's site, static IP and internet access provided by the company.)
In all of my history in IT, no one has questioned my use of the internet. Even when I was a consultant. If they ever do, I have an answer for them. Sometimes problems get solved by not thinking about them. I come up with really interesting and useful solutions to problems when I background the problem.
Of course, I have always gotten my work done, and don't let my surfing take precedence to my real work.
Do NOT use cutesy names. (Homer, Marge, etc etc etc). That works fine when you've got a lab of a dozen machines. When you've got thousands it's silly and unmangeable. I know I don't expect I'll be able to remember where one our of 5000 hosts is just because the name is "mickeymouse". Imagine just how functional that is for somebody who's new to your NOC?
Put down the coffee and back away from the keyboard. I've seen a few different naming conventions, and here's what some people found to be logical...
Chaos: Anyone can have any name they want as long as it's not taken. This was the same company that let users have their workstations' root passwords as well as allow users not to give IT those same root passwords.
IT Rules: "Help Desk" chooses names according to their whims -- usually grouped by department. Our test bench was (mostly) Back to the Future themed (biff, marty, mcfly...), our machines were grouped per department (firstbase, secondbase, thirdbase, slider).
Grouped by machine type: NetApps at one place I worked were all named after military bases (NorthIsland, Miramar, etc.), while we had a sim farm that was sequentially named (001-600). Our core servers were marge, homer, bart, etc.
By physical location: This worked for one of the places I worked, because it told PC Support where a machine was, as well as its IP. MB002 was 10.x.x.2, located in the Main Building. Printers were MB002PTR 10.y.y.2. When machines were moved to another building, they were renamed and re-addressed.
By user: Where I work now, our machines are named for the user working on them, and more recently, for the OS on the machine. jsmith-nt or jsmith-w2k.
By function: The servers at one place I worked were named for their function and location... ie. sfapp01, the first app server for san francisco, sdmsg18, the eighteenth messaging server in san diego, etc.
By Asset Tag: Sure, this makes DNS lookups difficult, but you know where all of your assets are...
At home, my bf and I disagree on naming conventions... I have fyrebird, nightbird, and dodobird (my Obligatory Windows PC) and he has Ten, Tita, and other anime-based characters.
It's all in what makes sense for your organization, and the IT group specifically. Users will get used to pretty much anything.
Personally I'd encode them using one or two characters to denote the platform ( i = intel, s = sun, h = hp, blah blah). Then use the additional characters to denote room, rack, etc etc.
I spent the last few weeks doing the rack/computer room shuffle of about a dozen machines. If I had to rename them each time I moved them from one rack to the next, or from one room to the other, I'd have gone batty.
Paraphrasing: You don't have to enjoy your job. That's why they call it work. The idea that work is supposed to be fulfilling is a new idea that's basically hogwash.
While I'm usually not one to butt heads with Savage, if you're not getting something other than a paycheck out of your job, whether it's CEO or janitor, it's not worth it.
Of course, it almost goes without saying** that you get out of something what you put into it. If your skillset makes you a good Computer person, but you're scrubbing floors for a living, if you go to work every day with the attitude that you hate your job, no one appreciates you, etc.... you will get nothing out of it. However, if you go into your job to be the best damn janitor, programmer, doctor, lawyer, firefighter, administrative assistant, etc. you will feel satisfied with the day is done.
** It would go without saying if common sense were actually common.
Of course if I called to tell this to Savage, he'd most likely call me a liberal, and I would hang up on him, enforcing his theory that liberals are wusses.
-- the kshgoddess
PS: I'm not some fresh-out-of-college, no-real-world-experience sunny optimist. I'm a realist, with real life experience (both as an employee and as a consultant) behind me.
Apologies in advance; I'm in a twisted mood. It's Friday.
rlsnyder asks Has SPAM really decreased universally thanks to these lists? Well, it is hard to say. Spam has increased monotonically since its inception, and it continues to grow. It is possible that blacklists have helped lower the rate of growth.
