A lot of humor makes fun of a group of people. Like Jeff Foxworthy, I do a lot of redneck humor, and like Jeff Foxworthy, I usually do it from a "first-person" perspective to make it less offensive. But it still is offensive, it's just that white trash is still an acceptable group to make fun of. Or should that be "of which to make fun"?
Anyone who has done more than 10 minutes of sysadmin or hell desk work will inevitably run into a verifiable "cluebie", the clueless newbie. I don't get frustrated with the regular newbies if they're trying to learn. The frustration comes from people who don't try to solve problems themselves, don't learn from past mistakes, and generally see you as the crutch which they so desperately need to lean on to successfully perform even the simplest of tasks. Your job consists solely of helping them do their job.
That's the true essence of the BOFH, right? In the rare instance that Simon has the phone on hook, he knows what the problem is before he picks it up, based on caller id. The perpetual newbies are frustrating.
I don't think it's really possible to draw a parallel to school children and teachers. The point of being a professional, regardless of your profession, is that you are assumed to have a certain knowledge level for your job, and the ability to learn what is necessary to perform your job duties. If you can't use the computer without relying on tech support for the rest of your life, you probably don't have the ability, or more like you don't have the will, to sit down and learn what you need to learn.
And such people are fair game to those of us who would mock them.
And where is IBM now? With all the clones it has lost its place in PCs
IBM lost nothing except market share. We'll never know if the PC platform would have taken off as it did had IBM been able to keep it proprietary, but I would suggest that it wouldn't have. The point is, I think IBM has made far more money from PC's than they would have with a proprietary system, simply because the market is so much larger. I'd rather have 10% of $10,000 than 100% of $100.
As for hardware drivers, no company has anything to lose from releasing the specs to their hardware and the source to their drivers. I hear a lot of BS about "trade secrets" and "competition" and all that. Given the amount of time necessary to develop a new piece of hardware and bring it to market, someone who wants to copy your design is damned to an existence of being perpetually behind you. In other words, right where you want them.
Everytime I see this, the only phrase I can come up with is "And the down side is?"
It's especially silly to not release specs. The Linux community is large enough that people will step forward and write a device driver at no cost to the company, if they have the specs. Actually, plenty of drivers have been written without the specs, but it makes no sense to make life more difficult for people who, ultimately, are helping the hardware manufacturer as much as they help themselves.
Why do you think Hotmail has 50M+ users? Plenty of people have a Hotmail account just so that they can put something in as an email address when filling out forms. Check it once/month, hope the spam filters are working, it all works out great.
Linux is an OS kernel, and it is from scratch. Here's a hint, folks. man pages aren't part of the kernel, neither is anything is/usr/bin, or/bin/, or/sbin (see a pattern yet?).
This is why Stallman notes that what we call "Linux" should be called "GNU/Linux", since an OS kernel is pretty much useless without the programs required to do something, minimally the C compiler.
I'm one of the few people who has been on "the net" for 10+ years now, before the WWW existed. I remember the first spam post on Usenet. I remember when Robert McElwaine earned our wrath through his moronic posting of his moronic writings on multiple, unassociated newsgroups. We had no idea what was to come.
Many usenet groups are dead due to the spam volume, and people have moved on to websites to perform the same function (and I would argue that most do a better job of it, anyway). There's no doubt that the WWW brought a pretty face to the Internet and made it as popular as it is. Companies like AOL further exacerbated the problem. The WWW brought in a larger crop of people whom I can describe only as "perpetual newbies", people who will never get a clue about this stuff.
When I started with it, you had to be a Unix user to really, truly be on the net. Internet email was mostly Unix-based, newsreaders like rn and later trn were Unix-only, ftp clients, etc. All command-line, which helped separate the wheat from the chaff.
I hardly recognize this new Internet, centered around commerce and hype. The old Internet, centered around communities and people, was a much friendlier place, but we'll never get it back.
Hey, I spoke with the reporter about two hours ago- at 6:30PM CST. My guess is that we'll be hearing more about this, and I'll keep the/. crowd updated.
The USPS is run as a business. It's difficult to classify it as part of the government, although it is publicly owned and was created through legislation (same legislation gives the USPS a monopoly in mail delivery). They receive no government funding currently, and yes, they do make a handsome profit. For the past few years, though, they've been warning that they needed those profits to offset predicted future cost inflations.
