If you are willing to work for a company that openly labels you a "Geek", I doubt you much care what happens to you.
My 12 year-old daughter is the worst Luser in the world. If Word doesn't shit her a purple pony on command, she swears there is a worldwide computer conspiracy against her. If her printer runs out of ink, she swears everyone hates her. Any attempts to help her are met with glaring disdain because I am dumb as a bag of hammers. Note: All fathers of 12 year-old girls are too stupid to live. I pity the poor bastard that is going to marry her.
She reminds me of a user I had that would demand I come to her cube because she had an emergency. The emergency was always a problem printing a banner for her church on the dot-matrix printer and it was always the same issue. Writing down the instructions didn't help. She wanted a "geek" to come stand next to her in case she needed help.
Poor Hillary and Bill are scrambling trying to keep this story from going wide open. Bill's administration was doing the same thing domestically. Too bad he didn't use it to CATCH TERRORISTS instead of using it to find out whose husband was out of town. Hillary's Presidential run looks to be an albatross around the neck of Bill's legacy.
It is ironic that the New York Times scooped Risen's story about the wiretaps which was the main selling point for his book. Now his book is in the tank. Maybe the NYT tapped his phone to get the story since he wouldn't release the book to them.
Meanwhile, someone bought a whole assload of trackless cell phones. Great. Thanks guys.
Have someone page you 15 minutes after the meeting starts. You can leave if it is boring. This even works if it is YOUR meeting.
Avoid inviting the Devil's Advocate to your meeting. You know. The one who says "I feel strongly about X but I also see how Not X would work as well." He's a time waster and a rambling felcher.
Agree to use Tabling. Table a long discussion until the end of the meeting. Leave before the end of the meeting.
Mention the meeting will be primarily "detailed and technical". That will shake off the posers who know that "very technical" meetings are rarely attended by people who matter.
Drop a nuke. If you have a lot of "campers" (people who attend meetings to have a project to put in their portfolio), mention the project could be late. They'll leave like the room is on fire. You can also run off the "bullwinkles" (managers with no reports) who are looking to justify their existence by assigning technical work to them.
VERY large corp in 1997. Manager comes in to my convertible office (cubicle), very pale and sweaty because a phone mail reporting system was out. --------------------- John's on vacation. Figure out what is wrong with this system. He usually works on it. Here's the documentation.
What? That's not documentation. That's a Dbase II manual.
Well, that's what it is written on.
On a Windows 3.1 box I bet.
Yeah. So. It works.
DBase II disappeared a decade ago.
We've never seen the need to upgrade. FIX IT. ----------------------
You all guessed it. Rebooted and Bob's your uncle. Man, that John was a piece of work. That poor manager was stressed out of his mind thinking the world would discover he was nursing a dead legacy app. John could die in that job. I would have given my left nut to see that manager poring over that Dbase II manual thinking it was documentation for the system. 'Wow, this is impressive work but I can't find anything on the phone mail system'.
I would build my own. Then you don't have to wait for parts. The idea that I have to depend on Dell to stock my parts and get them to me in a timely manner is playing with fire. But we are required to buy from big vendors so I always order duplicates. I have a 6 year old webserver and right next to it is another 6 year-old computer with the same config.
Yeah I have a production webserver running on a 6 year-old NT box. They are going to move it to central hosting "any day now". "Any day now" has been going on for 3 years. I just fix it when it breaks. Oddly, it never breaks.
No lie, one of the guys in the office has an XT. He swears it has important data on it that he wants to get off. I doubt I am going to find another 5.25 drive, much less an MFM drive.
That was the strangest, most convoluted attempt to justify censorship that I have even seen. Perhaps you should have stuck to the old "The government knows what is best for us" routine or even the old Joe Biden "You don't ride in a limo. They do. They get paid more than you because they know more than you" concept.
China doesn't want their people to hear dissent about the government because they might learn the truth about their government. Or at least confront the truth they already know.
When I came out of school in 1981, employers were all screaming about the need for programmers that could talk to the users. They didn't want dungeon coders who had the personality skills of a serial killer. They wanted people who could wear ties and talk about cash flow. They wanted coders who "understand the business". As one boss told me "I want people I can take to a meeting".
Hell, now they hire guys who can't speak understandable English. And they don't care. Shoot, lock them in the basement and make them code. Who cares if they "know the business"? Just work cheap.
If Batty Jack hasn't threatened to sue you, you ain't shit. He's Dudley-Do-Right, arriving just in time to save Nell from the evil clutches of Luther Campbell.
