I've been in the same situation as you somewhat. I wanted to help an open source project so as to improve my coding skills, as well as learning how to wrap myself in a big web project.
Not sure what languages you know, you mention PHP and that is enough. There are plenty of PHP projects that some people vitally depend on, like OScommerce. Lots of things to improve there - the customer form seems non-American (no Zip Code), there are a number of almost necessary add-ons and adding them all on is a tough process etc. And many people depend on it. I also see PHP security issues for all kinds of PHP projects all of the time, something else to work on.
I know C decently, and had an interest in optical character recognition, and a few years back GOCR was the best free OCR out there. As I was unused to contributing to large C projects it took me a little bit to wrap my head around the program, but ultimately I didn't have to completely - some programs split up functionality so that one only has to understand parts. I tested GOCR against many scans, saw where it made a lot of errors and then worked to improve its functionality for those mis-scanned letters - ultimately I did a patch. The maintainer disappeared for a few months so I gave up on submitting it, but then he returned, I made noise about my patch and he submitted a modified version of it.
Around that time, Google released the tesseract OCR in C++. It is superior to GOCR, but I do not know C++ as well as C, and its data structures (based on the common and abstract dawg and trie type data structures) are more complex than GOCR's, I have not had the time to wrap my head around it to contribute.
After learning some Java in a class, I felt I had little real-world experience in it, so I just searched through the bug reports in the most popular Sourceforge Java projects. I picked a sort of uncomplicated project, and a bug which was not that incredibly complex (but was not simple) and fixed it up. My patch was accepted.
I also had a problem with one of my programs on Ubuntu and got involved with it. This program calls libraries, which call other libraries, which call other libraries. So the bug reporting is a little off - people report bugs all over the place (Ubuntu bug tracking, Red Hat bug tracking, Debian bug tracking), but they don't always make it to the right place - a lot of the bugs need to be kicked upstream to the library maintainers. One bug which is happening was introduced during a certain commit, I discovered where it happened and patched the problem, but they have not accepted my patch yet. I am trying to learn the library (and the library the library depends on) so as to commit a better patch. But just my help in maintaining the bug tracking systems and coordinating them is being a help - I close tickets and email people that their problems have been patched and so forth - I do grunt work the people who know the coding language and the programs well do not want to do, so even in that aspect I am helping. Although I am working to understand the programs as well as they do.
There are a lot of arguments against degrees, however it depends on the circumstances. Yes, as many articles have pointed out, over $100k, plus interest, for a four-year degree may not be worth it. Yes, some schools have crappy CS programs and a CS degree from them is not worth much.
I started working as a UNIX sysadmin in 1996. I am going for my Bachelors now - I started off going nights and weekends and am now doing it more heavily. For two reasons - one, many job applications ask for a Bachelors, and even if they don't, HR often asks if I have a degree. My other reason is I always felt lacking in terms of programming skill (and to a lesser extent, OS knowledge). I always wondered about assembly language but never did much to learn it - well, I took a class and wrote Towers of Hanoi in assembly and got 3 credits and an A+. Just one course in Java gave me enough confidence to send in a patch for a bug on a major free software Java project - and it was committed.
Putting aside my ignoring of assembly for so long - I would have never, ever, ever done the studying of discrete math and graphing theory and calculus that I have been doing in school. Yet it allows me to approach projects which I was never able to get a handle on before. Data structures and algorithms which once confused me become clearer - especially complex data structures. And I am still learning.
One of the keys is having great teachers. One teacher I had had us do homework after homework, often just changing around a little what we were doing - we would do recursion with Fibonacci numbers, which was disastrous (which was the lesson), then we would do recursion with something more useful. We also used recursion along with a backtracking algorithm. He was very knowledgeable and a good teacher and his lessons and homework were very enlightening.
The problem with work is there is always such a rush. The business unit wants the code done, the server installed, whatever, yesterday. Then after commuting, 8+ hours at work and commuting again, the last thing you feel like doing is cracking open a book on calculus and doing integrations, or a discrete math book and studying set theory, so as to prepare you for more advanced computer science topics. School is what you make of it - the guy next to me in one of my classes watches the World Cup on his computer screen, I don't see him ten years out as being a programmer making any kind of money, I wonder what he is even doing there. A decently priced state school with a (mostly) good staff can push forward your knowledge.
There are bright people who have succeeded right out of high school, however if they had gone to college they would probably be doing even better. When someone mentioned an algorithm was a (big-O) algebraic one, and could be made better, they would understand what that means instead of stumbling around in the dark somewhat as to what that all meant, as I used to. Computer science is not for "people who do not know how to use computers" - many of my classmates know computers well, are very sharp, and are getting even sharper (admittedly, a few of the other ones I can't see as ever being programmers). Some of my professors are very good as well.
Americans arm and fund the Taliban and Al Qaeda to overthrow the secular Afghani government in the 1970s and 1980s. Then they invade Iraq, one of the few secular Arab countries left, whose constitution changes a country from what was nominally one following pan-Arab socialism (something it had been in the early days) to one that was officially Islamic. We keep hearing about how US intervention is against Islamic fundamentalists - yet to repeat, the US funded the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the the Iraq invasion changed the Iraqi constitution to one stating the country was an Islamic one.
So the US is funding Israel, which just killed a number of people on a humanitarian flotilla delivering food to blockaded Gaza today, a flotilla on which there is a Jewish holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and various European MPs. The US grabs Iraqis off the street and puts them in Abu Ghraib, forces them to masturbate and films them doing so (besides the one tortured to death). The forced masturbation is allowed to be done, but not broadcast on US TV because our good Christian values does not allow us to see what we are doing over there or something.
So on top of all this bloodshed and mayhem the US causes in these countries, as their bodies pile up, Americans are now attacking their culture and religion. It is an attempt to dehumanize the people already being killed. If drones were not flying through Pakistan killing people, it would be one thing, but this Facebook thing is just another attack on all the blood and bodies Americans are stacking up in these countries. It has worked too - this sort of thing has stirred up fundamentalists in Pakistan, who just bombed some mosques of the moderate Ahmadis. So the usual US practice of getting rid of secular moderates and putting radical Islamists in charge is working.
On November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris Junior released his worm, on an Internet that at that time had very little security. It took down a significant chunk of the net, crashing thousands of machines. Morris's father was a bigwig in the national security establishment, Morris was an upper middle class WASP who went to Harvard. Despite all this damage, he did no jail time.
On January 24, 1990, in New York City, three MoD hackers were arrested. I had met all three before they were arrested. In terms of damage, only one machine they had ever been on had crashed, and all three denied crashing that one machine. There was no proof they had crashed it, and dozens of hackers had been on that Learning Link machine. Even if one had crashed it, which I don't believe, how can you accuse three people of the same crime? All three lived in poor or working class neighborhoods in New York, went to public schools etc. The judge said he would make an example of them and sent all three to jail.
I was 16 years old when they were arrested, and this was my first real experience seeing the "justice system" - an upper middle class WASP whose father was high in the military establishment admits he crashed thousands of machines and is called a misunderstood genius who made a mistake, and walks on charges. A year later three guys younger than him are arrested for crashing a computer which they all plausibly deny crashing (and how does it take three people to crash one computer anyhow), a computer which had dozens of other hackers on it. They come from working class neighborhoods in Queens, with modems connected to Commodore 64's, not Unix workstations at Ivy League schools like Cornell. They go to jail, Morris walks. An early lesson for me on how America really works.
My last high school math class was in 1991. 1990 really - the second half of senior year many were accepted early to college, so the high school didn't even really try to teach anything. I did Calculus I in late 2007 in night school.
I studied some stuff in the months before class, but was not really prepared at all. The first half of the first day of class covered all of algebra and pre-calc, the second half was new material. She put up stuff on the board the first day like x^(y/z) and expected us to know what it meant. The next few classes we were expected to already know what the quadratic equation was. Some of my lowest grades were in that class, and I studied all the time for it. I got a 670 on my Math SAT, and am doing math tutoring for grammar school kids right now. I am not bad at math, it is just too much to expect to remember this stuff 20 years later.
