My first home-built PC was a CP/M (precursor to DOS, still the basis for Windows), Z80 machine with 64K of ram and 2 241K 8 inch floppies. A local University (which I was attending) had a bunch of these and I glomed onto a PC board (no mask on it) with hand drawn traces and no chips, resistors or capacitors. I soldered all of them on then spent 2 months debugging things like traces that were too close and had capacitance between them. I bought the chips, resistors and capacitors, a raw transformer, a fan (all from places like Jameco), had a custom aluminum case made at a local machine shop, added an H-19 (vt52 clone) terminal and I had the only personal computer off-campus owned by any of the CS students. It only cost me about $1700 too (a commercial version of the same box cost $4400 without the terminal).
I did my homework using Microsoft FORTRAN (back when they were just a compiler company) and really hit gold when Borland released Turbo-Pascal v1 for $29 (advertised in Microcomputer magazine).
I have much better PC's now, but still miss the heavy horsepower sound of those Siemens 8 inch floppies moving the heads when doing disk I/O.
The idea that Macs could be running Windows is obvious. Once the switch to Intel happened, it's just a matter of writing a few drivers for their hardware. But the idea that Apple will ditch OS X is ludicrous. They make a lot of money from the Mac OS and related tools. It is much more likely that they will offer either or both operating systems. This will retain their current marketshare in the OS X world and increase hardware sales with Windows.
Having worked for a Government contractor that uses Linux in some of its USAF systems that are deployed today, the point is mute. They don't actually modify the Linux OS or the GNU tools, they write applications and drivers on the Linux platform which control the hardware to perform the mission.
There is rarely any modification of GPL'd code and that is classified. So it is never released to anyone.
You need to have a heart to heart with your boss. Find out what the company IS willing to do. If they expect you to train on you own time, then decide if you want to jump ship over it. If you don't want to jump ship, then explain that you'll be doing your training "on-the-job" and that it will make some tasks take longer because you'll have to research them while you work on them.
Worst case, post your resume on Dice/Monster/... and quietly look elsewhere. And don't take another position without talking to employees of that company who work in your area (admin). They'll tell you what it's like to work there so you don't get a nasty surprise.
Some people are afraid to express concerns to their managers because it may hurt their image. But, if you allow this kind of problem to fester, it will surely lead to worse problems. Good managers will try their best to address the problem and appreciate your trust in talking to them. Bad ones will not and that is another reason to have the talk. You need to find out if it is worth staying in your current position. An honest discussion will tell you all you need to know.
Most admins I've dealt with are over-worked, so quality of life issues make your choice of careers problematic. The places where I've seen admins who keep sane hours are: very large aerospace firms (tied very closely to the government) and the federal government. Anywhere else, they're usually over-worked.
I read ebooks all the time and unless this thing allows me to read any ebook like my PDA, it's not worth spit. The $300-$400 price tag is also extremely high for a single purpose device like this anyway.
BTW, Baen also sells non-DRM ebooks and also has a great library of FREE ebooks that come in multiple formats.
My first job out of school was maintaining a program called CODAN written in FORTRAN 4. It was layered on a custom shell written by a guy who'd wanted to add some capabilities to the manufacturer's shell (Cyber 170 mainframe running NOS). Somewhere along the line the source code had been lost and they only had the binary. So every year when Cyber upgraded NOS, the shell would break and this guy would come out of retirement (He'd retired early because he had this nice cash spigot to supplement his income) and for $250/hr he'd debug and fix the problem. The Cyber 170 was a 60 bit machine and his debug method was to do an OCTAL dump of the crash and pick through it (a 12 inch stack of 132 column fan-fold, impact printer output) until he found the problem(s), then use a binary editor to patch the binary.
I asked once why we didn't just re-write the program (CODAN was itself an horrendous piece of cut-and-paste architecture) and was told that we had a budget for maintenance, not new development. Since this was a defense contractor to the DOD, we couldn't move money from one to the other.
So this guy had an annual gig that brought in about 40K a year until he died. The satelite booster that this program supported is still being used with the same Z80 based flight computers, so the program COULD still be in use, IF he's alive. Go figure.
Holding politicians responsible already occurs through the ballot box. The sad fact is that our current political atmosphere isn't condusive to personal responsibility, wise money management or personal integrity, which ever side of the aisle they belong. So long as voters continue to send people to Washington who bring home the bacon and have backbones of jello on any politically sensitive issue, we will have no change.
