Getting info about an employer from a discussion board tends to only draw out the people who want to bitch about it (and all companies have disgruntled employees with horror stories). If you really want to know, go visit the place. Insist on getting walked around before the interview to observe and see if it seems like the sort of environment you'd want to be in.
Some of the truly great sysadmins I've met were either dropouts or had liberal arts degrees. This is because being a really good admin is less about education than it is about a lifestyle.
It doesn't take books or classes. It takes a basic love of all things computer and a basic hatred of those who would attempt to use those computing resources. You should feel a stirring in your heart when you think of giant, heavy routers, legacy token ring systems, raised floors, racks full of humming systems and disk arrays as far as the eye can see. You should feel utter sickness when some secretary can't abide by her 200 meg disk quota because it's her god-given right to surf Napter all day. You should feel perfectly comfortable taking horrible retribution against the userbase.
Despite all that, it's not insurmountable -- it just needs some competent writing.
I hear that the villain in the pilot is a surplus 1970's Soviet robot programmed to kill Jimmy Carter. I find that concept absolutely hysterical, for some reason. Hopefully, the show will live up to that sort of promise.
The Buffy musical was good...
...not because the singers were great (they weren't). ...not because the songs were all that good (they weren't). ...not because the story was shocking/compelling (it wasn't). ...not because of the lesbian sex inference (although that was good).
The Buffy musical was good because it was different than the rest of the bleak, TV wasteland. I'm sure that brief spark of originality will go completely unnoticed, however, so don't worry.
I second the Cowboy Neil thing. Maybe that could be a subscriber bonus: deletion of the Cowboy Neil option in polls and result tabulation.
If you really, really want to get people to pay, you could also allow only subscribers to filter Katz (you know, I used to be a supporter of that poser?). That seems a little mean, though.
I've been thinking about this off and on ever since I heard that Taco was going to institute subscriptions: Would I pay for Slashdot?
In favor: I've used and enjoyed Slashdot for a very long time. I'm not concerned about privacy issues involving my email address, so that's not a worry for me. I know that a lot of hard work has been done to keep this service running for me to enjoy, and I know that the upkeep costs a lot. I know that the reality of the web is different now than it was.
Convincing, but against: I, and all the other posters, experts, flamers, trolls and etc. are what make Slashdot even basically interesting. The stories alone I can get anywhere -- it's the posts that are semi-interesting. When I pay for a subscription to Salon, I'm paying to get content I enjoy. If I were to pay for Slashdot, even just to get ride of ads, I feel like I'd be paying for something I help make happen.
All that said: I'll pay for Slashdot. The reason is that, all philosophical problems aside, I know that economic realities are forcing this thing in. I'll miss the free Slashdot, but even a subscriber-friendly Slashdot is better than no Slashdot at all (what would I *do* with my days?).
In return, I'd really, really like to see a more intelligent basis for story selection. I *miss* that Slashdot from three years ago where the stories were mostly tech-oriented and not just another excuse to flame Katz or diss Microsoft. I want to see real efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio without stomping on unpopular views (like moderation tends to). Maybe it's not possible to go back to that, but I'd like to see some effort made to try.
Re:As long as there are no X10 ads...
on
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Pft, I hate him already. While we're at it, I hate you, too. Hell, I hate everybody. Except Santa Claus -- he's okay in my book.
Ramses sounds too much like a condom, and Nefertiti has the sound "tity" in it, whick would surely provoke complaints from parent groups calling for a more kid-friendly ancient leader names.
Fogey mode: You used to see stories like this posted to Slashdot all the time back in the day. Back then, there was no Katz or fluffy BS, just hardcore tech geekiness and Microsoft bashing (yeah, well, some things never change).
Reading over this article was like seeing an old friend again.
Screw that, man. Just plug your CD player straight in to the "Mic In" in your sound card.
I used to do this -- I had a computer with a CD drive that would always fail when I tried to rip for some reason. The sound quality didn't take any noticible hit (well, beyond the hit that all MP3's take, which is barely noticible even on a great system).
Of course, given that my kid sister could break RIAA-style encrytion, this is hardly an issue. The real danger isn't the technical stop-gap measures, it's the longer term transition of ideas into immutable corporate property.
Dude, what were you looking for? "We plan on using B2's from this specific airbase on this specific target, and they should be arriving in exactly x minutes...."
Relax, man. He got the important stuff across -- we're attacking the Taliban and we're going to be moving in ground forces to find Bin Laden & Friends. That answers most of the questions in my mind (at least, those I could reasonably expect answered).
