If you tell your employer "being subjected to groping or being seen naked makes me uncomfortable", then they are knowingly sending you into a hostile work environment, plain and simple.
Sure, and as it seems, your employer has devious plans spelled out for you. Words of a youngster that found a glitch in "the system" and is making a point ad absurdum, truly believing in a certain conspiracy.
It may not be "their fault" that the TSA is making that portion of your work-day hostile, but they are still knowingly sending you off into the hostile environment, and there are alternatives an employer can undertake NOT to do so.
OK, say you have a business in CA and you need occasional presence in ME. Try getting there without a plane. Amtrak? Greyhound? Forget both. Maybe driving over 2 days non stop? Sure. And when you get back you will put more shit on your employer for being deprived from sleeping.
You sound like one of the many pathetic women on Oprah, discussing some non-problem and expecting the panel and the audience to nod in sympathy. The difference is that a woman's problem is solved by care and sympathy but the travelling salesman problem needs actual action.
Poul-Henning Kamp seems to know his languages. Good for him.
But I take he's never worked in a financial institution where application programmers have to produce working code. Cursed are the idiots that write programs using glyphs outside the intersection of ASCII and EBCDIC sets. IMHO it is a sin to even put "fancy" characters even in comment.
Ever tried outsourcing code support to Hyderabad? How do you fancy your chances of being efficient or effective without limiting yourself to English in ASCII? Would you be pleased to see method and variable names in Urdu?
The god given language for programming is English, encoded in ASCII or in EBCDIC. Programming languages needn't support any other spoken language. To further emphasise this point, I speak as a non-native English speaker, not living in an English speaking country.
your employer, as part of your work function is forcing you to subject yourself to either
Oh come off it! It would be so if it were a specific order from the employer. But it never is and chances are the employer would prefer you to travel at ease and would certainly never spend money to make his employees feel like shit. The employer is merely asking to travel -just as he might ask to do other things normal people do- and he cannot be held liable for out of proportion security measures.
Seriously, what were you thinking when you punched in this line?
Imagine the power lines used to hooking up the car when charging.
Either a huge current -needing extremely thick cables- at low voltage or low current and high voltage -direct current at higher voltages is more dangerous that alternating current.
Then comes the requirement that the charging stations should be used by service station employees and other mortals.
I think I'd be more afraid of one of those power lines being damaged than of a petrol hose being accidentally cut.
Seriously? You seriously think they would use Wine for a real time system? Are you out of your mind?
You should read past the first line. Of course I don't.
If you know what you are doing writing portable C isn't all that hard.
It isn't that hard but not straight forward. Study widely distributed software written in C and you'll see. The Perl make process heavily scrutinises your system before compiling anything. Not particularly for the faint-hearted.
Have you ever developed for a financial institution? Decisions take ages, the result must be there pronto and you will never ever be allowed to support more platforms than used. Want to write a fancy configure.sh which intermediates programmers understand and newbies not? Use stuff that has been around since the mid-80s? Forget it.
My take is they engineered the system and that if they would have done a sane design it surely would have run even under Windows. Note that I say this against my personal preference and interests.
It wouldn't surprise me if the promoting force was the utterly unreliable system they had before and that hence budget was freed.
I'm sure they took the complete system as it used to run on Windows and then simply ran it on Linux using Wine, thus allowing for great comparison.
Or maybe they completely redesigned the system, avoided known bottle necks and halved the response time.
I'm a UNIX developer since many, many moons but I find these stories lacking detail highly disturbing. Sure, nice Linux PR but on/. I'd hope to get a bit more context information.
Summary: Bourne scripting can be pretty effective.
You finally made it! Welcome to the 70ies.
(Try building a system with simpleton commands like you show and you will eventually find yourself alone at night at the coffee maker. Trying to keep awake while solving yet another scaling problem. "Friends" feeling very sorry for you in their sleep.)
...a VERY large amount of data which for legal reasons had to be carefully reduced, archived, etc. There were various clusters of VMS...
It's the freekin' "standardised" options buddy for you. And the prompt, displaying the nice volume names. VMS was the main reason we needed wide screens.
