I was in the same boat: love programming, got a job, program all day, personal projects weren't as fun. I decided it was my computing environment being the same old thing I see at work every day. So I downloaded Mandrake a year ago. I started shell scripting, then Tcl/Tk, read The C Programming Language (it's better with a *nix box), started learning assembly (which I've always wanted to learn to do well), and am currently enjoying learning my new favorite editor - vi.
My advice is to make your computing experience at home as different as possible from work. Don't use the language you'd normally use at work. Learn a new one. It's the thrill of discovery, mastering something new that you enjoy, and accomplishment that drew you to programming in the first place. You need to get all that back in the mix. The experience won't hurt your career either.
My point is that you must have been doing something *really* wrong
Nope, it's just that some packages just aren't available in any of the common repositories. Surely you don't think every program and every library ever written is available for every distro. You've obviously never packaged a program that used anything out of the ordinary. Good for you.
No thanks, I don't want a config tool that forces you to use it for everything you do...clobbering my changes
There you go missing the whole point again. Grandma is not going to be tweaking her config files. My point is urpmi might be nice, but if you're going to give grandma a tool, YaSt is better. We could go on talking about the merits or lack thereof of each forever. You know my opinion. And I'm the one that's more experienced since I've tried and used both, and you refuse to. So I'm done talking. How about we discuss religion or politics. Those issues ought to be settled in about the same amount of time.
While I appreciate your advice, I never said I needed help installing RPMs or filing bugs. I have absolutely no problem with either. You're writing to someone that prefers to compile their own source code and compile the dependancies himself.
I think you might be missing the point of my posts, and the point of the story, which was Fedora deciding on urpmi as their new package front end. This, undoubtedly, is to increase user-friendliness. My point is, for the Joe Sixpacks of the world, you can't beat YaST. Also the story asked if this was a step closer to "Cross-distro RPMs". YaST proved (to me) that it could handle some RPMs better than the distro the RPMs were created for.
BTW - YaST was just GPL'd by SUSE (although it's not available for download yet). Try it and you'll see why they hung on to it so long.
If you had urpmi media available that had the required packages, then maybe you didn't update the medium
The update medium on my machines stay updated, and I have the original CDs and PLF in my sources also. Basically there aren't prebuilt packages for Mandrake for some relatively common libraries and programs, either officially or unofficially. That or the name of the package for Mandrake was not the standard name of the library/program.
I'm not putting down urpmi, and YaST would choke if it couldn't find a package just like urpmi does. But, YaST is a vastly superior tool all around. It's comparable to Control Panel in Windows in every way, only better IMO. This, coupled with the fact that SUSE seems to have packages prebuilt for just about everything, make software installation a non-issue. That's saying a lot for a Linux distro as we all know. Windows users are always complaining about a two-click installation. Well, SUSE with YaST is it. I didn't think anything could be easier than Mandrake and urpmi, I was wrong.
Anecdotal for sure but: I've been using Mandrake and urpmi for about a year and a half now. I create my own RPMs for programs I install that don't have one, so that I can uninstall it easily if need be and to contribute something back to the community however small. I list all dependencies in the RPM exactly like I should, however urpmi never would automatically resolve those dependencies on another Mandrake box (the box the RPMs were built with of course had the dependents).
I decided to install SUSE last week for s#17s and giggles, and to see why it was so well thought of. YAST amazingly resolved those dependencies in my RPMs without a hiccup. Out of the 100s of packages I've installed I have not been in dependency hell once. I also like the fact that you can right-click on any RPM and click "Install with YAST" in the context menu. Very, very easy and nice. Not one problem so far installing software.
...then figure out a way to Six-Sigma and Shigijutsu it to the point where they lose a shit-load of money on it.
Amen. I'm working for GE right now. They took a great company, Six-Sigma'ed it and changed the culture so much the customers didn't like it, started losing money, now they're unloading it with an IPO.
Off topic I know but it never ceases to amaze me how management intentionally changes something that works to justify themselves existing. Take McDonalds for instance. Every couple of years for the past 10 or so they've changed something seemingly insignificant about the taste of the food. From keeping the food in little steam drawers, to changing the oil in the fries (they're no longer the best IMO), etc. Bit by bit they've changed something good, that made money, into crap. So they could put down on a piece of paper how many pennies per unit they saved. Each preceeding PHB has pulled the same thing and the cycle will continue until one day, you'll order a cheeseburger and get a pickle wrapped in newspaper. This goes on all over the place, like taking that one ounce out of the ketchup bottle and charging the same price, then the next PHB does it, and so on. All while gradually but surely ruining their products in the customer's eyes.
[The ActiveX Plugin] is configured to only work with the Windows Media Player control.
