The one time I worked in a cubicle, it was not only hard to concentrate over the noise, but you lacked privacy and it seemed Big Brother was watching you, plus it also seemed like you were valued less, this was a step down from my offices of past.
It did help you not work and chat to your neighbour instead though.... Nice one management.
"2 Just How Dumb is Management, Anyway?"
Never underestimate the power of the Dark Side.
I've worked for managers who are knowledgeable ex-programmer types (useless managers and too out-of-date to be useful regarding programming other than basic logic) and managers who think they are knowledgeable as they've got some BSc from Bangalore Tech, and managers who are just managers and manage you instead of try to be your coding buddy.
"Does he base his assumptions of how you should be doing things based off the way that he did things?"
I remember a boss bitching at me as the PHP/Perl templating system we were using to knock out HTML was taking us too long to make changes to site design. He came up with some bullshit about "back in the day we did web design with Visual Basic and it was all drag'n'drop". He didn't understand that we were creating the pages dynamically - they were actually changing every time you refreshed the page, they were realtime reports FFS!
"B. Relies on, but disregards your technical advice"
Yup been there too, I actually had a boss who would say to your face that he didn't believe you, I expect as he thought we were saying something couldn't/shouldn't be done as we didn't want to do the work!
Me: Erm boss, I really don't think we should force a logoff of all our users mid-session, especially without telling them in advance.
Shitface: Ah you're just being lazy!
"C. Schedule Bullies:"
Ah n00b! You never tell them how long it will actually take (who knows anyway?) Read some BOFH. You tell them it will take 2 weeks every time. Then it will take you one week and you either tell them you're done early and get praise, or slack off for a week and hand it in on time in 2 weeks. Either way you don't get people breathing down your neck - daily progress meetings actually get in the way of progress!
"3. Personal Growth:"
This really is your first job isn't it?!;-)
You never get the opportunity for growth at work. You'll only ever get training if it's free or has something directly to do with a task at hand and not the possibility of training you for your next job outside the company. Your boss is always mindful of people who could fill his shoes.
Personal growth is achieved by taking in a "Learn X in 21 Days" book and reading it in the slow times. Or surfing www.X-programming.com then getting a job at a new company.
"4. Compensation and Overtime."
Two words you don't usually see in the same sentence in programming circles. Developers don't get PAID overtime, unless you're a contractor and you're charging the fuckers by the hour.
Never EVER give them free overtime out of dedication, they'll just come to expect it after that, you always get some suck-up who will ruin it for everybody though (and they don't get thought any better of be either side).
Also, as soon as you go to the boss asking about more money, they know you'll be looking for a new job if they refuse, so if they do refuse (or give you the alternative of some bullshit quarterly MBO bonus scheme) you know you're finished there.
I'd be surprised if anyone managed 24Mbps, you'd probably have to be within an inch of the exchange!
I can't even get 8Mb/400Kbps because I'm like 7 miles from the exchange in a not particularly rural area. Probably because the UK has fuck all cable infrastructure so everyone has to re-use BT's copper crap for ADSL.
512/256Kbps is going well though, nearer to 600Kbps/300Kbps, but sure ain't the old 4Mb/384Kbps I used to get in the States....
What's the upload on 24Mbps - gotta be 1Mbps at least surely, or are they being stupid with that?
I was talking to a friend from Holland who says they pretty much already have 10Mbps syncronous to every house and will have 100Mbps async in 5 years, or maybe even gigabit over cable when HDTV on-demand comes around.
And France is rolling out 24Mbps ADSL2 next month apparently.
Of course thanks to the RIAA/MPAA we will have no P2P or BitTorrents to download and the only use for the bandwidth will be Linux ISO's and those annoying websites that insist on a 4Mb Flash intro.
My $7 Realtek 8169's from Fry's are a lot more reliable and in fact slightly faster with lower CPU usage than the Intel Pro 1000 CT I have.
Although that might be due to crappy Linux drivers for the Intel (it hard crashes the box if you throw too much data at it).
Where I used to work we had a dual 3.2GHz Xeon with 2Gb RAM and a $4000 PCI-E gigabit card with fibre and that could not make much over 600MBps (the Realteks got about 220MBps on a regular PC/CAT5e).
I think you're a bit of a horder. I mean come on, who keeps TV episodes on his hard drive? Actually I've got CloneWars, but that's different!
