This just goes to show that the folks who write about the tech culture generally still suffer from a serious lack of understanding.
In my experience, most folks who really know their stuff tech-wise (aka, not the MIS people) are the people who learned it by messing around with it, not by going to some training class. That's not to say college is useless, but the really impressive folks are the ones who learn a lot more than what's in the classes. Hell, I know CS majors who are graduating this year who've never seen a UNIX prompt (don't worry, I have an A-6 with a full load of napalm on standby; I'll hit 'em on their way down the isle at graduation).
Alright Katz! You've hit on one of my favorite folks.
Freeman Dyson is like a lot of futurists in that most of his ideas are never gonna happen. Still, they're awful fun to think about and open up new doors for the rest of us; allow us to go in direction that we'd never consider otherwise.
The last thing I saw from him was an article called " Warm-Blooded Fish and Freeze-Dried Fish", where he talks about using custom-built plants to facilitate human exploration of the Universe.
I think the best thing about him, though, is that he looks far enough ahead that he's escaping talking about the impact of e-commerce or harping on the internet (unlike Ester Dyson, whose book felt like serious review).
Nothing is holding you to a job where you're not making what you're really worth (assuming you're not working for the Mob). Leave -- let 'em deal without you and see the folly of crossing the techs.
IMHO, I think Activision took a big risk by letting Loki release the Linux version two weeks after the Windows one came out. I mean, I would have bought it off the shelf at Best Buy the day it came out -- sheer force of the reputation of the previous two games. Now, I'll have to see if it sucks or not by talking to my non-Linux-using "friends".
Of course, I'll probably still buy it. I've been playing Civ2 for so long I'm starting to get retinal burn-in of the city screen...
This was a nice touch on the subject of what, I suspect, a lot of us do. Not 100%, mind you, but then what is? I'm showing this to my dad the next time he asks me what exactly it is I do for a living.
I still draw my idea of a sysadmin from the big red book "Unix System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth et al. When I saw how it covered everything from adding a disk to a UNIX system, moral issues with root powers, all the way to the sort of hardware you use in networking, I was hooked. Who wants to program ten hours a day when you can be out there making things go (rhetorical -- I know there a plenty of you who just want to code all day. I just don't get why).
Palms, notebooks, wire rooms, raised floors, routers, racks, RAIDs, switches, CAT5 cabling, thicknet =), shell scripts, kludges, line printers, ZIP drives, CD burners, Perl -- these are the spice of life.
Give me a job as an admin and a workplace where they appreciate what I do and I'm happy as a clam.
Circuit City just isn't pervasive enough -- they're not in the small markets in the sort of way that a company like Best Buy is. There was no way they were ever going to pull this one off.
BTW, has anybody else here noticed exactly how unhelpful the Best Buy web site is? I mean, for Christ's sake, I've seen better sites churned out by 12 year olds using Hotdog....
Isn't that lawyer employed by MS yet? I was under the impression that every attorney in the country is being retained by them for one reason or another. Plus, the picture of Bill Gates eating his combo meal at Taco Bell is really funny to me for some reason....
Hm, and nobody runs mission critical applications on Linux, eh? I wonder what constitutes a mission-critical app for a online magazine. Wait! Don't tell me! I know this one...
Have to take this to those jackoff consultants I saw here a while back offering a security blanket to any company that moves over to Linux.
Okay, lemme preface by saying I'm not seeking to start any kind of flame war here...
Can anyone give me info on how well Gnome is running now? Last time I looked was Gnome 1.0, and it still seemed really beta to me. I'm not a developer, so I'm not interested in using anything that won't just plain work; if I wanted to fight with my OS, I'd use Windows.
That would be, "Sorry, but GNU/Linux can't scale to 128 processor [snip] systems yet."
