Developers don't need root access. Simple. For what? Give me one good reason why.
I need to be able to edit/etc/inetd.conf (or xinetd), and restart the inetd daemon. I have a software architecture that depends on it, and in order to build / install / develop I need to be able to access it.
And before you ask, no it is not a fucking web app. It is an industrial control and monitoring application, and frankly I have trouble believing you would understand enough about software architecture that you would be able to make a judgement about whether I need it or not anyway.
Any downtime is not tolerated. For every minute my production machines are down, we're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Really.
Next time invest a couple of thousand dollars into a development server, maybe? Instead of losing a quanta-giggleion dollars per second when a developer accidentally knocks out a production server?
Why should I let anyone except someone who doesn't know exactly what power they wield have it?
You betray your previous statement that it is not about control, here. You should be asking "does this person _need_ access, to perform his company-assigned duties? How can I best help him achieve the company goals?" Instead you are just protecting your little kingdom.
So yeah, maybe I don't let the developers have free reign, but we also have the best-performing, most available systems around.
I'm so happy for you. Meanwhile, how are your developing coworkers doing? Failing all their deadlines? Not even getting the most basic infrastructure installed? Not even getting started with their projects, maybe?
Your problem is that you have wrong priorities. _You_ may like to see a great uptime, but other people simply want to get their work done. For developers, part of that work is installing new things on the system. Even if that threatens your holy grail of perfect uptime.
You are exactly the sort of person the article author is complaining about, you know? Some demi-god from the maintenance pantheon who will exercise his perceived authority by arbitrarily setting limits.
Here's a clue: developers develop _new_ stuff, they don't just maintain the status quo. Part of that process is installing things on their development server. When the application is rolled out, those same changes will necessarily also take place on the QA and production servers. You cannot develop things without also changing things. It is a natural part of the process.
I've worked in places where I could get maybe ten minutes worth of system administration attention every two weeks. I've worked with development servers that had no backup scheme "because it is just a development server, there is nothing critical on it" (well, except a million-euro project...). You'd fit right in at those places...
Their location is easily found, since they have a website. Look under "Praxis", then click on "vestigingen" (Dutch for "locations"). You will be prompted to fill in your address, and then our galactic overlords (who also sell some fine building materials, btw) will handle the rest for you.
Ok, I'll bite. For one thing, search engines have been around before there even was a WWW (remember gopher?). Secondly, there is no inherent design to the web - it just grew this way. Noone (well, apart from you) decided that search engines were not allowed. Thirdly, when I need a specific type of information I do not have time to linksurf for a couple of days. Doing so would be foolish, since a couple of seconds on Google can get me to the same places.
I certainly recognize that Google presents a weakness in the web. For example, it could be used for censhorship by simply hiding undesirable information. It is also arguably a critical point in the web infrastructure, with all associated dangers. However, neither of these problems seem too severe. Attempts at censhorship would be overcome by massive numbers of bloggers, who have large readerships and would raise an enormeous outcry if such a thing were to happen. And if Google falls of the edge of the web, there are still plenty other search engines that can take its place.
As for Google being more harmful than the situation in the middle east, I won't comment other than by saying "nice troll".
Well, why did they release a demo then? I didn't like the demo either so I _obviously_ won't be bothered to buy the game. That's the whole point of a demo, to see if you like the game or not...
People do not want nuclear power because it means leaving nuclear waste in the environment for tens of thousands of years. It has nothing to do with lack of knowledge, emotional responses, or even fear over what "the terrorrists" or accidents might do with the plant. Instead it is about caring about what happens to this planet over the next few millennia, and what sort of problems we leave to our children.
People here are giving you a hard time, and I do agree there are some gotchas, but at least I applaud the fact that you are looking for a developer and not a warm body. Too frequently, people in my area are simply looking for _anyone_ with _any_ coding skills. They refuse to believe there are good and bad coders, instead preferring to think that all programmers are interchangeable units.
Even so, I wouldn't really like to be surprised by something like this during an interview. Some minor things that have major impact:
- I'm stressed out enough as it is during an interview. "Programming" is a state of mind, and so is "interviewing", and they are disjunct and hard to switch between.