Mind you I've just bought 2x200Gb drives for my fileserver, as the old 40+160Gb was not enough for DVD rips and a load of VMWare sessions.
My routine is:
1. download/rip etc. the files and store them on the hard drive.
2. If I've not used a file in a month:
2a. If I think I may need to lay my hands on it quickly (like ghost images and fedora iso's), bung it on the 80Gb Firewire drive.
2b. If I don't think it's essential, burn to DVD/CD (this also prevents people stumbling on your pr0n collection when browsing your machine!)
Compression's not an option these days really as most stuff you download is already compressed anyway.
The only stuff I keep forever on the fileserver or local drives is really important stuff (company docs) or really big stuff (like yum repos) but that's also backed up of course.
Oh I forgot, put the DVD's on spindles too (maybe print a list of what DVD's are in what spindle) a 100 DVD spindle takes up about the room of what 4 DVD cases?
Much better than a CD rack, or even one of those wallet things, just not so easy to navigate.
I shipped about 400 DVD's from the US to the UK in a small UHaul box as I put them on spindles. I then sold the empty cases and recycled the paper covers.
If you have '10 400Gb hard drives lying around' and are going to be getting an LCD TV and LCDs+docking stations for laptops, then why move to a house half the size - presumably not to save money?
As for getting rid of the desktops - definitely keep one of them as a fileserver/Myth backend and bung it in a basement or cupboard somewhere, maybe with wireless if you're not a speed freak.
There's also the option of getting a LCD monitor with built in TV tuner - to be used as a TV and docking station for a laptop - two birds with one stone and all that.
I wouldn't bother with Shuttle cases if you're thinking of that, they're just not expandable enough, so you'll end up hanging USB/1394 drives off the back of them so you might as well just use a laptop.
Apple technician: "Steve, the iPod is known to have worse sound quality than the cheaper Creative, Archos, Karma, or iRiver".
SteveJ: "he has a point there Ives, and those muffling white earpieces won't help for long when all our customers get mugged"
Ives: "but I've spent months laser-etching the logo"
SteveJ: "that's true, and we can get Marketing to make a big point of this to the clueless drones who buy our shit, they will forget about the inadequacies of the product, form over function and all that"
AppleTech: "what about adding Ogg and WMA support, and allowing bi-directional transfer of files?"
Ives: "I've spent months on the roughness of the clickwheel compared to the smoothness of the rest of the exterior"
Linux CD's - Fedora of course including rescue CD.
WinXP SP2 and Win98SE CD's - sometimes we have to use Windows, and Win98SE makes a good boot CD for DOS firmware flashers.
USB key with my serials on them - it just seems easier to use text files than a load of sticky labels from CD cases. Also some example config files like xorg.conf and notes about how I've fixed Linux problems before, plus software I've written myself (always nice to test on a new platform) and the 'usual' stuff like wallpaper and some MP3's to test the audio with.
Acronis Drive Image 8 boot CD - will back up anything you throw at it, better than Ghost.
Ethernet cable - preferably linked to a switch to get to the fileserver and optionally the internet.
Screws - mainly drive and case types, plus motherboard risers and thumbscrews.
Magnetic Philips screwdriver - how many times have you dropped a screw in someplace unreachable by human hands and don't want to shake the whole case around to get it out?!
Cybertool Swiss Army Knife - for when you can't find the right screwdriver or you need to unscrew GFX card connectors or cut something.
80mm fans - I always seem to need to add these, cases never come with enough (usually 1-2).
Dremel - for cutting holes for fans, or trimming overly large drive bays, or emergency dental surgery;-)
Fileserver - contains ISO's for various CD's and also rsync'ed updates made into a YUM server and storage space to image the new PC to (see Acronis above).
Warez - well not warez as such, but the hundreds of CD/DVD's you've filled with stuff you've downloaded over the years. You'll always find something you need that you can no longer download (like that 96Mb Abi Titmuss Lesbian WMV, oh what I wouldn't give for a peak at that one!)
Artic Silver 3 thermal paste - much better than that white crap they give you with retail CPU's.
Spare Realtek/3com ethernet cards - endless times I've found computers I'm fixing have dead or dodgey ethernet, or Linux doesn't support the onboard one. Same goes for graphics cards - always carry an old 2Mb S3 PCI card and an 8Mb ATI AGP card.