Somebody, go out and rent a few episodes of the original Star Trek, then come back and answer me this:
If they'd been able to sneak it past the censors and if they'd been able to hire a real hottie to do it (aka, one who didn't need to be shot through a gauze screen), do you think that TOS would have had a rubdown scene in it as well?
You're off base in pretty much everything you said.
First, have you ever *watched* football? Do me a favor -- watch the Monday Night game this week and look at Brett Favre's face when he's playing and then tell me he's not enjoying himself. Sure, these guys get paid a lot, but the best players you see are in the zone. That's where you want your people, too.
The idea that you should "give up the idea of having fun at work" sounds like the refrain of a manager bent on shooting themselves in the foot. Say it with me: Happy people are productive people. Happy people are people not blowing out the door at 5 (like your post implies you do). Happy people are more original and have better ideas and generally do their jobs better.
Remember: fun doesn't have to mean doing no work. Fun can mean taking your people to Dave & Busters once a quarter if you make a tough quota. Fun can mean buying lunch for everybody and having a bonding session. These things don't create huge disruptions or take a lot of time but create a much better working environment.
Beyond that, remember that the really legendary workplaces -- places like EA way back in the day -- weren't sweat shops. They were places where people didn't have any huge need to go home, where they felt inspired, etc.
My office at my latest job was never a lot of fun, but when I started we had a ping-pong table.
It was actually really nice -- two or three times a day you could play a quick game or two, each time taking maybe five minutes. It was a great way to get away from your desk and get the blood pumping a little bit (nothing like some activity to get the brain working again).
Then our managers decided that we shouldn't play during the work day anymore. It was like night and day for me -- I couldn't get past the after-lunch sleepy feeling on most days, I didn't want to stay at work late anymore. Ironically, the amount of time I spent at my desk actually producing dropped dramatically.
It was just ping-pong, but I think it marked kind of a turning point in terms of morale at work. I know I wasn't the only one who felt that way.
A lot of the reactions I've been reading are reacting to the excesses of the dot-coms, like that "Generation Now" commercial where nobody in the office is actually working. That's fair, but it's important to remember that there's a lot of room between that extreme and a boring, soulless workplace.
Jesus, I wonder how long before this "feature" makes it into other MS products -- Internet Explorer anyone?
I can't believe that Microsoft
[The remainder of this post has been sanitized by MS Internet Explorer. Please go back about your business, and remember that Microsoft is only trying to conduct legitimate, non-predatory business. You have been warned.]
If it were just a matter of adding backdoors which would exist in all crypto, I'd support it too.
This may be an unpopular viewpoint on/., but I'd personally rather have the government able to read my email (with a subpeona, of course) than see another event where dozens of relatives were milling around outside a disaster zone clutching photos of their lost father/son/daughter/wife/etc.
Of course, the problem is that any moron with a mathematics education and a 486 can put together some pretty decent crypto on their own. Any smart terrorist (and it takes a smart, if not necessarily moral person to put something like this together) will use off-brand cryto without the back doors.
If there was a way to make the terrorists use standard, back-doored crypto, I'd be willing to force all crypto to have a back door.
Basically, that's exactly it. I had one of out semi-intelligent guys arguing that they can fly above mach 1, so they had to have been able to get there.
I just pointed out that you had to add reaction time from chain of command, scrambling time, target aquisition, etc.
This whole incident has started to cement something for me (hang with me, I'm working this out as I go):
News is not knowledge. News is a thin layer that rests atop the mountain of our experience and knowledge.
This is why some people can't understand why we didn't just shoot down the second WTC plane while it's pretty obvious to me. This is why people blame religion or, conversely, discount completely the role of religion in this sort of event.
People who are news addicted tend to know what happened but lack a very basic understanding of why. I have seen a lot of these people lately, and I've experienced a lot of frustration trying to point out seemingly obvious mistakes in their logic.
Maybe, then, we need news reporting closer to that of the BBC or newspapers, where at least some depth is included (of course, at the cost of speed). Maybe we just need a better educational system -- hell, I took college-level philosophy classes without reading a page of Locke or Descartes, psych with no Freud of Jung, history without Gibbon.
Of course, religion doesn't kill people. People kill people -- religion can just sometimes serve as a suitable excuse. Nationalism works pretty interchangibly well for this, as do items like feelings of racial superiority, etc.
We could go into all of this now, and I could explain why your "insights" are sadly shallow, but I suspect you're just trolling. Shame on you for doing so on the backs of 5000 innocent people.
However, on the off chance that your viewpoint actually is that shallow, may I suggest some basic reading: "The Battle for God" by Karen Armstrong. It's an excellent primer on the role of religion and root causes of fundementalism.
