I can't believe all the whining going on here on the part of programmers. "sysadmins are idiots". "sysadmins are morons". blah blah blah.
Well, haven't I used enough crappy software in my life to think that developers are morons? What about all the shitcan applications I have to make work on a daily basis? Oh, yeah, developers are gods. Right.
What you don't understand is that while yes, we have essentially a service based job, we also have an utterly thankless job. Most of our time is spent dealing with flashing-twelve morons who know about 5% of what they should know about computers. Then there are the idiots who know about 25% of what they should know - look out. These are the idiots that think they "own" the computer and install all sorts of crap on it, download pirated shit all day, and make your life a miserable, intolerable hell.
The other day a luser came up to me with some ascii garbage her printer spat out at her. She showed it to me and asked "What does this mean?!" in a very surly manner. I told her I didn't have my decoder ring. She wasn't amused. "You're the computer person, you're supposed to know what this means!!" she insisted. I look at it for a second and pretend to translate: "you.. are... umm.. a FUCKING MORON!". Well, that's what I wanted to do anyway.
No one cares about your lunch hour. Everyone expects you to say "how high" when they say "jump". And we're all underpaid. So go to hell!!!
Oh, and yes, there are a lot of cluessless support people, but they are not real admins. I was dealing with one the other day who literally didn't know how to compress a file to email it to me (it was a word doc - of course - and way too large to email). I don't understand how people like this get jobs, but, whatever.
That's not my definition of a social life, it's my definition of a LACK of a social life.
Speaking of lack of social skills: you come to a predominately linux oriented site, then attach a sig which is highly insulting to linux users... um, you are the one with no social skills. What surprises me is that you haven't been flamed enough to remove it yet.
Probably you were the passionless, goody-goody type in high school who did everything your parents told you and didn't question anything, studied hard and made straight A's. Probably you are bland and uninteresting, and your insulting post, which shows nothing but bile and insensitivity, underscores both your lack of social skills and your ponderous vapidity.
Say what you want, but from all accounts so far, I think I'd rather get to know them than you.
One poster proclaims the subjects of Mr Katz's article to be "the white trash of the computer world".
That was timur, who is becoming famous on/. for being, well, a complete and utter asshole. His sig says it all - he comes to a predominately linux oriented site and then includes a sig insulting to anyone who uses linux. What a prick. Talk about lack of social skills.
Otherwise, yeah, I was reminded very much of myself when reading this. I too came from a lower middle class background, scraped by on practically nothing to get through college (and I had to join the army too). Although my background was liberal arts, I didn't get into computers 'til late - I was 26 (33 now).
These guys are unpolished gems, works in progress. I sincerely hope they go to college; I for one was sorry that they entered the horrible 9 - 5 crap shithole world so quickly. I delayed it as much as was humanly possible.
It's simply a better weapon. I wonder what would happen if we all focused our efforts in slashdotting www.microsoft.com. Just for one day. I'd for one like to see what they can take.
They mentioned the NT kernel specifically... while this would be of interest academically, the way I understand it, it won't hurt micros~1 dominance at all the way opening up the API's would - or am I wrong?
It seems opening up the API's would be the best since that would let projects like WINE work really well.
It's communist. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" -Marx, "Software must be freely distributable so you can help your neighbor." -Stallman
Communism is not just a few pithy statements you can regurgitate in hastily formed arguments. It's an entire cosmology, not just an economic proposition. Christ says we should share as well, does that make RMS christian?
His political ideas really don't have a great deal to do with the FSF, which has one very simple goal.
I can't believe I thought this article was true. I read it several days ago, when it was linked to linuxtoday (I have been reduced to spending not less than 60% of my working hours going between/. and linuxtoday). I completely thought it was true, although I really skimmed most of it. Having re-read it, I can't believe I didn't get it.
Maybe we all need to get out more and stop bashing micros~1 so much. I've even torn down the Bill Gates-as-Hitler poster with the "I want to believe - the Truth is out there" caption from my kitchen wall.
I think this is what he was talking about - not system logs. However, there is an option in 2.2 for "BSD style process accounting". I have no use for this myself, but it sounds like the sort of thing he was looking for.
Of course, he was not using kernel 2.2. If he wasn't going to judge linux based on the latest kernels, why review it at all? No one uses linux "out of the box" if their needs would be better met by compiling a custom latest kernel. It's a whole different mentality from the commercial world, and it didn't seem like he understands this.