<Stupid User Mode>I don't see how writing things down on black pieces of paper will keep spam from decreasing. The only thing that will decrease spam is consumers refusing to buy their homogenized meat!</Stupid User Mode>
Seriously, the concept of blacklists is good, it's just that the implementation differs from site to site.
If admins want to update their blacklists from the masters once a year, it's their choice. If they want to keep old virus definitions, it's their choice.
If you installed your mailserver with default settings and you're now on the blacklist, it's up to you to convince each list, and each administrator that you were a bad administrator, and you'll never do it again.
It's up to the individual adminsitrator to say yea or nay.
Personally, I enjoy getting spam; it lets me see how stupid people really are. Because I'm a geek, I get 'branded' middle-aged and male. Lots of pr0n spam, lots of 'increase your genetalia' spam, and 'look 20 years younger'... erm, yeah. I don't want to go back to elementary school.
Disclaimer: I am not a coder; I am a sysadmin who scripts and codes when necessary.
Yes! There's hitting the nail on the head. My current manager is an NT guy with a LOT of Compaq hardware experience. I'm a hybrid administrator (unfortunately doing more NT than Unix right now) with considerable experience with several Unix flavors on different hardware platforms, with a smattering of NT. I'm constantly looking for a way to explain Unix terms in NT terminology. "I want to remove these things from/etc/inetd.conf -- kind of like changing the services to manual in NT."
My management now needs to be beaten with cluesticks, other than that, though. It's my strong belief that managers should have a clue. They shouldn't put themselves above or beside a team, because you can't lead from outside of a group. They should shield their team from the politics, listen to their team, and set reasonable expectations... we got a list of 1400 users to check against an exchange distribution list at 2:30 this afternoon that was supposed to 'get done by Monday morning'. They've frustrated me enough that I've written 2 essays (and posted them on my website) on how IT departments should be run.
The best manager I ever had-- and I've had 9 in the past 5 years (consulting)-- had the unique ability to assess people's strengths, and put us in roles that used those strengths. He let us do our jobs, for the most part, and even encouraged us to have an internal IRC server. We had weekly meetings, and we felt like a team, even though we rarely ever saw each other face-to-face. He understood how to play the management games so that we looked good, and so that we were performing at our best. We had Team Goals, which made sure that all of us knew what he expected of us, and when he set goals to show to people outside of our department, he first made sure that these goals were readily attainable, even with delays.
Dude, I worked in a hospital that had wireless access points & a fully functional wireless network. Even in the Heart Center. The access points didn't interfere with pacemakers or other sensitive medical devices. The only wards that didn't have wireless laptops were the ICU's... because the rooms were so full of equipment already. We ended up using Citrix clients on their monitoring devices (which would switch back in case of emergency) for these nurses to use the same system as the rest of the hospital for patient monitoring, etc.
I remember doing a presentation on our RF wireless system to the rest of IT -- we used a company that used FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) technology. Safe, effective, and took interference better than DSSS (Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum).
If wireless access points are safe enough for use in hospitals, why are these people up in arms?
Can you say psychosomatic? Can you say hypochondriac? I knew you could.
College is *not* the only answer. Neither is tech school, or any other training course. I've been on the temp end; at 20, I was filing (moving large pieces of paper that had small pieces of paper in them into alphabetical order) for $7/hr for a food services company. I hated it. I had the skills to move into a reception job, or a data-entry job, even then... Word, Excel, PowerPoint, 80+wpm keyboarding, etc.
I had also gone to ~2 years of college, which I also hated. I saw it as a very expensive waste of my time.
I left the temp company to work for an ISP, at minimum wage. I was the *anything you can think of having to do at an ISP* person. I answered phones, signed users up, helped them get configured (and reconfigured), handled billing, and anything else you can think of. I left there after a year, with a few more skills, but nothing special. I got the job because I taught myself html.