No one is forced to work anywhere they don't want to. If your manager is a dick-head, work somewhere else. It is a self correcting system anyway. Someone who applies too much pressure will have a high turn over rate which will, over time, cost a business too much money for the short term gains of over working your staff in a sadistic manner.
There is no such thing as a no-pressure environment. I've worked for the DoD and as a private software consultant and if there is no pressure at work, you're fooling yourself. What we are really talking about is a "reasonable" amount of pressure. That is a highly subjective term that is unique to each of us. It is our personal responsibility to work where we fit, not make the world fit us.
Thoreau had his head up his rear. Any one who has actually been in the military knows that serving "as machines" is hogwash. Such people are quickly eliminated from the gene pool.
There is NO FREE ANYTHING folks. Yes those canucks don't have a monthly bill for internet access. BUT (and it's a big one;), they also pay exhorbitant taxes. Having worked for the government for 12 years, I can guarantee that the cost per person in tax dollars (even Canadian) is higher than it would be if a private company were doing it.
Whether it's a good thing for US government to do is certainly open for debate. But never think that something you get from/through government is FREE.
In '82 when the PC came out, I was programming on CP/M and everyone wondered why we needed PC-DOS (and 640K). We had all of the programs we needed (running in 64K). The same holds true today. Most distros install pretty easily and support most hardware. BUT, the applications people use aren't there. You can bitch about what people should do, or what would make money or how much better Linux is in many areas. But until the most common Windows applications run on Linux (or have viable replacements)AND there is a good reason for business to go through the trauma of switching OS's, it won't happen.
And doesn't anyone on this site know the difference between there and their?
You're still missing the point here. Governments by nature regulate anything that they control. Money is control. So even if they switched to OSS and spent the license money there to promote it, they would REQUIRE/CONTROL how it was done, what it did, and anything else they (the government officials) deemed in their interest to control. Since it isn't a black box and they would be getting source code along with the executables.
I worked for DOD for 12 years and that is how it works. Even though the computer folks in government generally understand OSS, the administrators and politicians don't. If you think you're up against MS FUD now, think of MS losing license dollars on the scale the government spends and what the hordes of MS lobbyists would be doing to prevent or recover that loss.
Who cares what was said by whom. The core issue is whether the RealNames idea had merit and whether the cost was justified. The MARKET determined that merit by letting them go out of business from lack of interest. Frankly, I don't see anything bad about the idea. Who cares if someone wants to cater to technophobes (who don't like using PCs anyway, but may have to) by allowing them to type in the more human readable "RealNames: Linus's Socialist Operating System" instead of the more technically precise "http://www.linux.org"? FREEDOM is all about the ability to do things without interferance from those who fear and want to control ideas. If no one likes the idea or it has no real value, it will die. The fees RealNames wanted to charge were almost certainly the reason they failed. Just as Apple failed to compete on price in the late '80s with their PC that was arguably superior to Windows based PCs and lost almost all of the market, RealNames tried to charge an absurd amount for their idea and their company died. This is simple market economics, not cosmic justice for doing a BAD THING.
That Microsoft recognized the stupidity of their marketing plan should be no surprise. Microsoft's biggest talent is marketing.
This is about as idiotic a reply as any I've ever read here. This is akin to saying that a thief isn't responsible for stealing because your house isn't protected well enough, and gee, he really needed that 20th TV.
The fact that security holes exist in software is NOT the problem, unethical, destructive criminal behavior IS the problem. Virus writersare responsible for their choice to inflict the results of their actions on millions of potential victims, causing millions of dollars in lost work time to companies (owned and staffed by people, this raises the price of the goods and services YOU pay for) and governments (paid for by YOUR taxes, raising the cost of our already very expensive government).
Virus writers ARE THIEVES on a much grander scale than the amateur who breaks into your house and takes your TV. It just isn't as personal a violation. The tendency to off-load the blame for bad (in this case criminal) behavior onto society (in this case the authors of non-secure software) is one of the most wrong headed notions of our time.
Actual plans for lunar development.
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This is all amusing, but I would suggest that if you want to know about actual plans for lunar development, visit http://www.asi.org/ or http://www.moonsociety.org/. Both sites are related and you can tour a mockup of a virtual lunar colony built in a lava tube.
> There is no evidence whatsoever that environmental regulations have anything to do with the power crisis in California. In fact, the state government had been pleading for years with power companies to build extra capacity, and they just weren't interested because they didn't want to drive down prices further.
This is a common misconception. The reason California power companies didn't build more capacity is because of costs. A purely business decision. It takes almost twice the time and money to build plants in CA as any other state, because of heavy regulation. The environmental community wanted cleaner, more efficient power and pushed through laws and the resulting regulations (enacted by the CA executive branch) to attain that goal. So the environmentalists **DID** help bring about the current situation by raising the cost of doing business in CA through regulations.