I would suggest auditing a pre-calc course, or even taking a non-credit pre-calc course outside your college. Or take one there. It is a lot more work than I had anticipated. It is cumulative as well so if you fall behind I would have been screwed. We also barely covered asymptotes in class but half the test questions were on asymptotes.
Also - almost everyone I know who is short a few credits in college to graduate is almost always short for the math classes. There must be a reason math is always the subject people are short a few credits to graduate in. I myself have been pushing off Calc II since Calc I was so hard.
I have been happy with Dreamhost to some extent. It is known as a tech-friendly place - meaning tech-handy people are happy with it.
One problem I have had is the load average on my (web) server sometimes spikes enormously. I have been telling support this for years but they give me the runaround. They switched off my ability to see others processes, so who or what is spiking the processor is a mystery to me. Sometimes it slows my web site to a crawl. Multiple complaints for years only gets ridiculous answers. I don't think the people answering know what load average means. Worse yet, they think they know more than me and act like I'm an idiot talking about something I don't know about.
One problem with a lot of these hosts is they don't offer Tomcat or java application servers and they prefer people use PHP (or Perl, or RoR). Some do, but you have to pay. Others do it cheap but have other problems. If the good major ones offered Tomcat, that would be nice.
I think there will be manned missions to Mars before a real union of IT workers is formed in the US, nevertheless I find some of these statements to be incorrect.
"everything else that has been done for union's sake lately (see: destruction of US auto industry)"
And what destroyed the US textile industry? North Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the country, 50 of 50, yet over the past years textile factories have been closing all over North Carolina and moving to other countries. What you're saying makes no sense - manufacturing has been moving out of the US to developing countries for some time. Whether it is very unionized like the auto industry, or with virtually no unionization like the textile industry in the Southern US, all have been affected the same. If unionization was what is doing it, then the textile factories in the South wouldn't be closing at the same rate that auto manufacturing plants are.
"How exactly, considering that funding isn't sufficient for staffing at the current expense, do you expect companies to afford to bankroll a union AND get more staff to man the servers?"
There are three places money goes out to in any company - buying (especially replenishing) goods, wages and profit. Regarding goods - for an IT company keyboards, mice, monitors etc. get worn out and are replaced over time, electricity is used and so on. As far as wages - this is what people are paid. As far as profits - in large companies these are sent out as dividends to stockholders, in smaller companies they are often reinvested to buy more goods and pay wages to more people. Unions are focused on profits, and getting more of it into the wage slot. Take a company like Verizon - it has a union, it also has a de facto monopoly on the local loop, no matter what the law says. Verizon sends a fat dividend check to its shareholders every quarter, and the check would be even fatter if the CWA was not a union at Verizon. The Verizon techs and workers do all the work, create all the wealth, so they organize to pull more of that dividend check to their wages. Anyhow, the union goes after the profit, so that is how the union is "bankrolled". If the company has no profit to go after, there is no point in a union.
"In all likelihood you will end up with lower pay and more work; but hey at least you will have a contract!"
Virtually every economic study done in every country in every time period shows this is not the case. Unionization almost always tends to a higher pay per hour. As unions ask for overtime pay (IT is exempt from mandatory overtime pay) the hours worked tend to be less as well, although this correlation is less strong. If they have to pay overtime, they pay 3 people to work 40 hours a week instead of 2 to work 60 hours a week.
"Now, you probably have a very comparable education to your boss, and probably to his boss and most of the rest of the organization. You are smart, start making your own decisions."
While you may be correct that unions, or labor organizations, or whatever you want to call them may need to adapt to the changing economy, your statement is self-contradictory. You talk about "Your boss, and probably...his boss" and "you". Well there you have it right there, you already have two educations against one education. Who is smarter, both of them put together or you? You make my point in your statement. The boss has the management structure, human resources, lawyers and a lot of money on their side, you are one, isolated individual. It is like a basketball team versus one player. Who is going to win?
"You know what else would prevent you from having to take work calls after hours? Stand up, tell your boss you won't give up your personal time anymore, and let him fix the situation or fire you. Presto, no more late nights!"
For unionized workers, this is not even a conversation they would even have to have. Which is the point. They are automatically paid for overtime, they don't have to argue with their boss over whether to come in on Saturday or not.
This submission is either the dumbest submission I've ever seen on Slashdot, or one of the cleverest trolls. Posted by kdawson, what a shock.
"We inevitably miss deadlines"
This is completely meaningless. I have never worked for a company which had sane deadlines. If I've been lucky, I've had an especially good manager who has been able to push back some of the pressure from his manager and the managers of other groups toward deadlines. If you search Google for "death march", the #1 entry is for the famous Bataan death march, the #2 entry is the Wikipedia entry for a Software development death march. I don't know how many times I've been brought into projects in the middle of them, where the project manager points to a flow chart on my first day in and says "you should have finished your part last week". In other words, I'm already a week behind because the original person slated quit, or went on vacation, or whatever. I have been in the industry since 1996, have worked at everything from very small startups to Fortune 100 companies and it is the same everywhere, unless your lucky to find some oasis in an academic job, government job or even, rarely, within a company. Deadlines use in modern companies is as a tool for management to overwork and exploit employees.
"I'm not in any position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently. Management seems to tolerate it."
Exactly. You are NOT in a position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently, you are not a manager, so shut the hell up! What are you, the little dork with a hall monitor armband? What damned business is it of yours? If there's something I can't stand, it's some whiny low-level developer who thinks he is a manager. Guess what, you're not a manager. It's not your job to say anything about someone who puts out crap code or doesn't work a straight 10-12 hours a day like everyone else. Especially if you are a recent graduate. Every once in a while I get these developers who are ultimately low level peons just like all of us not in management who whine and gripe about how certain developers are lazy and certain developers write crap code. And I don't mean when this has a *direct* effect on said complainer, as that is understandable and I would even complain myself about it. I mean people who make such complaints when this has no direct effect on them. Why do you care, and more so, why the hell should I care? I don't own the company, I just get a paycheck, so I don't give a shit. If the company wanted me to care, they can give me a 1% piece in the company, otherwise, caveat emptor, for them. Something exists to deal with these people, it is called management, if you are not a manager, and it does not directly effect you, then shut the hell up, stop giving yourself airs of being more important than you are when you're not.
My attitude is thus: if they give me significant options or a piece of the company, then my attitude changes and I become "concerned with the company". The other possible motivator is if I want to climb the corporate ladder. One ladder I am not on, thank heavens, but have seen is from low-level (A+/MCITP) help-desk guy to a position of seniority within the helpdesk group to a low position on the group running Exchange/file/domain control servers, to a position of seniority in that group, and then on to a position in the engineering/architecture group. So the desire to be promoted to a better position is another motivator. Other than those two factors, what motivation is there for me to anything other than the bare minimum to keep my job and keep sharp on my skill set? These companies will put hard-working employees who work extra hours when half the department quits due to crap working conditions, who spends years waking up from being paged in the middle of the night to fix something, out on the street in the worst economies the second their profit margin looks like it might dip slightly. They will give you inferior equipment, too littl
The only Americans I know who are dead from Anthrax were killed by a chemical warfare researcher working for the US Army, Bruce Edwards Ivans. So the US army's chemical warfare division developing these virii in order to "protect Americans" just in case the US ever needs to use chemical warfare (beyond napalm, Agent Orange etc.) has only wound up killing Americans.
Now they want to kill off monkeys in the course of this chemical warfare research as well. Great, two birds with one stone, we can torture and kill monkeys and boost the US in the field of chemical warfare.
One thing not mentioned much in the press is that guy at Yale who killed animal researcher Annie Le was the person who took care of the animals there. He was also known to have complained about how she mistreated the animals. PETA has complained for years how that lab mistreated animals, for very little constructive reason.
It is not animals versus humans, it is animals and those working people in the world who are still normal and human versus this OSU collaboration of chemical warfare and animal torture/killing and everything that is along with it. Abu Ghraib, the US support of Osama bin Laden, the US support of Hussein gassing the Kurds then the corporate media using that as a pretext decades later for invading Iraq, rabid right wing US Army chemical researchers killing Americans with the anthrax the army made, the US support of the coup in Honduras, the massive effort to keep working poor Americans from getting healthcare, SUVs causing global warming with their lobby preventing public transportation, US army bases spread all over the world with poor girls from rural villages in the whorehouses surrounding the bases, the Patriot Act, all of it is just one big thing, the big machine that is destroying life on this planet, people are either support it or don't, and from the comments it's obvious where most people on this board stand.