Long, long, long story short, I've been a PC Support Tech, a Unix Admin, and a contract sysadmin in Silicon Valley during the boom. I'm now a sysadmin, and I got there by teaching myself how to do most of what I do. A book here, a book there, man pages, FAQ's, and online documentation have been more useful to me than any of the classes I took in college.
It's a myth that you have to go to college to get the education you need for a good job. Especially in computers. You just have to be motivated to learn.
A college education may get your foot in the door, but if you can't do the work, no matter if it's accounting, system administration, or human resources, it's just another piece of paper.
While I support the concept that you have to learn and better yourself, not everyone who doesn't have a college degree is unemployable.
... to see the small blonde woman in the Ford Explorer drinking coffee, on her cell phone, yelling at her kids, swerving down the road?
"I'm sorry officer, I was having my car do my nails, watching a video, talking to my broker, being reminded of a meeting, and trying to get little Billy to stay buckled in his seatbelt when I looked over and smashed into that other car"
I mean, I like my computer(s) as much as the next person, but... I can think about getting coffee and gas in the morning without something reminding me. I know it's supposed to be 'freeing' to not have to think about the basic schtuff, but if you're so spaced that you don't remember coffee... just stay home.
I own several computers, and work has supplied me with more, because, well, I'm a geek, but having a computer decide when to hit the snooze button, etc. sounds like it's taking away my freedom to choose whether to be late to work or not, which way to go to work, etc. I don't want my alarm clock to make my coffee, or fluff my pillows. I don't want my shirt to know that I have a meeting in an hour. I don't want my shoes to remind me that they're getting worn out and there's a sale just down the street. It's my decision, and if I wanted to be nagged all the time, I'd buy shareware and live with a family member.
Just lending my two cents (I need them back, though.)
It's very odd to make those types of sweeping generalizations... I myself key fairly quickly on the normal keyboard at work, but have a totally different pattern of keying on my natural keyboard at home, because I'm more relaxed, not doing work, etc. Ditto for the optical mouse/trackball differences between work & home.
I almost take offense at the channel-surfing generality. I'm a notorious channel-surfer during commercials (and during shows, sometimes, too). Does that mean I'd get jock strap commercials? Viagra?
Then again, as one of my co-workers pointed out: "Sysadmins don't have sex. Hey wait, that works both ways."
Slashdot Mirror
That's so wrong it makes my head hurt.
Here, let me send you something useful that you can't use without violating the license on the front. How can you evaluate a book without opening it (other than virtually opening it at amazon)? I evaluate non-fiction books, like most people, by several criteria: availability of a table of contents, the existance of an index, whether the index actually works to find the things I need to know, and sample content of one or more pages for the first and last chapters. The physician can't even evaluate the book without agreeing to the legalese stipulated by the shrink-wrap agreement.
What's sad is that it's probably a somewhat useful book, and then Omnicare's overactive legal department decided to get involved. What's really sick is that I can think of several ways to remotely disable a book if someone doesn't agree to the license. [Of course, not agreeing would have to trip a physical switch, but... ]
And yes, this is exactly what software licensing has led us to. Information, it would seem, wants to be shrink-wrapped.
By spending time with her fiance, discussing cooking? By talking about the things that make her cooking good/bad/indifferent? By not having an a-hole of a fiance complain about her cooking publicly? *cursing*
Relationships are built on trust and communication. Not "Honey, you make the worst crap I've ever tasted" communication, but "I know you worked hard on this dish, but it's [too salty|got mushrooms|kinda funny looking]." Although sometimes, walking into the kitchen and saying "What did you do to that rice?" is needed.
Cooking is an art. It takes imagination and self-confidence. If the cookbook says one thing, and you want to do another, and your bf/gf has bitched about your cooking in the past, you won't feel free to experiment.
Disclaimer: I am a pretty good cook, and so is my bf. We actually discuss what makes the meal that we're eating good, so that we both learn. Sometimes I screw up, sometimes he screws up, but we still learn in the process. We learn things like the ginger jar has no shaker top so be careful, cayenne and chili powder make everything taste better, and it's really hard to screw up a burrito.
