One thing I've noticed in living with Kubuntu is that it's quite a bit more political than Gentoo. That is, support for binary drivers and stuff like MP3 is significantly more painful than it is in Gentoo, or even CentOS.
I like the way Kubuntu recognized my SATA and iPod subsystems off the bat, and its smart grub configuration system. However, when politics gets in the way of user experience, that's bad IMHO. Perhaps the default should be to install the stuff users expect, but to flag it so that users are made aware of the implications of their choices?
If Gentoo could take the smart bits from Ubuntu (the great installer and autoconfiguration, sensible defaults (where they're apolitical), even the 'root-disabled-by-default' for certain installation classes) while still using ebuild/emerge and remaining somewhat apolitical, that'd be nice.
Also, I've gotten lazy, and I quite like the chkconfig/service stuff from CentOS, so an analog of that rather than hacking S??service files in the init state dirs manually would be nice too... (Maybe I should just go back to gentoo when the SATA situation improves?)
... My school got like 3 of them when I was in kindergarten, and I started learning BASIC then.. It's taken a lifetime to unlearn!
Seriously though, after the PET arrived, and my folks saw how much fun I had making it do things, they got a pension loan and bought a newly-released Apple ][+.. They even let me upgrade it from 16k to 48k, then they let me install the Disk ][ and Micro-Soft 64k card (for integer BASIC), and I got to go to summer computer courses at a local community college when I was 10-11.. I'm a member of the generation between those who wrote their term papers using typewriters and those who've never seen a typewriter outside of museums or media... ScreenWriter and C.Itoh escape codes ftw!!!
Enough reminiscing and procrastinating, back to the mines...
gdb into any live production code to unwedge something lately?
And an admin is more likely to get shitcanned for that kind of incompetence than a developer is for writing shoddy/incomplete/nonexistent documentation or slamming an untested bit of code into production without telling anyone.
I've seen admins fired for that kind of nonsense. I rarely see developers fired for shoddy workmanship, lax code management or other egregious crap.
Very interesting discussion about the relationship between developers and admins in TFA. My own take is that it's basically the only useful thing that team leads or managers can do anything about by setting the incentive structure for both to be somewhat similar.
Essentially, if a developer's job relies on the same thing that an admin's job relies on (that is, stable, secure and reliable operations) then you have the foundation for harmony. If a developer's job relies on features and new functionality at the expense of stability, security and reliability, you have a recipe for hostility.
You can tell the priorities at a company by how cranky its admins are.
On the other hand, admins need to be open and available to developers, offering advice on OS, hardware, infrastructure, etc. and be able to clearly define the requirements for SSR so that any new designs or requirements can be supported from day 1.
Oh, and a great way to get documentation from developers: give all their cell#s to the admins, so when something breaks at 3am on a sunday and there's no documentation, the admin has a little company. A few calls like that and developers can write some pretty handy documentation!
Re:After checking Core Duo specs, the verdict is
on
Centrino Duo, Buy or Wait?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Er, the Macbook has up to 256MB dedicated to a real mobile GPU..
As an admin, where my job depends on stable, dependable code and well-documented functionality, I have a healthy paranoia regarding new features, system changes, etc. When there's a proper development process (with developer sandboxes, multiple test systems, a staging rig that lets admins beat on the code and get comfortable with it, and then _and only then_ updating production code) that paranoia is lessened if not completely assuaged.
If you have a system where developers gdb into mission critical code during peak live hours to hack around undocumented behaviors or bugs (I'm lookin at _YOU_, Dave...) the confidence level in your code (or whoever's code you inherited) goes waay down and paranoia rises in inverse proportion.
Also remember that admins are lazy, and good ones get away with it by getting systems running so tight they don't have to waste hours a day poring over logs or fighting fires. When they hear from users it's usually because something is broken (likely by the user or developer) or they want to make a change to the precious systems equilibrium. So the win for the admin is, what? Vs. the failure that might cost him his job? You think that having CD-R mailspool trail hasn't saved _my_ job a few times because of folks forgetting what they asked for or when, then trying to pin the blame on me?