Honestly, I don't care about that. I would much rather have a boss with a backbone who prevents unnecessary late night requests then one who is micro-managing me during one. Most bosses I've had fall into two categories: self-confident, competent people who don't agree to crazy requests from other teams and their managers and who generally leave me alone - and - incompetent managers who worry about their position and who agree to impossible demands and who get nervous and pissy whenever something goes wrong and who are always micro-managing. Being one or the other is what keeps me there or looking for a job elsewhere.
If I have to stay two hours extra to finish something, I prefer my boss leaving, its sort of like "I have faith and confidence you can handle this, call me if there's a problem". On the other hand, if I or the team has to come in at 3 AM Saturday morning for some reason and the manager comes in just to show moral support that an inconvenience for us will be one that he will bear as well, that can be a nice thing - you know he's not going to have you working hours he won't work himself. But as I said, being competent, self-confident and having a backbone with other business units and with his own management is what I want more than working late with me. I'd rather him making sure I don't have to work late to deal with some other groups problems or lack of planning or whatever.
I saw that as well. I have been "upgrading over the Internet" with Debian (as well as Ubuntu) for years. I have upgraded Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems over the Internet for years as well. This is not some new, unique, innovative thing that only OpenSUSE has achieved.
Outside of the United States (other than some ignored sectors in England) this is not even a problem. Scientists and the intelligentsia know about global warming and how it is caused by humans. I'm not even sure how data from the last century could be manipulated - anyone with a thermometer can verify it, and the so-called "disputed" data is all very recent. All of this is really more of a window into the American psychology or politics or what have you than anything to do with peer reviewed climate change. Even if one scientist was manipulating data, which is not the case anyhow, that would not change the laws of physics where the burning of gasoline produces carbon dioxide. Some anonymous criminals break into a university's computers, hold onto the data for months while they cherry pick certain quotes, then release it just before the Copenhagen summit. This has no effect anywhere except in the United States, where a Senator from a fundamentalist, rural state demands the anonymous criminal's accusations be investigated. In a country where people have to battle to teach evolution and common descent of life, and not that some magic man in the clouds created all living things several thousand years ago; where we have a $27 million dollar museum in Kentucky showing this latter theory or faith or whatever, is this the country where we want to hear the opinions of the amateurs from?
The first thing I would do is try to bury it. Get your name out there on the Internet with lots of nice things attached.
I have never written anything that can be used against me but idiots, who I don't even know, have, and have done so years ago. Sometimes I have been successful having the content pulled but sometimes it is based in other countries. Who knows how it has affected me - no one has ever mentioned it to me, but perhaps someone looking at my resume will see something they don't like and I don't get a call.
So my name is on lists in lots of nice capacities - I patch some program, I help this or that project out. If you can Google your name, and one of the first 50 responses is something bad about you, you're probably in trouble. If a few of the first 50 are patches for some software, you helpfully answering someone's question etc., that is better.
I've succeeded in removing my name from a few places, I suggest you being nice about it, and in some cases, dishonest about it.
In the mid 1990s I watched a video tape of "The Falcon and the Snowman". It is based on a real story of a young man who worked at a sensitive location at TRW (his father was in the FBI and got him the job through the old boy network) which was responsible for sending and receiving CIA cables from overseas. Sometimes, they mixed up the TWXs and they saw cables they weren't supposed to. It was by this that he learned of how the CIA helped in the overthrow the government of Australia in the 1970s, the famous Whitlam constitutional crisis. You can read about it on Wikipedia. It can be debated how effective or ineffective the CIA's efforts were, but they've never denied their involvement, and in fact it was alleged that John Kerr was a CIA asset.
Anyhow, so one day in 1997 or 1998 I was sitting at my SunOS x86 workstation at work, back before NAT had become popular, and I decided to surf the web and visit some lefty Australian web sites that discussed the extent of CIA involvement in overthrowing Australia's government in the 1970s. Several days later, I noticed SNMP requests coming into my workstation, scanning for any information about it. If I hadn't set my workstation to log absolutely everything, if it wasn't a UNIX workstation, if I didn't control the Cisco router and access list and so on and so forth I never would have seen it, it would have been a standard SNMP request. In fact, I didn't log for everything and who knows what other queries came to the machine. I saved the request for years but then lost it in a hard drive crash. It came out of a US army intelligence division (.MIL) that was based in Quantico, Virginia and which had some long acronym which I now forget. I thought the military wasn't supposed to monitor the communications of US citizens, but apparently not in this case. Also, as soon as I saw this, I thought of how I had read about Whitlam and the CIA on the Australian web site days before, and that was the only thing I had done on the machine that they might have been interested in. With the Patriot Act etc. who knows what will be happening.
Through the 1992 presidential campaign, I had to sit through story after story after story about how Clinton protested the Vietnam War while he was in England. This was all 20 years after it happened, and was seen as a completely legitimate line of enquiry by the media and the establishment.
As far as government monitoring, I know people in the US with FBI files thousands of pages thick due to their involvement in peace or civil rights movements. The Patriot Act has widened the range of permissible activities beyond anything allowed in the twentieth century.
In fact, John Kerry going to France in the early 1970s was considered an issue in the 2004 campaign, and in fact Kerry doing things like that was the main line of attack against him in the presidential campaign.
Oh, but this is big, evil Iran. The country whose secular government the CIA overthrew in the 1950s because the Iranians wanted control over their own oil. They have to play by a different set of rules than we do.
I got a Commodore 64 around 1983, and got a modem soon after. I learned BASIC on it. In 1989, a friend of mine had a dial-in account on a local university's Unix and I began calling that. I always had Unix access since then. I began a job as a Unix Systems Administrator in 1996, at which time I began learning some Perl, and later, some PHP. In 2000, I had a lot of free time and sat down and shored up my C knowledge more than I had already.
In 2006, I went back for my CS degree. I have learned a lot that I had not learned in the proceeding 23 years. I learned C++. Despite all my experience, I had no idea what a constructor was before taking a C++ class. I learned Java, to where I have sent implemented patches to some major free software Java programs. I learned assembly language and programmed in it. I learned computer internals, DeMorgan's Law and how to create a two's complement binary calculator with AND, OR and NOT gates. I learned about big-O notation. One of my teacher's is an old-timer, and he really showed us how recursion and back-tracking could be used on a whole host of programs - it was really impressive how powerful these tools can be on a whole host of problems.
I have interviewed people, and have been interviewed, dozens, maybe hundreds of times. The world is full of programmers and administrators who know the basics of how to code, and only learn minimally when they have the job. Once in a while you meet people who really want to understand everything and almost seem to actually understand everything about what we're doing. Amidst a whole bunch of interviewees they really stand out - if they are somewhat normal and seem like they'd do the work, they're almost a guaranteed hire.
Also, on the other hand, do you want to look at yourself as a wage slave who knows the minimum to get by, or a craftsman who understands his work, even if he happens to be a wage slave? You can get caught in a trap of thinking that spending time learning is only benefiting your boss, but really your bosses will win either way, if you just consider yourself a cog in the machine, they've won in another way. People should take pride in their craftsmanship, even if the management doesn't.
Everyone above me is useless and accomplishes nothing. I don't think I am the most important person here though - the network team has to run the network, the DBAs have to run the databases, the programmers have to code. The systems do rest on my shoulders.
As far as the people above me, I don't need 10 managers to come by every morning and tell me there's a new cover for the TPS reports.
I started working at an organization a while back and I would file a trouble ticket whenever I came across something broken, even if it was unimportant and with an overflowing workload might not be done for a while. A manager was hired after a while who decided to use the trouble ticket system as a meter of progress for tasks done. When he announced this, I immediately closed all of these types of tickets, saved them locally on my machine, and even went into the database so as to delete all vestiges of these tickets. I began only creating tickets when I knew a task would probably be done on-time and quickly. The manager was canned after about two years there - the thing that saved him for so long is that his manager changed three times while he was there, the third one axed him.