Maybe you'll just have to do the lion's share of the cooking. Maybe your next vacation can include a trip to a cooking school for you and your fiancee.
This comes to mind, although it'd probably be closer to this.
What's a geek who refuses to learn something new? Dead. Especially with the job market as tight as it is. If you can afford the luxury of deciding not to learn a new skill, you probably can't afford to graduate from high school/college and move out of your parents' house.
ichimunki is why I don't talk OS's with people. "I'm used to it my way! I'm obviously right! You don't know what you're talking about! I'm so leet!" Where's the expected geek curiosity? Where's the expected "Hey, this is new and shiny, I want to tear it apart to see the insides"?
Maybe I'm just too old (at 26) to deal with the younger geeks without a chuckle at their naive view of operating systems. Now if only I had some official UNIX suspenders (I can't grow the beard).
Golias is perfectly justified in the points given; of course, I'm a bit biased, as I'm saving my pennies for an ibook at the time... and not one running Yellow Dog Linux. ;)
Amen. Investors are really the least-impacted by this. Waah, your 401k dropped through the floor.
The people who work for worldcom, the people who work for companies that contract to worldcom, their families, their communities will be affected more negatively than 99.9% of the investors.
Having just survived a RIF, where we lost/are losing 1/2 of our staff (three waves: now, September, and January), I've gotta say that all in all, it sucks. I 'lost' two good friends in layoffs, and the only reason I was kept is because my skillset covers two other peoples' skillsets. As I've never stayed anywhere long enough for options to vest, it doesn't concern me too much that all of my options are so far underwater that they're rolling down into the marianas trench.
Investing is speculation. It's gambling, as much as playing blackjack at a Las Vegas casino is gambling. If you haven't diversified enough to protect your assets, it's your own fault.
If you've invested in your company because you believe in it, just remember that it's the higher-ups who know exactly how much money your company has or doesn't have. Remember that you should keep a diversified portfolio in case Enron or WorldCom happens to your company. You never know where the next surprise is coming from.
exim. From their front page...
It's not just a spam filter, it's a GPL'ed MTA. Perhaps that's why no one mentioned it. It works, though. Well, for the most part. I just re-activated my hotjobs account, and now I'm getting resume spam, but the offers to enlarge my penis (erm, yeah, that won't work at all), enlarge my breasts (uh.... that's not useful. I don't want to have to wear a back brace, or buy custom-made undies), re-finance my house, sell my children to Zimbabwe, or CHECK OUT THESE HOT TEEN SLUTS have actually stopped appearing in my inbox.
Amen.
Do you know what construction workers get paid? I didn't know anything about road construction expenses until I found out that wages in road construction are similar (per hour) to sysadmin-ing. Sometimes more.
My aunt (who is a business teacher) used to say that if you don't learn computers, the only job you'll be prepared for is to stand in the middle of the road and hold the 'stop|slow' sign. After my bf explained how much an hour people who do that make, she has re-examined her example.
Construction workers don't get calls in the middle of the night, or on weekends, or holidays. Construction workers don't have people whining at them that the nail they put in is at an 87 degree angle, etc. or that their 'users' can't figure out how to use their new wall.
spy: to watch secretly usually for hostile purposes
Wow. You keep saying that parents should spy on their kids. That's not exactly true. Parents should talk to their kids about where they went, with whom, etc. Parents should know their childrens' friends, and their friends' parents, but spying is just an invasion of privacy which gets parents nowhere. How many sitcoms have episodes where the teen gets pissed off because the parent reads their diary/finds their stash of pr0n/finds their whatever they're not allowed to have? Why so many? Because that's how teens react.