KVM is useful (if they have built-in cables, nothing's worse than trying to find that monitor extension cable!) so are dual input LCD's, but always have a spare CRT around for when the GFX card is trying to use a mode a 60Hz 1280x1024 LCD would not cope with.
Spare mice - Microsoft are the best, don't like USB mice, but I have found some motherboards that won't power down with PS/2. Also get a PS/2 keyboard not a USB one.
well it appears to happen more when you open a url in another tab - that way you have no back button, no url in the url bar for some reason, and refresh just refreshes the blank page.
Has anyone else suffered with the weird thing where if a website times out, the browser displays a blank page, the tab says 'untitled' and if you refresh, instantly you just get a blank page (as if it hasn't even tried to refetch it).
Also there's that thing where the browser will not display the page due to some timeout again I guess, but the ticker thing still rotates as if it's trying to fetch the page (a look at netstat or LievHTTPHeaders tells you it's not).
Mind you I think the rotating ticker thing is broken in Thunderbird too, as it keeps on going after 'no new messages on server'.
Or is it meant to constantly rotate in the top right of the window just to distract you?!
Don't get me wrong, I love Mozilla stuff, but there's still basic bugs in it that need fixing before adding more crap.
1. Cool dude. Quite a nice bloke, basically a Web Designer, he realised that I knew more than him about programming and systems stuff, so left me alone to do my job.
Useless manager though - no deadlines, no projects "just fix what you think needs doing".
2. Ex-techie. Well, he had delusions of being a geek - so much so that he would actually go to DefCon and shop for clothes at ThinkGeek to try to fit in. He would profess to have written C programs that we later found were downloaded from SourceForge.
Useless manager - well he did the usual PowerPoint stuff and had meetings with upper management all the time, but would get obsessed with something he'd read about, so forced us to use it, even if it was totally inappropriate. Two people left just because of him.
3. Micromanager. Quite technical so demanded to know exactly how we planned to do everything, was also quite manager-y so made project plans and gave us [artificial] deadlines. Had favourites - mainly those who sucked up and were generally bad at their job.
I can remember 4 really good workers in 3 years who quit just because they couldn't get on with him. He treated us like mushrooms too - it was almost impossible to get to the President and find out what was going on with the company. Mind you, the President was a bit of a pyscho, I liked him though.
4. Non-technical. This bloke was a bit of a dodgey geezer, some definitely illegal stuff was going on I'm sure. He basically ran the place by being threatening and shouting/swearing if things didn't get done. Very high staff turnover, but if you were loyal, you would be well rewarded.
5. Religious freak. This one believed in penance. If you screwed something up, you'd be doing a stock take or cleaning the place up. I remember a bunch of us went to a trade show and one of us (not me) was unfortunate enough to have to share a hotel room with him - he walked around naked apparently!
I've had other bosses too, like the power nut (everything has to be done my way), the dirty old man (mainly hired 18 year old girls in short skirts) and one woman (always off because of her kids, or sleeping her way to the top).
"That means your staff are well dressed, well groomed, and act with the utmost professionalism. "
You really must be a PHB/MBA lurker, as no real Slashdotter would expect any staff to fit that description.
Also, a suit and tie really is a crappy outfit for crawling around fixing wiring and opening PC's. That's what black jeans and T-shirts are for.
Personally, I think big displays of lm_sensors or top stats, MRTG graphs, gkrellm/superkarama/gdesklets kinda things are going to impress on big plasmas.
"Also I loved their ethernet cards which had Linux support before kernel 2.0."
Well the only Intel ethernet card I've ever used - the Pro 100/1000 CT, causes hard crashes (requiring a reboot) in Fedora4 if you pump more than about 2megs of traffic at it - yeah nice gigabit that makes!
Replaced it with a faster and stable Realtek 8169 costing 7usd from Fry's (I would usually go with 3com 3c905B but wanted gigabit).
And I'm heartily disappointed with my Prescott 3GHz, I can't actually use it right now as I can't keep it below 55-78C(and no, that's not a stock retail fan!)
Mind you, my AthlonXP-M would have exploded by the time it got to 55C, and would probably require 100% load for a day or more to get that hot, it idles around 35C and that's a 2600+ @ 2.5GHz
I used to like Intel back in the PII-300 days, but the PIII was an abomination and the PIV (except the M) not even as good. Where I used to work, even dual Xeon 3.2GHz's were a disappointment.