Until the recent "crisis" raised the value of energy, the return didn't justify any new investment investment in additional capacity.
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket.
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There are 2 possible explanations for this situation, both are management issues.
1. The manager is an idiot who can't communicate his needs and doesn't track his assignments well. Hence, when HIS idiot manager yells fire, he does the same to those below him. Use the list idea given in one of the posts.
2. The manager is a jerk and is doing this on purpose. Its called whipping the horses. You keep cracking the whip and yelling EE-HAW and they keep running until they keel over. Then you get new horses. Use the list idea given in one of the posts.
A word about using the list. Since the guy your dealing with is also the guy who largely decides what kind of raise you get, caution and forethought are required on your part. The best weapon you can use on someone who is abusing you for whatever reason is to be reasonable with them. He is transfering his stress to you. Don't let him. The list idea is great, but be reasonable. It'll force him to be reasonable too. Being reasonable may take some restraint on your part since he may still try to ratchet up the stress level. Let him keep the stress.
Lastly, what you really need to do here is project management. Since your manager isn't doing it, you do it. That's what the list of prioritized tasks is all about. This is great experience for when YOU are in a position to manage projects. You'll learn how to negotiate priorities, how to define tasks, how to estimate effort and how to talk to unreasonable people without getting mad or offended. You'll also be able to take your lists (now accomplished) at the end of the year and put together a "Why I should get a really BIG RAISE + MORE STOCK OPTIONS" letter to show why you're very valuable to the company. (Just put all of your lists in a file folder, instead of the round file.) Don't bail on the company before trying this stuff. Many companies are run very much like this, so you'll just end up dealing with the same problems elsewhere.
So give it a few months. Make your list and talk to your (idiot && || jerk)manager from the "Gee I'd really like to do what you want, but I'M confused and here's my list of current tasks, what do you REALLY want me to work on first" standpoint. Things will get better.
I understand that the main reason Tito is unacceptable to NASA is because he's affiliated with the WRONG political party, i.e. the one opposite to the current head of NASA. This is the latest from an Artemis Society mailing list. If you're interested in finding out more, goto http://www.moonsociety.org/.
About 10 years ago I worked with a guy who'd worked at Bell Labs who gave me an artical on a 3D optical storage device Bell Labs had created(the artical was photo-copied from some technical rag, I don't recall which, he had first hand knowledge of the project). It used plastic cubes about 1.5 inches square and lasers. According to the artical and my colleague, the unit worked but wasn't economically feasible. The unit was about the 14x9x5 inches and stored about 3 GB. That was quite a bit in `90. The cubes looked like they could easily evolve into the thick rectangular storage cards used by HAL in the 2001 movie.
The artical mentioned that AT&T (the commercial side of Bell Labs) was looking to commercialize the unit and had targeted an 18 month time frame. I suspect that it has never made it to the commercial arena because hard drives have become so large (storage wise) and cheap. Of course this is assuming that the technical issues could be resolved.
Temperature trends STILL have not deviated from long term climatological trends that anyone can look at at NOAA of any state climatological office. Of course this is not a politically correct or in vogue idea. And worse yet, this kind of environmental heresy WILL NOT get you any government money.
Mt Pinatubo pumped more pollution (of exactly the same kinds we produce, along with some we don't) in one natural event than the human race has generated in its entire history. It is pure arrogance on our part to think we are having that much of an impact on this planet.
All of the comments about engineering are generally well put, but the biggest problem is in the user and business community. Until engineering software is rewarded and hacking software (I mean just getting it running so it can go to market) is NOT rewarded, software will continue to suck. Rewarding good programming will only happen when the people who buy software stop accepting crappy software and rewarding businesses that market crap with money.
It doesn't take a rat long to realize that stepping onto an electrified plate is an unrewarding behavior. Even business and marketing types (they may have more brains than rats) will stop creating and selling crappy software if it doesn't make money. Competition in the hardware arena forces good engineering behavior by compensating those that produce good product. Who would buy a new CPU that crashes after 56 hrs or that requires you to pull it from the socket and re-insert it after any periferal chip changes? Even a relatively obscure bug in the floating point circuitry can cause a massive recall.
As long as users are willing to pay for crappy software, there will be no improvement in software quality.
I was dragged kicking and screaming into my first Ada project. I would have prefered almost anything else. Having programmed in C and then C++ for 12 years I argued vehemently for C++, and lost.