I agree that new drivers (no matter their age) are inherently bad drivers, because they lack experience. Some drivers learn the rules of the road faster than others. Some drivers never learn. Putting a box like this in the car would be beneficial to new drivers, and as long as the data were collected ethically, for reasons specified in the data-collection contract, fine.
I drive a GM car that has a black box in it. If I get into an accident with someone stupid enough to blame me for it (AGAIN), and I have the proof to vindicate myself, why wouldn't I want to use it?
Erm, yeah. Chicks dig guys who cook. I find this as amusing as when my bf told my brother "Chicks like stuffed animals."
If you haven't caught on by now, not all chicks dig guys who <insert activity here>. While it's true that some chicks like guys who cook, and guys who bring them stuffed animals, it's not a singular activity that "chicks" like. Most "chicks" like guys who are interesting, and who enjoy life.
Of course, my guy cooks, cleans, vacuums, mops, sews, does woodwork, metalwork, road construction, and sysadmins and codes on the side. On that note, we're two of a kind; I sysadmin, script and code some, but I also quilt, crochet, draw, and of course, cook.
The cat, however, is the least talented of us, by simply being an expert in sleeping and chasing his tail.
More to the topic of Alton Brown, I think he's pretty cool, and his shows are always interesting. He's found a way to present pretty dry information (like how to cook fish, or fry chicken) that's been done by everyone and their brother, from Emeril to Martin Yan, and make it funny, interesting, and educational. I always learn something, even if it's not what the main topic's about.
If Alton Brown (or his script writer) put as much of himself into the book as he does for the show, it's probably worth buying. I'm not a big cookbook fan, myself. I prefer to cook by smell and taste, and by the "what's in the cupboard" rule. I eat simply, which is what I like about how Alton presents things. He usually doesn't cook food that requires its own weird set of utensils. Who owns olive forks or asparagus tongs or boullion spoons these days anyway?
>I have Solaris for my servers, Linux for my firewall/router, and Windows for games and office stuff. And, I can still beat the $1100 price of the Mac you quoted. I have a hard time justifying buying a propriatary OS that runs on propriatary hardware.
Me too, kinda. At home, between the two of us (myself and my otherperson), we have 11 machines. Most of them are SUN boxen. Old SUN boxen (U1, SS5, SS20, IPX, IPC), but the hardware still works fast enough for our needs. For those interested, we also have an HP workstation, an SGI Indigo, and a Fujitsu SPARC-based server.
Currently, we only have 5 machines up on our network, 6 when I bring home my laptop from work. The SS5 runs OpenBSD, the SS20 is my otherperson's workstation, he plays with Yahoo! Messenger on his laptop (and views pages that don't work in Galeon), the U1 is where our home directories live, and my PC is where I check my mail and surf the web. I run Windows 98. My laptop is Win2k, because it's work's, and that's what they run.
Why do I run windows? Not because it's "A Good Thing" as Martha Stewart would say, but because it's good enough. All I really do at home is surf the web and send email. If I want to work on scripts, code, etc. I have puTTY to any of the unix boxen. I also have the Win98 system because my family/less adept friends like to send Microsoft Office documents every now and again, and it's nice to be able to read them.
Yes, I know there are cloned office suites that will open Office Docs kindasorta (some better than others). Yes, I know that there are a myriad of choices of Linux distributions and *BSD's. Yes, I know all of that, but I use Windows because I'm lazy. By the time I get home, I want to spend time with my otherperson and my cat, not spend all weekend trying to figure out why [insert hardware here] doesn't work with my [Operating System] box.
I've been through the suffering that is Galeon on Solaris, and the strange voodoo that my otherperson had to go through to get Mozilla working. I know how frustrating it is to compile something and have it not work, not work as designed, or work as designed, but not the way that you thought it was supposed to work. I play with computers as a hobby, and as a career. When I just want something to do a simple task, such as getting my e-mail, or surfing the 'net, all I want to do is click. I don't want to deal with configuring a desktop environment, learning the 12 different button combinations I have access to, etc. I just want to click, read my mail, and get on with my life.