I don't own it, I just paid for it. And even though I have the "receipt" screen here, someone at Microsoft probably received an mail thanking them for the payment.
This might be interesting when everybody gets back from the holiday break.
Hey, I paid it for them. Merry Christmas, Microsoft.
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try "myrealbox.com", which is a Novell service. I don't think they have subfolders, might want to check, but the rest is there. No frills, but quick and easy.
If there's a war, it's between the open source/free software movement and the traditional proprietary software world. Unfortunately, pretty much all Unixes- except Linux and the BSD's- are in the "traditional proprietary software world". Nice to see that Netscape may be coming over to our side.
How many have read through Barksdale's rantings? Netscape wanted the Internet. Bad. How would they do that, though? decommoditization of protocols, although he isn't too open about it (unlike Microsoft). In other words, close-sourcing the Internet. That would sure put a crimp in the marketshare for all other browsers, wouldn't it? But how would they do this? Simple:
Basing their dominant browser on standards, but adding in their own proprietary "plug-ins" that add extra features that we would eventually become dependant on- and other proprietary, non-standard extensions like JavaScript- despite the fact that it would be just as easy (easier, even) to write a java applet (based on Sun's proprietary Java language). So, rally behind IE! Forgoe downloading Shockwave or Flash plugins, boycott sites that use them! If we all go along with it, it won't go away.
Let's see, you've sued etoy.com because one of your customers went to their site accidently and you think you lost a sale.
Well, get ready to sue yourselves.
I was going to buy a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff from your site next week for the numerous children in my family, as well as friends' children here in town. You've lost far more sales by losing me as a customer, both present and future, than etoy.com could have ever cost you.
Oh well, KayBee toys (a clueful toy store with an internet presence at www.kbkids.com) will be getting an extra order this Christmas.
No offense, but I bet he's a bit more technical than you.
Sorry, somebody who has his credit card number stolen and blames it on cookies is in the peewee leagues.
It's a shame, he's backed himself into a corner here. One of two realities exists. In the first, he doesn't know much about cookies, and made a public statement about something of which he knew very little. In the second, he's being dishonest about cookies just to plug his company's product. He's either 1) dumb or 2) a liar. Neither label is particularly appealing.
You can spout drivel about degrees and corporate positions until the cows come home; the bottom line is he made a gaffe here and needs to be called on it.
I know some guys at Novell who have been in meetings with Eric and have attested to his intelligence. Unfortunately, he needs to guard it a bit closer.
What a crock. Given that xfree86 is the only future that X has, they should have simply declined the offer and waited a few years for X.org to cease to exist.
And Ford has a "monopoly" on the Taurus. So what? You need to look up the definition of a monopoly.
The original poster is "more correct". Apple has a monopoly on Macs. While only Ford makes Tauruses, it's reasonable to say that most other cars are interchangeable with a Taurus, so Ford doesn't have a monopoly on cars.
Mac's are only partially interchangeable with PC's (otherwise, nobody would buy a Mac), so they have a limited monopoly in a limited sense.
I thought Sendmail, Inc. was already more or less corporate, with their own funding
And Netscape isn't? I agree that the money would be better spent on something other than Sendmail, but your position is extremely mixed to advocate Mozilla- another corporate product- and not Sendmail.
Great that they might help with Mozilla - that makes all the sense in the world. We NEED a browser!:)
No, we need choice. Mozilla has funding, I'd be interested in seeing the money spent a bit more wisely.
What happened to the old "we only do free software" RedHat? Aren't there some new free [speech] browser projects that are more worthy of their cash than Mozilla? Nothing against Mozilla, I'd just like to see some choice in the Linux browser market, and I'd like to see a free product.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of humor makes fun of a group of people. Like Jeff Foxworthy, I do a lot of redneck humor, and like Jeff Foxworthy, I usually do it from a "first-person" perspective to make it less offensive. But it still is offensive, it's just that white trash is still an acceptable group to make fun of. Or should that be "of which to make fun"?
Anyone who has done more than 10 minutes of sysadmin or hell desk work will inevitably run into a verifiable "cluebie", the clueless newbie. I don't get frustrated with the regular newbies if they're trying to learn. The frustration comes from people who don't try to solve problems themselves, don't learn from past mistakes, and generally see you as the crutch which they so desperately need to lean on to successfully perform even the simplest of tasks. Your job consists solely of helping them do their job.