I like the basic idea, but that should make for an awful lot of comments to wade through, especially for those of us who try to read the unmodded comments.
There's got to be a better way than one *huge* forum -- maybe some sort of sidebar collection of stories and forums or something. Of course, that's moving towards violating the very straightforward paradigm that Slashdot's been following since way back in the day...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is why I freeze everything I ship -- from electronics to Han Solo -- into a block of carbonite.
Shush! You'll give the DeBeers family ideas, you fool!
Besides being a totally irrelevant article:
Getting info about an employer from a discussion board tends to only draw out the people who want to bitch about it (and all companies have disgruntled employees with horror stories). If you really want to know, go visit the place. Insist on getting walked around before the interview to observe and see if it seems like the sort of environment you'd want to be in.
Some of the truly great sysadmins I've met were either dropouts or had liberal arts degrees. This is because being a really good admin is less about education than it is about a lifestyle.
It doesn't take books or classes. It takes a basic love of all things computer and a basic hatred of those who would attempt to use those computing resources. You should feel a stirring in your heart when you think of giant, heavy routers, legacy token ring systems, raised floors, racks full of humming systems and disk arrays as far as the eye can see. You should feel utter sickness when some secretary can't abide by her 200 meg disk quota because it's her god-given right to surf Napter all day. You should feel perfectly comfortable taking horrible retribution against the userbase.
That's my view, anyhow.
I hear that the villain in the pilot is a surplus 1970's Soviet robot programmed to kill Jimmy Carter. I find that concept absolutely hysterical, for some reason. Hopefully, the show will live up to that sort of promise.
The Buffy musical was good because it was different than the rest of the bleak, TV wasteland. I'm sure that brief spark of originality will go completely unnoticed, however, so don't worry.
If you really, really want to get people to pay, you could also allow only subscribers to filter Katz (you know, I used to be a supporter of that poser?). That seems a little mean, though.
In favor: I've used and enjoyed Slashdot for a very long time. I'm not concerned about privacy issues involving my email address, so that's not a worry for me. I know that a lot of hard work has been done to keep this service running for me to enjoy, and I know that the upkeep costs a lot. I know that the reality of the web is different now than it was.
Convincing, but against: I, and all the other posters, experts, flamers, trolls and etc. are what make Slashdot even basically interesting. The stories alone I can get anywhere -- it's the posts that are semi-interesting. When I pay for a subscription to Salon, I'm paying to get content I enjoy. If I were to pay for Slashdot, even just to get ride of ads, I feel like I'd be paying for something I help make happen.
All that said: I'll pay for Slashdot. The reason is that, all philosophical problems aside, I know that economic realities are forcing this thing in. I'll miss the free Slashdot, but even a subscriber-friendly Slashdot is better than no Slashdot at all (what would I *do* with my days?).
In return, I'd really, really like to see a more intelligent basis for story selection. I *miss* that Slashdot from three years ago where the stories were mostly tech-oriented and not just another excuse to flame Katz or diss Microsoft. I want to see real efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio without stomping on unpopular views (like moderation tends to). Maybe it's not possible to go back to that, but I'd like to see some effort made to try.
Pft, I hate him already. While we're at it, I hate you, too. Hell, I hate everybody. Except Santa Claus -- he's okay in my book.
Ramses sounds too much like a condom, and Nefertiti has the sound "tity" in it, whick would surely provoke complaints from parent groups calling for a more kid-friendly ancient leader names.
Fogey mode: You used to see stories like this posted to Slashdot all the time back in the day. Back then, there was no Katz or fluffy BS, just hardcore tech geekiness and Microsoft bashing (yeah, well, some things never change).
Reading over this article was like seeing an old friend again.
I used to do this -- I had a computer with a CD drive that would always fail when I tried to rip for some reason. The sound quality didn't take any noticible hit (well, beyond the hit that all MP3's take, which is barely noticible even on a great system).
Of course, given that my kid sister could break RIAA-style encrytion, this is hardly an issue. The real danger isn't the technical stop-gap measures, it's the longer term transition of ideas into immutable corporate property.
Relax, man. He got the important stuff across -- we're attacking the Taliban and we're going to be moving in ground forces to find Bin Laden & Friends. That answers most of the questions in my mind (at least, those I could reasonably expect answered).
If they'd been able to sneak it past the censors and if they'd been able to hire a real hottie to do it (aka, one who didn't need to be shot through a gauze screen), do you think that TOS would have had a rubdown scene in it as well?
Think a minute. The answer, of course, is YES!
Check it out:
h tm l
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1576/706443.
Basically, Phil feels responsible for helping the terrorists.