Right now, I'm saving my pennies to get a Mac, so that I can have ease of use with the Unix I enjoy so much.
>lets see.. take perfect pristine water and then add it to ground up beans and end up drinking dirty black water...
Yeah, why do that when you can add cola syrup and get... dirty black water... Or steep tea leaves in it and get... dirty brown water. Wait, maybe just this cocoa powder... nope. Dirty brown water again, and this time it's opaque. Darn.
>and why do people drink decaf?!?!
Some people get the shakes after drinking too much caffeine, and since they've been drinking coffee every morning for the last 10 years, it's a ritual. At least, that's my theory. Personally, if I have decaf, I get really pissed off, because I get the coffee taste, but not the nice rush of a sizable dose of caffeine (decaf does have *some* caffeine left in it). Maybe it's all those video games I've been playing...
>> just "Wizard" every action the user may need to take.
>I *haaaaate* those things. I don't *want* to click >"Next" seventeen times.Worse is when you have instructions for administrative tasks where some lovely person (two or three teams ago) has instructed you to Click Next three times.
We're currently updating our NT- and 2K-related work instructions, and any time I come across that kind of schtuff, it gets deleted.
Of course, this also means that my WI's begin with: This WI assumes that the user has Domain Admin privilages, and has experience installing Windows applications.
If only manuals were normally written with some intended audience in mind. I think it would work much better if there were a tiered approach to manuals: Basic Tasks, Advanced Tasks, and an index where you can reference where to find the stupid thing that you're trying to do. The lack of a good index will keep me from buying a book. If only it would keep people from buying Microsoft products. <Insert "Stupid Clippy!" remark here.>
<AOL>METOO</AOL>I've got to admit that when I was a young pup just out of high school (not that I'm THAT old now...), I thought community college/technical college was a joke, and it's forced down students' throats in high school that if you want to get anywhere in life, you must have a college degree.
What I really needed was someone to sit me down and say, "Look. College is a bunch of stuff that's just like high school but ten times worse, and you'll be bored and disgusted with it. You won't start independant thinking courses until your Junior year. You'd be better off taking a vocational degree at a tech college"
What ended up happening was that I flunked out of one college, and got fed up with another, and started working. I built up my knowledgebase during my downtime at work, and voila! I'm doing NT administration because the job market sucks for "pure" Unix Admins where I am. So, I'm going back to college, taking a course in C at the community college near my house for US$11/Credit Unit + fees (~110 for the class I'm in), instead of taking one at the University near my work for US$400-700 + fees.
It's not too expensive, and it keeps me on my mental toes after a long day of clicking 'OK' and 'Next'.
Not only can I cash in and come out with an AA, or transfer the credits over to a university, but sometimes the community colleges offer certificate programs. The place I go offers certificates in Unix Admin, Cisco (with test prep for the Cisco certs), Database Admin, and even Video Game Programming in their CS discipline.
My spoon is too big!
I'm a banana!
It's from an animated short called "Rejected" from last year's Spike and Mike, which, unfortunately, wasn't out on the last [insert video format here] last time I checked.
(anyway...) This got coverage, and the shaker we got in southern California a couple months ago... nothing. Not that I have anything against northern California, I used to live/work/eat/breathe/sleep there before the dot-bust. My last gig before layoffs was in Morgan Hill, right above Gilroy, oddly enough.
Where I work now, we have the logging, but no one checks the logs unless someone is severely screwing off.
I've worked at places where the logs were checked quarterly, or on a user-by-user basis. This kind of checking was used to add blocks to the proxy server, as well as to give warnings to users.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've worked at one site where a sysadmin was running a pr0n site on the company dime. (Server hosted at the company's site, static IP and internet access provided by the company.)
In all of my history in IT, no one has questioned my use of the internet. Even when I was a consultant. If they ever do, I have an answer for them. Sometimes problems get solved by not thinking about them. I come up with really interesting and useful solutions to problems when I background the problem.