"We want some pus.." "I'll save the day!" "Curses!"
You take it very slowly and prove you can keep the systems up and running. Everything else follows that. You also make sure no one is getting any magazines related to computers. It makes them experts and they will waste your time with foolish requests for technology that is unproven. People outside of IT are always looking for ways to avoid using passwords. Speaking of which, people don't care about security. They just expect it to be secure. And they want it to be easy to use. If these conflict, err on the side of "easy to use" if you want to get ahead.
Make your services critical and the world will beat a path to your door. But it doesn't happen overnight.
Give me a FPS D&D and I might play it. "I'm going to cast a spell with this AK-47. 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage..OK he's dead"
1. Always ask for more than you need. More money, more capabilities, more features. You may not ever use them but it doesn't hurt to have them. Every graybeard alive has uttered the phrase "Why do we need a whole gig? A 500 meg drive is fine" and later regretted it.
2. Every call is a desire for a personal visit. Everyone who calls really wants you to come by and fix their problem. Some people like to show their coworkers that they have their own tech guy. Some like the feeling that they are important enough to get a personal visit while the other poor slobs have to settle for a phone stroke. Some simply can't find the esc key. They always want you to come by. My neighbors even call wanting a visit and they live up the mountain. Offer me Scotch if you want a personal tech visit.
3. Our computers at home have the covers off and we have a closet full of ISA boards. Admit it. You can tell us. We understand.
4. We get really pissed off when people call and say "I can't explain it. Just come by". It's ALWAYS something that can be figured out over the phone. Or they are trying to install illegal software. I can say "No" over the phone just as easily.
5. We have all given out passwords. "Come up with a password". "I can't" "Just type something in and write it down" "OK FINE...777777" "No you can't use that" "I don't know what to use" "OK, GaxtaL1967" "That doesn't make sense" "Exactly". And we've all dealt with people who forget the password between typing it in and the confirmation.
6. An illiterate computer neophyte can defeat any system we design to stop him from damaging stuff. He will zap his hard drive despite having NO rights and will have defeated the backup system months prior. He will yank down his password-protected firewall in order to download stupid videos and, as a result, try to infect the whole network. He will send a Word document to the entire company with a virus embedded in it because he somehow murdered his anti-virus software. And he will be an expert in computers who never fails to offer his advice to you.
When the web was young, universities were the incubators for some of the worst trash on the internet. Almost every racist site was kept at a university as "research". The worst of the anti-Clinton conspiracy rants were held at universities. Universities kept a hands-off approach and hid behind the mantle of free speech. Every crackpot was clamoring for a university account so they could put their insanity on display for the world to see.
Today, universities are the bastion of the worst forms of Political Correctness and repression. You'll find the occaisonal Ward Churchhill holding on for dear life but they are a rarity. If it could cost the university in contributions, it's gone. If it could lead to criticism of "illustrious" faculty, it is gone. Everything is sanitized. Every email is checked for possible "offensive" speech. If you even mention Christmas, you are on report. Literally. If there is even the possibility for some nameless, faceless entity to be offended, it's right out.
I worked for an S&L data bank and we bought some ATM software from a company from India. The mainframe part was all in COBOL. We insisted and paid extra for the source code. We got the source and found all the variable names were esoteric (WA1, WA2, XB4, etc). When we complained, they offered to sell us the book that contained all the definitions of the variable names.
They gave us a free Star Trek game with the book so it wasn't a total loss.
I thought it was long gone. I have a copy somewhere that reviews the top CGA monitors and cards. An ad for a 10mhz PC-XT clone with a 20 meg drive for only $1200. Should I bust out 2 large for an AT 8mhz clone with a 40 meg drive and CGA? And that was less than 20 years ago. That mag has been around the block.
For those keeping track, an 8 mhz AT booted faster than my kids' 2400mhz machine. Of course, all you saw was
C:\>
If MS makes Office more "flexible", I will scream. People around here are already confused because they have too many choices.
I do a lot of Access development and it's a waste. I'm a programmer. Access is supposed to be an end-user tool. The end-users can't figure out Access for snot. So I have to do all the devlopment of reports, forms, modules and queries. I SHOULD be using a better tool and database than Access but we are sold on Access because it is a good end-user tool.
Freaking circular logic. We would be better off creating a real database in MySQL or Postgres or Oracle and using an ODBC link into Excel since the users understand Excel...somewhat.
Access is a PIG. It pisses me off.
