As mainstream as Linux has become, I still get the feeling it's an extension of the same old stratification of the regular and popular kids vs. the nerds, geeks and marginalized in school.
Geeks invent something (Linux) that benefits the rest of the world. Some of the popular kids shake down geeks for their homework (SCO's apparent claims of ownership of Linux). One or two older wiser kids step in to defend the victim. (IBM/RH) The regular kids take the popular side and throw their support at the popular kids (Baystar, et al.) because they think they're right and can't relate to the subculture of nerd and geekdom. (GPL)
You are *not* free to say whatever you want, and not expect bodily harm.
In the United States you are.
So the right to free speach advocates.
However, if you're among a group of people who think one way while you another, you will be treated unfairly. Whether it is a beating, discrimination or exclusion. It can be quite difficult to prove but it's there nonetheless.
Just look back on the last year and the anti-war/anti GWB voices.
Cows, buffalo, chicks, ducks, and turkey are stupid animals.
Cows - Ever worked on a beef ranch? They are intelligent and are looking for weaknesses in the fences that contain them and work together at breaking through.
Chickens & ducks - Lump them into the same category as parrots/parakeets and other intelligent avian pets. They will recognize you the same as any higher intelligence pet birds.
Pigs - People keep pot bellied pigs as pets.
turkey - Not much I can say here that the cultivated ones will stare up into the sky when it rains, beaks wide open wondering what's going on and eventually drown.
What's food in one part of the world isn't food in another part. Try ordering steak in India or even finding someone to slaughter a cow.
From chatting with friends, the gist is that it's illegal to upload music to a public ftp server but it's perfectly legal to have file sharing turned on in your computer.
It's also perfectly legal to download.
Already in practise to a limited extent...
on
RIAA Bits
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· Score: 2, Informative
We went to a baby and toddler products consumer show yesterday. One booth was selling CDs of music with your child's name in a number of songs.
It was a small booth and they might have had 20 CDs on display of the most popular children's names.
However, if your child's name wasn't on any of the disks they already had, you simply paid $20 (Canadian) and within an hour, you could come back and they'll have burned a disk and have a laser printed clear label.
Presumably, the owners had access to a studio, did a one time creation of a few instrumental tracks and sang/recorded the songs thousands of times.
Perfect example outside of writing software code on how this model works.
Science is as much a process as Christ was a process.br>
Both create and created a set of beliefs to which followers gathered, tout, use and abuse for their own end.
Difference is that one ended and over the centuries, bad translation created different interpretations.
Charge home users the same way business gets charged. If people still whine about that, make block out an opt-out thing.
We have a *nix box in co-location on a burstable connection and quite a few IPs allocated to us.
We were on the verge of being charged over-usage since we were into the 2nd month of our grace-period.
All the regular services weren't receiving or sending out any more traffic than the previous few months. The solution, we found was a particular B-block that started 135 and 139 scanning our entire subnet and then turned into massive ICMP scans.
Blocking all three of those has brought our bandwidth usage back down to pre-August levels and got us away from the eye of the biller.
Pain in the fucking ass that we had to do that anyways.
Let the bleeding hearts bleed all they want but I have no intention of paying for someone else's static.
[Insert redneck drawl] God damned commie bastards. Takn' 'way mah God-given rights to free and open ports and the right to own and use as big a BFG that them thar gun makers make...
People aren't that obsessed about regular movies...
Just imagine, seeing a character living in New York hop on a bike (sound effect of jet engine) ride 3 blocks, be in Tokyo, eat some rice (crunchy sounds), then ride back (sound effect of jet engine again), stopping for a chunk of orange ice called `coffee' before heading home, which, of course, is a castle built in the middle of an 8 lane interstate, which the cars bounce over.
Nobody would complain, because its a WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF!
Damn Anal Nerds...
Alone and by itself and especially if it was supposed to be a mainstream Hollywood film, neither I nor 90% of viewing public would suspend their disbelief for it.
(I think Gigli had much of the same problems with suspension of disbelief on the social sciences.)
If in the same above cited Hollywood shlock was revealed to us that the character was a character in a world where everyone had or had access to a transdimensional travelling bike, then I could suspend my disbelief (even with the crunchy rice).