It updated while I slept and I was reading the article in Chrome 7.
What?!
Yes, Chrome does that.
No offence buddy, but you wrote "it" updated while you were sleeping AND reading the article. Sleeping and thinking I can manage. But I bow to you for reading with your eyes closed.
Seattle moderator: Right, we wanna shov... sell our Office sofware [sic.] to the wider public and we need a name. You John?
John: Well, how's about we name it Office %VERSION%++
SM: Very good indeed, John... You Mark?
Mark: It's for the people... which are alive... eh lets name it "Live........ (Several hours pass) SM: (Yelling) Oh for god's sake, we can't name everything 360, can we! Some nobody: (Very meek voice) 365 maybe? For the year, you know? OK, I'll get my coat. (Several more hours pass) SM: (Desperate) OK, 365 it is. Another nobody: (Very softly) And what about leap years?.
Speaking as the devil's advocate, I must remark that:
"Planning" for Linux is a good point in negotiating fees with MS.
Inept management caused by inexperience will increase system management effort. (There are so many blithering idiots out there thinking UNIX-like systems can be managed just as sloppy as Windows systems. Letting run anything under root. Chmodding 777 anything they find. Barbarians!)
OTOH: A good UNIX-like admin-policy allows you to administer large or even huge amount of systems at a fraction of the cost compared to Windows.
Not quite. For a relatively old fart like me, it's fun to once in a while really get dirty hands, I also keep up-to-date hands-on with currently available hardware and -last but not least- I get a bit of distraction which makes me look at problems at hand from a different perspective.
Also, the soft argument of "fun" is somehow important to me. Take that away and I'm just hacking code for bread. Consider the luxury of doing stuff you want or you always wanted to do. There's the saying that when you die you regret the things you didn't do. Wouldn't want that to happen to me. (So I also like building my sports car, for instance.)
For me keeping hands-on experience somehow works. For others, maybe for most others, it may not.
It sounds like you could compete with Dell and that you should start a company. Maybe then you realise that 1kUS$ isn't that much for a system.
Don't make the mistake of not calculating the effort it costs you to assemble the systems yourself. Say you cost a modest 100US$ per hour to your employer and redo the maths.
You seem to know about hardware. Now consider how you will train co-workers to attain your level of expertise. Will you now be teaching as well? Think of what will happen when you'll leave the company. Don't worry, you eventually will move on to other challenges.
I myself build the systems for my own small business. It's costs me significant amounts of effort which I could put towards paying customers. I only do it because I like it and because I take the liberty to do so. But really, I probably shouldn't.
I have come to an age and I will tell you something... What? Already bored?
OK, a one liner then. I hate wasting my time on quick, shallow communication.
Why would I contemplate chit chat? I'm a geek and I like knowing exactly how people and stuff work. I won't invest time in witnessing symptoms or occasional exclamations.
I'm surprised 29% of the messages are actually read. Must be the indexing bots. And even those contraptions don't really care.
That's a Bargain. I live in a rural area where 1 acre (4046.86 m^2) of building land would set you back roughly 2 to 2.5 times the price of 1.7M$. Land prices increase exponentially towards the city centre. If you have the money you can buy one m^2 (10.7 Ft^2) for 120kUD$.
This is wrong on so many levels. Apparently the city of South Fulton delivers fire fighting service to Obion County and demands their inhabitants to pay a fee for that. That's very fair.
Gene Cranick apparently forgot to pay for the service this year and he deserves a jolly good bollocking for that. But he offered to pay a surplus to South Fulton in order to have them over anyway but South Fulton replied that was too late and refused to take any action. Until, that is, a neighbour -who did pay the fee- called and the fire fighters had to eventually scramble to Obion County to protect the neighbours house but still refusing to do anything for Gene Cranick.
The thing that strikes me most is the blatant neglect by South Fulton of a potentially dangerous situation. When there's a fire you have to move in order to minimise damage but more importantly to prevent calamities. This fire could have spread wild, endangering people, life stock and maybe even a whole village. South Fulton preferred to scratch their testicles and to eventually move very reluctantly.