6 months into the project I suddenly found that the awkwardness of a strongly typed language had become an asset. I was writing code just as quickly as anything else I'd ever done, and it WORKED! I no longer had to deal with memory stomping problems or unexpected behavior because I accidentally used = instead of ==. The only problems I was dealing with were logic problems. So if the logic of my solution was correct and I correctly implemented that logic, I was done. On C and (especially) C++ projects, this phase is called integration 8-() and lasts forever. Java is much better but has its own drawbacks since it is still interpreted.
The bottom line is that we produced rock solid software in somewhat less time than we would have with C++ or its ilk. I've since been on several C++ projects and they have only strengthened my opinion. One project involved an embedded system written in C++ which could only run 26 minutes before it crashed. It was fielded since the typical runtime duration for this system was 20 minutes (only because they couldn't go longer without embarassment). A similar project written in Ada (not by me) has been working beautifully for 5+ years, but the Ada is bad crowd managed to get the new system written in a much better language with laughable results.
It is unfortunate that the free software culture shuns good software engineering practices and languages that support them. Free software is good because 1) most of it is NOT written in C++; 2) Some very talented people have made major contributions; 3) most importantly, it undergoes rigorous adhoc testing by the community at large (one of the first things to be scrapped in the commercial world is good testing, aka MS).
I don't have any solution for this, although I understand that Ada is being used to teach programming in universities more because it has been tied to government money. Maybe that will work.
I have to agree having used and installed RH(I've been using it since version 1(!) and had 6.1 on one of my desktop boxes), OpenLinux, Debian and Suse 6.3. SuSe clearly provides more features and a more complete package of software than any of the others (I admit I haven't tried all of them).
The one drawback to SuSe is their installation utilities, YAST 1 & 2. YAST 1 provides a somewhat flexible TTY based installation, but still prevents you from specifying exactly what you want to install. At least it allows you to specify more than one partition. YAST 2 is easy to use, but completely brain dead in its approach to partitioning (let alone package selection). I started to install using it, but after seeing what I would be forced to do, installed with YAST 1. RH 6.1 has a much better installation tool, too bad you can't mix and match. In fairness, I haven't seen Debian's last 2 releases and only installed OpenLinux once at a customer site last summer (hated it). One "feature" all of the Linux distributions' installation tools seem to share is brittleness. None of them recover from mistakes well.
I prefer to put/,/usr and/home on separate partitions. This way, I can blow away everything except/home and still keep MY stuff untouched. I suppose you could put everything on just / &/home and achieve the same thing
I've found that corporate decision makers look on software engineers as intrechangeable cogs (whether they admit it or not) and are only concerned with time to market. They have no loyalty to you beyond your ability to produce. I got tired of working like a mule for the same money as someone turning in a 40 hour week. So I choose to work as an independent consultant on an hourly basis. This puts me in control of my career. If someone asks for the impossible in a ridiculously short time I give them a reasonable estimate of time and effort so they can decide if they really want it done. I refuse to hack out someting as fast as possible and only produce well engineered software. If they think I'm blowing smoke out my keester then we part ways. I have yet to have that happen. Most folks are reasonable when you explain reality to them properly and in sufficient detail.
The bottom line is that I am in control of what I do for whom and for how much. There is some added risk since I have no "employer" and must find contracts. However, the security of being traditionally employed is a myth. In a real crunch they might keep you around a week or two more than a contractor, but an FTE (full time employee) can be downsized as easily as I can loose a contract. I make significantly more than a salaried FTE and can easily endure being out of work for a couple of months because I pay myself for vacation and unemployment insurance (savings).
Your employees' situation is a bit different from my situation as an independent consultant. If there is no increase in hourly income to allow them to create their own savings buffer, then they are better off as salaried employees with a weak overtime package (at least they have one).
Half of these points are well taken. Point 1 is rather weak since a stoopid uzer will avoid the shell at all costs. Point 3 is way off, personally, either KDE or GNOME (my preference) kicks the snot out of the Windoze GUI. I can't imagine how ssssllloooowwww NT would be if it tried to implement a virtual desktop. Points 2 and 4 are right on the money. I make my living in the client/server world and that means Windoze a lot of the time. Regardless of how crappy it is in many respects, it does have tremendous hardware support (comes of being the gorilla) and PNP mostly works for simple systems (the type stoopid uzers would have).
Linux has come a long way in just the last year, and it's accelerating. The fun is really just starting.
d4,...,Nf3, or maybe I should use a Ratfaced Mcdougal?