Of course, I have always gotten my work done, and don't let my surfing take precedence to my real work.
Put down the coffee and back away from the keyboard. I've seen a few different naming conventions, and here's what some people found to be logical...
At home, my bf and I disagree on naming conventions... I have fyrebird, nightbird, and dodobird (my Obligatory Windows PC) and he has Ten, Tita, and other anime-based characters.
It's all in what makes sense for your organization, and the IT group specifically. Users will get used to pretty much anything.
I spent the last few weeks doing the rack/computer room shuffle of about a dozen machines. If I had to rename them each time I moved them from one rack to the next, or from one room to the other, I'd have gone batty.
Not that I'm saying I'm wholly sane...
While I'm usually not one to butt heads with Savage, if you're not getting something other than a paycheck out of your job, whether it's CEO or janitor, it's not worth it.
Of course, it almost goes without saying** that you get out of something what you put into it. If your skillset makes you a good Computer person, but you're scrubbing floors for a living, if you go to work every day with the attitude that you hate your job, no one appreciates you, etc. ... you will get nothing out of it. However, if you go into your job to be the best damn janitor, programmer, doctor, lawyer, firefighter, administrative assistant, etc. you will feel satisfied with the day is done.
** It would go without saying if common sense were actually common.Of course if I called to tell this to Savage, he'd most likely call me a liberal, and I would hang up on him, enforcing his theory that liberals are wusses.
-- the kshgoddessPS: I'm not some fresh-out-of-college, no-real-world-experience sunny optimist. I'm a realist, with real life experience (both as an employee and as a consultant) behind me.
Apologies in advance; I'm in a twisted mood. It's Friday.
<Stupid User Mode>I don't see how writing things down on black pieces of paper will keep spam from decreasing. The only thing that will decrease spam is consumers refusing to buy their homogenized meat!</Stupid User Mode>
Seriously, the concept of blacklists is good, it's just that the implementation differs from site to site.
If admins want to update their blacklists from the masters once a year, it's their choice. If they want to keep old virus definitions, it's their choice.
If you installed your mailserver with default settings and you're now on the blacklist, it's up to you to convince each list, and each administrator that you were a bad administrator, and you'll never do it again.
It's up to the individual adminsitrator to say yea or nay.
Personally, I enjoy getting spam; it lets me see how stupid people really are. Because I'm a geek, I get 'branded' middle-aged and male. Lots of pr0n spam, lots of 'increase your genetalia' spam, and 'look 20 years younger'... erm, yeah. I don't want to go back to elementary school.
Disclaimer: I am not a coder; I am a sysadmin who scripts and codes when necessary.
Yes! There's hitting the nail on the head. My current manager is an NT guy with a LOT of Compaq hardware experience. I'm a hybrid administrator (unfortunately doing more NT than Unix right now) with considerable experience with several Unix flavors on different hardware platforms, with a smattering of NT. I'm constantly looking for a way to explain Unix terms in NT terminology. "I want to remove these things from /etc/inetd.conf -- kind of like changing the services to manual in NT."
My management now needs to be beaten with cluesticks, other than that, though. It's my strong belief that managers should have a clue. They shouldn't put themselves above or beside a team, because you can't lead from outside of a group. They should shield their team from the politics, listen to their team, and set reasonable expectations... we got a list of 1400 users to check against an exchange distribution list at 2:30 this afternoon that was supposed to 'get done by Monday morning'. They've frustrated me enough that I've written 2 essays (and posted them on my website) on how IT departments should be run.
The best manager I ever had-- and I've had 9 in the past 5 years (consulting)-- had the unique ability to assess people's strengths, and put us in roles that used those strengths. He let us do our jobs, for the most part, and even encouraged us to have an internal IRC server. We had weekly meetings, and we felt like a team, even though we rarely ever saw each other face-to-face. He understood how to play the management games so that we looked good, and so that we were performing at our best. We had Team Goals, which made sure that all of us knew what he expected of us, and when he set goals to show to people outside of our department, he first made sure that these goals were readily attainable, even with delays.