Don't forget that pissing an admin off only puts you on his shit list. Admins have _loonnnnggg_ memories. And they can read your email.
WTF am I still in New York?
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 1
The NY area is pretty dead for tech. Sure, you get paid more for the finance gigs, but the area's cost of living is ridiculous. I know guys who commute in from the Philadelphia burbs.
How many of us have clothes/laptops/radios/dvd players/televisions that were made in China?
I'm not the pious, high and mighty one claiming to be morally superior. I don't even claim to be not evil.
It's the corporate hypocrisy that rankles, and brings Google morally back down into the muck.
It's their right, and perhaps their duty to shareholders, to kowtow to the largest collection of eyeballs on earth. This is what happens when you become a real company in the real world.
But a private business with moral backbone would simply decline to do business in that atmosphere.
True to a point, but then with protocols like BGP, telcos can easily set link preferences and AS paths for whatever reasons they choose. Technically, the correct answer is to select paths that are cheapest/fastest, but they could just as easily be defined by diktat ("make the UUNet link super expensive or route it over the slow line, because we as a corporation don't like them."). There's also traffic shaping and other stuff that can be done to "improve local connectivity".
Not saying that it's particularly wise, but it is fairly straightforward to do.
Frameworks, DCOP, KParts, KWallet, some integration between stuff like Kopete/Kaddressbook/Kalendar/KMail, etc..
Granted, GNOME projects tend to have better support (OO vs. KOffice, Firefox vs. Konqueror) but as an environment KDE is richer and closer to the holistic OS X ideal than GNOME (which is striving for Mac OS 9).
On a Mac OS X box, the fact that the system address book, calendar, mail client, chat client, passwords, web client, etc. are all integrated (if email address is in system addressbook, do not junk filter, if im username is in addressbook, add to ichat) is wonderful and simple. You enter info once in a canonical location (addressbook), and everything else uses that. KDE is going there. Apple's iStuff is also integrated pretty well, and I can imagine KDE getting there before GNOME thanks to KDE's preference for frameworks (another *Step/OS X thing).
In the end, this may seem like developer candy, but the applications (and their ease of use) that result from these development methods can be much more user friendly... If only...
IANAB, so I'm curious.. From what I know, it's not just the brain cell that matters, but how many, densely packed and networked they are together that make humans unique. I guess that's one of the things they're trying to find out..
The man crashed his ultralight and nearly died.. An experience like that tends to make you appreciate life a little more, and it reorients your priorities. I've never seen or heard anything about Woz getting 'screwed' by anyone at Apple, except possibly for the Atari incident at the top of that link.
Nope, I think Woz was doing what he always does, just being a nice guy and a thoughtful hacker.
... according to the openwrt site, the linksys wrt54g 5.0 comes with half the ram and flash of the 4.0 model (and other prior models). That could explain the cost difference.
Also, the wrt54gs looks more interesting, it has 8mb flash / 32mb ram...
RTFA: "This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
Reusable. MP3 format.
I may actually get it. Granted, 128MB isn't nearly large enough for my BNL boot collection (~2gb or so), but I could use a memory key and $30 isn't too bad a price.. Here's hoping _McDonald's Girl_ and/or _Lovers in a Dangerous Time_ are on there...
Re:Brown: not just for rinsing out your GPA anymor
on
First Silicon Laser
·
· Score: 1
Heh, had the grades, but I was too white and too middle-class to afford it..
Like I said, if only public, affordable universities had such low grading standards!
Brown: not just for rinsing out your GPA anymore..
on
First Silicon Laser
·
· Score: -1, Troll
.... A, B, C, or the grade doesn't count (you just pay to repeat the class)..
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've noticed in living with Kubuntu is that it's quite a bit more political than Gentoo. That is, support for binary drivers and stuff like MP3 is significantly more painful than it is in Gentoo, or even CentOS.
