I don't see anyone giving actual, useful advice here. I face similar problems with Amanda, and so far my solutions have been to lower the barriers to entry and to encourage users to increase their investment in supporting the product.
I've tried to lower barriers by
writing better developer-level documentation
providing a list of "starter projects"
giving talks and webinars about Amanda's internals
rewriting parts of the application in a more accessible language (Perl)
making myself highly available for answers and advice
I've tried to increase investment by
prominently displaying the names of contributors in ChangeLog, NEWS, etc.
asking users to become "official" supporters (platform experts)
requesting testing from specific people, rather than sending blanket "everyone please test this" emails
asking users to donate processor cycles to automatic testing (this is still in the works)
I work on Amanda, but the site misrepresents my contributions in two important ways, too: first, I commit a lot of other peoples' patches, so my name appears in the ChangeLog a lot less often than it appears in the commit log. Second, Amanda changed from CVS to Subversion a few years back, and Ohloh doesn't index the old CVS submissions. As a result, the project is marked as just a few years old (it was originally written in '92), and few of the many historical contributors are not listed. I would like to see some way to "correct the record," but I suppose that's pretty hard.
IM windows -- if you don't talk to 'l33td00d' for a predetermined amount of time, the window fades and you can work right through it, although you can still see it and thus respond to any further '3nc0d3d m3554g3s'.
Dustin
At this point, I would suspect that anyone that hasn't bailed at SCO is going to get the cold shoulder from future employers whether SCO is around or not: they were clearly either on the take in this scheme, or too stupid to realize what was going on.
crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.200 crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.201 crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.202 crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.205 crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.206 crl.verisign.net has address 64.94.110.11
serial 2004010808
I should add that the oddball, 64.94.110.11, is the SiteFinder server. I guess they had some spare bandwidth kicking around there.
What a bunch of clowns.
OK, I'm not sure what slashdot means by junk characters, but hopefully these will balance them out.
NFS is stateless from the server's perspective. This is done so that the server doesn't have to track the state of a whole fleet of clients (and so that the server can pick up where it left off when it crashes and restarts).
So the server, by design, has no notion of the number / names of users connected to it.
The best you could do would probably be to monitor NFS traffic, and present a dialog on shutdown if there has been any traffic in the last 5 minutes or so.
As a teacher I was given the opportunity to use a system my district purchased called classroom performance system. Basically it's a bunch of small infrared "remotes" with buttons A-H on them and an infrared receiver. It's designed for classrooms, so it's oriented around a question-response mode and assessment, but it is also very useful for rough surveys, votes, etc.
In particular, I am told that the state of South Carolina (luddites that they are) used this system to enable an enormous gathering of teachers to vote on which questions should or should not be included in their high-stakes NCLB-compliant test, the PACT.
Dustin Disclaimer: I don't work for eInstruction; I just used their product when I was teaching, and was very impressed.
OK, so these folks think they can move the base station to avoid space junk. That sounds extremely tricky already. But I wonder what they can do about meteorites and other smaller stuff that comes in much larger batches? The cable may be able to take one or two hits from these little buggers, but it's going to sustain *some* damage!
I live in South Carolina, and I work as an admin for a school in Chicago. Since I'm part time, I don't get any perks like long-distance expenses. This makes for something of a problem when discussing thorny technical issues whether a wooden or metal cluebat would be best applied to the latest luser.
I was never one to chat much. Then I tripped across Jabber, and thought I'd give it a shot (it's an open protocol -- lots of fun to hack cool tools onto). Turns out most of my co-workers were using one or another chat system (AIM, MSN, ICQ) for their personal communication. Jabber does a wonderful job of tying all of those networks together, so I can chat with any of them. It also allows me to incorporate some nifty scripts. My favorites are server-monitoring scripts, so I can 'chat' with my servers, and they can send me a message when unusual circumstances present themselves.
For most purposes, I find it easier to chat via Jabber than to talk on the phone -- most of the things we discuss are best seen spelled out (snippets of code, hostnames, etc.).
Currently being discussed
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is currently being discussed on NANOG (where it's an offtopic favorite). I highly recommend this list for peeks and views into the people who keep this Internet thing working.
In the discussions yesterday and today, there's been a lot of talk about how to "bootstrap" this new protocol. There are interesting discussions of the business ramifications of being an early adopter of something like this -- very sililar to those for IPv6.
It's been said by far wiser people than me: spam is a social problem, and it must have a social cure. Any solution which does not respect these two facts is doomed to failure.