South Fulton also missed an opportunity to cash in on Gene Cranick by charging him handsomely for the service. I believe he would have gladly paid a very good price for the service. To my knowledge, letting a cash opportunity slip in the US is a mortal sin, even worse than driving a Lada.
South Fulton showed themselves as an aparatski from the long gone communist era doing everything by the book.
South Fulton should have simply helped Gene Cranick. Afterwards I'm sure they'd settle the bill amicably.
And then there's the simple human thing.
South Fulton, incapable of assessing dangerous situations, inept at making money for the tax payer, horribly formal and without any trace of humanity in them. What a bunch of bastards.
Cheerfully ignore comments stating that scripts for changing configuration files can screw up production. Hobbyists stating such manure apparently don't know you should run unit and integration tests before deploying any change whatsoever in a production environment. Nowadays any half professional organisation can afford multiple test environments to minimise production failures caused by untested software.
I'm curious. How exactly do you run a 'unit and integration test' on a Cisco router or an Active Directory server?
Are there such things as test harness frameworks for LDAP, DNS, DHCP, TFTP, SSH, WiFi, Cisco IOS, PXE boot, MSI, SCCM, SQL Server, Windows Registry, user profile, Group Policy, VMWare ESX vSphere, and the enterprise tape backup system of your choice? How precisely do you replicate the server-to-screen configuration and physical cable patch information for a 2,000 PC and 200 server campus into a representative 'test environment'? Can it be done in a single product with text serialisation to a unified version control database for all those changes?
Cause if there exists such a product I want to know about it!
The products you use for testing are irrelevant. The most important thing is recognising that you need unit and integration testing. Practically, you then initially perform tests with the means at hand and then you consider expanding the means.
In my experience you divide data -parameters which drive changes- and logic -programs that execute changes.
Most effort goes into testing logic, trying to run through every single branch of the programs and forcing all possible exceptions to occur.
A little less effort usually goes into testing the data for integrity. Data is usually either generated by logic and therefore correct, it has a very simple syntax and/or relationships between objects are very simple. If this is not the case then you probably need a subsystem to derive the data you use.
You seem to work in the networking department. Running a unit test for a Cisco router requires that you set up a network in your lab resembling your productive network -I know, it's not quite as straight forward as I make it sound, especially if you need a specific context like routing tables- and that you run your tests. With this you should be pretty sure anything further down the line should run smoothly. Integration tests on (networking)-infrastructure are usually much harder because, by definition, you simply don't have an environment resembling the production infrastructure -e.g. imagine testing BGP changes- and which you are allowed to potentially screw up, so you wind up in a Catch 22 situation. Usually, and for most cases, you can negotiate a service window with the responsible manager, where you will be allowed to run your tests.
What I described for your Cisco router applies for most other systems/environments you mention. The Cisco router is probably the most tricky to test cleanly.
However, getting managers to understand, appreciate and invest in decent testing environments is hard. Usually the requirements for testing are there, testing frameworks will be deployed and bean counters will be appointed to check the boxes. You may even get budget for a testing infrastructure, although here it already starts to get tough. A manager that understands that most of your work consists in exception handling and the testing thereof, is very rare to say the least.
Decent testing costs loads of dedication, effort and money. It doesn't completely prevent disasters but minimise the probability and makes the developer, supporter and organisation more aware of the environment they operate in and the risks involved. The level of testing is one parameter in measuring professionalism. That's the reason why I referred to hobbyists in my previous post.
In an ideal world, configuration files adhere to a specific syntax.
in this world that would mean standardising on xml or some other markup-language for everything, i wouln't like that!
Nah, hate XML for configuration files too. The syntax can be specific to the configuration file type. For instance,/etc/passwd has its own syntax (which is pretty much straight forward) and the bind configuration files in have a different one (slightly more complex.)
The bitch about XML is that you have to adhere to XML syntax and to a schema. Good for automated processes, not too good for humans to read or edit.
Slashdot Mirror
If you tell your employer "being subjected to groping or being seen naked makes me uncomfortable", then they are knowingly sending you into a hostile work environment, plain and simple.
Sure, and as it seems, your employer has devious plans spelled out for you. Words of a youngster that found a glitch in "the system" and is making a point ad absurdum, truly believing in a certain conspiracy.