My next chip (which will be in at least a year) will probably be an Athlon64 or whatever they're on by then, not Intel.
Had to laugh - thought you mean 'a few thousand Piece Of Shit systems'.
As far as Linux From Scratch goes, I can relate - where I worked previously we had to settle for Slackware as building our own Linux (for a network appliance) seemed absurd to the PHB, we told him Slackware was what RedHat was based on;-)
Let's face it. Everybody speeds - even those idiots who say "police in WA enforce laws" and "speed kills".
We're all from Democracy's (except for the Americans where the corporations like the RIAA/MPAA/Disney/Sony make the laws) so if the norm is to speed, then surely we should just vote to have the limits raised?
I know there's *supposed* to be a scientific basis for the limits being what they are, but hey they've been calculated by civil servants, and lets face it, if you're hit by a car doing 65mph, being hit at 90mph isn't going to make much difference to you.
If the speed limit on a motorway/freeway was 90mph, then tha majority of us would no longer be speeding.
Think about it - you could instantly reduce the speeding figures - and simultaeneously bankrupt the private companies that put cameras around, or the insurance companies that subsidise them.
Hey we could even cut taxes by firing all the traffic cops - simultaneously putting a lot of donut companies out of business.
Anyway, can't hang around here all day, I'm off to read an article about how its been proven that speed cameras increase accident rates.
...by being "better", surely iPod doesn't win on low price.
Glad you put the quotes around "better" there, as hardware-wise the iPod is one of the worst media players available, they also have pretty poor sound output and signal-to-noise ratio.
The iPod only wins on marketing and UI - same as the Mac I guess....
Slashdot Mirror
Well you Yankies are the ones who are SUPPOSED to be speaking English!
And as for the food - would you prefer we broiled it or BBQ'd it to death?
"Don't work in cubicles, ever."
;-)
The one time I worked in a cubicle, it was not only hard to concentrate over the noise, but you lacked privacy and it seemed Big Brother was watching you, plus it also seemed like you were valued less, this was a step down from my offices of past.
It did help you not work and chat to your neighbour instead though.... Nice one management.
"2 Just How Dumb is Management, Anyway?"
Never underestimate the power of the Dark Side.
I've worked for managers who are knowledgeable ex-programmer types (useless managers and too out-of-date to be useful regarding programming other than basic logic) and managers who think they are knowledgeable as they've got some BSc from Bangalore Tech, and managers who are just managers and manage you instead of try to be your coding buddy.
"Does he base his assumptions of how you should be doing things based off the way that he did things?"
I remember a boss bitching at me as the PHP/Perl templating system we were using to knock out HTML was taking us too long to make changes to site design. He came up with some bullshit about "back in the day we did web design with Visual Basic and it was all drag'n'drop". He didn't understand that we were creating the pages dynamically - they were actually changing every time you refreshed the page, they were realtime reports FFS!
"B. Relies on, but disregards your technical advice"
Yup been there too, I actually had a boss who would say to your face that he didn't believe you, I expect as he thought we were saying something couldn't/shouldn't be done as we didn't want to do the work!
Me: Erm boss, I really don't think we should force a logoff of all our users mid-session, especially without telling them in advance.
Shitface: Ah you're just being lazy!
"C. Schedule Bullies:"
Ah n00b! You never tell them how long it will actually take (who knows anyway?) Read some BOFH. You tell them it will take 2 weeks every time. Then it will take you one week and you either tell them you're done early and get praise, or slack off for a week and hand it in on time in 2 weeks. Either way you don't get people breathing down your neck - daily progress meetings actually get in the way of progress!
"3. Personal Growth:"
This really is your first job isn't it?!
You never get the opportunity for growth at work. You'll only ever get training if it's free or has something directly to do with a task at hand and not the possibility of training you for your next job outside the company. Your boss is always mindful of people who could fill his shoes.
Personal growth is achieved by taking in a "Learn X in 21 Days" book and reading it in the slow times. Or surfing www.X-programming.com then getting a job at a new company.
"4. Compensation and Overtime."
Two words you don't usually see in the same sentence in programming circles. Developers don't get PAID overtime, unless you're a contractor and you're charging the fuckers by the hour.
Never EVER give them free overtime out of dedication, they'll just come to expect it after that, you always get some suck-up who will ruin it for everybody though (and they don't get thought any better of be either side).