And I'm not using Ubuntu because it just don't sound American.
One virus outbreak completely flushes the study. I had a virus get into a Windows 2000 server and it worked me to death. That doesn't count what happens if the virus propogates through the network from my server. Explain that to your boss, especially is a VP was the one who infected the system because the boss insisted he have manly rights "just in case".
I learned how to win at Monopoly by playing it on a Univac mainframe. And it was all text. None of that hippie art crap for us. OG, baby. Original Gamer. Open the mailbox, G. Load your cassette of Avalon Hill's B1 Nuclear Bomber and take out the Soviet Union. Star Trek on the Univac...fire the photon torps and find a supply station before you get Klingoned.
Old school computer games sucked. I loved playing Panzerblitz and Third Reich on boards though. But I'll take Call of Duty over the whole pile.
As a developer, I would like to take this time to shout out to all the SysAdmins out there with a hearty
SHOVE OFF
You're nothing but a bunch of overpaid secretaries who sit around playing games and complaining about phone calls demanding you do your jobs. You only work late because you don't want to go home to your nagging fat wives who don't give a tinker's damn about your boring little jobs.
Now applications developers, those are the real men. Leading lives of adventure that sys admins can only dream about.
Nah. Just throw a whole assload of money at it. You can fix anything by heaving money in its direction. You throw money until forms a vacuum. Then it will suck money and you no longer need to tote the money yourself. It will just suck it out of your pocket.
Maybe when it is safe for gays to go to Cuba, the US can broker a deal. But as long as there is no law protecting the rights of people there, it's a lost cause.
He did not say he invented the Internet. He said he created it. BIG difference.
But he did say:
"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
Design docs are like flowcharts. You write them AFTER the system in implemented. That way, you don't have to explain why the system doesn't fit the documents.
The fight isn't over land. The fight is over control of SE Asia. India's military buildup makes China squirrely. This is especially true with India's lead in naval forces. India can project further out that China. In the absence of a war, that is a key asset in diplomacy.
China and India may pretend to get along as newlyweds but China's support of Pakistan's military is the porn stash in the closet.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, pluck my nuts and call me Lucy. Does that mean I can be in the Castrada Clan?
If you are willing to work for a company that openly labels you a "Geek", I doubt you much care what happens to you.
My 12 year-old daughter is the worst Luser in the world. If Word doesn't shit her a purple pony on command, she swears there is a worldwide computer conspiracy against her. If her printer runs out of ink, she swears everyone hates her. Any attempts to help her are met with glaring disdain because I am dumb as a bag of hammers. Note: All fathers of 12 year-old girls are too stupid to live. I pity the poor bastard that is going to marry her.
She reminds me of a user I had that would demand I come to her cube because she had an emergency. The emergency was always a problem printing a banner for her church on the dot-matrix printer and it was always the same issue. Writing down the instructions didn't help. She wanted a "geek" to come stand next to her in case she needed help.
Poor Hillary and Bill are scrambling trying to keep this story from going wide open. Bill's administration was doing the same thing domestically. Too bad he didn't use it to CATCH TERRORISTS instead of using it to find out whose husband was out of town. Hillary's Presidential run looks to be an albatross around the neck of Bill's legacy.
It is ironic that the New York Times scooped Risen's story about the wiretaps which was the main selling point for his book. Now his book is in the tank. Maybe the NYT tapped his phone to get the story since he wouldn't release the book to them.
Meanwhile, someone bought a whole assload of trackless cell phones. Great. Thanks guys.
Have someone page you 15 minutes after the meeting starts. You can leave if it is boring. This even works if it is YOUR meeting.
Avoid inviting the Devil's Advocate to your meeting. You know. The one who says "I feel strongly about X but I also see how Not X would work as well." He's a time waster and a rambling felcher.
Agree to use Tabling. Table a long discussion until the end of the meeting. Leave before the end of the meeting.
Mention the meeting will be primarily "detailed and technical". That will shake off the posers who know that "very technical" meetings are rarely attended by people who matter.
Drop a nuke. If you have a lot of "campers" (people who attend meetings to have a project to put in their portfolio), mention the project could be late. They'll leave like the room is on fire. You can also run off the "bullwinkles" (managers with no reports) who are looking to justify their existence by assigning technical work to them.
VERY large corp in 1997. Manager comes in to my convertible office (cubicle), very pale and sweaty because a phone mail reporting system was out.
---------------------
John's on vacation. Figure out what is wrong with this system. He usually works on it. Here's the documentation.