It may not be "their fault" that the TSA is making that portion of your work-day hostile, but they are still knowingly sending you off into the hostile environment, and there are alternatives an employer can undertake NOT to do so.
OK, say you have a business in CA and you need occasional presence in ME. Try getting there without a plane. Amtrak? Greyhound? Forget both. Maybe driving over 2 days non stop? Sure. And when you get back you will put more shit on your employer for being deprived from sleeping.
You sound like one of the many pathetic women on Oprah, discussing some non-problem and expecting the panel and the audience to nod in sympathy. The difference is that a woman's problem is solved by care and sympathy but the travelling salesman problem needs actual action.
Who the hell modded you up in the first place?
Poul-Henning Kamp seems to know his languages. Good for him.
But I take he's never worked in a financial institution where application programmers have to produce working code. Cursed are the idiots that write programs using glyphs outside the intersection of ASCII and EBCDIC sets. IMHO it is a sin to even put "fancy" characters even in comment.
Ever tried outsourcing code support to Hyderabad? How do you fancy your chances of being efficient or effective without limiting yourself to English in ASCII? Would you be pleased to see method and variable names in Urdu?
The god given language for programming is English, encoded in ASCII or in EBCDIC. Programming languages needn't support any other spoken language. To further emphasise this point, I speak as a non-native English speaker, not living in an English speaking country.
your employer, as part of your work function is forcing you to subject yourself to either
Oh come off it! It would be so if it were a specific order from the employer. But it never is and chances are the employer would prefer you to travel at ease and would certainly never spend money to make his employees feel like shit. The employer is merely asking to travel -just as he might ask to do other things normal people do- and he cannot be held liable for out of proportion security measures.
Seriously, what were you thinking when you punched in this line?
Imagine the power lines used to hooking up the car when charging.
Either a huge current -needing extremely thick cables- at low voltage or low current and high voltage -direct current at higher voltages is more dangerous that alternating current.
Then comes the requirement that the charging stations should be used by service station employees and other mortals.
I think I'd be more afraid of one of those power lines being damaged than of a petrol hose being accidentally cut.
Seriously? You seriously think they would use Wine for a real time system? Are you out of your mind?
You should read past the first line. Of course I don't.
If you know what you are doing writing portable C isn't all that hard.
It isn't that hard but not straight forward. Study widely distributed software written in C and you'll see. The Perl make process heavily scrutinises your system before compiling anything. Not particularly for the faint-hearted.
Have you ever developed for a financial institution? Decisions take ages, the result must be there pronto and you will never ever be allowed to support more platforms than used. Want to write a fancy configure.sh which intermediates programmers understand and newbies not? Use stuff that has been around since the mid-80s? Forget it.
My take is they engineered the system and that if they would have done a sane design it surely would have run even under Windows. Note that I say this against my personal preference and interests.
It wouldn't surprise me if the promoting force was the utterly unreliable system they had before and that hence budget was freed.
Hip hip hooray for Wine!
/. I'd hope to get a bit more context information.
I'm sure they took the complete system as it used to run on Windows and then simply ran it on Linux using Wine, thus allowing for great comparison.
Or maybe they completely redesigned the system, avoided known bottle necks and halved the response time.
I'm a UNIX developer since many, many moons but I find these stories lacking detail highly disturbing. Sure, nice Linux PR but on
Summary: Bourne scripting can be pretty effective.
You finally made it! Welcome to the 70ies.
(Try building a system with simpleton commands like you show and you will eventually find yourself alone at night at the coffee maker. Trying to keep awake while solving yet another scaling problem. "Friends" feeling very sorry for you in their sleep.)
...a VERY large amount of data which for legal reasons had to be carefully reduced, archived, etc. There were various clusters of VMS...
It's the freekin' "standardised" options buddy for you. And the prompt, displaying the nice volume names. VMS was the main reason we needed wide screens.
It will let you view GIFs, JPEGs and PNGs on any page you visit.
Yeah, but how about text?
It updated while I slept and I was reading the article in Chrome 7.
What?!
Yes, Chrome does that.