What management wants to see is that their investment in you is getting results. If they spend X amount of dollars on something, they want to see how it is helping the company or whatever. Show how successful your projects have been, how your uptime rate is always increasing etc. Use lots of colorful charts, lists with 20 goals and "accomplished" next to 18 of them and "partially accomplished" next to the other two. That type of crap. I mean, if management wants this nonsense from the sysadmin, you're in Dilbert land already.
In France in 1968 there was a massive general strike, with workers taking over factories and the like, and De Gaulle even planned contingencies to leave France and invade it at some future point with the French army and possibly NATO support. One of the wall posters of that time said "The boss needs you, you don't need the boss". Sometimes I think these exercises are more to psychologically mess with you than anything. You do all the work and create all the wealth, the bosses and shareholders don't do anything and collect salaries and profits. By making you do a pointless exercise like this to justify yourself to them, they're putting the idea out of your head of the reverse - of why *they* are necessary to the company. After 13 years in this industry, I'm becoming convinced that the dumb, pointless things management makes you do does have some strange psychological point along these lines. I've quit agreeing with my co-workers that these presentations are dumb and pointless, I think they do have a point - keeping us disciplined, from requesting sane hours and on-call rotation and all of that.
I put Koala on two laptops - one an upgrade from Ibex, one a fresh install.
In mid-October I was running a Ubuntu-derivative Heron on my desktop and a straight, normal Ubuntu Ibex on my laptop. I had a package application doing a segmentation fault under certain repeatable conditions with both. I upgraded my laptop to Jackalope and still saw the bug. I checked out Ubuntu's launchpad and saw that most of the new bugs reported were for the Koala beta. So I upgraded to Koala beta (thus, being one of the people who tested the beta). The bug was still there, and I had apport report the bug to launchpad. When the release happened I was doing work over the net, so I did a piecemeal upgrade to the full version, grabbing 100 megs of packages via apt-get, doing other work, grabbing another 100 megs of packages and so on until i had upgraded completely. Aside from this third-party application bug which still persisted, the upgrade went fine for me.
Days later, someone who has a netbook running Windows said that it was broken and asked me to fix it since "I know how computers work". They use it solely to surf the web and they only use their web browser. It was blue screening on ever bootup, even "safe mode". I booted with Ubuntu LiveCD on the USB, mounted the hard drive and tried to fix the startup but it persisted. I did not have the time to deal with solving their Windows problem, and did not know how that Windows OEM recovery crap would work on this netbook. I told them I could wipe Windows and put Ubuntu on and they could surf the web again. They agreed. I did a fresh install.
The first problem was, networking was not working. Their netbook actually had a switch that turned networking on and off. I made sure it was turned on, stopped and started the wifi and network stuff a few times, rebooted once or twice and then it came on. As I said, I was in a rush and preferred it to just start working then diving into figuring out the problem. The second problem is they could not watch Youtube because Flash was not installed. I did not see flash as package, whether via apt-cache search or in that software universe GUI thing. Adobe did not have the Koala (9.10) as a package download so I downloaded a previous version. It could not find two package libraries. So then I looked for Gnash or Swfdec, even though those aren't so great. They were not listed. So I told the person I would fix it so they could watch Youtube some other day, they could still access e-mail and so on. So wifi was a slight bump, and Flash still is.
I went back to my laptop, which had been upgraded and not fresh installed and it could see Gnash and Swfdec as packages although the fresh install had not been able to.
Having looked at all of launchpad for my application problem, I began checking out other applications having problems on Koala. I saw a few that said all was well in Jackalope but an application went bust with the upgrade. I tested some of them and saw it was true, some of the Ubuntu package applications do not work at all on Koala - not a minor bug, the whole package is completely broken.
A lot of the bug reports have applications which use a lot of Gnome/Gtk/Glib libraries, as well as other libraries, and the problem that occurs spans calls from an application to one library to another library to another library, often libraries which are not that well-related, sometimes written in different languages (one C, one C++). As one needs to know Gnome/Glib etc. to some extent, download all these libraries etc. I can see how debugging can be tough, or a bit of a pain, or whatever. One was only downloadable off of SVN and it took me half an hour of playing with autoconf, automake and so on to recall that autom4te would just do all of that for me with the package.
Insofar as Ubuntu, Ubuntu wants to do a code release every six months, and after the experience of Debian, I support this 100%. Ubuntu also wants to focus on the desktop, and be one that a non-techie can use, and I think that is good
I usually use Linux, but I have a Windows PC and have had to install the drivers for an HP printer/scanner on the Windows PC (in fact, I had to do this for someone else with an HP printer/scanner and Windows PC as well). I know how to install a printer driver on Windows but know little about scanners, so I just let the HP CD install the drivers. It literally took more than half an hour each time, I don't even remember how long it took, and I had to keep coming back and clicking "OK" for this or that. It installed a ton of crap, photo-albums and other junk I will never use - I just use Gimp. You'd think I was hooking my PC up to a satellite dish on the roof or something for how long it takes to connect a damned printer/scanner.
I agree. In 1993 I heard about lynx and the World Wide Web, but when I checked it out and compared it to UMN's UNIX gopher client and gopherspace, it did not compare well at all, gopherspace was far superior with much more content, search engines like Archie and Veronica etc.
In November 1994 Netscape released its first beta, in December its first full version. For me, this was really when the web began to look more interesting - Navigator was well-made, there was graphical content and so forth. Also, don't forget, Navigator could use the Gopher protocol (my Firefox still can - Aerv.nl. From early 1995 on, you began to see an explosion of web content.
As far as hosting - in early 1996 I began working at an ISP which charged $50 a month for 10 megabytes of disk space, and the use of CGI, email and so forth was extra. And we were real cheap compared to some local competitors - people came flooding in to use us. Geocities began offering free (with advertising, a Geocities URL etc.) web pages in mid-1995, I created one in October 1995, as I certainly could not afford to shell out $50 a month for my web page back then. There was nothing really n00b about Geocities, Craigslist's web page did not have HTML as a job requirement when Geocities launched, in fact, Craigslist did not have a web page until 1996, the year after Geocities launched.
Before Madoff was arrested, a Google search for his name pointed to many pages at Yeshiva University, which he gave a lot of money to. If you clicked on the Google cache, there were glowing profiles about him. If you clicked on the actual pages, his name had been pulled out of all those pages almost as soon as he was arrested, because I was Googling all of this the day after he was arrested. It's still all probably on archive.org
ARPAnet went online in 1969, and there was no legal commercial activity on it until 1992 (and all barriers to commercial activity did not fall until 1995). The creation and architecture of the Internet has nothing to do with the "free market" whatever that means (how is a market in the USA which uses dollars free while a market in the old USSR using rubles not free?). It has to do with two decades of massive taxpayer investment in research and development for the Internet, which from 1992 to 1995 was handed over to corporations.
It continually amazes me how people who know little about the Internet, or just got on it recently, have rewritten its history to such an extent. I got on the Internet back when SRI-NIC was the root name server, I guess in the years ahead all of that will be washed away and the history of the creation of the Internet will be rewritten as a monument to free enterprise.
Yes, this person gave the correct response. By 10s I don't mean just the 10 card, but all the cards that also have a value of 10 - the 10, the Jack, the Queen and the King.
Also, a blackjack (Ace and 10 value card) usually pays out at 150%, so if the deck is full of 10 value cards and aces, that can shift the odds in your favor.
From a technical standpoint, they probably DO have a winning system. In a real world implementation, they don't.
I know someone who did this seriously, and I looked into it for a while. If you really dedicate yourself to it, and can follow the system, you can succeed. One thing to remember is it is all mathematical. Theoretically (although not in reality), you can place bets only when odds are in your favor! When the first hand is put out of a new deck, the odds are against you. Let's say for the first few hands of that new deck, most of the 4s, 5s and 6s from the deck have been dealt out, and none of the 10s or Aces. The odds swing into your favor, and get better and better as that pattern continues. Theoretically, you can watch the game, and only sit down and start betting when the odds turn in your favor. In reality, this will mark you as a counter, especially if you place large bets when you sit down.
The initial problem with counting is, you dedicate many, many hours to getting good at counting, but as soon as you start making money, you go in the "face book" and are banned from casinos (or at least banned from playing blackjack).