My girlfriend learned this at a thesis-writing seminar, and it's worked wonders for me. I work on each task for a specific, short length of time (30 minutes for most, but you may be more comfortable with another length). This applies for everything from open-source programming to household cleaning.
This system has several advantages. First, I'm never faced with an insurmountable task. When I began, my house was very cluttered, and it was hard to get excited about cleaning it. But it's not so hard to think "I'll just clean the living room for 30 minutes and I'll be done and on to something else". Second, for thinking tasks (like coding), the fixed time means I don't stop "between thoughts" on a project. When the time is up for a task, I stop right where I am, even in mid-sentence or mid-expression. The anticipation this creates keeps each task fresh in my mind, so I can pick up at full speed the next time I begin that task.
Has anyone looked at the major carriers? Most mid- to large-scale ISPs will now provide IPv6 transit to those who ask. If you ask and the answer is no, there are other ISPs out there that will say yes. The backbones are ready, and the effects are reaching into ever-smaller ISPs. Clients are just waiting for the need.
Come to think of it, the reason I don't like to log into NYT is usually I just want to glance at an article, just like I usually want to glance at the/. main page. My browser holds/.'s cookie for a long, long time, so I never have to log in again. If the NYT had me register once, and that cookie stayed around for long enough that I'd never have to think of it again, that would be fine. But when I'm asked to log in every day, and I have to remember which fake email address I used and which throwaway password, it just gets tiresome, and I don't read NYT articles.
But that's OK, I was losing karma for reading the articles anyway.
Oh, no! Not the law! Anything but that! (Gates comes out with his hands up)
Don't kid yourself. There are a lot of things Microsoft must do that aren't in its best business interests and therefore don't get done. Some of them are even public knowledge!
neither Microsoft nor the USPTO examiners seem to be aware of the existence of the Mainframe-based prior art, which is not cited in the patent.
In all fairness, Microsoft probably knew full well that this prior art existed. Putting that in the patent application would be like sending the USPTO a stamped, self-addressed rejection letter!
It's the USPTO people who are missing this experience to find prior art. But can we really expect one (government) organization to have deep experience in every field? There's something fundamentally wrong with the idea of the USPTO.
This is great if you think it's great. Grid computing is a technology without a cause right now. It's preposterous to think that the average joe, or even the average joe company, will have any use for grid computing in the forseeable future. Most of us can't keep our load average above 0.1 (that's 10% for you Windows-users) doing anything useful as it is!
Heck, look back over the grid computing stories we've seen here on/. Whose name keeps popping up?
Did anyone catch the (hard-to-miss) part about the DOD project that's trying to fit terrorists into some ontology that also includes "plants" and "animals"? That's so insane, I don't know whether to laugh or cry..
P.S. Yes, I read the article. Sorry. (slinks away in shame)
If this was a normal employment relationship, there would be two issues: first, sexual harassment in the workplace is illegal; second, firing someone for complaining about sexual harassment is also illegal.
Unfortunately, I believe one of the downsides to working as a consultant is that terminaing a contract for complaining about sexual harassment is not a problem (unless the termination is against the provisions of the contract, but it sounds like, in this case, the contract simply wouldn't be renewed).
However, the harassment is still against the law, and her supervisor would have to follow proper procedure if you were to tell him/her, but the supervisor is not required to give future work to your friend.
Funny how this sounds like the same glass wall/ceiling that women and minorities have been running into for years, eh?
What you need is an x86 emulator! There is nothing quite so beautiful to behold (and sturdy, hardworking, and reliable) as the iBook. It's just the only way to go!
Personally, I'm really the only hardcore UNIX person at my present employer. I anticipate that at some point I'll get hit by a bus or something, so I make notes on just about everything I do on a specially designed, password-protected web page. All of the data is in a format that's easy to read if, for example, Apache is broken.
I have directories for HOWOTOs, package install documentation, projects, standards & conventions, and official policies. Although most of the documentation up there is mine, I'm working on getting the rest of the admin team to use the site, too. It has already proven very helpful as an adjunct to my own memory, and as a source of "RTFM" URLs when others ask the same question over and over:-)
Ahem, for a person who has a well-developed moral code, pay and caring are unrelated. Most teachers care very much. We're just not able to do much because of the financial situation -- that's why most who can leave the profession. We care enough to consider questions carefully, and weigh the relative importance of various ideas and initiatives. And frankly, next to learning proper reasoning skills, reflective reading skills, and persuasive writing skills, cursive handwriting (as long as students can print) is, well not very important.
Personally, I thought cursive was stupid while I was learning it. "You just taught me to write one way, why are you teaching me another?". I refused to learn it any more than necessary for the relevant assessments, and would need one of those desk-strips if I were asked to write cursive today. I also don't know how to wash clothes with a washboard. And I don't feel one shred of guilt about either one.