No offence buddy, but you wrote "it" updated while you were sleeping AND reading the article. Sleeping and thinking I can manage. But I bow to you for reading with your eyes closed.
It updated while I slept and I was reading the article in Chrome 7.
What?!
Why do I instinctual click on this topic just to lay back and enjoy all the comments rated "Funny"?
Sorry Aussies but today it's your turn. Bring the ridicule on!!!
Office 24/7
Remember th' seventh of days upon even He rests, you heretic!
Imagine the board decision meeting.
... which are alive ... eh lets name it "Live ........
Seattle moderator: Right, we wanna shov... sell our Office sofware [sic.] to the wider public and we need a name. You John?
John: Well, how's about we name it Office %VERSION%++
SM: Very good indeed, John... You Mark?
Mark: It's for the people
(Several hours pass)
SM: (Yelling) Oh for god's sake, we can't name everything 360, can we!
Some nobody: (Very meek voice) 365 maybe? For the year, you know? OK, I'll get my coat.
(Several more hours pass)
SM: (Desperate) OK, 365 it is.
Another nobody: (Very softly) And what about leap years?.
Shock and horror! Where will I stick the dead bodies? And the horse's head? Damned progress!
OTOH: A good UNIX-like admin-policy allows you to administer large or even huge amount of systems at a fraction of the cost compared to Windows.
Forget if it's fun
Not quite. For a relatively old fart like me, it's fun to once in a while really get dirty hands, I also keep up-to-date hands-on with currently available hardware and -last but not least- I get a bit of distraction which makes me look at problems at hand from a different perspective.
Also, the soft argument of "fun" is somehow important to me. Take that away and I'm just hacking code for bread. Consider the luxury of doing stuff you want or you always wanted to do. There's the saying that when you die you regret the things you didn't do. Wouldn't want that to happen to me. (So I also like building my sports car, for instance.)
For me keeping hands-on experience somehow works. For others, maybe for most others, it may not.
It sounds like you could compete with Dell and that you should start a company. Maybe then you realise that 1kUS$ isn't that much for a system.
Don't make the mistake of not calculating the effort it costs you to assemble the systems yourself. Say you cost a modest 100US$ per hour to your employer and redo the maths.
You seem to know about hardware. Now consider how you will train co-workers to attain your level of expertise. Will you now be teaching as well? Think of what will happen when you'll leave the company. Don't worry, you eventually will move on to other challenges.
I myself build the systems for my own small business. It's costs me significant amounts of effort which I could put towards paying customers. I only do it because I like it and because I take the liberty to do so. But really, I probably shouldn't.
I can't see 3D you insensitive clot!
Really, I own 2 eyes but I effectively use only 1. I don't see in 3D and I don't know what the fuss is all about.
I'd like a real 3D experience though, using stuff like Johnny Chung Lee achieved using a Wiimote.
I have come to an age and I will tell you something... What? Already bored?
OK, a one liner then. I hate wasting my time on quick, shallow communication.
Why would I contemplate chit chat? I'm a geek and I like knowing exactly how people and stuff work. I won't invest time in witnessing symptoms or occasional exclamations.
I'm surprised 29% of the messages are actually read. Must be the indexing bots. And even those contraptions don't really care.
That's a Bargain. I live in a rural area where 1 acre (4046.86 m^2) of building land would set you back roughly 2 to 2.5 times the price of 1.7M$. Land prices increase exponentially towards the city centre. If you have the money you can buy one m^2 (10.7 Ft^2) for 120kUD$.
This is wrong on so many levels. Apparently the city of South Fulton delivers fire fighting service to Obion County and demands their inhabitants to pay a fee for that. That's very fair.
Gene Cranick apparently forgot to pay for the service this year and he deserves a jolly good bollocking for that. But he offered to pay a surplus to South Fulton in order to have them over anyway but South Fulton replied that was too late and refused to take any action. Until, that is, a neighbour -who did pay the fee- called and the fire fighters had to eventually scramble to Obion County to protect the neighbours house but still refusing to do anything for Gene Cranick.