- I may not have used the particular environment you have installed on the laptop. You may have Borland C++ installed while I know everything about Visual C++. If you hired me, it would take me a couple of hours to get comfortable with Borland - not enough to make me unhirable, but far too much for your 15 minute limit.
- By setting a time limit you are guaranteeing that people go for quick and dirty. You probably don't want candidates who do q&d, but you are asking them to display those skills.
As long as you are aware of these issues I guess it doesn't matter much, but given the fact that you haven't found anyone in 6 months suggests you may not be.
A flat tire takes 5-10 minutes to fix, and the only equipment you need to fix it is a patch, some glue, a few spanners, and a pump. It is an easy skill to learn, and a useful one to have, especially when you are dealing with recurring flat tire problems;-)
"Everyone breaks the rules sometime. Is there a specific situation where you broke the rule that in retrospect you think you shouldn't have ?"
Do you actually get answers to this other than "no, never"? If I were being interviewed I would understand this question as either "how will you try to screw us" or "give me an excuse why I should select someone else". Either way, pointing out my bad sides is hardly a priority for me during an interview.
Agreed. I grew up on 2D games: horizontal shooters, vertical shooters, platform games, overhead "arcade adventures", hell - real adventures. And guess what? I still _like_ all those game types!
But noone is making "real" adventures anymore (either of the text type, or in the Sierra/Lucas style), with a very small number of exceptions (I'd count Deus Ex and System Shock 2 as worthy successors to the adventure genre. Too bad the game industry doesn't seem to 'get' that it isn't about shooting, it is about thinking...).
As for shooters and platform games, they just don't work for me in 3D. You miss the pixel-perfect control you had in the old 2D games. Aiming is difficult. There are camera issues. FPS'es I usually enjoy, but they feel different.
The proof that this isn't about nostalgia came recently when I got a GBA and some games for it. Those games are simple, presentation is fairly basic, but boy do I have fun playing them!
If this laboratory had not invented this particular strain, it would never have existed, and there would have been no need to protect against it or even worry about it. There is no natural law stating that all types of viruses will eventually be created - there are countless possibilities for deadly viruses, and your new vaccin won't help against any of them, just like existing vaccins don't work against this one.
So what does a reprogrammed version of Pacman have to do with the SNES? And why does the submitter think MSX and Colecovision are the same thing (they are not, despite some similarities in the hardware)?
That first list is extremely PC-centric. Adding a handful of "old-school games" is just not good enough; there were entire genres on 8-bit and 16-bit systems that never appeared on PC and many games on those categories were classics that helped shape the field.
In addition, the breaking down into categories seems rather limiting. Why not have a database, allowing various break down methods depending on what you are looking for (eg. by platform, by age, by category, by number of players, by goal, etc.).
You have a job that requires you to start early. You also get home early. You do not have internet access at work, or are wise enough not to post to slashdot while you are there. This I can tell because you post as early as 16:09 (I'll be at work another two hours, usually...) and no later than 22:00 (mostly) on weekdays.
I'd hazard a guess that you have a fairly short commute.
You never post on sunday or monday evening, so I'd guess you go to church (sunday) and have some sort of social activity on monday.
You had a day off on september 11.
On saturday you go out (and post when you get back home).
All this, just from your posting log here on slashdot. Now imagine if someone had just about unlimited access to data regarding your person; not just some internet postings, but locations you visited, money you spent, etc. He would know as much about you as you do yourself...
It is _much_ harder to commit fraud using paper. For one thing, with software it requires just one guy making one change to a piece of software to bend the election results for an entire nation. With paper the same thing can be done on a local scale, but it is very hard to pull it off nationwide without people noticing.
Where I live I can go and watch elections as they happen (I can ask to be an observer and that request must be granted). I cannot do that with electronic voting, since I cannot watch what goes on inside the machine.
E-voting is simply a bad idea. Voting needs to be done using paper, in order to keep accountability. Paper, once written, cannot be changed and can always be recounted. Software offers no such guarantee, not even if a thousand 'experts' all proclaim the software to be safe.