So you have to get a team together. Most teams have a lot of low level counters who bet small and when a decks odds turn in the player's favor (or when a deck turns significantly in the player's favor) they signal a "big player" on their counting team, who sits down and starts making big bets. If your team is betting big money and is successful, eventually they'll figure this out as well, but if you keep trading players out and are clever, you can keep it going, and make some money.
The problem is it takes a lot of discipline. With a team, you need good discipline from a lot of people. You need to trust everyone with large amounts of money. One person screwing up can blow your whole team's security. It is not an easy thing to do. On top of it all, even if you succeed in getting a disciplined team, once you get rolling, Griffin will begin figuring out who you are. Remember, you have dealers, pit bosses, floor managers there not to mention the cameras which have film saved for quite a while and then Griffin investigating. If you can get a competent, disciplined team like that together, why not start a company or something, without having the pain of all that security breathing down your neck once you get good? Ultimately, you have to do it for enjoyment as much as the money. Because it takes a lot of work, discipline, and relations with regards to the team.
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Not sure what languages you know, you mention PHP and that is enough. There are plenty of PHP projects that some people vitally depend on, like OScommerce. Lots of things to improve there - the customer form seems non-American (no Zip Code), there are a number of almost necessary add-ons and adding them all on is a tough process etc. And many people depend on it. I also see PHP security issues for all kinds of PHP projects all of the time, something else to work on.
I know C decently, and had an interest in optical character recognition, and a few years back GOCR was the best free OCR out there. As I was unused to contributing to large C projects it took me a little bit to wrap my head around the program, but ultimately I didn't have to completely - some programs split up functionality so that one only has to understand parts. I tested GOCR against many scans, saw where it made a lot of errors and then worked to improve its functionality for those mis-scanned letters - ultimately I did a patch. The maintainer disappeared for a few months so I gave up on submitting it, but then he returned, I made noise about my patch and he submitted a modified version of it.
Around that time, Google released the tesseract OCR in C++. It is superior to GOCR, but I do not know C++ as well as C, and its data structures (based on the common and abstract dawg and trie type data structures) are more complex than GOCR's, I have not had the time to wrap my head around it to contribute.
After learning some Java in a class, I felt I had little real-world experience in it, so I just searched through the bug reports in the most popular Sourceforge Java projects. I picked a sort of uncomplicated project, and a bug which was not that incredibly complex (but was not simple) and fixed it up. My patch was accepted.
I also had a problem with one of my programs on Ubuntu and got involved with it. This program calls libraries, which call other libraries, which call other libraries. So the bug reporting is a little off - people report bugs all over the place (Ubuntu bug tracking, Red Hat bug tracking, Debian bug tracking), but they don't always make it to the right place - a lot of the bugs need to be kicked upstream to the library maintainers. One bug which is happening was introduced during a certain commit, I discovered where it happened and patched the problem, but they have not accepted my patch yet. I am trying to learn the library (and the library the library depends on) so as to commit a better patch. But just my help in maintaining the bug tracking systems and coordinating them is being a help - I close tickets and email people that their problems have been patched and so forth - I do grunt work the people who know the coding language and the programs well do not want to do, so even in that aspect I am helping. Although I am working to understand the programs as well as they do.
I started working as a UNIX sysadmin in 1996. I am going for my Bachelors now - I started off going nights and weekends and am now doing it more heavily. For two reasons - one, many job applications ask for a Bachelors, and even if they don't, HR often asks if I have a degree. My other reason is I always felt lacking in terms of programming skill (and to a lesser extent, OS knowledge). I always wondered about assembly language but never did much to learn it - well, I took a class and wrote Towers of Hanoi in assembly and got 3 credits and an A+. Just one course in Java gave me enough confidence to send in a patch for a bug on a major free software Java project - and it was committed.
Putting aside my ignoring of assembly for so long - I would have never, ever, ever done the studying of discrete math and graphing theory and calculus that I have been doing in school. Yet it allows me to approach projects which I was never able to get a handle on before. Data structures and algorithms which once confused me become clearer - especially complex data structures. And I am still learning.
One of the keys is having great teachers. One teacher I had had us do homework after homework, often just changing around a little what we were doing - we would do recursion with Fibonacci numbers, which was disastrous (which was the lesson), then we would do recursion with something more useful. We also used recursion along with a backtracking algorithm. He was very knowledgeable and a good teacher and his lessons and homework were very enlightening.
The problem with work is there is always such a rush. The business unit wants the code done, the server installed, whatever, yesterday. Then after commuting, 8+ hours at work and commuting again, the last thing you feel like doing is cracking open a book on calculus and doing integrations, or a discrete math book and studying set theory, so as to prepare you for more advanced computer science topics. School is what you make of it - the guy next to me in one of my classes watches the World Cup on his computer screen, I don't see him ten years out as being a programmer making any kind of money, I wonder what he is even doing there. A decently priced state school with a (mostly) good staff can push forward your knowledge.
There are bright people who have succeeded right out of high school, however if they had gone to college they would probably be doing even better. When someone mentioned an algorithm was a (big-O) algebraic one, and could be made better, they would understand what that means instead of stumbling around in the dark somewhat as to what that all meant, as I used to. Computer science is not for "people who do not know how to use computers" - many of my classmates know computers well, are very sharp, and are getting even sharper (admittedly, a few of the other ones I can't see as ever being programmers). Some of my professors are very good as well.
So the US is funding Israel, which just killed a number of people on a humanitarian flotilla delivering food to blockaded Gaza today, a flotilla on which there is a Jewish holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and various European MPs. The US grabs Iraqis off the street and puts them in Abu Ghraib, forces them to masturbate and films them doing so (besides the one tortured to death). The forced masturbation is allowed to be done, but not broadcast on US TV because our good Christian values does not allow us to see what we are doing over there or something.
So on top of all this bloodshed and mayhem the US causes in these countries, as their bodies pile up, Americans are now attacking their culture and religion. It is an attempt to dehumanize the people already being killed. If drones were not flying through Pakistan killing people, it would be one thing, but this Facebook thing is just another attack on all the blood and bodies Americans are stacking up in these countries. It has worked too - this sort of thing has stirred up fundamentalists in Pakistan, who just bombed some mosques of the moderate Ahmadis. So the usual US practice of getting rid of secular moderates and putting radical Islamists in charge is working.
On January 24, 1990, in New York City, three MoD hackers were arrested. I had met all three before they were arrested. In terms of damage, only one machine they had ever been on had crashed, and all three denied crashing that one machine. There was no proof they had crashed it, and dozens of hackers had been on that Learning Link machine. Even if one had crashed it, which I don't believe, how can you accuse three people of the same crime? All three lived in poor or working class neighborhoods in New York, went to public schools etc. The judge said he would make an example of them and sent all three to jail.
I was 16 years old when they were arrested, and this was my first real experience seeing the "justice system" - an upper middle class WASP whose father was high in the military establishment admits he crashed thousands of machines and is called a misunderstood genius who made a mistake, and walks on charges. A year later three guys younger than him are arrested for crashing a computer which they all plausibly deny crashing (and how does it take three people to crash one computer anyhow), a computer which had dozens of other hackers on it. They come from working class neighborhoods in Queens, with modems connected to Commodore 64's, not Unix workstations at Ivy League schools like Cornell. They go to jail, Morris walks. An early lesson for me on how America really works.
I studied some stuff in the months before class, but was not really prepared at all. The first half of the first day of class covered all of algebra and pre-calc, the second half was new material. She put up stuff on the board the first day like x^(y/z) and expected us to know what it meant. The next few classes we were expected to already know what the quadratic equation was. Some of my lowest grades were in that class, and I studied all the time for it. I got a 670 on my Math SAT, and am doing math tutoring for grammar school kids right now. I am not bad at math, it is just too much to expect to remember this stuff 20 years later.
I would suggest auditing a pre-calc course, or even taking a non-credit pre-calc course outside your college. Or take one there. It is a lot more work than I had anticipated. It is cumulative as well so if you fall behind I would have been screwed. We also barely covered asymptotes in class but half the test questions were on asymptotes.