Now imagine in the same film, that character in New York later being invited out to a meal at a restaurant at the base of Mt. Fuji and he tells the host he'll be there but there's absolutely no way and no technology that allow him to make it quickly. It'll be a 30 hour ferry ride across the Hudson. When he gets there, the same looking rice he ate in Tokyo now doesn't make a crunchy sound.
If this were an Andalousian Dog II, I probably would suspend my disbelief.
Since this part happened in the same movie, I have problems.
It's all about consistency.
Let's break this down into two groups of us Damn Anal Nerds... Those of us who can't suspend disbelief and those of us who want internal consistency.
Those who can't suspend disbelief at all need to get a life. The rest of us in the thinking majority would like to see consistency.
That said, if they released the movie Tron today with the same marketing they did in the 80s, it'd have a hard time convincing anyone since nobody in their right mind could believe any super computer in our real world could scan and digitize the way Tron did.
However if they framed it in an alternate universe where there were other sorts of wacky stuff going on, it might work.
TV series Reboot and movie Spykids 2003 (whatever it's called) pull off the life inside a computer thing because of the way they are presented as fantasy, sci-fi and children's programing. The former with a bit of an adult oriented twist in the last couple of season.
As for being anal about suspension of disbelief...
I chuckled, shrugged and accepted it as a plot device when someone pointed out an inconsistency 10 years ago in Sneakers, Robert Redford's character went through all sorts of trouble stealing and forging different forms of IDs while River Phoenix's character (IIRC) as a maintenance person was able to sneak into the rafters and get into the same room without as much trouble as Redford.
Colin Baker as Dr. Who in Terror of the Vervoids... Where the apparently walking talking plants speak of murderous animals that have been taking their offspring to slaughter for many millenia was a bit of a stretch. It's still somewhat acceptable as long as the dead botanists in the compost heap nor the Doctor never spoke about plant evolution and why fruit contain seeds.
I cringe watching Scott Bakula and crew on Enterprise as their technology looks far more sophisticated than the stuff in Shatner's time. For those of us that sees all the Trek episodes happening in the same universe, if you have to suspend your disbelief for some things and not other things and each week, the items switch over, it becomes way too complicated to enjoy.
But then again, this takes us back to conistency...
Very good observations... then again, it isn't hard to poke holes in Trek.
The Genesis device introduced in the second movie was discussed to be a potentially dangerous weapon and someone made mention that it was barred from use ever again.
Faced with the Borg taking over, nobody ever thought about it again for the use while they were cooking up new ways to defend against them.
A few die-hard trekies argued that it was in some ethical law and one even laughed at the notion of having cube shaped planets.
Appologists... ugh.
Re:My plane didn't go quite so far...
on
TAM 5 Has landed
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· Score: 1
As much as the TV commercials show kids flying RC planes around the neighbourhood, these things AREN'T children's toys.
Go here http://modelaircraft.org, find a club near you, join it and go through whatever number of flights you'll need with a quallified instructor (most clubs have a Saturday morning and/or one weeknight newbie session) to get you off the ground.
press release from SCO that basically calls for IBM to "move away from the GPL"."
So, for the sake of arguement with SCO, (and don't take this as flamebait), what would happen if IBM actually moved away from the GPL and onto the BSD license?
Where would SCO be, would Darl McBride be looking for a tall building to jump off of?
That statement really gives me the impression they're just looking for a way to stomp out the competition. I think as time progresses, the more they say, the more filet of sole they'll be eating once they get into court.
I'm not "high and mighty" I just personally had got stuck only doing stuff like that and had to figure out where I had went wrong. What I'm sayinging is if you do go to something not suited for your skills and dreams, just don't give-in, keep trying and remember what you want to be.
Fair enough.
I am an english major who wanted to teach elementary school. But the environment wasn't right in the early 90s. The Internet was commercializing and I jumped on that bandwagon doing phone support in the early days and worked up to becoming a sysadmin.
I'm now in my late 20s. The environment is far better for teaching but I get a great deal of pleasure from the freelance IT work I do and a side business in the food industry.
Though I've abandoned what I wanted to do in the early days, life has changed for me lots and I have no regrets.
The base of what I want to be is happy from being challenged, excercise some form of creativity and have something to show for it at the end of the day.
It's all about personal preferences and choices that make you most happy. Your original message gave me the impression that us freelance support folks are nothing but the lowly dredges of the work force.