I buy all my CD's over the web, and it is usually cheaper than buying them from a store (then again, where I live CD's are outrageously overpriced anyway). Some URL's:
This is a bit of a grey area, since it depends on the definition of "linking code together". Simple case: if you link your wrapper-library to GPL code, that library also becomes GPL. If you then link that library to your application, that application therefore also becomes GPL. In other words, it isn't possible to rip off the open source community by using something as simple as a wrapper.
Then again, if you put the GPL stuff in a separate process that you connect to through a socket, that's ok. Otherwise noone would be able to connect with Internet Explorer to Apache, for example.
And there are some really grey areas: how about loading the wrapper dynamically, does that count as "linking"? The answer might just be, "this depends on your operating system."
As for paying for GPL'ed source and binaries, that is no problem. You can most certainly ask money for GPL'ed software. For example, if a customer of mine wanted some new software, and assuming he pays for it, I do not mind the software being released under GPL. Since the customer already gets full rights to the source as it is (including the right to outsource further work to other companies) this changes very little for me.
Some movie reviewers seem to use the following, much simpler formula: "if everybody likes it, it is crap. If it is some obscure shitty art film, it is great."
As long as reviewers take this attitude to reviewing I won't care about their reviews...
Slashdot Mirror
I need to be able to edit /etc/inetd.conf (or xinetd), and restart the inetd daemon. I have a software architecture that depends on it, and in order to build / install / develop I need to be able to access it.
And before you ask, no it is not a fucking web app. It is an industrial control and monitoring application, and frankly I have trouble believing you would understand enough about software architecture that you would be able to make a judgement about whether I need it or not anyway.
Any downtime is not tolerated. For every minute my production machines are down, we're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Really.
Next time invest a couple of thousand dollars into a development server, maybe? Instead of losing a quanta-giggleion dollars per second when a developer accidentally knocks out a production server?
Why should I let anyone except someone who doesn't know exactly what power they wield have it?
You betray your previous statement that it is not about control, here. You should be asking "does this person _need_ access, to perform his company-assigned duties? How can I best help him achieve the company goals?" Instead you are just protecting your little kingdom.
So yeah, maybe I don't let the developers have free reign, but we also have the best-performing, most available systems around.
I'm so happy for you. Meanwhile, how are your developing coworkers doing? Failing all their deadlines? Not even getting the most basic infrastructure installed? Not even getting started with their projects, maybe?
Your problem is that you have wrong priorities. _You_ may like to see a great uptime, but other people simply want to get their work done. For developers, part of that work is installing new things on the system. Even if that threatens your holy grail of perfect uptime.
Here's a clue: developers develop _new_ stuff, they don't just maintain the status quo. Part of that process is installing things on their development server. When the application is rolled out, those same changes will necessarily also take place on the QA and production servers. You cannot develop things without also changing things. It is a natural part of the process.
I've worked in places where I could get maybe ten minutes worth of system administration attention every two weeks. I've worked with development servers that had no backup scheme "because it is just a development server, there is nothing critical on it" (well, except a million-euro project...). You'd fit right in at those places...
Don't you think your programmers might want to do something social once in a while? You know, just like real people?
I certainly recognize that Google presents a weakness in the web. For example, it could be used for censhorship by simply hiding undesirable information. It is also arguably a critical point in the web infrastructure, with all associated dangers. However, neither of these problems seem too severe. Attempts at censhorship would be overcome by massive numbers of bloggers, who have large readerships and would raise an enormeous outcry if such a thing were to happen. And if Google falls of the edge of the web, there are still plenty other search engines that can take its place.
As for Google being more harmful than the situation in the middle east, I won't comment other than by saying "nice troll".
Well, why did they release a demo then? I didn't like the demo either so I _obviously_ won't be bothered to buy the game. That's the whole point of a demo, to see if you like the game or not...
Even so, I wouldn't really like to be surprised by something like this during an interview. Some minor things that have major impact:
- I'm stressed out enough as it is during an interview. "Programming" is a state of mind, and so is "interviewing", and they are disjunct and hard to switch between.
- I may not have used the particular environment you have installed on the laptop. You may have Borland C++ installed while I know everything about Visual C++. If you hired me, it would take me a couple of hours to get comfortable with Borland - not enough to make me unhirable, but far too much for your 15 minute limit.