That said, who in the fuck would pay $1000 for this nonsense? If they weren't willing to even upgrade kernels, one wonders how much work they went into testing... it smacks of "we're too lazy to do any testing, so we'll compile a bunch of info you already know, and charge you $1000 for it". What a joke. I need to start my own fudly Gartner Group clone.
I've never seen the idea anywhere else. Yes, it was one of his arguments he rejected leading up to his famous cogito ergo sum, but as far as I know, no one else thought of that distinct possibility before Descartes.
Of course we all know that Descartes was completely wrong, and that he stole the idea from Al Gore (when time traveling) anyway, who is controlled by Venusians led by Elvis.
Mozilla was completely redone... it will be more standards compliant. Yes, IE does currently kick Netscapes ass.
IE still has more cruft. This will start to show later on, and IE might turn out to be another unmanageable micros~1 product. It's not bigger than 4.0, but it's sure close.
I admit it's sure hard to defend netscape these days.
It's more of an action film, but it has sci-fi elements. It just didn't take the ai-human thing very far. That, to me, was to only real flaw in this movie. They present you with this horrible circumstance, present it in a terrifying way, then they just blow the whole theme off. As if to say, "Oh, I can't deal with this - fuck it, let's just have some fun". Well, it was fun, but it didn't really have anything intelligent to say.
Oh, and does anyone else think sci-fi has really sucked lately (ike the last ten years or so)? Look what they did to Starship Troopers. Sphere was unbvelieveably bad (a blatant rip-off of Solaris, which is a great movie) as are all the recent Crighton crap.
The only sci-fi movie I've ever seen that managed to be both brilliant and dizzyingly action packed at the same time was Robocop. The Matrix just didn't cut it.
But it was great to see Larry Fishburne in a good movie, he is a great actor, and has been in some real duds lately (remember Event Horizon - more horrible sci-fi). As good as Keanu Reeves is bad. And boy, Keanu Reeves is bad. But he did OK here, due mainly I suspect to competent direction and keeping his part of the script under 150 words, total (did anyone count?).
It doesn't matter that the movie had holes; as long as you didn't have time to think about them while you were watching it.
I'd say that the movie was full of holes and silliness, but it doesn't matter; most action movies are (and yes, it was an action movie). They did a great job at suspending disbelief in this case, you hardly had time to think about whether the plot was credible or not.
BTW, humans have mused about the "brain in a vat controlled by evil aliens" theory since Descartes. I'm just a little surprised no one's made a good movie about it until now (no Dark City was horrible).
These cultures have not "been killing each other for centuries" -- the ethnic cleansing conducted by Serbian nationlists first in Bosnia and now in Kosovo is the product of a deliberate and callous fabrication of history as a means of attainting and maintaining political power.
??... and the Croats (ustachi) were slaughtering the serbs - whole villages of them - during WW2, and before that, etc. etc. Yes, they do hate each other, and yes they do have a long history of killing each other.
Yes, but while Croats and Serbs may speak to each other they may not write to each other (serbs use cyrillic alphabet and croats use the latin). So yes, you're right, but I didn't feel/. was the place to get very technical about it.
At least that's my opinion. These people have been killing each other for centuries (since the original Ottoman invasion).
The only thing that has even kept peace in the Balkans has been occupation, plain and simple. The Ottomans kept an iron-fisted peace, as did the Austrians after them, albeit a bit more gently. Probably the US occupying the Balkans would be a bad idea; and as soon as our military presence disappears, they will go back to slaughtering each other.
The real problem is that these cultures simply hate each other. They are the same ethnicity; most people do not realize this. The bosnians, serbs and croats are all the same people, separated by culture - religeon, language...
The way to fix this is not with bombs, but with televisions. We need to put a TV in every Balkan home and pipe in M-TV. This will eradicate their cultures, religeon and everything else along with it, turn their populations in drooling, babbling idiots, and hence fix the problem. Talk about techno-war. Hmphhh!
We all have such high hopes for Mozilla, it is so depressing to hear that so few outside people have picked it up. We keep hearing from the press about how mozilla is "on track" and now this. One gets the impression that the whole project has been a disaster.
Unfortunately, jwz is right. Netscape has become huge, greedy and unweildly. The management is making stupid decisions (like the effort poured into 4.5). Big companies are just that. Obcessed with the bottom line, they get too fat and conservative, and finally, paralysis sets in.
Perhaps it is for the best, but one cannnot be but saddened, as when your two best friends start hating each other.