Read about the free software movement -- free as in speech, not free as in beer. Lots of free software gets paid for, in the form of boxes with red hats on them. Of course, one box can be installed on thousands of computers, so that cost can be amortized aggressively.
So yes, by giving away their software at no cost, MS can undercut free software which is often distributed at a small cost.
Slashdot Mirror
- writing better developer-level documentation
- providing a list of "starter projects"
- giving talks and webinars about Amanda's internals
- rewriting parts of the application in a more accessible language (Perl)
- making myself highly available for answers and advice
I've tried to increase investment byI work on Amanda, but the site misrepresents my contributions in two important ways, too: first, I commit a lot of other peoples' patches, so my name appears in the ChangeLog a lot less often than it appears in the commit log. Second, Amanda changed from CVS to Subversion a few years back, and Ohloh doesn't index the old CVS submissions. As a result, the project is marked as just a few years old (it was originally written in '92), and few of the many historical contributors are not listed. I would like to see some way to "correct the record," but I suppose that's pretty hard.
IM windows -- if you don't talk to 'l33td00d' for a predetermined amount of time, the window fades and you can work right through it, although you can still see it and thus respond to any further '3nc0d3d m3554g3s'. Dustin
I couldn't have said it better. It has never occurred to me that this might be difficult.
At this point, I would suspect that anyone that hasn't bailed at SCO is going to get the cold shoulder from future employers whether SCO is around or not: they were clearly either on the take in this scheme, or too stupid to realize what was going on.
No,
crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.200
crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.201
crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.202
crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.205
crl.verisign.net has address 198.49.161.206
crl.verisign.net has address 64.94.110.11
serial 2004010808
I should add that the oddball, 64.94.110.11, is the SiteFinder server. I guess they had some spare bandwidth kicking around there.
What a bunch of clowns.
OK, I'm not sure what slashdot means by junk characters, but hopefully these will balance them out.
NFS is stateless from the server's perspective. This is done so that the server doesn't have to track the state of a whole fleet of clients (and so that the server can pick up where it left off when it crashes and restarts).
So the server, by design, has no notion of the number / names of users connected to it.
The best you could do would probably be to monitor NFS traffic, and present a dialog on shutdown if there has been any traffic in the last 5 minutes or so.
As a teacher I was given the opportunity to use a system my district purchased called classroom performance system. Basically it's a bunch of small infrared "remotes" with buttons A-H on them and an infrared receiver. It's designed for classrooms, so it's oriented around a question-response mode and assessment, but it is also very useful for rough surveys, votes, etc. In particular, I am told that the state of South Carolina (luddites that they are) used this system to enable an enormous gathering of teachers to vote on which questions should or should not be included in their high-stakes NCLB-compliant test, the PACT.
Dustin
Disclaimer: I don't work for eInstruction; I just used their product when I was teaching, and was very impressed.
OK, so these folks think they can move the base station to avoid space junk. That sounds extremely tricky already. But I wonder what they can do about meteorites and other smaller stuff that comes in much larger batches? The cable may be able to take one or two hits from these little buggers, but it's going to sustain *some* damage!
I live in South Carolina, and I work as an admin for a school in Chicago. Since I'm part time, I don't get any perks like long-distance expenses. This makes for something of a problem when discussing thorny technical issues whether a wooden or metal cluebat would be best applied to the latest luser.
I was never one to chat much. Then I tripped across Jabber, and thought I'd give it a shot (it's an open protocol -- lots of fun to hack cool tools onto). Turns out most of my co-workers were using one or another chat system (AIM, MSN, ICQ) for their personal communication. Jabber does a wonderful job of tying all of those networks together, so I can chat with any of them. It also allows me to incorporate some nifty scripts. My favorites are server-monitoring scripts, so I can 'chat' with my servers, and they can send me a message when unusual circumstances present themselves.
For most purposes, I find it easier to chat via Jabber than to talk on the phone -- most of the things we discuss are best seen spelled out (snippets of code, hostnames, etc.).
This is currently being discussed on NANOG (where it's an offtopic favorite). I highly recommend this list for peeks and views into the people who keep this Internet thing working.
In the discussions yesterday and today, there's been a lot of talk about how to "bootstrap" this new protocol. There are interesting discussions of the business ramifications of being an early adopter of something like this -- very sililar to those for IPv6.
It's been said by far wiser people than me: spam is a social problem, and it must have a social cure. Any solution which does not respect these two facts is doomed to failure.