I'm not trying to be cute here (well, okay, yes I am). SGI has been rumbling about getting Linux up and running on a large-scale Origin system. When you think about it, it's in their interest to get behind any type of promising OS (be it Linux or NT), since there's still a lot of money to be made in large-scale systems like the Origins. After all, IRIX hasn't exactly proved to be a market slayer...
Who, as a teen anyway, has never been tempted to bust into a system just to see if they can? It's part of being a tech-savvy teen, just like driving recklessly or having awkward sex in some corn field.
Knowing you can and actually doing are less a line in morality and more in maturity. Remember, most teens get absolutely no time of day from people, even when the teen is just trying to help (how many stories have you heard of the school library that gets a bunch of new computers, and who decline offers of assistance from students in leiu of bringing in a bunch of knuckleheads who do a half-ass job for $100/hour?).
It's easier for you or me -- we rate (I hope) jobs where people listen to us. We don't need to prove anything to anybody; when I look at a system and know I could root it if I wanted, that's good enough. That's no reason to start thinking that we're better than the up-and-comings.
Then you'd see even more decisions being made by people who don't know what they're doing. I mean, imagine a world where everything was written in VB... [shudder]
Next thing you know, the US will begin bombing countries where they have mp3 servers. "Clear and Present" and all that.
So here's my idea: VPI (virtual private internet). Protect the entire thing with strong encryption, the keys for which will only be given to people who show some basic degree of understanding of technology. So, we just let all the jonnie-come-latelies have the internet, and we have our own little niche.
For example, if you can't get the VPI software to work and your first urge is to call tech support rather than RTFM, you can't get on. Or, if you don't understand why your computer that you bought six years ago can't run the latest and greatest 3D game at a reasonable speed, you can't get on.
As a side bonus, this should do away with first posters and other people who ruin the AC thing for those who use it responsibly.
This is kind of an unfortunate thing we have going on here.
I mean, I've started to notice that OSS projects always seem to be trailing boldly behind closed source stuff. It's not that I don't see the value of an open source vmware-type project, but it's sort of upsetting that (lately, at least) we're always playing catch-up to ideas that companies have had.
I wonder if open source somehow doesn't foster originality...
Well, there is a difference between the gurus and the rank and file.
Let me clarify: in my experience, there always seem to be one or two people who really drive a successful development effort. While others put in a ton of work, these are the folks who you can single out and say "this wouldn't have worked without these guys". Think Romero and Carmack at id back in the olden days, Seymour Cray at Cray Research or (and you just knew I'd go there) Linus with the Linux kernel.
These are the folks who seem to be leaving Netscape/AOL now. You can call them prima donnas or credit hogs or whatever, but the fact is that all really legendary development teams have them, and they always seem to fall apart when they lose them. In that manner, 2 of 2000 can be really important.
PS: Don't call me a lemming. We prefer "sudden decelleration syndrome addicts".
Man, I never wanted to think that the all time game of games (and Doom really was, no matter how far Quake has taken the idea since) was named after a line delivered by Tom Cruise...
Fact: Smart hacker types don't want to work at a company as seriously unhip as AOL. Result: they're fleeing like rodents from a sinking ship. I mean, at least MS has an undeniable reputation for having some very smart cookies working for them (they must spend their days playing Ages of Empires or something, but they're there). AOL just has a reputation for having some pretty dumb users; I suspect that stigma carries over.
But then again, they do buy a lot of machines from My Favorite Comupter Maker.
I'd hope that a moderator with something good to say would post instead of moderating. Of course, this leaves the moderation up to the lurkers, who can't be moderators because they don't post...
[snif snif] Hey, I smell a catch 22 here. Maybe you should only actively post until you become a moderator....
So they caught the asshole. Virus writers get no sympathy from me -- I've had to spend too many extra hours at work over the years because of dickheads like this, rebooting the system of some moron who ignored our policy about opening email attachments or who disabled our virus checkers.
If I ever see another person with a copy of stoned, I swear I'm gonna have to go on a shooting spree.