What? That's not documentation. That's a Dbase II manual.
Well, that's what it is written on.
On a Windows 3.1 box I bet.
Yeah. So. It works.
DBase II disappeared a decade ago.
We've never seen the need to upgrade. FIX IT.
----------------------
You all guessed it. Rebooted and Bob's your uncle. Man, that John was a piece of work. That poor manager was stressed out of his mind thinking the world would discover he was nursing a dead legacy app. John could die in that job. I would have given my left nut to see that manager poring over that Dbase II manual thinking it was documentation for the system. 'Wow, this is impressive work but I can't find anything on the phone mail system'.
I would build my own. Then you don't have to wait for parts. The idea that I have to depend on Dell to stock my parts and get them to me in a timely manner is playing with fire. But we are required to buy from big vendors so I always order duplicates. I have a 6 year old webserver and right next to it is another 6 year-old computer with the same config.
Yeah I have a production webserver running on a 6 year-old NT box. They are going to move it to central hosting "any day now". "Any day now" has been going on for 3 years. I just fix it when it breaks. Oddly, it never breaks.
No lie, one of the guys in the office has an XT. He swears it has important data on it that he wants to get off. I doubt I am going to find another 5.25 drive, much less an MFM drive.
That was the strangest, most convoluted attempt to justify censorship that I have even seen. Perhaps you should have stuck to the old "The government knows what is best for us" routine or even the old Joe Biden "You don't ride in a limo. They do. They get paid more than you because they know more than you" concept.
China doesn't want their people to hear dissent about the government because they might learn the truth about their government. Or at least confront the truth they already know.
When I came out of school in 1981, employers were all screaming about the need for programmers that could talk to the users. They didn't want dungeon coders who had the personality skills of a serial killer. They wanted people who could wear ties and talk about cash flow. They wanted coders who "understand the business". As one boss told me "I want people I can take to a meeting".
Hell, now they hire guys who can't speak understandable English. And they don't care. Shoot, lock them in the basement and make them code. Who cares if they "know the business"? Just work cheap.
If Batty Jack hasn't threatened to sue you, you ain't shit. He's Dudley-Do-Right, arriving just in time to save Nell from the evil clutches of Luther Campbell.
"We want some pus.."
"I'll save the day!"
"Curses!"
CHANGE?????!!
You take it very slowly and prove you can keep the systems up and running. Everything else follows that. You also make sure no one is getting any magazines related to computers. It makes them experts and they will waste your time with foolish requests for technology that is unproven. People outside of IT are always looking for ways to avoid using passwords. Speaking of which, people don't care about security. They just expect it to be secure. And they want it to be easy to use. If these conflict, err on the side of "easy to use" if you want to get ahead.
Make your services critical and the world will beat a path to your door. But it doesn't happen overnight.
Roll the dice and see if I'm drunk
Give me a FPS D&D and I might play it. "I'm going to cast a spell with this AK-47. 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage
10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage 10ptdamage..OK he's dead"
1. Always ask for more than you need. More money, more capabilities, more features. You may not ever use them but it doesn't hurt to have them. Every graybeard alive has uttered the phrase "Why do we need a whole gig? A 500 meg drive is fine" and later regretted it.
2. Every call is a desire for a personal visit. Everyone who calls really wants you to come by and fix their problem. Some people like to show their coworkers that they have their own tech guy. Some like the feeling that they are important enough to get a personal visit while the other poor slobs have to settle for a phone stroke. Some simply can't find the esc key. They always want you to come by. My neighbors even call wanting a visit and they live up the mountain. Offer me Scotch if you want a personal tech visit.
3. Our computers at home have the covers off and we have a closet full of ISA boards. Admit it. You can tell us. We understand.
4. We get really pissed off when people call and say "I can't explain it. Just come by". It's ALWAYS something that can be figured out over the phone. Or they are trying to install illegal software. I can say "No" over the phone just as easily.
5. We have all given out passwords. "Come up with a password". "I can't" "Just type something in and write it down" "OK FINE...777777" "No you can't use that" "I don't know what to use" "OK, GaxtaL1967" "That doesn't make sense" "Exactly". And we've all dealt with people who forget the password between typing it in and the confirmation.
6. An illiterate computer neophyte can defeat any system we design to stop him from damaging stuff. He will zap his hard drive despite having NO rights and will have defeated the backup system months prior. He will yank down his password-protected firewall in order to download stupid videos and, as a result, try to infect the whole network. He will send a Word document to the entire company with a virus embedded in it because he somehow murdered his anti-virus software. And he will be an expert in computers who never fails to offer his advice to you.