That's the true essence of the BOFH, right? In the rare instance that Simon has the phone on hook, he knows what the problem is before he picks it up, based on caller id. The perpetual newbies are frustrating.
I don't think it's really possible to draw a parallel to school children and teachers. The point of being a professional, regardless of your profession, is that you are assumed to have a certain knowledge level for your job, and the ability to learn what is necessary to perform your job duties. If you can't use the computer without relying on tech support for the rest of your life, you probably don't have the ability, or more like you don't have the will, to sit down and learn what you need to learn.
And such people are fair game to those of us who would mock them.
They didn't shut down the site completely, just supended the domain name.
That sucks. I tried to pay for it thinking maybe that would fix it, but no payment is due.
And where is IBM now? With all the clones it has lost its place in PCs
IBM lost nothing except market share. We'll never know if the PC platform would have taken off as it did had IBM been able to keep it proprietary, but I would suggest that it wouldn't have. The point is, I think IBM has made far more money from PC's than they would have with a proprietary system, simply because the market is so much larger. I'd rather have 10% of $10,000 than 100% of $100.
As for hardware drivers, no company has anything to lose from releasing the specs to their hardware and the source to their drivers. I hear a lot of BS about "trade secrets" and "competition" and all that. Given the amount of time necessary to develop a new piece of hardware and bring it to market, someone who wants to copy your design is damned to an existence of being perpetually behind you. In other words, right where you want them.
Everytime I see this, the only phrase I can come up with is "And the down side is?"
It's especially silly to not release specs. The Linux community is large enough that people will step forward and write a device driver at no cost to the company, if they have the specs. Actually, plenty of drivers have been written without the specs, but it makes no sense to make life more difficult for people who, ultimately, are helping the hardware manufacturer as much as they help themselves.
Why do you think Hotmail has 50M+ users? Plenty of people have a Hotmail account just so that they can put something in as an email address when filling out forms. Check it once/month, hope the spam filters are working, it all works out great.
Linux is an OS kernel, and it is from scratch. Here's a hint, folks. man pages aren't part of the kernel, neither is anything is /usr/bin, or /bin/, or /sbin (see a pattern yet?).
This is why Stallman notes that what we call "Linux" should be called "GNU/Linux", since an OS kernel is pretty much useless without the programs required to do something, minimally the C compiler.
I'm one of the few people who has been on "the net" for 10+ years now, before the WWW existed. I remember the first spam post on Usenet. I remember when Robert McElwaine earned our wrath through his moronic posting of his moronic writings on multiple, unassociated newsgroups. We had no idea what was to come.
Many usenet groups are dead due to the spam volume, and people have moved on to websites to perform the same function (and I would argue that most do a better job of it, anyway). There's no doubt that the WWW brought a pretty face to the Internet and made it as popular as it is. Companies like AOL further exacerbated the problem. The WWW brought in a larger crop of people whom I can describe only as "perpetual newbies", people who will never get a clue about this stuff.
When I started with it, you had to be a Unix user to really, truly be on the net. Internet email was mostly Unix-based, newsreaders like rn and later trn were Unix-only, ftp clients, etc. All command-line, which helped separate the wheat from the chaff.
I hardly recognize this new Internet, centered around commerce and hype. The old Internet, centered around communities and people, was a much friendlier place, but we'll never get it back.
Folks, it's 6:00AM CST and Hotmail is again accessible. passport.com is finally resolvable again:
[root@dialerServer: localhost
Address: 127.0.0.1
Name: passport.com
Address: 207.46.198.16
By golly, I think I fixed it.
Hey, I spoke with the reporter about two hours ago- at 6:30PM CST. My guess is that we'll be hearing more about this, and I'll keep the /. crowd updated.
The USPS is run as a business. It's difficult to classify it as part of the government, although it is publicly owned and was created through legislation (same legislation gives the USPS a monopoly in mail delivery). They receive no government funding currently, and yes, they do make a handsome profit. For the past few years, though, they've been warning that they needed those profits to offset predicted future cost inflations.
I don't own it, I just paid for it. And even though I have the "receipt" screen here, someone at Microsoft probably received an mail thanking them for the payment.