I'm sorry to admit this to all my good friends at/., but I've liked Reeves in movies. Specifically: Bill & Ted's (the original one), Speed and Devil's Advocate (I like it when the good guys don't really win).
That said, I'm liking what I hear about this movie -- maybe I'll go catch a show today (what the hell, it's only $4.50 before 5:30).
On another subject, this "Katz v. Taco" thing needs some Mortal Kombat II-inspired icon to go with it. Maybe a shot of them holding up their dukes at one another. No, on second thought that would look pretty bad -- maybe they could be poised with their palm pilots and cell phones and personal fax machines, ready for a geek duel a la Dilbert. Yeah, that'd work...
The Pentagon is saying it probably was a SAM that shot it down -- it seems an AWAC saw it go up.
There are, after all, more than one way to skin a cat or, in this case, shoot down an airplane. Even the most slealthy airplane (and those things are very nearly impossible to spot on even the best radar sets) gives off a lot of heat. Fling a heat-seeker in its direction, and all you've got it a subsonic airplane and some flares.
It's about that time you start wishing you'd signed up to fly an A-10...
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In my experience, most folks who really know their stuff tech-wise (aka, not the MIS people) are the people who learned it by messing around with it, not by going to some training class. That's not to say college is useless, but the really impressive folks are the ones who learn a lot more than what's in the classes. Hell, I know CS majors who are graduating this year who've never seen a UNIX prompt (don't worry, I have an A-6 with a full load of napalm on standby; I'll hit 'em on their way down the isle at graduation).
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Freeman Dyson is like a lot of futurists in that most of his ideas are never gonna happen. Still, they're awful fun to think about and open up new doors for the rest of us; allow us to go in direction that we'd never consider otherwise.
The last thing I saw from him was an article called " Warm-Blooded Fish and Freeze-Dried Fish", where he talks about using custom-built plants to facilitate human exploration of the Universe.
I think the best thing about him, though, is that he looks far enough ahead that he's escaping talking about the impact of e-commerce or harping on the internet (unlike Ester Dyson, whose book felt like serious review).
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IMHO, I think Activision took a big risk by letting Loki release the Linux version two weeks after the Windows one came out. I mean, I would have bought it off the shelf at Best Buy the day it came out -- sheer force of the reputation of the previous two games. Now, I'll have to see if it sucks or not by talking to my non-Linux-using "friends".
Of course, I'll probably still buy it. I've been playing Civ2 for so long I'm starting to get retinal burn-in of the city screen...
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I still draw my idea of a sysadmin from the big red book "Unix System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth et al. When I saw how it covered everything from adding a disk to a UNIX system, moral issues with root powers, all the way to the sort of hardware you use in networking, I was hooked. Who wants to program ten hours a day when you can be out there making things go (rhetorical -- I know there a plenty of you who just want to code all day. I just don't get why).
Palms, notebooks, wire rooms, raised floors, routers, racks, RAIDs, switches, CAT5 cabling, thicknet =), shell scripts, kludges, line printers, ZIP drives, CD burners, Perl -- these are the spice of life.
Give me a job as an admin and a workplace where they appreciate what I do and I'm happy as a clam.
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BTW, has anybody else here noticed exactly how unhelpful the Best Buy web site is? I mean, for Christ's sake, I've seen better sites churned out by 12 year olds using Hotdog....
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Have to take this to those jackoff consultants I saw here a while back offering a security blanket to any company that moves over to Linux.
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Can anyone give me info on how well Gnome is running now? Last time I looked was Gnome 1.0, and it still seemed really beta to me. I'm not a developer, so I'm not interested in using anything that won't just plain work; if I wanted to fight with my OS, I'd use Windows.
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That would be, "Sorry, but GNU/Linux can't scale to 128 processor [snip] systems yet."