First, have you ever *watched* football? Do me a favor -- watch the Monday Night game this week and look at Brett Favre's face when he's playing and then tell me he's not enjoying himself. Sure, these guys get paid a lot, but the best players you see are in the zone. That's where you want your people, too.
The idea that you should "give up the idea of having fun at work" sounds like the refrain of a manager bent on shooting themselves in the foot. Say it with me: Happy people are productive people. Happy people are people not blowing out the door at 5 (like your post implies you do). Happy people are more original and have better ideas and generally do their jobs better.
Remember: fun doesn't have to mean doing no work. Fun can mean taking your people to Dave & Busters once a quarter if you make a tough quota. Fun can mean buying lunch for everybody and having a bonding session. These things don't create huge disruptions or take a lot of time but create a much better working environment.
Beyond that, remember that the really legendary workplaces -- places like EA way back in the day -- weren't sweat shops. They were places where people didn't have any huge need to go home, where they felt inspired, etc.
It was actually really nice -- two or three times a day you could play a quick game or two, each time taking maybe five minutes. It was a great way to get away from your desk and get the blood pumping a little bit (nothing like some activity to get the brain working again).
Then our managers decided that we shouldn't play during the work day anymore. It was like night and day for me -- I couldn't get past the after-lunch sleepy feeling on most days, I didn't want to stay at work late anymore. Ironically, the amount of time I spent at my desk actually producing dropped dramatically.
It was just ping-pong, but I think it marked kind of a turning point in terms of morale at work. I know I wasn't the only one who felt that way.
A lot of the reactions I've been reading are reacting to the excesses of the dot-coms, like that "Generation Now" commercial where nobody in the office is actually working. That's fair, but it's important to remember that there's a lot of room between that extreme and a boring, soulless workplace.
I dunno, man.
I'd like to think you were right on this one, but you've got to remember that NDAs are apparently legal, so speech obviously isn't always gaurenteed.
I can't believe that Microsoft [The remainder of this post has been sanitized by MS Internet Explorer. Please go back about your business, and remember that Microsoft is only trying to conduct legitimate, non-predatory business. You have been warned.]
This may be an unpopular viewpoint on /., but I'd personally rather have the government able to read my email (with a subpeona, of course) than see another event where dozens of relatives were milling around outside a disaster zone clutching photos of their lost father/son/daughter/wife/etc.
Of course, the problem is that any moron with a mathematics education and a 486 can put together some pretty decent crypto on their own. Any smart terrorist (and it takes a smart, if not necessarily moral person to put something like this together) will use off-brand cryto without the back doors.
If there was a way to make the terrorists use standard, back-doored crypto, I'd be willing to force all crypto to have a back door.
Basically, that's exactly it. I had one of out semi-intelligent guys arguing that they can fly above mach 1, so they had to have been able to get there.
I just pointed out that you had to add reaction time from chain of command, scrambling time, target aquisition, etc.
This whole incident has started to cement something for me (hang with me, I'm working this out as I go):
News is not knowledge. News is a thin layer that rests atop the mountain of our experience and knowledge.
This is why some people can't understand why we didn't just shoot down the second WTC plane while it's pretty obvious to me. This is why people blame religion or, conversely, discount completely the role of religion in this sort of event.
People who are news addicted tend to know what happened but lack a very basic understanding of why. I have seen a lot of these people lately, and I've experienced a lot of frustration trying to point out seemingly obvious mistakes in their logic.
Maybe, then, we need news reporting closer to that of the BBC or newspapers, where at least some depth is included (of course, at the cost of speed). Maybe we just need a better educational system -- hell, I took college-level philosophy classes without reading a page of Locke or Descartes, psych with no Freud of Jung, history without Gibbon.
Maybe I'm ranting -- it's late and I'm tired.
Of course, religion doesn't kill people. People kill people -- religion can just sometimes serve as a suitable excuse. Nationalism works pretty interchangibly well for this, as do items like feelings of racial superiority, etc.
We could go into all of this now, and I could explain why your "insights" are sadly shallow, but I suspect you're just trolling. Shame on you for doing so on the backs of 5000 innocent people.
However, on the off chance that your viewpoint actually is that shallow, may I suggest some basic reading: "The Battle for God" by Karen Armstrong. It's an excellent primer on the role of religion and root causes of fundementalism.
I like the basic idea, but that should make for an awful lot of comments to wade through, especially for those of us who try to read the unmodded comments.
There's got to be a better way than one *huge* forum -- maybe some sort of sidebar collection of stories and forums or something. Of course, that's moving towards violating the very straightforward paradigm that Slashdot's been following since way back in the day...
You make the call!