In that book that came out a few months ago - "The Microsoft File". A very good read, however it is totally undocumented; I wish she had used some footnotes or something. At any rate, the section on DR DOS was great reading, the means with which micros~1 managed to crush that product were astonishing.
CLI's are VERY powerful but they do not "scale down" to very simple tasks, while menu based gui's cannot to "scale up" for very complcated or repetitive tasks; so one really needs both.
It is a tremendous fallacy to think the OS does not need a cli and attendant tools. The main application for cli's is system administration, but there are many other places where a normal user would benefit.
However, I disagree with you one one point: there really is a trade off between power and ease of use. This is not to say there is a trade off between power and good design or simplicity (which I think was really your point after all). Ease of use generally involves limiting one's options or obfuscating them; there really isn't any other way.
There comes a point where complexity and power are traded for ease of use (note: ease of use and simplicity are not the same thing). This is the point one should strive for.
If you want to be rational, that is.
Red Hat is designed to make it easy for the refugee, this is true. However, Red Hat is also cutting edge and they keep up with the times. You talk about how glorious Slackware is, but the truth is that this distro is dead, totally unsecure, unmaintained, and horribly out of date.
Yes, there is a point in doing something the hard way, but as I heard someone on usenet say:
"The first time I upgraded all the libraries and updated all the daemons for security fixes for slack, it was a learning experience. The second time it was a pain in the ass, and the third time I just switched to Red Hat."
This seems to be a trend, and I see this a lot in Debian and especially BSD users. The idea that something has to be difficult to be powerful. This is ridiculous and counter productive, and it just doesn't make sense. Simplicity, always. Always.
Take BSD's install and compare to Red Hat's. BSD's is far more complicated, it is counter intuitive and yet it is no more powerful than Red Hat's, which is so easy that anyone with some experience with PC's could do it with only a little RTFM. The reason BSD's install sucks is not because it is powerful, but because the people who designed it just aren't good at interface design.
Something can be simple and powerful. Deal with it. This is just something the BSD/Debian fud coalition is going to have to face.
The idea that Red Hat is somehow inferior because it doesn't make you compile and install bash before you can use it is just utterly ridiculous. This article was nothing more than "my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours" chest thumping nonsense. People like this have no point and need to be ignored. If the Debain maintainers do not want to add value (convenience is a value, yes) to linux then that's their business, but they'll just have less users because of it. Yes, even advanced users want convenience. Sorry.
UNIX like OS's are not gaining popularity because they are complex. Rather, they are gaining popularity because they are simple. Compare linux to the insane, incomprehensible complexity of Windows NT. If complexity was such a great thing in and of itself, this guy would be mucking about in the NT registry, not using Debian.
There are a lot of administrators out there who just can't get enough of Micos~1. I know, I work with two of them. Micros~1 everything. Of course they are - what a coincedence - not very bright and I have no idea why they have their jobs, but that's another story.
When I pointed out that "melissa" was merely taking advantage of weaknesses built-in to Micros~1 Word, they just grinned and shrugged, as if to suggest that I'm some sort of conspiracy obcessed wacko who needs to be ignored or just laughed off. Ughh.
Pretty interesting, and some of the prank reviews had me falling off my chair.
God, I love the internet because of stuff like this. Finally, people can at least fight the insulting drivel that has been handed to them by advertising and marketing droids. It's funny that these people have been pushing this crap through a one-way medium for so long they have no idea what to do when they meet with responses.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, haven't I used enough crappy software in my life to think that developers are morons? What about all the shitcan applications I have to make work on a daily basis? Oh, yeah, developers are gods. Right.
What you don't understand is that while yes, we have essentially a service based job, we also have an utterly thankless job. Most of our time is spent dealing with flashing-twelve morons who know about 5% of what they should know about computers. Then there are the idiots who know about 25% of what they should know - look out. These are the idiots that think they "own" the computer and install all sorts of crap on it, download pirated shit all day, and make your life a miserable, intolerable hell.
The other day a luser came up to me with some ascii garbage her printer spat out at her. She showed it to me and asked "What does this mean?!" in a very surly manner. I told her I didn't have my decoder ring. She wasn't amused. "You're the computer person, you're supposed to know what this means!!" she insisted. I look at it for a second and pretend to translate: "you .. are ... umm .. a FUCKING MORON!". Well, that's what I wanted to do anyway.
No one cares about your lunch hour. Everyone expects you to say "how high" when they say "jump". And we're all underpaid. So go to hell!!!