I'm not trying to be cute here (well, okay, yes I am). SGI has been rumbling about getting Linux up and running on a large-scale Origin system. When you think about it, it's in their interest to get behind any type of promising OS (be it Linux or NT), since there's still a lot of money to be made in large-scale systems like the Origins. After all, IRIX hasn't exactly proved to be a market slayer...
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Who, as a teen anyway, has never been tempted to bust into a system just to see if they can? It's part of being a tech-savvy teen, just like driving recklessly or having awkward sex in some corn field.
Knowing you can and actually doing are less a line in morality and more in maturity. Remember, most teens get absolutely no time of day from people, even when the teen is just trying to help (how many stories have you heard of the school library that gets a bunch of new computers, and who decline offers of assistance from students in leiu of bringing in a bunch of knuckleheads who do a half-ass job for $100/hour?).
It's easier for you or me -- we rate (I hope) jobs where people listen to us. We don't need to prove anything to anybody; when I look at a system and know I could root it if I wanted, that's good enough. That's no reason to start thinking that we're better than the up-and-comings.
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So here's my idea: VPI (virtual private internet). Protect the entire thing with strong encryption, the keys for which will only be given to people who show some basic degree of understanding of technology. So, we just let all the jonnie-come-latelies have the internet, and we have our own little niche.
For example, if you can't get the VPI software to work and your first urge is to call tech support rather than RTFM, you can't get on. Or, if you don't understand why your computer that you bought six years ago can't run the latest and greatest 3D game at a reasonable speed, you can't get on.
As a side bonus, this should do away with first posters and other people who ruin the AC thing for those who use it responsibly.
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I mean, I've started to notice that OSS projects always seem to be trailing boldly behind closed source stuff. It's not that I don't see the value of an open source vmware-type project, but it's sort of upsetting that (lately, at least) we're always playing catch-up to ideas that companies have had.
I wonder if open source somehow doesn't foster originality...
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Let me clarify: in my experience, there always seem to be one or two people who really drive a successful development effort. While others put in a ton of work, these are the folks who you can single out and say "this wouldn't have worked without these guys". Think Romero and Carmack at id back in the olden days, Seymour Cray at Cray Research or (and you just knew I'd go there) Linus with the Linux kernel.
These are the folks who seem to be leaving Netscape/AOL now. You can call them prima donnas or credit hogs or whatever, but the fact is that all really legendary development teams have them, and they always seem to fall apart when they lose them. In that manner, 2 of 2000 can be really important.
PS: Don't call me a lemming. We prefer "sudden decelleration syndrome addicts".
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But then again, they do buy a lot of machines from My Favorite Comupter Maker.
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I don't decide what the users at my company get. I just get stuck supporting it. Gotta pay for school somehow, you know.
Next time, maybe you ought to get your facts straight before you open your cakehole.
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[snif snif] Hey, I smell a catch 22 here. Maybe you should only actively post until you become a moderator....
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If I ever see another person with a copy of stoned, I swear I'm gonna have to go on a shooting spree.
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That said, I'm liking what I hear about this movie -- maybe I'll go catch a show today (what the hell, it's only $4.50 before 5:30).
On another subject, this "Katz v. Taco" thing needs some Mortal Kombat II-inspired icon to go with it. Maybe a shot of them holding up their dukes at one another. No, on second thought that would look pretty bad -- maybe they could be poised with their palm pilots and cell phones and personal fax machines, ready for a geek duel a la Dilbert. Yeah, that'd work...
----
----
There are, after all, more than one way to skin a cat or, in this case, shoot down an airplane. Even the most slealthy airplane (and those things are very nearly impossible to spot on even the best radar sets) gives off a lot of heat. Fling a heat-seeker in its direction, and all you've got it a subsonic airplane and some flares.
It's about that time you start wishing you'd signed up to fly an A-10...
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Given a choice between using high-tech weapons and not, I'll take 'em. Any good soldier recognizes the value of the tools layed out in front of him.
As with all tools, their value is in how you use them.
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