Dude, I worked in a hospital that had wireless access points & a fully functional wireless network.
Even in the Heart Center.
The access points didn't interfere with pacemakers or other sensitive medical devices. The only wards that didn't have wireless laptops were the ICU's... because the rooms were so full of equipment already. We ended up using Citrix clients on their monitoring devices (which would switch back in case of emergency) for these nurses to use the same system as the rest of the hospital for patient monitoring, etc.
I remember doing a presentation on our RF wireless system to the rest of IT -- we used a company that used FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) technology. Safe, effective, and took interference better than DSSS (Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum).
If wireless access points are safe enough for use in hospitals, why are these people up in arms? Can you say psychosomatic? Can you say hypochondriac? I knew you could.
College is *not* the only answer. Neither is tech school, or any other training course. I've been on the temp end; at 20, I was filing (moving large pieces of paper that had small pieces of paper in them into alphabetical order) for $7/hr for a food services company. I hated it. I had the skills to move into a reception job, or a data-entry job, even then... Word, Excel, PowerPoint, 80+wpm keyboarding, etc.
I had also gone to ~2 years of college, which I also hated. I saw it as a very expensive waste of my time.
I left the temp company to work for an ISP, at minimum wage. I was the *anything you can think of having to do at an ISP* person. I answered phones, signed users up, helped them get configured (and reconfigured), handled billing, and anything else you can think of. I left there after a year, with a few more skills, but nothing special. I got the job because I taught myself html.
Long, long, long story short, I've been a PC Support Tech, a Unix Admin, and a contract sysadmin in Silicon Valley during the boom. I'm now a sysadmin, and I got there by teaching myself how to do most of what I do. A book here, a book there, man pages, FAQ's, and online documentation have been more useful to me than any of the classes I took in college.
It's a myth that you have to go to college to get the education you need for a good job. Especially in computers. You just have to be motivated to learn.
A college education may get your foot in the door, but if you can't do the work, no matter if it's accounting, system administration, or human resources, it's just another piece of paper.
While I support the concept that you have to learn and better yourself, not everyone who doesn't have a college degree is unemployable.
... to see the small blonde woman in the Ford Explorer drinking coffee, on her cell phone, yelling at her kids, swerving down the road?
"I'm sorry officer, I was having my car do my nails, watching a video, talking to my broker, being reminded of a meeting, and trying to get little Billy to stay buckled in his seatbelt when I looked over and smashed into that other car"
I mean, I like my computer(s) as much as the next person, but... I can think about getting coffee and gas in the morning without something reminding me. I know it's supposed to be 'freeing' to not have to think about the basic schtuff, but if you're so spaced that you don't remember coffee... just stay home.
I own several computers, and work has supplied me with more, because, well, I'm a geek, but having a computer decide when to hit the snooze button, etc. sounds like it's taking away my freedom to choose whether to be late to work or not, which way to go to work, etc. I don't want my alarm clock to make my coffee, or fluff my pillows. I don't want my shirt to know that I have a meeting in an hour. I don't want my shoes to remind me that they're getting worn out and there's a sale just down the street. It's my decision, and if I wanted to be nagged all the time, I'd buy shareware and live with a family member.
Just lending my two cents (I need them back, though.)
It's very odd to make those types of sweeping generalizations... I myself key fairly quickly on the normal keyboard at work, but have a totally different pattern of keying on my natural keyboard at home, because I'm more relaxed, not doing work, etc. Ditto for the optical mouse/trackball differences between work & home.
I almost take offense at the channel-surfing generality. I'm a notorious channel-surfer during commercials (and during shows, sometimes, too). Does that mean I'd get jock strap commercials? Viagra?
Then again, as one of my co-workers pointed out: "Sysadmins don't have sex. Hey wait, that works both ways."
--KshGoddess