Also, as soon as you go to the boss asking about more money, they know you'll be looking for a new job if they refuse, so if they do refuse (or give you the alternative of some bullshit quarterly MBO bonus scheme) you know you're finished there.
"Work is not all bad."
No you're right, payday and Friday are good.
RIAA: hey Cohen, how do we put poisonned torrents on ThePirateBay, there's way too many people downloading our worthless crap for free?
;-)
MPAA: don't forget MiniNova or we won't get Time Warner's money and Microsoft will never buy in.
Cohen: it'll cost ya $8.75m
I'd be surprised if anyone managed 24Mbps, you'd probably have to be within an inch of the exchange!
I can't even get 8Mb/400Kbps because I'm like 7 miles from the exchange in a not particularly rural area. Probably because the UK has fuck all cable infrastructure so everyone has to re-use BT's copper crap for ADSL.
512/256Kbps is going well though, nearer to 600Kbps/300Kbps, but sure ain't the old 4Mb/384Kbps I used to get in the States....
What's the upload on 24Mbps - gotta be 1Mbps at least surely, or are they being stupid with that?
I was talking to a friend from Holland who says they pretty much already have 10Mbps syncronous to every house and will have 100Mbps async in 5 years, or maybe even gigabit over cable when HDTV on-demand comes around.
And France is rolling out 24Mbps ADSL2 next month apparently.
Of course thanks to the RIAA/MPAA we will have no P2P or BitTorrents to download and the only use for the bandwidth will be Linux ISO's and those annoying websites that insist on a 4Mb Flash intro.
My $7 Realtek 8169's from Fry's are a lot more reliable and in fact slightly faster with lower CPU usage than the Intel Pro 1000 CT I have.
Although that might be due to crappy Linux drivers for the Intel (it hard crashes the box if you throw too much data at it).
Where I used to work we had a dual 3.2GHz Xeon with 2Gb RAM and a $4000 PCI-E gigabit card with fibre and that could not make much over 600MBps (the Realteks got about 220MBps on a regular PC/CAT5e).
I think you're a bit of a horder. I mean come on, who keeps TV episodes on his hard drive? Actually I've got CloneWars, but that's different!
Mind you I've just bought 2x200Gb drives for my fileserver, as the old 40+160Gb was not enough for DVD rips and a load of VMWare sessions.
My routine is:
1. download/rip etc. the files and store them on the hard drive.
2. If I've not used a file in a month:
2a. If I think I may need to lay my hands on it quickly (like ghost images and fedora iso's), bung it on the 80Gb Firewire drive.
2b. If I don't think it's essential, burn to DVD/CD (this also prevents people stumbling on your pr0n collection when browsing your machine!)
Compression's not an option these days really as most stuff you download is already compressed anyway.
The only stuff I keep forever on the fileserver or local drives is really important stuff (company docs) or really big stuff (like yum repos) but that's also backed up of course.
Can whoever it is that reads osnews.com stop posting copies to Slashdot 4 days later?
Hah, should keep some Koreans busy fixing it then, instead of sending me spam!
"Intel Developing Ultra-Low Power Chips"
Erm, you mean like the StrongARM or XScale?
do we have a link or model number?
Oh I forgot, put the DVD's on spindles too (maybe print a list of what DVD's are in what spindle) a 100 DVD spindle takes up about the room of what 4 DVD cases?
Much better than a CD rack, or even one of those wallet things, just not so easy to navigate.
I shipped about 400 DVD's from the US to the UK in a small UHaul box as I put them on spindles. I then sold the empty cases and recycled the paper covers.
If you have '10 400Gb hard drives lying around' and are going to be getting an LCD TV and LCDs+docking stations for laptops, then why move to a house half the size - presumably not to save money?
As for getting rid of the desktops - definitely keep one of them as a fileserver/Myth backend and bung it in a basement or cupboard somewhere, maybe with wireless if you're not a speed freak.
There's also the option of getting a LCD monitor with built in TV tuner - to be used as a TV and docking station for a laptop - two birds with one stone and all that.
I wouldn't bother with Shuttle cases if you're thinking of that, they're just not expandable enough, so you'll end up hanging USB/1394 drives off the back of them so you might as well just use a laptop.
Apple technician: "Steve, the iPod is known to have worse sound quality than the cheaper Creative, Archos, Karma, or iRiver".