I like the way Kubuntu recognized my SATA and iPod subsystems off the bat, and its smart grub configuration system. However, when politics gets in the way of user experience, that's bad IMHO. Perhaps the default should be to install the stuff users expect, but to flag it so that users are made aware of the implications of their choices?
If Gentoo could take the smart bits from Ubuntu (the great installer and autoconfiguration, sensible defaults (where they're apolitical), even the 'root-disabled-by-default' for certain installation classes) while still using ebuild/emerge and remaining somewhat apolitical, that'd be nice.
Also, I've gotten lazy, and I quite like the chkconfig/service stuff from CentOS, so an analog of that rather than hacking S??service files in the init state dirs manually would be nice too... (Maybe I should just go back to gentoo when the SATA situation improves?)
... My school got like 3 of them when I was in kindergarten, and I started learning BASIC then.. It's taken a lifetime to unlearn!
Seriously though, after the PET arrived, and my folks saw how much fun I had making it do things, they got a pension loan and bought a newly-released Apple ][+.. They even let me upgrade it from 16k to 48k, then they let me install the Disk ][ and Micro-Soft 64k card (for integer BASIC), and I got to go to summer computer courses at a local community college when I was 10-11.. I'm a member of the generation between those who wrote their term papers using typewriters and those who've never seen a typewriter outside of museums or media... ScreenWriter and C.Itoh escape codes ftw!!!
Enough reminiscing and procrastinating, back to the mines...
gdb into any live production code to unwedge something lately?
And an admin is more likely to get shitcanned for that kind of incompetence than a developer is for writing shoddy/incomplete/nonexistent documentation or slamming an untested bit of code into production without telling anyone.
I've seen admins fired for that kind of nonsense. I rarely see developers fired for shoddy workmanship, lax code management or other egregious crap.
Very interesting discussion about the relationship between developers and admins in TFA. My own take is that it's basically the only useful thing that team leads or managers can do anything about by setting the incentive structure for both to be somewhat similar.
Essentially, if a developer's job relies on the same thing that an admin's job relies on (that is, stable, secure and reliable operations) then you have the foundation for harmony. If a developer's job relies on features and new functionality at the expense of stability, security and reliability, you have a recipe for hostility.
You can tell the priorities at a company by how cranky its admins are.
On the other hand, admins need to be open and available to developers, offering advice on OS, hardware, infrastructure, etc. and be able to clearly define the requirements for SSR so that any new designs or requirements can be supported from day 1.
Oh, and a great way to get documentation from developers: give all their cell#s to the admins, so when something breaks at 3am on a sunday and there's no documentation, the admin has a little company. A few calls like that and developers can write some pretty handy documentation!
Er, the Macbook has up to 256MB dedicated to a real mobile GPU..
Come over to the shiny side!!
As an admin, where my job depends on stable, dependable code and well-documented functionality, I have a healthy paranoia regarding new features, system changes, etc. When there's a proper development process (with developer sandboxes, multiple test systems, a staging rig that lets admins beat on the code and get comfortable with it, and then _and only then_ updating production code) that paranoia is lessened if not completely assuaged.
If you have a system where developers gdb into mission critical code during peak live hours to hack around undocumented behaviors or bugs (I'm lookin at _YOU_, Dave...) the confidence level in your code (or whoever's code you inherited) goes waay down and paranoia rises in inverse proportion.
Also remember that admins are lazy, and good ones get away with it by getting systems running so tight they don't have to waste hours a day poring over logs or fighting fires. When they hear from users it's usually because something is broken (likely by the user or developer) or they want to make a change to the precious systems equilibrium. So the win for the admin is, what? Vs. the failure that might cost him his job? You think that having CD-R mailspool trail hasn't saved _my_ job a few times because of folks forgetting what they asked for or when, then trying to pin the blame on me?
Don't forget that pissing an admin off only puts you on his shit list. Admins have _loonnnnggg_ memories. And they can read your email.
The NY area is pretty dead for tech. Sure, you get paid more for the finance gigs, but the area's cost of living is ridiculous. I know guys who commute in from the Philadelphia burbs.
Grumble.
Kinda like Tang for the War on Terror-age.