When the web was young, universities were the incubators for some of the worst trash on the internet. Almost every racist site was kept at a university as "research". The worst of the anti-Clinton conspiracy rants were held at universities. Universities kept a hands-off approach and hid behind the mantle of free speech. Every crackpot was clamoring for a university account so they could put their insanity on display for the world to see.
Today, universities are the bastion of the worst forms of Political Correctness and repression. You'll find the occaisonal Ward Churchhill holding on for dear life but they are a rarity. If it could cost the university in contributions, it's gone. If it could lead to criticism of "illustrious" faculty, it is gone. Everything is sanitized. Every email is checked for possible "offensive" speech. If you even mention Christmas, you are on report. Literally. If there is even the possibility for some nameless, faceless entity to be offended, it's right out.
I bet you can't tell where I work.
I worked for an S&L data bank and we bought some ATM software from a company from India. The mainframe part was all in COBOL. We insisted and paid extra for the source code. We got the source and found all the variable names were esoteric (WA1, WA2, XB4, etc). When we complained, they offered to sell us the book that contained all the definitions of the variable names.
They gave us a free Star Trek game with the book so it wasn't a total loss.
I thought it was long gone. I have a copy somewhere that reviews the top CGA monitors and cards. An ad for a 10mhz PC-XT clone with a 20 meg drive for only $1200. Should I bust out 2 large for an AT 8mhz clone with a 40 meg drive and CGA? And that was less than 20 years ago. That mag has been around the block.
For those keeping track, an 8 mhz AT booted faster than my kids' 2400mhz machine. Of course, all you saw was
C:\>
If MS makes Office more "flexible", I will scream. People around here are already confused because they have too many choices.
I do a lot of Access development and it's a waste. I'm a programmer. Access is supposed to be an end-user tool. The end-users can't figure out Access for snot. So I have to do all the devlopment of reports, forms, modules and queries. I SHOULD be using a better tool and database than Access but we are sold on Access because it is a good end-user tool.
Freaking circular logic. We would be better off creating a real database in MySQL or Postgres or Oracle and using an ODBC link into Excel since the users understand Excel...somewhat.
Access is a PIG. It pisses me off.
And I'm not using Ubuntu because it just don't sound American.
One virus outbreak completely flushes the study. I had a virus get into a Windows 2000 server and it worked me to death. That doesn't count what happens if the virus propogates through the network from my server. Explain that to your boss, especially is a VP was the one who infected the system because the boss insisted he have manly rights "just in case".
I learned how to win at Monopoly by playing it on a Univac mainframe. And it was all text. None of that hippie art crap for us. OG, baby. Original Gamer. Open the mailbox, G. Load your cassette of Avalon Hill's B1 Nuclear Bomber and take out the Soviet Union. Star Trek on the Univac...fire the photon torps and find a supply station before you get Klingoned.
Old school computer games sucked. I loved playing Panzerblitz and Third Reich on boards though. But I'll take Call of Duty over the whole pile.
Nah. Just turn it off when you aren't using it. That will eliminate the 11-6 raids which seem to be the majority these days.
As a developer, I would like to take this time to shout out to all the SysAdmins out there with a hearty
SHOVE OFF
You're nothing but a bunch of overpaid secretaries who sit around playing games and complaining about phone calls demanding you do your jobs. You only work late because you don't want to go home to your nagging fat wives who don't give a tinker's damn about your boring little jobs.
Now applications developers, those are the real men. Leading lives of adventure that sys admins can only dream about.
Nah. Just throw a whole assload of money at it. You can fix anything by heaving money in its direction. You throw money until forms a vacuum. Then it will suck money and you no longer need to tote the money yourself. It will just suck it out of your pocket.
Maybe when it is safe for gays to go to Cuba, the US can broker a deal. But as long as there is no law protecting the rights of people there, it's a lost cause.
He did not say he invented the Internet. He said he created it. BIG difference.
But he did say:
"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
Design docs are like flowcharts. You write them AFTER the system in implemented. That way, you don't have to explain why the system doesn't fit the documents.
The fight isn't over land. The fight is over control of SE Asia. India's military buildup makes China squirrely. This is especially true with India's lead in naval forces. India can project further out that China. In the absence of a war, that is a key asset in diplomacy.
China and India may pretend to get along as newlyweds but China's support of Pakistan's military is the porn stash in the closet.