This might be interesting when everybody gets back from the holiday break.
Would you mind if I conteacted a few friends in the media regarding this touching holiday tech story? awaiting your response
Sure, that'd be cool. This is actually kind of fun.
I have no idea what will come of it. But I assure you, Linux is my bread and butter, and as such, it will be mentioned wherever possible.
Hey, I paid it for them. Merry Christmas, Microsoft.
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Amount Charged (USD): 35.00
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try "myrealbox.com", which is a Novell service. I don't think they have subfolders, might want to check, but the rest is there. No frills, but quick and easy.
I was going to mention that you forgot Barksdale, but he's crawled in a hole since quitting. More proof that God answers my prayers.
Please name a standard to which IE doesn't adhere. Do the same thing for NS. Wow, is that the sound of bubbles being burst? Sorry.
I've yet to get any email, yet I regularly defend Microsoft when they are treated unfairly (rare occurance here on /.). Anonymous Cowards are cowards.
If there's a war, it's between the open source/free software movement and the traditional proprietary software world. Unfortunately, pretty much all Unixes- except Linux and the BSD's- are in the "traditional proprietary software world". Nice to see that Netscape may be coming over to our side.
How many have read through Barksdale's rantings? Netscape wanted the Internet. Bad. How would they do that, though? decommoditization of protocols, although he isn't too open about it (unlike Microsoft). In other words, close-sourcing the Internet. That would sure put a crimp in the marketshare for all other browsers, wouldn't it? But how would they do this? Simple:
Basing their dominant browser on standards, but adding in their own proprietary "plug-ins" that add extra features that we would eventually become dependant on- and other proprietary, non-standard extensions like JavaScript- despite the fact that it would be just as easy (easier, even) to write a java applet (based on Sun's proprietary Java language). So, rally behind IE! Forgoe downloading Shockwave or Flash plugins, boycott sites that use them! If we all go along with it, it won't go away.
Scary how well that translates....
Let's see, you've sued etoy.com because one of your customers went to their site accidently and you think you lost a sale.
Well, get ready to sue yourselves.
I was going to buy a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff from your site next week for the numerous children in my family, as well as friends' children here in town. You've lost far more sales by losing me as a customer, both present and future, than etoy.com could have ever cost you.
Oh well, KayBee toys (a clueful toy store with an internet presence at www.kbkids.com) will be getting an extra order this Christmas.
Hey, good luck getting blood out of that turnip.
Michael
No offense, but I bet he's a bit more technical than you.
Sorry, somebody who has his credit card number stolen and blames it on cookies is in the peewee leagues.
It's a shame, he's backed himself into a corner here. One of two realities exists. In the first, he doesn't know much about cookies, and made a public statement about something of which he knew very little. In the second, he's being dishonest about cookies just to plug his company's product. He's either 1) dumb or 2) a liar. Neither label is particularly appealing.
You can spout drivel about degrees and corporate positions until the cows come home; the bottom line is he made a gaffe here and needs to be called on it.
I know some guys at Novell who have been in meetings with Eric and have attested to his intelligence. Unfortunately, he needs to guard it a bit closer.
What a crock. Given that xfree86 is the only future that X has, they should have simply declined the offer and waited a few years for X.org to cease to exist.
And Ford has a "monopoly" on the Taurus. So what? You need to look up the definition of a monopoly.
The original poster is "more correct". Apple has a monopoly on Macs. While only Ford makes Tauruses, it's reasonable to say that most other cars are interchangeable with a Taurus, so Ford doesn't have a monopoly on cars.
Mac's are only partially interchangeable with PC's (otherwise, nobody would buy a Mac), so they have a limited monopoly in a limited sense.
I thought Sendmail, Inc. was already more or less corporate, with their own funding
And Netscape isn't? I agree that the money would be better spent on something other than Sendmail, but your position is extremely mixed to advocate Mozilla- another corporate product- and not Sendmail.
Great that they might help with Mozilla - that makes all the sense in the world. We NEED a browser! :)
No, we need choice. Mozilla has funding, I'd be interested in seeing the money spent a bit more wisely.
What happened to the old "we only do free software" RedHat? Aren't there some new free [speech] browser projects that are more worthy of their cash than Mozilla? Nothing against Mozilla, I'd just like to see some choice in the Linux browser market, and I'd like to see a free product.