"My experience has been that the guys that put up ads in the grocery store usually don't understand the nature of the business and/or lack sufficient expertise to provide any real support beyone the most basic of problems..."
Or recently laid off from doing the same work, not knowing the value of the work they do and getting frustrated at the level of customers that pick up those ads.
...there is a big difference between sitting in front of your neighbors computer and trying to talk someone through fixes over the phone...
I've met many "elitist" programmers and sysadmins who swore they could never do anything that involved the end-user.
So be it and kudos to them for finding the right position that they can continue to be that way.
They're not into people and those that I know would rather be in a dark windowless room doing their magic on a console.
Sociologically, it's interesting and probably a good academic topic to do research on but practically speaking, they will be happier and likely will find other things to do should they find themselves without a similar job.
There are two events in my life as a "LAN admin"/"Corporate Computer Guy"/"Helpdesk Guy" that turned the job from being fun to hell.
1) Seeing John/Jane Q. Public from off the street hired as junior support personnel being trained to follow a problem script rather than relying on their familiaity with an O/S and ability to solve the problem.
2) Being a LAN Admin with a new manager who came in from a merger and being told that we had to follow a problem solving script, not being allowed to use image casting software and being forced to sit through all the progress bar indicators when installing O/S or any software.
I believe that through the last 5 years, IT and the computer nerd had been forced apart by the flood of average people that would have normally gone into blue collar jobs.
Stay away from doing phone support unless you can charge money for each call you take. The original article was about freelance tech support - going on premises and physically getting your hands on the problem.
Phone support is near the end of the proverbial bottomless black pit.
Judging by the number of responses, this looks like a hot topic that hits a nerve.
Hopefully someone reads this...
First off, The Rant:
Home users are not often a cinch. Neither are many small businesses. I also find particularaly that medical offices can be a pain.
Reason being is that many in the above mentioned group buy the cheapest computers featuring the lowest of low quality components. Drivers that aren't available on upgrading to another OS or drivers that can't be found without spending hours browsing the web.
Even if you have all the drivers, some really cheap clones can take much longer than an equivalent computer with quality parts to install the O/S. HD grinding away for god knows what reason. (no, not smardisk.exe)
Then there is the matter of laptop/notebook computers. I decided to take one home to work on (a compaq Presario 1400 series one). It's apparently not fully compatable (NIC card) with Windows XP (which the client bought for it). And to top it all off, on the final reboot, the laptop hung. The only way to power it down was to pull the battery and PSU. When I put everything back in, the green LED indicating that an external PSU was connected but it wouldn't turn back on.
Apparently I need a new motherboard. I don't have insurance for this and I'm saving up to buy a new mobo for this laptop.
Where does responsibility start and end????
End Rant.
Otherwise, freelance work is great. No corporate know nothing IT manager breathing down your back wondering why you're taking so much time holding a customer's hand, no politics, ability to fire your customers should they become unreasonable (more by way of raising rates).
For a perpetual source of income, alot of the small companies you service tend to need websites and e-mail. If you have the technical know-how, find some cheap moderate bandwidth co-location, setup your favourite flavour of *nix and host away. Be selective about who you take on as a client. Most of these small businesses won't likely get/.'ed and they're likely to have informational/pamphlet type websites that take up a few hundred Kbytes.
And just think, if he was American, he'd just march to his high school, kill a few kids, be convicted as an adult and sentenced to death, a new wave of hypersensitive administrators would expel kids for having even a Han Solo collectable doll, George Lucus would be the new Face of Evil, and Jon Katz would have a week's worth of/. articles
Already happened.... well something of the sorts already happened in that province a decade ago. Only it was mysogynist and not the downtroden geek.
Slashdot Mirror
As mainstream as Linux has become, I still get the feeling it's an extension of the same old stratification of the regular and popular kids vs. the nerds, geeks and marginalized in school.
Geeks invent something (Linux) that benefits the rest of the world. Some of the popular kids shake down geeks for their homework (SCO's apparent claims of ownership of Linux). One or two older wiser kids step in to defend the victim. (IBM/RH) The regular kids take the popular side and throw their support at the popular kids (Baystar, et al.) because they think they're right and can't relate to the subculture of nerd and geekdom. (GPL)
Either that or SCO does actually have a case...