Also - almost everyone I know who is short a few credits in college to graduate is almost always short for the math classes. There must be a reason math is always the subject people are short a few credits to graduate in. I myself have been pushing off Calc II since Calc I was so hard.
One problem I have had is the load average on my (web) server sometimes spikes enormously. I have been telling support this for years but they give me the runaround. They switched off my ability to see others processes, so who or what is spiking the processor is a mystery to me. Sometimes it slows my web site to a crawl. Multiple complaints for years only gets ridiculous answers. I don't think the people answering know what load average means. Worse yet, they think they know more than me and act like I'm an idiot talking about something I don't know about.
One problem with a lot of these hosts is they don't offer Tomcat or java application servers and they prefer people use PHP (or Perl, or RoR). Some do, but you have to pay. Others do it cheap but have other problems. If the good major ones offered Tomcat, that would be nice.
"everything else that has been done for union's sake lately (see: destruction of US auto industry)"
And what destroyed the US textile industry? North Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the country, 50 of 50, yet over the past years textile factories have been closing all over North Carolina and moving to other countries. What you're saying makes no sense - manufacturing has been moving out of the US to developing countries for some time. Whether it is very unionized like the auto industry, or with virtually no unionization like the textile industry in the Southern US, all have been affected the same. If unionization was what is doing it, then the textile factories in the South wouldn't be closing at the same rate that auto manufacturing plants are.
"How exactly, considering that funding isn't sufficient for staffing at the current expense, do you expect companies to afford to bankroll a union AND get more staff to man the servers?"
There are three places money goes out to in any company - buying (especially replenishing) goods, wages and profit. Regarding goods - for an IT company keyboards, mice, monitors etc. get worn out and are replaced over time, electricity is used and so on. As far as wages - this is what people are paid. As far as profits - in large companies these are sent out as dividends to stockholders, in smaller companies they are often reinvested to buy more goods and pay wages to more people. Unions are focused on profits, and getting more of it into the wage slot. Take a company like Verizon - it has a union, it also has a de facto monopoly on the local loop, no matter what the law says. Verizon sends a fat dividend check to its shareholders every quarter, and the check would be even fatter if the CWA was not a union at Verizon. The Verizon techs and workers do all the work, create all the wealth, so they organize to pull more of that dividend check to their wages. Anyhow, the union goes after the profit, so that is how the union is "bankrolled". If the company has no profit to go after, there is no point in a union.
"In all likelihood you will end up with lower pay and more work; but hey at least you will have a contract!"
Virtually every economic study done in every country in every time period shows this is not the case. Unionization almost always tends to a higher pay per hour. As unions ask for overtime pay (IT is exempt from mandatory overtime pay) the hours worked tend to be less as well, although this correlation is less strong. If they have to pay overtime, they pay 3 people to work 40 hours a week instead of 2 to work 60 hours a week.
"Now, you probably have a very comparable education to your boss, and probably to his boss and most of the rest of the organization. You are smart, start making your own decisions."
While you may be correct that unions, or labor organizations, or whatever you want to call them may need to adapt to the changing economy, your statement is self-contradictory. You talk about "Your boss, and probably...his boss" and "you". Well there you have it right there, you already have two educations against one education. Who is smarter, both of them put together or you? You make my point in your statement. The boss has the management structure, human resources, lawyers and a lot of money on their side, you are one, isolated individual. It is like a basketball team versus one player. Who is going to win?
"You know what else would prevent you from having to take work calls after hours? Stand up, tell your boss you won't give up your personal time anymore, and let him fix the situation or fire you. Presto, no more late nights!"
For unionized workers, this is not even a conversation they would even have to have. Which is the point. They are automatically paid for overtime, they don't have to argue with their boss over whether to come in on Saturday or not.
"We inevitably miss deadlines"
This is completely meaningless. I have never worked for a company which had sane deadlines. If I've been lucky, I've had an especially good manager who has been able to push back some of the pressure from his manager and the managers of other groups toward deadlines. If you search Google for "death march", the #1 entry is for the famous Bataan death march, the #2 entry is the Wikipedia entry for a Software development death march. I don't know how many times I've been brought into projects in the middle of them, where the project manager points to a flow chart on my first day in and says "you should have finished your part last week". In other words, I'm already a week behind because the original person slated quit, or went on vacation, or whatever. I have been in the industry since 1996, have worked at everything from very small startups to Fortune 100 companies and it is the same everywhere, unless your lucky to find some oasis in an academic job, government job or even, rarely, within a company. Deadlines use in modern companies is as a tool for management to overwork and exploit employees.
"I'm not in any position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently. Management seems to tolerate it."
Exactly. You are NOT in a position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently, you are not a manager, so shut the hell up! What are you, the little dork with a hall monitor armband? What damned business is it of yours? If there's something I can't stand, it's some whiny low-level developer who thinks he is a manager. Guess what, you're not a manager. It's not your job to say anything about someone who puts out crap code or doesn't work a straight 10-12 hours a day like everyone else. Especially if you are a recent graduate. Every once in a while I get these developers who are ultimately low level peons just like all of us not in management who whine and gripe about how certain developers are lazy and certain developers write crap code. And I don't mean when this has a *direct* effect on said complainer, as that is understandable and I would even complain myself about it. I mean people who make such complaints when this has no direct effect on them. Why do you care, and more so, why the hell should I care? I don't own the company, I just get a paycheck, so I don't give a shit. If the company wanted me to care, they can give me a 1% piece in the company, otherwise, caveat emptor, for them. Something exists to deal with these people, it is called management, if you are not a manager, and it does not directly effect you, then shut the hell up, stop giving yourself airs of being more important than you are when you're not.
My attitude is thus: if they give me significant options or a piece of the company, then my attitude changes and I become "concerned with the company". The other possible motivator is if I want to climb the corporate ladder. One ladder I am not on, thank heavens, but have seen is from low-level (A+/MCITP) help-desk guy to a position of seniority within the helpdesk group to a low position on the group running Exchange/file/domain control servers, to a position of seniority in that group, and then on to a position in the engineering/architecture group. So the desire to be promoted to a better position is another motivator. Other than those two factors, what motivation is there for me to anything other than the bare minimum to keep my job and keep sharp on my skill set? These companies will put hard-working employees who work extra hours when half the department quits due to crap working conditions, who spends years waking up from being paged in the middle of the night to fix something, out on the street in the worst economies the second their profit margin looks like it might dip slightly. They will give you inferior equipment, too littl
The only Americans I know who are dead from Anthrax were killed by a chemical warfare researcher working for the US Army, Bruce Edwards Ivans. So the US army's chemical warfare division developing these virii in order to "protect Americans" just in case the US ever needs to use chemical warfare (beyond napalm, Agent Orange etc.) has only wound up killing Americans.
Now they want to kill off monkeys in the course of this chemical warfare research as well. Great, two birds with one stone, we can torture and kill monkeys and boost the US in the field of chemical warfare.
One thing not mentioned much in the press is that guy at Yale who killed animal researcher Annie Le was the person who took care of the animals there. He was also known to have complained about how she mistreated the animals. PETA has complained for years how that lab mistreated animals, for very little constructive reason.
It is not animals versus humans, it is animals and those working people in the world who are still normal and human versus this OSU collaboration of chemical warfare and animal torture/killing and everything that is along with it. Abu Ghraib, the US support of Osama bin Laden, the US support of Hussein gassing the Kurds then the corporate media using that as a pretext decades later for invading Iraq, rabid right wing US Army chemical researchers killing Americans with the anthrax the army made, the US support of the coup in Honduras, the massive effort to keep working poor Americans from getting healthcare, SUVs causing global warming with their lobby preventing public transportation, US army bases spread all over the world with poor girls from rural villages in the whorehouses surrounding the bases, the Patriot Act, all of it is just one big thing, the big machine that is destroying life on this planet, people are either support it or don't, and from the comments it's obvious where most people on this board stand.