Slashdot Mirror
My first home-built PC was a CP/M (precursor to DOS, still the basis for Windows), Z80 machine with 64K of ram and 2 241K 8 inch floppies. A local University (which I was attending) had a bunch of these and I glomed onto a PC board (no mask on it) with hand drawn traces and no chips, resistors or capacitors. I soldered all of them on then spent 2 months debugging things like traces that were too close and had capacitance between them. I bought the chips, resistors and capacitors, a raw transformer, a fan (all from places like Jameco), had a custom aluminum case made at a local machine shop, added an H-19 (vt52 clone) terminal and I had the only personal computer off-campus owned by any of the CS students. It only cost me about $1700 too (a commercial version of the same box cost $4400 without the terminal).
I did my homework using Microsoft FORTRAN (back when they were just a compiler company) and really hit gold when Borland released Turbo-Pascal v1 for $29 (advertised in Microcomputer magazine).
I have much better PC's now, but still miss the heavy horsepower sound of those Siemens 8 inch floppies moving the heads when doing disk I/O.
The idea that Macs could be running Windows is obvious. Once the switch to Intel happened, it's just a matter of writing a few drivers for their hardware. But the idea that Apple will ditch OS X is ludicrous. They make a lot of money from the Mac OS and related tools. It is much more likely that they will offer either or both operating systems. This will retain their current marketshare in the OS X world and increase hardware sales with Windows.
"Hey dude, you're gettin' a Mac!"
Having worked for a Government contractor that uses Linux in some of its USAF systems that are deployed today, the point is mute. They don't actually modify the Linux OS or the GNU tools, they write applications and drivers on the Linux platform which control the hardware to perform the mission.
There is rarely any modification of GPL'd code and that is classified. So it is never released to anyone.
You need to have a heart to heart with your boss. Find out what the company IS willing to do. If they expect you to train on you own time, then decide if you want to jump ship over it. If you don't want to jump ship, then explain that you'll be doing your training "on-the-job" and that it will make some tasks take longer because you'll have to research them while you work on them.
Worst case, post your resume on Dice/Monster/... and quietly look elsewhere. And don't take another position without talking to employees of that company who work in your area (admin). They'll tell you what it's like to work there so you don't get a nasty surprise.
Some people are afraid to express concerns to their managers because it may hurt their image. But, if you allow this kind of problem to fester, it will surely lead to worse problems. Good managers will try their best to address the problem and appreciate your trust in talking to them. Bad ones will not and that is another reason to have the talk. You need to find out if it is worth staying in your current position. An honest discussion will tell you all you need to know.
Most admins I've dealt with are over-worked, so quality of life issues make your choice of careers problematic. The places where I've seen admins who keep sane hours are: very large aerospace firms (tied very closely to the government) and the federal government. Anywhere else, they're usually over-worked.
Good Luck.
I read ebooks all the time and unless this thing allows me to read any ebook like my PDA, it's not worth spit. The $300-$400 price tag is also extremely high for a single purpose device like this anyway.
BTW, Baen also sells non-DRM ebooks and also has a great library of FREE ebooks that come in multiple formats.
My first job out of school was maintaining a program called CODAN written in FORTRAN 4. It was layered on a custom shell written by a guy who'd wanted to add some capabilities to the manufacturer's shell (Cyber 170 mainframe running NOS). Somewhere along the line the source code had been lost and they only had the binary. So every year when Cyber upgraded NOS, the shell would break and this guy would come out of retirement (He'd retired early because he had this nice cash spigot to supplement his income) and for $250/hr he'd debug and fix the problem. The Cyber 170 was a 60 bit machine and his debug method was to do an OCTAL dump of the crash and pick through it (a 12 inch stack of 132 column fan-fold, impact printer output) until he found the problem(s), then use a binary editor to patch the binary.
I asked once why we didn't just re-write the program (CODAN was itself an horrendous piece of cut-and-paste architecture) and was told that we had a budget for maintenance, not new development. Since this was a defense contractor to the DOD, we couldn't move money from one to the other.
So this guy had an annual gig that brought in about 40K a year until he died. The satelite booster that this program supported is still being used with the same Z80 based flight computers, so the program COULD still be in use, IF he's alive. Go figure.
Holding politicians responsible already occurs through the ballot box. The sad fact is that our current political atmosphere isn't condusive to personal responsibility, wise money management or personal integrity, which ever side of the aisle they belong. So long as voters continue to send people to Washington who bring home the bacon and have backbones of jello on any politically sensitive issue, we will have no change.
Touche. And as for the replies to this parent...