Oh, and yes, there are a lot of cluessless support people, but they are not real admins. I was dealing with one the other day who literally didn't know how to compress a file to email it to me (it was a word doc - of course - and way too large to email). I don't understand how people like this get jobs, but, whatever.
Begin the flames!
Speaking of lack of social skills: you come to a predominately linux oriented site, then attach a sig which is highly insulting to linux users ... um, you are the one with no social skills. What surprises me is that you haven't been flamed enough to remove it yet.
Probably you were the passionless, goody-goody type in high school who did everything your parents told you and didn't question anything, studied hard and made straight A's. Probably you are bland and uninteresting, and your insulting post, which shows nothing but bile and insensitivity, underscores both your lack of social skills and your ponderous vapidity.
Say what you want, but from all accounts so far, I think I'd rather get to know them than you.
That was timur, who is becoming famous on
Otherwise, yeah, I was reminded very much of myself when reading this. I too came from a lower middle class background, scraped by on practically nothing to get through college (and I had to join the army too). Although my background was liberal arts, I didn't get into computers 'til late - I was 26 (33 now).
These guys are unpolished gems, works in progress. I sincerely hope they go to college; I for one was sorry that they entered the horrible 9 - 5 crap shithole world so quickly. I delayed it as much as was humanly possible.
Go to school guys, you won't regret it!!
It's simply a better weapon. I wonder what would happen if we all focused our efforts in slashdotting www.microsoft.com. Just for one day. I'd for one like to see what they can take.
Yeah, I know I'm immature.
It seems opening up the API's would be the best since that would let projects like WINE work really well.
Communism is not just a few pithy statements you can regurgitate in hastily formed arguments. It's an entire cosmology, not just an economic proposition. Christ says we should share as well, does that make RMS christian?
His political ideas really don't have a great deal to do with the FSF, which has one very simple goal.
I don't like any of those. The old one is better.
Maybe we all need to get out more and stop bashing micros~1 so much. I've even torn down the Bill Gates-as-Hitler poster with the "I want to believe - the Truth is out there" caption from my kitchen wall.
KILL MICROS~1!!!
MICROS~1MUST DIE!!!
DIE!
DIE!!!!!
Of course, he was not using kernel 2.2. If he wasn't going to judge linux based on the latest kernels, why review it at all? No one uses linux "out of the box" if their needs would be better met by compiling a custom latest kernel. It's a whole different mentality from the commercial world, and it didn't seem like he understands this.
That said, who in the fuck would pay $1000 for this nonsense? If they weren't willing to even upgrade kernels, one wonders how much work they went into testing ... it smacks of "we're too lazy to do any testing, so we'll compile a bunch of info you already know, and charge you $1000 for it". What a joke. I need to start my own fudly Gartner Group clone.
Of course we all know that Descartes was completely wrong, and that he stole the idea from Al Gore (when time traveling) anyway, who is controlled by Venusians led by Elvis.
IE still has more cruft. This will start to show later on, and IE might turn out to be another unmanageable micros~1 product. It's not bigger than 4.0, but it's sure close.
I admit it's sure hard to defend netscape these days.
It's more of an action film, but it has sci-fi elements. It just didn't take the ai-human thing very far. That, to me, was to only real flaw in this movie. They present you with this horrible circumstance, present it in a terrifying way, then they just blow the whole theme off. As if to say, "Oh, I can't deal with this - fuck it, let's just have some fun". Well, it was fun, but it didn't really have anything intelligent to say.
Oh, and does anyone else think sci-fi has really sucked lately (ike the last ten years or so)? Look what they did to Starship Troopers. Sphere was unbvelieveably bad (a blatant rip-off of Solaris, which is a great movie) as are all the recent Crighton crap.
The only sci-fi movie I've ever seen that managed to be both brilliant and dizzyingly action packed at the same time was Robocop. The Matrix just didn't cut it.
But it was great to see Larry Fishburne in a good movie, he is a great actor, and has been in some real duds lately (remember Event Horizon - more horrible sci-fi). As good as Keanu Reeves is bad. And boy, Keanu Reeves is bad. But he did OK here, due mainly I suspect to competent direction and keeping his part of the script under 150 words, total (did anyone count?).
I'd say that the movie was full of holes and silliness, but it doesn't matter; most action movies are (and yes, it was an action movie). They did a great job at suspending disbelief in this case, you hardly had time to think about whether the plot was credible or not.
BTW, humans have mused about the "brain in a vat controlled by evil aliens" theory since Descartes. I'm just a little surprised no one's made a good movie about it until now (no Dark City was horrible).