- By setting a time limit you are guaranteeing that people go for quick and dirty. You probably don't want candidates who do q&d, but you are asking them to display those skills.
As long as you are aware of these issues I guess it doesn't matter much, but given the fact that you haven't found anyone in 6 months suggests you may not be.
A flat tire takes 5-10 minutes to fix, and the only equipment you need to fix it is a patch, some glue, a few spanners, and a pump. It is an easy skill to learn, and a useful one to have, especially when you are dealing with recurring flat tire problems ;-)
Do you actually get answers to this other than "no, never"? If I were being interviewed I would understand this question as either "how will you try to screw us" or "give me an excuse why I should select someone else". Either way, pointing out my bad sides is hardly a priority for me during an interview.
What do you need on Linux to consider switching?
Hey, there's an idea... I think you may have stumbled onto something here! ;-)
Your funny statement notwithstanding, impossible things are by their very definition impossible on any OS in any situation.
But noone is making "real" adventures anymore (either of the text type, or in the Sierra/Lucas style), with a very small number of exceptions (I'd count Deus Ex and System Shock 2 as worthy successors to the adventure genre. Too bad the game industry doesn't seem to 'get' that it isn't about shooting, it is about thinking...).
As for shooters and platform games, they just don't work for me in 3D. You miss the pixel-perfect control you had in the old 2D games. Aiming is difficult. There are camera issues. FPS'es I usually enjoy, but they feel different.
The proof that this isn't about nostalgia came recently when I got a GBA and some games for it. Those games are simple, presentation is fairly basic, but boy do I have fun playing them!
If this laboratory had not invented this particular strain, it would never have existed, and there would have been no need to protect against it or even worry about it. There is no natural law stating that all types of viruses will eventually be created - there are countless possibilities for deadly viruses, and your new vaccin won't help against any of them, just like existing vaccins don't work against this one.
So what does a reprogrammed version of Pacman have to do with the SNES? And why does the submitter think MSX and Colecovision are the same thing (they are not, despite some similarities in the hardware)?
It may be a huge market, but if nobody ever pays for his games it isn't actually worth much...
In addition, the breaking down into categories seems rather limiting. Why not have a database, allowing various break down methods depending on what you are looking for (eg. by platform, by age, by category, by number of players, by goal, etc.).
No no, you got it all wrong. The website is linked to by SCO code, so now it is obviously owned by SCO!
I'd hazard a guess that you have a fairly short commute.
You never post on sunday or monday evening, so I'd guess you go to church (sunday) and have some sort of social activity on monday.
You had a day off on september 11.
On saturday you go out (and post when you get back home).
All this, just from your posting log here on slashdot. Now imagine if someone had just about unlimited access to data regarding your person; not just some internet postings, but locations you visited, money you spent, etc. He would know as much about you as you do yourself...
Just for the record, how close did I get? ;-)
Where I live I can go and watch elections as they happen (I can ask to be an observer and that request must be granted). I cannot do that with electronic voting, since I cannot watch what goes on inside the machine.
E-voting is simply a bad idea. Voting needs to be done using paper, in order to keep accountability. Paper, once written, cannot be changed and can always be recounted. Software offers no such guarantee, not even if a thousand 'experts' all proclaim the software to be safe.
Game music
Anime castle
Anime jungle
Anime outpost
Right stuff
Anime nation
Then again, if you put the GPL stuff in a separate process that you connect to through a socket, that's ok. Otherwise noone would be able to connect with Internet Explorer to Apache, for example.
And there are some really grey areas: how about loading the wrapper dynamically, does that count as "linking"? The answer might just be, "this depends on your operating system."
As for paying for GPL'ed source and binaries, that is no problem. You can most certainly ask money for GPL'ed software. For example, if a customer of mine wanted some new software, and assuming he pays for it, I do not mind the software being released under GPL. Since the customer already gets full rights to the source as it is (including the right to outsource further work to other companies) this changes very little for me.
Oh, for completeness I should mention IANAL...
As long as reviewers take this attitude to reviewing I won't care about their reviews...