No one is forced to work anywhere they don't want to. If your manager is a dick-head, work somewhere else. It is a self correcting system anyway. Someone who applies too much pressure will have a high turn over rate which will, over time, cost a business too much money for the short term gains of over working your staff in a sadistic manner.
There is no such thing as a no-pressure environment. I've worked for the DoD and as a private software consultant and if there is no pressure at work, you're fooling yourself. What we are really talking about is a "reasonable" amount of pressure. That is a highly subjective term that is unique to each of us. It is our personal responsibility to work where we fit, not make the world fit us.
Thoreau had his head up his rear. Any one who has actually been in the military knows that serving "as machines" is hogwash. Such people are quickly eliminated from the gene pool.
There is NO FREE ANYTHING folks. Yes those canucks don't have a monthly bill for internet access. BUT (and it's a big one ;), they also pay exhorbitant taxes. Having worked for the government for 12 years, I can guarantee that the cost per person in tax dollars (even Canadian) is higher than it would be if a private company were doing it.
Whether it's a good thing for US government to do is certainly open for debate. But never think that something you get from/through government is FREE.
In '82 when the PC came out, I was programming on CP/M and everyone wondered why we needed PC-DOS (and 640K). We had all of the programs we needed (running in 64K). The same holds true today. Most distros install pretty easily and support most hardware. BUT, the applications people use aren't there. You can bitch about what people should do, or what would make money or how much better Linux is in many areas. But until the most common Windows applications run on Linux (or have viable replacements)AND there is a good reason for business to go through the trauma of switching OS's, it won't happen.
And doesn't anyone on this site know the difference between there and their?
You're still missing the point here. Governments by nature regulate anything that they control. Money is control. So even if they switched to OSS and spent the license money there to promote it, they would REQUIRE/CONTROL how it was done, what it did, and anything else they (the government officials) deemed in their interest to control. Since it isn't a black box and they would be getting source code along with the executables.
I worked for DOD for 12 years and that is how it works. Even though the computer folks in government generally understand OSS, the administrators and politicians don't. If you think you're up against MS FUD now, think of MS losing license dollars on the scale the government spends and what the hordes of MS lobbyists would be doing to prevent or recover that loss.
Who cares what was said by whom. The core issue is whether the RealNames idea had merit and whether the cost was justified. The MARKET determined that merit by letting them go out of business from lack of interest. Frankly, I don't see anything bad about the idea. Who cares if someone wants to cater to technophobes (who don't like using PCs anyway, but may have to) by allowing them to type in the more human readable "RealNames: Linus's Socialist Operating System" instead of the more technically precise "http://www.linux.org"? FREEDOM is all about the ability to do things without interferance from those who fear and want to control ideas. If no one likes the idea or it has no real value, it will die. The fees RealNames wanted to charge were almost certainly the reason they failed. Just as Apple failed to compete on price in the late '80s with their PC that was arguably superior to Windows based PCs and lost almost all of the market, RealNames tried to charge an absurd amount for their idea and their company died. This is simple market economics, not cosmic justice for doing a BAD THING.
That Microsoft recognized the stupidity of their marketing plan should be no surprise. Microsoft's biggest talent is marketing.
This is about as idiotic a reply as any I've ever read here. This is akin to saying that a thief isn't responsible for stealing because your house isn't protected well enough, and gee, he really needed that 20th TV.
The fact that security holes exist in software is NOT the problem, unethical, destructive criminal behavior IS the problem. Virus writers are responsible for their choice to inflict the results of their actions on millions of potential victims, causing millions of dollars in lost work time to companies (owned and staffed by people, this raises the price of the goods and services YOU pay for) and governments (paid for by YOUR taxes, raising the cost of our already very expensive government).
Virus writers ARE THIEVES on a much grander scale than the amateur who breaks into your house and takes your TV. It just isn't as personal a violation. The tendency to off-load the blame for bad (in this case criminal) behavior onto society (in this case the authors of non-secure software) is one of the most wrong headed notions of our time.
This is all amusing, but I would suggest that if you want to know about actual plans for lunar development, visit http://www.asi.org/ or http://www.moonsociety.org/. Both sites are related and you can tour a mockup of a virtual lunar colony built in a lava tube.
> There is no evidence whatsoever that environmental regulations have anything to do with the power crisis in California. In fact, the state government had been pleading for years with power companies to build extra capacity, and they just weren't interested because they didn't want to drive down prices further.