Honestly, I don't care about that. I would much rather have a boss with a backbone who prevents unnecessary late night requests then one who is micro-managing me during one. Most bosses I've had fall into two categories: self-confident, competent people who don't agree to crazy requests from other teams and their managers and who generally leave me alone - and - incompetent managers who worry about their position and who agree to impossible demands and who get nervous and pissy whenever something goes wrong and who are always micro-managing. Being one or the other is what keeps me there or looking for a job elsewhere. If I have to stay two hours extra to finish something, I prefer my boss leaving, its sort of like "I have faith and confidence you can handle this, call me if there's a problem". On the other hand, if I or the team has to come in at 3 AM Saturday morning for some reason and the manager comes in just to show moral support that an inconvenience for us will be one that he will bear as well, that can be a nice thing - you know he's not going to have you working hours he won't work himself. But as I said, being competent, self-confident and having a backbone with other business units and with his own management is what I want more than working late with me. I'd rather him making sure I don't have to work late to deal with some other groups problems or lack of planning or whatever.
I saw that as well. I have been "upgrading over the Internet" with Debian (as well as Ubuntu) for years. I have upgraded Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems over the Internet for years as well. This is not some new, unique, innovative thing that only OpenSUSE has achieved.
Outside of the United States (other than some ignored sectors in England) this is not even a problem. Scientists and the intelligentsia know about global warming and how it is caused by humans. I'm not even sure how data from the last century could be manipulated - anyone with a thermometer can verify it, and the so-called "disputed" data is all very recent. All of this is really more of a window into the American psychology or politics or what have you than anything to do with peer reviewed climate change. Even if one scientist was manipulating data, which is not the case anyhow, that would not change the laws of physics where the burning of gasoline produces carbon dioxide. Some anonymous criminals break into a university's computers, hold onto the data for months while they cherry pick certain quotes, then release it just before the Copenhagen summit. This has no effect anywhere except in the United States, where a Senator from a fundamentalist, rural state demands the anonymous criminal's accusations be investigated. In a country where people have to battle to teach evolution and common descent of life, and not that some magic man in the clouds created all living things several thousand years ago; where we have a $27 million dollar museum in Kentucky showing this latter theory or faith or whatever, is this the country where we want to hear the opinions of the amateurs from?
I have never written anything that can be used against me but idiots, who I don't even know, have, and have done so years ago. Sometimes I have been successful having the content pulled but sometimes it is based in other countries. Who knows how it has affected me - no one has ever mentioned it to me, but perhaps someone looking at my resume will see something they don't like and I don't get a call.
So my name is on lists in lots of nice capacities - I patch some program, I help this or that project out. If you can Google your name, and one of the first 50 responses is something bad about you, you're probably in trouble. If a few of the first 50 are patches for some software, you helpfully answering someone's question etc., that is better.
I've succeeded in removing my name from a few places, I suggest you being nice about it, and in some cases, dishonest about it.
In the mid 1990s I watched a video tape of "The Falcon and the Snowman". It is based on a real story of a young man who worked at a sensitive location at TRW (his father was in the FBI and got him the job through the old boy network) which was responsible for sending and receiving CIA cables from overseas. Sometimes, they mixed up the TWXs and they saw cables they weren't supposed to. It was by this that he learned of how the CIA helped in the overthrow the government of Australia in the 1970s, the famous Whitlam constitutional crisis. You can read about it on Wikipedia. It can be debated how effective or ineffective the CIA's efforts were, but they've never denied their involvement, and in fact it was alleged that John Kerr was a CIA asset. Anyhow, so one day in 1997 or 1998 I was sitting at my SunOS x86 workstation at work, back before NAT had become popular, and I decided to surf the web and visit some lefty Australian web sites that discussed the extent of CIA involvement in overthrowing Australia's government in the 1970s. Several days later, I noticed SNMP requests coming into my workstation, scanning for any information about it. If I hadn't set my workstation to log absolutely everything, if it wasn't a UNIX workstation, if I didn't control the Cisco router and access list and so on and so forth I never would have seen it, it would have been a standard SNMP request. In fact, I didn't log for everything and who knows what other queries came to the machine. I saved the request for years but then lost it in a hard drive crash. It came out of a US army intelligence division (.MIL) that was based in Quantico, Virginia and which had some long acronym which I now forget. I thought the military wasn't supposed to monitor the communications of US citizens, but apparently not in this case. Also, as soon as I saw this, I thought of how I had read about Whitlam and the CIA on the Australian web site days before, and that was the only thing I had done on the machine that they might have been interested in. With the Patriot Act etc. who knows what will be happening.
Through the 1992 presidential campaign, I had to sit through story after story after story about how Clinton protested the Vietnam War while he was in England. This was all 20 years after it happened, and was seen as a completely legitimate line of enquiry by the media and the establishment.
As far as government monitoring, I know people in the US with FBI files thousands of pages thick due to their involvement in peace or civil rights movements. The Patriot Act has widened the range of permissible activities beyond anything allowed in the twentieth century.
In fact, John Kerry going to France in the early 1970s was considered an issue in the 2004 campaign, and in fact Kerry doing things like that was the main line of attack against him in the presidential campaign.
Oh, but this is big, evil Iran. The country whose secular government the CIA overthrew in the 1950s because the Iranians wanted control over their own oil. They have to play by a different set of rules than we do.
I got a Commodore 64 around 1983, and got a modem soon after. I learned BASIC on it. In 1989, a friend of mine had a dial-in account on a local university's Unix and I began calling that. I always had Unix access since then. I began a job as a Unix Systems Administrator in 1996, at which time I began learning some Perl, and later, some PHP. In 2000, I had a lot of free time and sat down and shored up my C knowledge more than I had already.
In 2006, I went back for my CS degree. I have learned a lot that I had not learned in the proceeding 23 years. I learned C++. Despite all my experience, I had no idea what a constructor was before taking a C++ class. I learned Java, to where I have sent implemented patches to some major free software Java programs. I learned assembly language and programmed in it. I learned computer internals, DeMorgan's Law and how to create a two's complement binary calculator with AND, OR and NOT gates. I learned about big-O notation. One of my teacher's is an old-timer, and he really showed us how recursion and back-tracking could be used on a whole host of programs - it was really impressive how powerful these tools can be on a whole host of problems.
I have interviewed people, and have been interviewed, dozens, maybe hundreds of times. The world is full of programmers and administrators who know the basics of how to code, and only learn minimally when they have the job. Once in a while you meet people who really want to understand everything and almost seem to actually understand everything about what we're doing. Amidst a whole bunch of interviewees they really stand out - if they are somewhat normal and seem like they'd do the work, they're almost a guaranteed hire.
Also, on the other hand, do you want to look at yourself as a wage slave who knows the minimum to get by, or a craftsman who understands his work, even if he happens to be a wage slave? You can get caught in a trap of thinking that spending time learning is only benefiting your boss, but really your bosses will win either way, if you just consider yourself a cog in the machine, they've won in another way. People should take pride in their craftsmanship, even if the management doesn't.
Everyone above me is useless and accomplishes nothing. I don't think I am the most important person here though - the network team has to run the network, the DBAs have to run the databases, the programmers have to code. The systems do rest on my shoulders.
As far as the people above me, I don't need 10 managers to come by every morning and tell me there's a new cover for the TPS reports.
I started working at an organization a while back and I would file a trouble ticket whenever I came across something broken, even if it was unimportant and with an overflowing workload might not be done for a while. A manager was hired after a while who decided to use the trouble ticket system as a meter of progress for tasks done. When he announced this, I immediately closed all of these types of tickets, saved them locally on my machine, and even went into the database so as to delete all vestiges of these tickets. I began only creating tickets when I knew a task would probably be done on-time and quickly. The manager was canned after about two years there - the thing that saved him for so long is that his manager changed three times while he was there, the third one axed him.
What management wants to see is that their investment in you is getting results. If they spend X amount of dollars on something, they want to see how it is helping the company or whatever. Show how successful your projects have been, how your uptime rate is always increasing etc. Use lots of colorful charts, lists with 20 goals and "accomplished" next to 18 of them and "partially accomplished" next to the other two. That type of crap. I mean, if management wants this nonsense from the sysadmin, you're in Dilbert land already.