Well.
$50 million for SCO to go to court, $4.3B for IBM....
Too bad law firms aren't publically owned and traded. Seeing as everyone else will be soaked in this.
You are *not* free to say whatever you want, and not expect bodily harm.
In the United States you are.
So the right to free speach advocates.
However, if you're among a group of people who think one way while you another, you will be treated unfairly. Whether it is a beating, discrimination or exclusion. It can be quite difficult to prove but it's there nonetheless.
Just look back on the last year and the anti-war/anti GWB voices.
Cows, buffalo, chicks, ducks, and turkey are stupid animals.
Cows - Ever worked on a beef ranch? They are intelligent and are looking for weaknesses in the fences that contain them and work together at breaking through.
Chickens & ducks - Lump them into the same category as parrots/parakeets and other intelligent avian pets. They will recognize you the same as any higher intelligence pet birds.
Pigs - People keep pot bellied pigs as pets.
turkey - Not much I can say here that the cultivated ones will stare up into the sky when it rains, beaks wide open wondering what's going on and eventually drown.
What's food in one part of the world isn't food in another part. Try ordering steak in India or even finding someone to slaughter a cow.
Get over yourself.
http://techcentralstation.com/081803C.html
From chatting with friends, the gist is that it's illegal to upload music to a public ftp server but it's perfectly legal to have file sharing turned on in your computer.
It's also perfectly legal to download.
We went to a baby and toddler products consumer show yesterday. One booth was selling CDs of music with your child's name in a number of songs.
It was a small booth and they might have had 20 CDs on display of the most popular children's names.
However, if your child's name wasn't on any of the disks they already had, you simply paid $20 (Canadian) and within an hour, you could come back and they'll have burned a disk and have a laser printed clear label.
Presumably, the owners had access to a studio, did a one time creation of a few instrumental tracks and sang/recorded the songs thousands of times.
Perfect example outside of writing software code on how this model works.
Science is as much a process as Christ was a process.br>
Both create and created a set of beliefs to which followers gathered, tout, use and abuse for their own end.
Difference is that one ended and over the centuries, bad translation created different interpretations.
And they would've gotten away for it if it wasn't for you meddling slashdotters.
Here here!
Charge home users the same way business gets charged. If people still whine about that, make block out an opt-out thing.
We have a *nix box in co-location on a burstable connection and quite a few IPs allocated to us.
We were on the verge of being charged over-usage since we were into the 2nd month of our grace-period.
All the regular services weren't receiving or sending out any more traffic than the previous few months. The solution, we found was a particular B-block that started 135 and 139 scanning our entire subnet and then turned into massive ICMP scans.
Blocking all three of those has brought our bandwidth usage back down to pre-August levels and got us away from the eye of the biller.
Pain in the fucking ass that we had to do that anyways.
Let the bleeding hearts bleed all they want but I have no intention of paying for someone else's static.
Yeah...
Open ports don't take down the net.
Much like guns don't kill people....
[Insert redneck drawl] God damned commie bastards. Takn' 'way mah God-given rights to free and open ports and the right to own and use as big a BFG that them thar gun makers make...
He likely won't get anything out of it.
Even though it's Quebec, it's still the Canadian legal system he's dealing with here.
Lawsuits like this might make the 6 o'clock news but they hardly get off the ground.
People aren't that obsessed about regular movies...
Just imagine, seeing a character living in New York hop on a bike (sound effect of jet engine) ride 3 blocks, be in Tokyo, eat some rice (crunchy sounds), then ride back (sound effect of jet engine again), stopping for a chunk of orange ice called `coffee' before heading home, which, of course, is a castle built in the middle of an 8 lane interstate, which the cars bounce over.
Nobody would complain, because its a WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF!
Damn Anal Nerds...
Alone and by itself and especially if it was supposed to be a mainstream Hollywood film, neither I nor 90% of viewing public would suspend their disbelief for it.
(I think Gigli had much of the same problems with suspension of disbelief on the social sciences.)
If in the same above cited Hollywood shlock was revealed to us that the character was a character in a world where everyone had or had access to a transdimensional travelling bike, then I could suspend my disbelief (even with the crunchy rice).