This is a common misconception. The reason California power companies didn't build more capacity is because of costs. A purely business decision. It takes almost twice the time and money to build plants in CA as any other state, because of heavy regulation. The environmental community wanted cleaner, more efficient power and pushed through laws and the resulting regulations (enacted by the CA executive branch) to attain that goal. So the environmentalists **DID** help bring about the current situation by raising the cost of doing business in CA through regulations.
Until the recent "crisis" raised the value of energy, the return didn't justify any new investment investment in additional capacity.
There are 2 possible explanations for this situation, both are management issues.
1. The manager is an idiot who can't communicate his needs and doesn't track his assignments well. Hence, when HIS idiot manager yells fire, he does the same to those below him. Use the list idea given in one of the posts.
2. The manager is a jerk and is doing this on purpose. Its called whipping the horses. You keep cracking the whip and yelling EE-HAW and they keep running until they keel over. Then you get new horses. Use the list idea given in one of the posts.
A word about using the list. Since the guy your dealing with is also the guy who largely decides what kind of raise you get, caution and forethought are required on your part. The best weapon you can use on someone who is abusing you for whatever reason is to be reasonable with them. He is transfering his stress to you. Don't let him. The list idea is great, but be reasonable. It'll force him to be reasonable too. Being reasonable may take some restraint on your part since he may still try to ratchet up the stress level. Let him keep the stress.
Lastly, what you really need to do here is project management. Since your manager isn't doing it, you do it. That's what the list of prioritized tasks is all about. This is great experience for when YOU are in a position to manage projects. You'll learn how to negotiate priorities, how to define tasks, how to estimate effort and how to talk to unreasonable people without getting mad or offended. You'll also be able to take your lists (now accomplished) at the end of the year and put together a "Why I should get a really BIG RAISE + MORE STOCK OPTIONS" letter to show why you're very valuable to the company. (Just put all of your lists in a file folder, instead of the round file.) Don't bail on the company before trying this stuff. Many companies are run very much like this, so you'll just end up dealing with the same problems elsewhere.
So give it a few months. Make your list and talk to your (idiot && || jerk)manager from the "Gee I'd really like to do what you want, but I'M confused and here's my list of current tasks, what do you REALLY want me to work on first" standpoint. Things will get better.
I understand that the main reason Tito is unacceptable to NASA is because he's affiliated with the WRONG political party, i.e. the one opposite to the current head of NASA. This is the latest from an Artemis Society mailing list. If you're interested in finding out more, goto http://www.moonsociety.org/.
About 10 years ago I worked with a guy who'd worked at Bell Labs who gave me an artical on a 3D optical storage device Bell Labs had created(the artical was photo-copied from some technical rag, I don't recall which, he had first hand knowledge of the project). It used plastic cubes about 1.5 inches square and lasers. According to the artical and my colleague, the unit worked but wasn't economically feasible. The unit was about the 14x9x5 inches and stored about 3 GB. That was quite a bit in `90. The cubes looked like they could easily evolve into the thick rectangular storage cards used by HAL in the 2001 movie.
The artical mentioned that AT&T (the commercial side of Bell Labs) was looking to commercialize the unit and had targeted an 18 month time frame. I suspect that it has never made it to the commercial arena because hard drives have become so large (storage wise) and cheap. Of course this is assuming that the technical issues could be resolved.
Temperature trends STILL have not deviated from long term climatological trends that anyone can look at at NOAA of any state climatological office. Of course this is not a politically correct or in vogue idea. And worse yet, this kind of environmental heresy WILL NOT get you any government money.
Mt Pinatubo pumped more pollution (of exactly the same kinds we produce, along with some we don't) in one natural event than the human race has generated in its entire history. It is pure arrogance on our part to think we are having that much of an impact on this planet.
All of the comments about engineering are generally well put, but the biggest problem is in the user and business community. Until engineering software is rewarded and hacking software (I mean just getting it running so it can go to market) is NOT rewarded, software will continue to suck. Rewarding good programming will only happen when the people who buy software stop accepting crappy software and rewarding businesses that market crap with money.
It doesn't take a rat long to realize that stepping onto an electrified plate is an unrewarding behavior. Even business and marketing types (they may have more brains than rats) will stop creating and selling crappy software if it doesn't make money. Competition in the hardware arena forces good engineering behavior by compensating those that produce good product. Who would buy a new CPU that crashes after 56 hrs or that requires you to pull it from the socket and re-insert it after any periferal chip changes? Even a relatively obscure bug in the floating point circuitry can cause a massive recall.
As long as users are willing to pay for crappy software, there will be no improvement in software quality.
I was dragged kicking and screaming into my first Ada project. I would have prefered almost anything else. Having programmed in C and then C++ for 12 years I argued vehemently for C++, and lost.