What's so funny about Tang? Growing boys need Tang!
How many of us have clothes/laptops/radios/dvd players/televisions that were made in China?
I'm not the pious, high and mighty one claiming to be morally superior. I don't even claim to be not evil.
It's the corporate hypocrisy that rankles, and brings Google morally back down into the muck.
It's their right, and perhaps their duty to shareholders, to kowtow to the largest collection of eyeballs on earth. This is what happens when you become a real company in the real world.
But a private business with moral backbone would simply decline to do business in that atmosphere.
dupe of earl
dupe dupe
dupe of earl
dupe dupe
dupe of earl
dupe dupe....
... What I wanna know is, where's my updated version of Karateka?
(Or Kabul Spy?)
The Ford Nucleon!
Of course, if it was engineered anything like the Pinto....
True to a point, but then with protocols like BGP, telcos can easily set link preferences and AS paths for whatever reasons they choose. Technically, the correct answer is to select paths that are cheapest/fastest, but they could just as easily be defined by diktat ("make the UUNet link super expensive or route it over the slow line, because we as a corporation don't like them."). There's also traffic shaping and other stuff that can be done to "improve local connectivity".
Not saying that it's particularly wise, but it is fairly straightforward to do.
Last weekend's episode, Boost Mobile... hehehe...
"You're black, right? You sound black..."
Frameworks, DCOP, KParts, KWallet, some integration between stuff like Kopete/Kaddressbook/Kalendar/KMail, etc..
Granted, GNOME projects tend to have better support (OO vs. KOffice, Firefox vs. Konqueror) but as an environment KDE is richer and closer to the holistic OS X ideal than GNOME (which is striving for Mac OS 9).
On a Mac OS X box, the fact that the system address book, calendar, mail client, chat client, passwords, web client, etc. are all integrated (if email address is in system addressbook, do not junk filter, if im username is in addressbook, add to ichat) is wonderful and simple. You enter info once in a canonical location (addressbook), and everything else uses that. KDE is going there. Apple's iStuff is also integrated pretty well, and I can imagine KDE getting there before GNOME thanks to KDE's preference for frameworks (another *Step/OS X thing).
In the end, this may seem like developer candy, but the applications (and their ease of use) that result from these development methods can be much more user friendly... If only...
IANAB, so I'm curious.. From what I know, it's not just the brain cell that matters, but how many, densely packed and networked they are together that make humans unique. I guess that's one of the things they're trying to find out..
$ curl http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/wrnpc11.txt| banner -w 79 |lp -d tp
(ignore the slashdot url manglation)
You're
Fired
What the fuck are you talking about?
The man crashed his ultralight and nearly died.. An experience like that tends to make you appreciate life a little more, and it reorients your priorities. I've never seen or heard anything about Woz getting 'screwed' by anyone at Apple, except possibly for the Atari incident at the top of that link.
Nope, I think Woz was doing what he always does, just being a nice guy and a thoughtful hacker.
... according to the openwrt site, the linksys wrt54g 5.0 comes with half the ram and flash of the 4.0 model (and other prior models). That could explain the cost difference.
Also, the wrt54gs looks more interesting, it has 8mb flash / 32mb ram...
Expect a massive VR resurrgance in a few years time.
You mean, like this?
Yes, but who is the Master Beta?
RTFA:
"This 128 reusable drive contains 29 songs, including the band's 2004 "Barenaked for the Holidays" album, in MP3 format along with live tracks, in-concert spoken quips, album art, photos, videos and more."
Reusable. MP3 format.
I may actually get it. Granted, 128MB isn't nearly large enough for my BNL boot collection (~2gb or so), but I could use a memory key and $30 isn't too bad a price.. Here's hoping _McDonald's Girl_ and/or _Lovers in a Dangerous Time_ are on there...
Heh, had the grades, but I was too white and too middle-class to afford it..
Like I said, if only public, affordable universities had such low grading standards!
.... A, B, C, or the grade doesn't count (you just pay to repeat the class)..
Wish I had that at my state university!