SteveJ: "he has a point there Ives, and those muffling white earpieces won't help for long when all our customers get mugged"
Ives: "but I've spent months laser-etching the logo"
SteveJ: "that's true, and we can get Marketing to make a big point of this to the clueless drones who buy our shit, they will forget about the inadequacies of the product, form over function and all that"
AppleTech: "what about adding Ogg and WMA support, and allowing bi-directional transfer of files?"
Ives: "I've spent months on the roughness of the clickwheel compared to the smoothness of the rest of the exterior"
SteveJ: "ship it!"
Linux CD's - Fedora of course including rescue CD.
;-)
WinXP SP2 and Win98SE CD's - sometimes we have to use Windows, and Win98SE makes a good boot CD for DOS firmware flashers.
USB key with my serials on them - it just seems easier to use text files than a load of sticky labels from CD cases. Also some example config files like xorg.conf and notes about how I've fixed Linux problems before, plus software I've written myself (always nice to test on a new platform) and the 'usual' stuff like wallpaper and some MP3's to test the audio with.
Acronis Drive Image 8 boot CD - will back up anything you throw at it, better than Ghost.
Ethernet cable - preferably linked to a switch to get to the fileserver and optionally the internet.
Screws - mainly drive and case types, plus motherboard risers and thumbscrews.
Magnetic Philips screwdriver - how many times have you dropped a screw in someplace unreachable by human hands and don't want to shake the whole case around to get it out?!
Cybertool Swiss Army Knife - for when you can't find the right screwdriver or you need to unscrew GFX card connectors or cut something.
80mm fans - I always seem to need to add these, cases never come with enough (usually 1-2).
Dremel - for cutting holes for fans, or trimming overly large drive bays, or emergency dental surgery
Fileserver - contains ISO's for various CD's and also rsync'ed updates made into a YUM server and storage space to image the new PC to (see Acronis above).
Warez - well not warez as such, but the hundreds of CD/DVD's you've filled with stuff you've downloaded over the years. You'll always find something you need that you can no longer download (like that 96Mb Abi Titmuss Lesbian WMV, oh what I wouldn't give for a peak at that one!)
Artic Silver 3 thermal paste - much better than that white crap they give you with retail CPU's.
Spare Realtek/3com ethernet cards - endless times I've found computers I'm fixing have dead or dodgey ethernet, or Linux doesn't support the onboard one. Same goes for graphics cards - always carry an old 2Mb S3 PCI card and an 8Mb ATI AGP card.
KVM is useful (if they have built-in cables, nothing's worse than trying to find that monitor extension cable!) so are dual input LCD's, but always have a spare CRT around for when the GFX card is trying to use a mode a 60Hz 1280x1024 LCD would not cope with.
Spare mice - Microsoft are the best, don't like USB mice, but I have found some motherboards that won't power down with PS/2. Also get a PS/2 keyboard not a USB one.
well it appears to happen more when you open a url in another tab - that way you have no back button, no url in the url bar for some reason, and refresh just refreshes the blank page.
this is present in 1.0.6 for linux and windows.
Has anyone else suffered with the weird thing where if a website times out, the browser displays a blank page, the tab says 'untitled' and if you refresh, instantly you just get a blank page (as if it hasn't even tried to refetch it).
Also there's that thing where the browser will not display the page due to some timeout again I guess, but the ticker thing still rotates as if it's trying to fetch the page (a look at netstat or LievHTTPHeaders tells you it's not).
Mind you I think the rotating ticker thing is broken in Thunderbird too, as it keeps on going after 'no new messages on server'.
Or is it meant to constantly rotate in the top right of the window just to distract you?!
Don't get me wrong, I love Mozilla stuff, but there's still basic bugs in it that need fixing before adding more crap.
1. Cool dude.
Quite a nice bloke, basically a Web Designer, he realised that I knew more than him about programming and systems stuff, so left me alone to do my job.
Useless manager though - no deadlines, no projects "just fix what you think needs doing".
2. Ex-techie.
Well, he had delusions of being a geek - so much so that he would actually go to DefCon and shop for clothes at ThinkGeek to try to fit in. He would profess to have written C programs that we later found were downloaded from SourceForge.
Useless manager - well he did the usual PowerPoint stuff and had meetings with upper management all the time, but would get obsessed with something he'd read about, so forced us to use it, even if it was totally inappropriate. Two people left just because of him.