This system has several advantages. First, I'm never faced with an insurmountable task. When I began, my house was very cluttered, and it was hard to get excited about cleaning it. But it's not so hard to think "I'll just clean the living room for 30 minutes and I'll be done and on to something else". Second, for thinking tasks (like coding), the fixed time means I don't stop "between thoughts" on a project. When the time is up for a task, I stop right where I am, even in mid-sentence or mid-expression. The anticipation this creates keeps each task fresh in my mind, so I can pick up at full speed the next time I begin that task.
Has anyone looked at the major carriers? Most mid- to large-scale ISPs will now provide IPv6 transit to those who ask. If you ask and the answer is no, there are other ISPs out there that will say yes. The backbones are ready, and the effects are reaching into ever-smaller ISPs. Clients are just waiting for the need.
The White House is /.'d. The irony is unbearable!
Come to think of it, the reason I don't like to log into NYT is usually I just want to glance at an article, just like I usually want to glance at the /. main page. My browser holds /.'s cookie for a long, long time, so I never have to log in again. If the NYT had me register once, and that cookie stayed around for long enough that I'd never have to think of it again, that would be fine. But when I'm asked to log in every day, and I have to remember which fake email address I used and which throwaway password, it just gets tiresome, and I don't read NYT articles.
But that's OK, I was losing karma for reading the articles anyway.
Oh, no! Not the law! Anything but that! (Gates comes out with his hands up)
Don't kid yourself. There are a lot of things Microsoft must do that aren't in its best business interests and therefore don't get done. Some of them are even public knowledge!
neither Microsoft nor the USPTO examiners seem to be aware of the existence of the Mainframe-based prior art, which is not cited in the patent.
In all fairness, Microsoft probably knew full well that this prior art existed. Putting that in the patent application would be like sending the USPTO a stamped, self-addressed rejection letter!
It's the USPTO people who are missing this experience to find prior art. But can we really expect one (government) organization to have deep experience in every field? There's something fundamentally wrong with the idea of the USPTO.
This is great if you think it's great. Grid computing is a technology without a cause right now. It's preposterous to think that the average joe, or even the average joe company, will have any use for grid computing in the forseeable future. Most of us can't keep our load average above 0.1 (that's 10% for you Windows-users) doing anything useful as it is!
Heck, look back over the grid computing stories we've seen here on /. Whose name keeps popping up?
Did anyone catch the (hard-to-miss) part about the DOD project that's trying to fit terrorists into some ontology that also includes "plants" and "animals"? That's so insane, I don't know whether to laugh or cry..
P.S. Yes, I read the article. Sorry. (slinks away in shame)
If this was a normal employment relationship, there would be two issues: first, sexual harassment in the workplace is illegal; second, firing someone for complaining about sexual harassment is also illegal.
Unfortunately, I believe one of the downsides to working as a consultant is that terminaing a contract for complaining about sexual harassment is not a problem (unless the termination is against the provisions of the contract, but it sounds like, in this case, the contract simply wouldn't be renewed).
However, the harassment is still against the law, and her supervisor would have to follow proper procedure if you were to tell him/her, but the supervisor is not required to give future work to your friend.
Funny how this sounds like the same glass wall/ceiling that women and minorities have been running into for years, eh?
What you need is an x86 emulator! There is nothing quite so beautiful to behold (and sturdy, hardworking, and reliable) as the iBook. It's just the only way to go!
I have directories for HOWOTOs, package install documentation, projects, standards & conventions, and official policies. Although most of the documentation up there is mine, I'm working on getting the rest of the admin team to use the site, too. It has already proven very helpful as an adjunct to my own memory, and as a source of "RTFM" URLs when others ask the same question over and over :-)
My printing has improved considerably since I learned LaTeX, but that might just be me.
educators don't get paid enough to care.
Ahem, for a person who has a well-developed moral code, pay and caring are unrelated. Most teachers care very much. We're just not able to do much because of the financial situation -- that's why most who can leave the profession. We care enough to consider questions carefully, and weigh the relative importance of various ideas and initiatives. And frankly, next to learning proper reasoning skills, reflective reading skills, and persuasive writing skills, cursive handwriting (as long as students can print) is, well not very important.
Personally, I thought cursive was stupid while I was learning it. "You just taught me to write one way, why are you teaching me another?". I refused to learn it any more than necessary for the relevant assessments, and would need one of those desk-strips if I were asked to write cursive today. I also don't know how to wash clothes with a washboard. And I don't feel one shred of guilt about either one.
So yes, by giving away their software at no cost, MS can undercut free software which is often distributed at a small cost.