6 months into the project I suddenly found that the awkwardness of a strongly typed language had become an asset. I was writing code just as quickly as anything else I'd ever done, and it WORKED! I no longer had to deal with memory stomping problems or unexpected behavior because I accidentally used = instead of ==. The only problems I was dealing with were logic problems. So if the logic of my solution was correct and I correctly implemented that logic, I was done. On C and (especially) C++ projects, this phase is called integration 8-() and lasts forever. Java is much better but has its own drawbacks since it is still interpreted.
The bottom line is that we produced rock solid software in somewhat less time than we would have with C++ or its ilk. I've since been on several C++ projects and they have only strengthened my opinion. One project involved an embedded system written in C++ which could only run 26 minutes before it crashed. It was fielded since the typical runtime duration for this system was 20 minutes (only because they couldn't go longer without embarassment). A similar project written in Ada (not by me) has been working beautifully for 5+ years, but the Ada is bad crowd managed to get the new system written in a much better language with laughable results.
It is unfortunate that the free software culture shuns good software engineering practices and languages that support them. Free software is good because 1) most of it is NOT written in C++; 2) Some very talented people have made major contributions; 3) most importantly, it undergoes rigorous adhoc testing by the community at large (one of the first things to be scrapped in the commercial world is good testing, aka MS).
I don't have any solution for this, although I understand that Ada is being used to teach programming in universities more because it has been tied to government money. Maybe that will work.
I have to agree having used and installed RH(I've been using it since version 1(!) and had 6.1 on one of my desktop boxes), OpenLinux, Debian and Suse 6.3. SuSe clearly provides more features and a more complete package of software than any of the others (I admit I haven't tried all of them).
/, /usr and /home on separate partitions. This way, I can blow away everything except /home and still keep MY stuff untouched. I suppose you could put everything on just / & /home and achieve the same thing
The one drawback to SuSe is their installation utilities, YAST 1 & 2. YAST 1 provides a somewhat flexible TTY based installation, but still prevents you from specifying exactly what you want to install. At least it allows you to specify more than one partition. YAST 2 is easy to use, but completely brain dead in its approach to partitioning (let alone package selection). I started to install using it, but after seeing what I would be forced to do, installed with YAST 1. RH 6.1 has a much better installation tool, too bad you can't mix and match. In fairness, I haven't seen Debian's last 2 releases and only installed OpenLinux once at a customer site last summer (hated it). One "feature" all of the Linux distributions' installation tools seem to share is brittleness. None of them recover from mistakes well.
I prefer to put
I've found that corporate decision makers look on software engineers as intrechangeable cogs (whether they admit it or not) and are only concerned with time to market. They have no loyalty to you beyond your ability to produce. I got tired of working like a mule for the same money as someone turning in a 40 hour week. So I choose to work as an independent consultant on an hourly basis. This puts me in control of my career. If someone asks for the impossible in a ridiculously short time I give them a reasonable estimate of time and effort so they can decide if they really want it done. I refuse to hack out someting as fast as possible and only produce well engineered software. If they think I'm blowing smoke out my keester then we part ways. I have yet to have that happen. Most folks are reasonable when you explain reality to them properly and in sufficient detail.
The bottom line is that I am in control of what I do for whom and for how much. There is some added risk since I have no "employer" and must find contracts. However, the security of being traditionally employed is a myth. In a real crunch they might keep you around a week or two more than a contractor, but an FTE (full time employee) can be downsized as easily as I can loose a contract. I make significantly more than a salaried FTE and can easily endure being out of work for a couple of months because I pay myself for vacation and unemployment insurance (savings).
Your employees' situation is a bit different from my situation as an independent consultant. If there is no increase in hourly income to allow them to create their own savings buffer, then they are better off as salaried employees with a weak overtime package (at least they have one).
Half of these points are well taken. Point 1 is rather weak since a stoopid uzer will avoid the shell at all costs. Point 3 is way off, personally, either KDE or GNOME (my preference) kicks the snot out of the Windoze GUI. I can't imagine how ssssllloooowwww NT would be if it tried to implement a virtual desktop. Points 2 and 4 are right on the money. I make my living in the client/server world and that means Windoze a lot of the time. Regardless of how crappy it is in many respects, it does have tremendous hardware support (comes of being the gorilla) and PNP mostly works for simple systems (the type stoopid uzers would have).
Linux has come a long way in just the last year, and it's accelerating. The fun is really just starting.
d4,...,Nf3, or maybe I should use a Ratfaced Mcdougal?