3. Micromanager.
Quite technical so demanded to know exactly how we planned to do everything, was also quite manager-y so made project plans and gave us [artificial] deadlines. Had favourites - mainly those who sucked up and were generally bad at their job.
I can remember 4 really good workers in 3 years who quit just because they couldn't get on with him. He treated us like mushrooms too - it was almost impossible to get to the President and find out what was going on with the company. Mind you, the President was a bit of a pyscho, I liked him though.
4. Non-technical.
This bloke was a bit of a dodgey geezer, some definitely illegal stuff was going on I'm sure. He basically ran the place by being threatening and shouting/swearing if things didn't get done. Very high staff turnover, but if you were loyal, you would be well rewarded.
5. Religious freak.
This one believed in penance. If you screwed something up, you'd be doing a stock take or cleaning the place up. I remember a bunch of us went to a trade show and one of us (not me) was unfortunate enough to have to share a hotel room with him - he walked around naked apparently!
I've had other bosses too, like the power nut (everything has to be done my way), the dirty old man (mainly hired 18 year old girls in short skirts) and one woman (always off because of her kids, or sleeping her way to the top).
"That means your staff are well dressed, well groomed, and act with the utmost professionalism. "
You really must be a PHB/MBA lurker, as no real Slashdotter would expect any staff to fit that description.
Also, a suit and tie really is a crappy outfit for crawling around fixing wiring and opening PC's. That's what black jeans and T-shirts are for.
Personally, I think big displays of lm_sensors or top stats, MRTG graphs, gkrellm/superkarama/gdesklets kinda things are going to impress on big plasmas.
DRM sux0rz
"Also I loved their ethernet cards which had Linux support before kernel 2.0."
Well the only Intel ethernet card I've ever used - the Pro 100/1000 CT, causes hard crashes (requiring a reboot) in Fedora4 if you pump more than about 2megs of traffic at it - yeah nice gigabit that makes!
Replaced it with a faster and stable Realtek 8169 costing 7usd from Fry's (I would usually go with 3com 3c905B but wanted gigabit).
And I'm heartily disappointed with my Prescott 3GHz, I can't actually use it right now as I can't keep it below 55-78C(and no, that's not a stock retail fan!)
Mind you, my AthlonXP-M would have exploded by the time it got to 55C, and would probably require 100% load for a day or more to get that hot, it idles around 35C and that's a 2600+ @ 2.5GHz
I used to like Intel back in the PII-300 days, but the PIII was an abomination and the PIV (except the M) not even as good. Where I used to work, even dual Xeon 3.2GHz's were a disappointment.
My next chip (which will be in at least a year) will probably be an Athlon64 or whatever they're on by then, not Intel.
Had to laugh - thought you mean 'a few thousand Piece Of Shit systems'.
;-)
As far as Linux From Scratch goes, I can relate - where I worked previously we had to settle for Slackware as building our own Linux (for a network appliance) seemed absurd to the PHB, we told him Slackware was what RedHat was based on
Let's face it. Everybody speeds - even those idiots who say "police in WA enforce laws" and "speed kills".
We're all from Democracy's (except for the Americans where the corporations like the RIAA/MPAA/Disney/Sony make the laws) so if the norm is to speed, then surely we should just vote to have the limits raised?
I know there's *supposed* to be a scientific basis for the limits being what they are, but hey they've been calculated by civil servants, and lets face it, if you're hit by a car doing 65mph, being hit at 90mph isn't going to make much difference to you.
If the speed limit on a motorway/freeway was 90mph, then tha majority of us would no longer be speeding.
Think about it - you could instantly reduce the speeding figures - and simultaeneously bankrupt the private companies that put cameras around, or the insurance companies that subsidise them.
Hey we could even cut taxes by firing all the traffic cops - simultaneously putting a lot of donut companies out of business.
Anyway, can't hang around here all day, I'm off to read an article about how its been proven that speed cameras increase accident rates.
...by being "better", surely iPod doesn't win on low price.
Glad you put the quotes around "better" there, as hardware-wise the iPod is one of the worst media players available, they also have pretty poor sound output and signal-to-noise ratio.
The iPod only wins on marketing and UI - same as the Mac I guess....
yeah, exactly what i was thinking - firefox prides itself on security and being free from the type of crap that "toolbars" put into your browser.
Well I did come back to England (via France) to get away from the ignorant Yanks, but.... ;-)