In France in 1968 there was a massive general strike, with workers taking over factories and the like, and De Gaulle even planned contingencies to leave France and invade it at some future point with the French army and possibly NATO support. One of the wall posters of that time said "The boss needs you, you don't need the boss". Sometimes I think these exercises are more to psychologically mess with you than anything. You do all the work and create all the wealth, the bosses and shareholders don't do anything and collect salaries and profits. By making you do a pointless exercise like this to justify yourself to them, they're putting the idea out of your head of the reverse - of why *they* are necessary to the company. After 13 years in this industry, I'm becoming convinced that the dumb, pointless things management makes you do does have some strange psychological point along these lines. I've quit agreeing with my co-workers that these presentations are dumb and pointless, I think they do have a point - keeping us disciplined, from requesting sane hours and on-call rotation and all of that.
I put Koala on two laptops - one an upgrade from Ibex, one a fresh install.
In mid-October I was running a Ubuntu-derivative Heron on my desktop and a straight, normal Ubuntu Ibex on my laptop. I had a package application doing a segmentation fault under certain repeatable conditions with both. I upgraded my laptop to Jackalope and still saw the bug. I checked out Ubuntu's launchpad and saw that most of the new bugs reported were for the Koala beta. So I upgraded to Koala beta (thus, being one of the people who tested the beta). The bug was still there, and I had apport report the bug to launchpad. When the release happened I was doing work over the net, so I did a piecemeal upgrade to the full version, grabbing 100 megs of packages via apt-get, doing other work, grabbing another 100 megs of packages and so on until i had upgraded completely. Aside from this third-party application bug which still persisted, the upgrade went fine for me.
Days later, someone who has a netbook running Windows said that it was broken and asked me to fix it since "I know how computers work". They use it solely to surf the web and they only use their web browser. It was blue screening on ever bootup, even "safe mode". I booted with Ubuntu LiveCD on the USB, mounted the hard drive and tried to fix the startup but it persisted. I did not have the time to deal with solving their Windows problem, and did not know how that Windows OEM recovery crap would work on this netbook. I told them I could wipe Windows and put Ubuntu on and they could surf the web again. They agreed. I did a fresh install.
The first problem was, networking was not working. Their netbook actually had a switch that turned networking on and off. I made sure it was turned on, stopped and started the wifi and network stuff a few times, rebooted once or twice and then it came on. As I said, I was in a rush and preferred it to just start working then diving into figuring out the problem. The second problem is they could not watch Youtube because Flash was not installed. I did not see flash as package, whether via apt-cache search or in that software universe GUI thing. Adobe did not have the Koala (9.10) as a package download so I downloaded a previous version. It could not find two package libraries. So then I looked for Gnash or Swfdec, even though those aren't so great. They were not listed. So I told the person I would fix it so they could watch Youtube some other day, they could still access e-mail and so on. So wifi was a slight bump, and Flash still is.
I went back to my laptop, which had been upgraded and not fresh installed and it could see Gnash and Swfdec as packages although the fresh install had not been able to.
Having looked at all of launchpad for my application problem, I began checking out other applications having problems on Koala. I saw a few that said all was well in Jackalope but an application went bust with the upgrade. I tested some of them and saw it was true, some of the Ubuntu package applications do not work at all on Koala - not a minor bug, the whole package is completely broken.
A lot of the bug reports have applications which use a lot of Gnome/Gtk/Glib libraries, as well as other libraries, and the problem that occurs spans calls from an application to one library to another library to another library, often libraries which are not that well-related, sometimes written in different languages (one C, one C++). As one needs to know Gnome/Glib etc. to some extent, download all these libraries etc. I can see how debugging can be tough, or a bit of a pain, or whatever. One was only downloadable off of SVN and it took me half an hour of playing with autoconf, automake and so on to recall that autom4te would just do all of that for me with the package.
Insofar as Ubuntu, Ubuntu wants to do a code release every six months, and after the experience of Debian, I support this 100%. Ubuntu also wants to focus on the desktop, and be one that a non-techie can use, and I think that is good
I usually use Linux, but I have a Windows PC and have had to install the drivers for an HP printer/scanner on the Windows PC (in fact, I had to do this for someone else with an HP printer/scanner and Windows PC as well). I know how to install a printer driver on Windows but know little about scanners, so I just let the HP CD install the drivers. It literally took more than half an hour each time, I don't even remember how long it took, and I had to keep coming back and clicking "OK" for this or that. It installed a ton of crap, photo-albums and other junk I will never use - I just use Gimp. You'd think I was hooking my PC up to a satellite dish on the roof or something for how long it takes to connect a damned printer/scanner.
In November 1994 Netscape released its first beta, in December its first full version. For me, this was really when the web began to look more interesting - Navigator was well-made, there was graphical content and so forth. Also, don't forget, Navigator could use the Gopher protocol (my Firefox still can - Aerv.nl. From early 1995 on, you began to see an explosion of web content.
As far as hosting - in early 1996 I began working at an ISP which charged $50 a month for 10 megabytes of disk space, and the use of CGI, email and so forth was extra. And we were real cheap compared to some local competitors - people came flooding in to use us. Geocities began offering free (with advertising, a Geocities URL etc.) web pages in mid-1995, I created one in October 1995, as I certainly could not afford to shell out $50 a month for my web page back then. There was nothing really n00b about Geocities, Craigslist's web page did not have HTML as a job requirement when Geocities launched, in fact, Craigslist did not have a web page until 1996, the year after Geocities launched.
Before Madoff was arrested, a Google search for his name pointed to many pages at Yeshiva University, which he gave a lot of money to. If you clicked on the Google cache, there were glowing profiles about him. If you clicked on the actual pages, his name had been pulled out of all those pages almost as soon as he was arrested, because I was Googling all of this the day after he was arrested. It's still all probably on archive.org
ARPAnet went online in 1969, and there was no legal commercial activity on it until 1992 (and all barriers to commercial activity did not fall until 1995). The creation and architecture of the Internet has nothing to do with the "free market" whatever that means (how is a market in the USA which uses dollars free while a market in the old USSR using rubles not free?). It has to do with two decades of massive taxpayer investment in research and development for the Internet, which from 1992 to 1995 was handed over to corporations.
It continually amazes me how people who know little about the Internet, or just got on it recently, have rewritten its history to such an extent. I got on the Internet back when SRI-NIC was the root name server, I guess in the years ahead all of that will be washed away and the history of the creation of the Internet will be rewritten as a monument to free enterprise.
Yes, this person gave the correct response. By 10s I don't mean just the 10 card, but all the cards that also have a value of 10 - the 10, the Jack, the Queen and the King.
Also, a blackjack (Ace and 10 value card) usually pays out at 150%, so if the deck is full of 10 value cards and aces, that can shift the odds in your favor.
I know someone who did this seriously, and I looked into it for a while. If you really dedicate yourself to it, and can follow the system, you can succeed. One thing to remember is it is all mathematical. Theoretically (although not in reality), you can place bets only when odds are in your favor! When the first hand is put out of a new deck, the odds are against you. Let's say for the first few hands of that new deck, most of the 4s, 5s and 6s from the deck have been dealt out, and none of the 10s or Aces. The odds swing into your favor, and get better and better as that pattern continues. Theoretically, you can watch the game, and only sit down and start betting when the odds turn in your favor. In reality, this will mark you as a counter, especially if you place large bets when you sit down.
The initial problem with counting is, you dedicate many, many hours to getting good at counting, but as soon as you start making money, you go in the "face book" and are banned from casinos (or at least banned from playing blackjack).
So you have to get a team together. Most teams have a lot of low level counters who bet small and when a decks odds turn in the player's favor (or when a deck turns significantly in the player's favor) they signal a "big player" on their counting team, who sits down and starts making big bets. If your team is betting big money and is successful, eventually they'll figure this out as well, but if you keep trading players out and are clever, you can keep it going, and make some money.
The problem is it takes a lot of discipline. With a team, you need good discipline from a lot of people. You need to trust everyone with large amounts of money. One person screwing up can blow your whole team's security. It is not an easy thing to do. On top of it all, even if you succeed in getting a disciplined team, once you get rolling, Griffin will begin figuring out who you are. Remember, you have dealers, pit bosses, floor managers there not to mention the cameras which have film saved for quite a while and then Griffin investigating. If you can get a competent, disciplined team like that together, why not start a company or something, without having the pain of all that security breathing down your neck once you get good? Ultimately, you have to do it for enjoyment as much as the money. Because it takes a lot of work, discipline, and relations with regards to the team.