The thing that strikes me most is the blatant neglect by South Fulton of a potentially dangerous situation. When there's a fire you have to move in order to minimise damage but more importantly to prevent calamities. This fire could have spread wild, endangering people, life stock and maybe even a whole village. South Fulton preferred to scratch their testicles and to eventually move very reluctantly.
South Fulton also missed an opportunity to cash in on Gene Cranick by charging him handsomely for the service. I believe he would have gladly paid a very good price for the service. To my knowledge, letting a cash opportunity slip in the US is a mortal sin, even worse than driving a Lada.
South Fulton showed themselves as an aparatski from the long gone communist era doing everything by the book.
South Fulton should have simply helped Gene Cranick. Afterwards I'm sure they'd settle the bill amicably.
And then there's the simple human thing.
South Fulton, incapable of assessing dangerous situations, inept at making money for the tax payer, horribly formal and without any trace of humanity in them. What a bunch of bastards.
Like Liberace, Apple will cry all the way to the bank.
Cheerfully ignore comments stating that scripts for changing configuration files can screw up production. Hobbyists stating such manure apparently don't know you should run unit and integration tests before deploying any change whatsoever in a production environment. Nowadays any half professional organisation can afford multiple test environments to minimise production failures caused by untested software.
I'm curious. How exactly do you run a 'unit and integration test' on a Cisco router or an Active Directory server?
Are there such things as test harness frameworks for LDAP, DNS, DHCP, TFTP, SSH, WiFi, Cisco IOS, PXE boot, MSI, SCCM, SQL Server, Windows Registry, user profile, Group Policy, VMWare ESX vSphere, and the enterprise tape backup system of your choice? How precisely do you replicate the server-to-screen configuration and physical cable patch information for a 2,000 PC and 200 server campus into a representative 'test environment'? Can it be done in a single product with text serialisation to a unified version control database for all those changes?
Cause if there exists such a product I want to know about it!
The products you use for testing are irrelevant. The most important thing is recognising that you need unit and integration testing. Practically, you then initially perform tests with the means at hand and then you consider expanding the means.
In my experience you divide data -parameters which drive changes- and logic -programs that execute changes.
Most effort goes into testing logic, trying to run through every single branch of the programs and forcing all possible exceptions to occur.
A little less effort usually goes into testing the data for integrity. Data is usually either generated by logic and therefore correct, it has a very simple syntax and/or relationships between objects are very simple. If this is not the case then you probably need a subsystem to derive the data you use.
You seem to work in the networking department. Running a unit test for a Cisco router requires that you set up a network in your lab resembling your productive network -I know, it's not quite as straight forward as I make it sound, especially if you need a specific context like routing tables- and that you run your tests. With this you should be pretty sure anything further down the line should run smoothly. Integration tests on (networking)-infrastructure are usually much harder because, by definition, you simply don't have an environment resembling the production infrastructure -e.g. imagine testing BGP changes- and which you are allowed to potentially screw up, so you wind up in a Catch 22 situation. Usually, and for most cases, you can negotiate a service window with the responsible manager, where you will be allowed to run your tests.
What I described for your Cisco router applies for most other systems/environments you mention. The Cisco router is probably the most tricky to test cleanly.
However, getting managers to understand, appreciate and invest in decent testing environments is hard. Usually the requirements for testing are there, testing frameworks will be deployed and bean counters will be appointed to check the boxes. You may even get budget for a testing infrastructure, although here it already starts to get tough. A manager that understands that most of your work consists in exception handling and the testing thereof, is very rare to say the least.
Decent testing costs loads of dedication, effort and money. It doesn't completely prevent disasters but minimise the probability and makes the developer, supporter and organisation more aware of the environment they operate in and the risks involved. The level of testing is one parameter in measuring professionalism. That's the reason why I referred to hobbyists in my previous post.
in this world that would mean standardising on xml or some other markup-language for everything, i wouln't like that!
Nah, hate XML for configuration files too. The syntax can be specific to the configuration file type. For instance, /etc/passwd has its own syntax (which is pretty much straight forward) and the bind configuration files in have a different one (slightly more complex.)
The bitch about XML is that you have to adhere to XML syntax and to a schema. Good for automated processes, not too good for humans to read or edit.