?? ... and the Croats (ustachi) were slaughtering the serbs - whole villages of them - during WW2, and before that, etc. etc. Yes, they do hate each other, and yes they do have a long history of killing each other.
Yes, but while Croats and Serbs may speak to each other they may not write to each other (serbs use cyrillic alphabet and croats use the latin). So yes, you're right, but I didn't feel /. was the place to get very technical about it.
The only thing that has even kept peace in the Balkans has been occupation, plain and simple. The Ottomans kept an iron-fisted peace, as did the Austrians after them, albeit a bit more gently. Probably the US occupying the Balkans would be a bad idea; and as soon as our military presence disappears, they will go back to slaughtering each other.
The real problem is that these cultures simply hate each other. They are the same ethnicity; most people do not realize this. The bosnians, serbs and croats are all the same people, separated by culture - religeon, language ...
The way to fix this is not with bombs, but with televisions. We need to put a TV in every Balkan home and pipe in M-TV. This will eradicate their cultures, religeon and everything else along with it, turn their populations in drooling, babbling idiots, and hence fix the problem. Talk about techno-war. Hmphhh!
Unfortunately, jwz is right. Netscape has become huge, greedy and unweildly. The management is making stupid decisions (like the effort poured into 4.5). Big companies are just that. Obcessed with the bottom line, they get too fat and conservative, and finally, paralysis sets in.
Perhaps it is for the best, but one cannnot be but saddened, as when your two best friends start hating each other.
In that book that came out a few months ago - "The Microsoft File". A very good read, however it is totally undocumented; I wish she had used some footnotes or something.
At any rate, the section on DR DOS was great reading, the means with which micros~1 managed to crush that product were astonishing.
It is a tremendous fallacy to think the OS does not need a cli and attendant tools. The main application for cli's is system administration, but there are many other places where a normal user would benefit.
However, I disagree with you one one point: there really is a trade off between power and ease of use. This is not to say there is a trade off between power and good design or simplicity (which I think was really your point after all). Ease of use generally involves limiting one's options or obfuscating them; there really isn't any other way.
If you want to be rational, that is.
Red Hat is designed to make it easy for the refugee, this is true. However, Red Hat is also cutting edge and they keep up with the times. You talk about how glorious Slackware is, but the truth is that this distro is dead, totally unsecure, unmaintained, and horribly out of date.
Yes, there is a point in doing something the hard way, but as I heard someone on usenet say:
This seems to be a trend, and I see this a lot in Debian and especially BSD users. The idea that something has to be difficult to be powerful. This is ridiculous and counter productive, and it just doesn't make sense. Simplicity, always. Always.
Take BSD's install and compare to Red Hat's. BSD's is far more complicated, it is counter intuitive and yet it is no more powerful than Red Hat's, which is so easy that anyone with some experience with PC's could do it with only a little RTFM. The reason BSD's install sucks is not because it is powerful, but because the people who designed it just aren't good at interface design.
Something can be simple and powerful. Deal with it. This is just something the BSD/Debian fud coalition is going to have to face.
The idea that Red Hat is somehow inferior because it doesn't make you compile and install bash before you can use it is just utterly ridiculous. This article was nothing more than "my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours" chest thumping nonsense. People like this have no point and need to be ignored. If the Debain maintainers do not want to add value (convenience is a value, yes) to linux then that's their business, but they'll just have less users because of it. Yes, even advanced users want convenience. Sorry.
UNIX like OS's are not gaining popularity because they are complex. Rather, they are gaining popularity because they are simple. Compare linux to the insane, incomprehensible complexity of Windows NT. If complexity was such a great thing in and of itself, this guy would be mucking about in the NT registry, not using Debian.
There are a lot of administrators out there who just can't get enough of Micos~1. I know, I work with two of them. Micros~1 everything. Of course they are - what a coincedence - not very bright and I have no idea why they have their jobs, but that's another story.
When I pointed out that "melissa" was merely taking advantage of weaknesses built-in to Micros~1 Word, they just grinned and shrugged, as if to suggest that I'm some sort of conspiracy obcessed wacko who needs to be ignored or just laughed off. Ughh.
God, I love the internet because of stuff like this. Finally, people can at least fight the insulting drivel that has been handed to them by advertising and marketing droids. It's funny that these people have been pushing this crap through a one-way medium for so long they have no idea what to do when they meet with responses.
Now let's all go write some reviews ... :-)
... and be done with it. Then everyone would call it "GNU Linux".