Now imagine in the same film, that character in New York later being invited out to a meal at a restaurant at the base of Mt. Fuji and he tells the host he'll be there but there's absolutely no way and no technology that allow him to make it quickly. It'll be a 30 hour ferry ride across the Hudson. When he gets there, the same looking rice he ate in Tokyo now doesn't make a crunchy sound.
If this were an Andalousian Dog II, I probably would suspend my disbelief.
Since this part happened in the same movie, I have problems.
It's all about consistency.
Let's break this down into two groups of us Damn Anal Nerds... Those of us who can't suspend disbelief and those of us who want internal consistency.
Those who can't suspend disbelief at all need to get a life. The rest of us in the thinking majority would like to see consistency.
That said, if they released the movie Tron today with the same marketing they did in the 80s, it'd have a hard time convincing anyone since nobody in their right mind could believe any super computer in our real world could scan and digitize the way Tron did.
However if they framed it in an alternate universe where there were other sorts of wacky stuff going on, it might work.
TV series Reboot and movie Spykids 2003 (whatever it's called) pull off the life inside a computer thing because of the way they are presented as fantasy, sci-fi and children's programing. The former with a bit of an adult oriented twist in the last couple of season.
As for being anal about suspension of disbelief...
I chuckled, shrugged and accepted it as a plot device when someone pointed out an inconsistency 10 years ago in Sneakers, Robert Redford's character went through all sorts of trouble stealing and forging different forms of IDs while River Phoenix's character (IIRC) as a maintenance person was able to sneak into the rafters and get into the same room without as much trouble as Redford.
Colin Baker as Dr. Who in Terror of the Vervoids... Where the apparently walking talking plants speak of murderous animals that have been taking their offspring to slaughter for many millenia was a bit of a stretch. It's still somewhat acceptable as long as the dead botanists in the compost heap nor the Doctor never spoke about plant evolution and why fruit contain seeds.
I cringe watching Scott Bakula and crew on Enterprise as their technology looks far more sophisticated than the stuff in Shatner's time. For those of us that sees all the Trek episodes happening in the same universe, if you have to suspend your disbelief for some things and not other things and each week, the items switch over, it becomes way too complicated to enjoy.
But then again, this takes us back to conistency...
Very good observations... then again, it isn't hard to poke holes in Trek.
The Genesis device introduced in the second movie was discussed to be a potentially dangerous weapon and someone made mention that it was barred from use ever again.
Faced with the Borg taking over, nobody ever thought about it again for the use while they were cooking up new ways to defend against them.
A few die-hard trekies argued that it was in some ethical law and one even laughed at the notion of having cube shaped planets.
Appologists... ugh.
As much as the TV commercials show kids flying RC planes around the neighbourhood, these things AREN'T children's toys.
Go here http://modelaircraft.org, find a club near you, join it and go through whatever number of flights you'll need with a quallified instructor (most clubs have a Saturday morning and/or one weeknight newbie session) to get you off the ground.
press release from SCO that basically calls for IBM to "move away from the GPL"."
So, for the sake of arguement with SCO, (and don't take this as flamebait), what would happen if IBM actually moved away from the GPL and onto the BSD license?
Where would SCO be, would Darl McBride be looking for a tall building to jump off of?
That statement really gives me the impression they're just looking for a way to stomp out the competition. I think as time progresses, the more they say, the more filet of sole they'll be eating once they get into court.
As the first poster says, get excercise.
And stop reading slashdot or any other blog leading up to the time your deadline!
Easy enough for me to say. I can't even do it myself.
I'm not "high and mighty" I just personally had got stuck only doing stuff like that and had to figure out where I had went wrong. What I'm sayinging is if you do go to something not suited for your skills and dreams, just don't give-in, keep trying and remember what you want to be.
Fair enough.
I am an english major who wanted to teach elementary school. But the environment wasn't right in the early 90s. The Internet was commercializing and I jumped on that bandwagon doing phone support in the early days and worked up to becoming a sysadmin.
I'm now in my late 20s. The environment is far better for teaching but I get a great deal of pleasure from the freelance IT work I do and a side business in the food industry.
Though I've abandoned what I wanted to do in the early days, life has changed for me lots and I have no regrets.
The base of what I want to be is happy from being challenged, excercise some form of creativity and have something to show for it at the end of the day.
It's all about personal preferences and choices that make you most happy. Your original message gave me the impression that us freelance support folks are nothing but the lowly dredges of the work force.
Peace
Not much better then saying "Would you like some fries with that?"
A wee bit high and mighty, aren't we?
As my father-in-law says, "there's no job that should be beneath you."
There was a janitor whose last name is Hoover who got rich from putting a hose, fan blower and a bag together.
It may not be prestigious and glorious work but it pays the bills and is a means to an end.
"My experience has been that the guys that put up ads in the grocery store usually don't understand the nature of the business and/or lack sufficient expertise to provide any real support beyone the most basic of problems..."
Or recently laid off from doing the same work, not knowing the value of the work they do and getting frustrated at the level of customers that pick up those ads.
Been there and done that and don't wanna go back.
...there is a big difference between sitting in front of your neighbors computer and trying to talk someone through fixes over the phone...
I've met many "elitist" programmers and sysadmins who swore they could never do anything that involved the end-user.
So be it and kudos to them for finding the right position that they can continue to be that way.
They're not into people and those that I know would rather be in a dark windowless room doing their magic on a console.
Sociologically, it's interesting and probably a good academic topic to do research on but practically speaking, they will be happier and likely will find other things to do should they find themselves without a similar job.
There are two events in my life as a "LAN admin"/"Corporate Computer Guy"/"Helpdesk Guy" that turned the job from being fun to hell.
1) Seeing John/Jane Q. Public from off the street hired as junior support personnel being trained to follow a problem script rather than relying on their familiaity with an O/S and ability to solve the problem.
2) Being a LAN Admin with a new manager who came in from a merger and being told that we had to follow a problem solving script, not being allowed to use image casting software and being forced to sit through all the progress bar indicators when installing O/S or any software.
I believe that through the last 5 years, IT and the computer nerd had been forced apart by the flood of average people that would have normally gone into blue collar jobs.
Shame.
No-oo-oo
Stay away from doing phone support unless you can charge money for each call you take. The original article was about freelance tech support - going on premises and physically getting your hands on the problem.
Phone support is near the end of the proverbial bottomless black pit.
Judging by the number of responses, this looks like a hot topic that hits a nerve.
/.'ed and they're likely to have informational/pamphlet type websites that take up a few hundred Kbytes.
Hopefully someone reads this...
First off, The Rant:
Home users are not often a cinch. Neither are many small businesses. I also find particularaly that medical offices can be a pain.
Reason being is that many in the above mentioned group buy the cheapest computers featuring the lowest of low quality components. Drivers that aren't available on upgrading to another OS or drivers that can't be found without spending hours browsing the web.
Even if you have all the drivers, some really cheap clones can take much longer than an equivalent computer with quality parts to install the O/S. HD grinding away for god knows what reason. (no, not smardisk.exe)
Then there is the matter of laptop/notebook computers. I decided to take one home to work on (a compaq Presario 1400 series one). It's apparently not fully compatable (NIC card) with Windows XP (which the client bought for it). And to top it all off, on the final reboot, the laptop hung. The only way to power it down was to pull the battery and PSU. When I put everything back in, the green LED indicating that an external PSU was connected but it wouldn't turn back on.
Apparently I need a new motherboard. I don't have insurance for this and I'm saving up to buy a new mobo for this laptop.
Where does responsibility start and end????
End Rant.
Otherwise, freelance work is great. No corporate know nothing IT manager breathing down your back wondering why you're taking so much time holding a customer's hand, no politics, ability to fire your customers should they become unreasonable (more by way of raising rates).
For a perpetual source of income, alot of the small companies you service tend to need websites and e-mail. If you have the technical know-how, find some cheap moderate bandwidth co-location, setup your favourite flavour of *nix and host away. Be selective about who you take on as a client. Most of these small businesses won't likely get
And just think, if he was American, he'd just march to his high school, kill a few kids, be convicted as an adult and sentenced to death, a new wave of hypersensitive administrators would expel kids for having even a Han Solo collectable doll, George Lucus would be the new Face of Evil, and Jon Katz would have a week's worth of /. articles
Already happened.... well something of the sorts already happened in that province a decade ago. Only it was mysogynist and not the downtroden geek.
Click Here for article
Geez, if you had to read that in PC World to know about it....