You should read the description of the ActiveX Plugin. Having said that, the developer is assumably trying to get all ActiveX to work with Mozilla eventually. I think this should be taken out of the plugins list before Joe Sixpack finds it. The developer can release it on his own if he likes. But making it even possible for Mozilla to be as insecure as IE is not a good idea IMHO.
You claim you don't understand that programmers are paid to get a job done regardless of hours: You are not paid to work 40 hours you are paid to get a job done? What the fuck?
Then you go on to explain it quite well: Fixed pay, higher positions can have this. Anyone from movie stars to directors get a fixed amount but are supposed to do the job that needs to be done regardless of hours.
You don't have to be a movie star to have a "fixed pay". Most professionals in America have a version of it. Of course, in most businesses this usually means working more than 40 hours instead of less. Either way you get the same amount. Hours are not usually tracked in any official way. But yes, they'd notice if you worked 30 minutes a day and fire you. They just don't seem to notice when you're working 12.
The He in question a reference to something in the article. It has nothing to do with the title, and in the context in which the author meant it, yes it should have been capitalized (btw - learn to spell that word). Since you can't bother to be informed about what you're talking about, here you go...
"...computer architect, as he often describes himself -- a Silicon Valley deity, generally regarded as one of the most gifted..."
So does that mean if you come up with some novel idea, intel or some other big company should be able to profit from it, while you don't because they have the capital to persue the idea and you don't?
Not necessarily. But if you come up with some novel idea - have no intention of pursuing it, don't have the cash to pursue it anyway, and don't want to sell it - you shouldn't be allowed to sit back and keep society from benefiting from it. I don't know what the answer is, perhaps an "intention to pursue within n years" amendment to patent law, which went into effect when the patent was granted, and every time the patent changed ownership. So you couldn't hold an idea hostage for very long unless you actually used it. Maybe that would prevent companies from existing just to sue other companies.
LaserDiscs were the first optical disc storage media, invented in the late 1960's by Philips. The compact disc was developed from this technology in 1980. The LD players were first available on the market in 1978, and first demonstrated in 1972. These players automatically played the video on the storage media, so this has been around for at least 30 years. It's also in CD players mentioned in earlier posts, which came just a little later. I often wonder if the employees of the US Patent Office came here, very recently, from another planet. That might explain why they have no clue about prior inventions.
Still, the AVI mime types are video/msvideo, video/x-msvideo, video/avi. AVI was developed by Microsoft to add multimedia capabilities to Windows. When I see the extension "avi" I think Microsoft, regardless of what platform it was encoded on or how it was encoded.
Hey cool, just saw your reply. A little late now.:) I see YMMV with this one anyway with Linux, which I use, and would want it to work with in case I needed/wanted to transfer something to their machine. I ended up getting 2 64MB PNY drives for about $29 each.
My algorithm is very simple:
if (snailmail==bill) {
toTrash snailmail;
}
Really. I pay bills using an online service through my bank. For bills that I can't get electronically, I still pay them using the service. So, there is a record of me paying the bill through the service along with account numbers, etc, and there is a record in my online check register of the money going out and to whom it was paid. And for bills that I do get electronically, there is all of the above plus the actual online copy of the bill - in the highly unlikely event I need to see it again. I don't feel the need to keep paper.
Right on! I did the same thing for two family members that take work home with them often and lug a 100MB Zip drive with them. You can 128MB USB drives for about US$45 and they're way more convenient.
According to the IRS: The 8 percent refers to an allocation required on the 8027 tip-reporting forms when the total amount of tips reported for any payroll period is less than 8 percent of total gross receipts. There is a widely held misperception that as long as employees in an establishment are reporting 8 percent neither they nor the establishment are vulnerable to an audit. THIS IS FALSE. If servers are not reporting an average of 8 percent, this triggers certain requirements for employers -- i.e., you must allocate a tip amount of 8 percent to each server.
Restaurants are only required to make 8 percent mandatory if the total tip amounts reported by the entire staff together is under 8 percent of total sales for any given pay period. That would mean that about half of the customers could not tip, and 8 percent still wouldn't be mandatory according to the law. You could get $0 in tips for a pay period, and as long as everyone else got average, or even below-average, tips you should get your entire pay check. Restaurants probably do the 8 percent across the board to save on their own bookkeeping costs. This may or may not be legal. I am not a lawyer.
Because a)According to MS this is a "critical" patch, b)It wasn't issued when it should have been, it was "missed", and c)If MS's own update system didn't have a flaw of some sort, you still wouldn't have the patch.
If a known critical Linux patch was withheld or otherwise delayed for any reason, you can very safely bet that it would be all over Slashdot too. I don't know why you would categorize this as "understandable".
You hit the nail on the head here. The author thinks he failed the polygraph because polygraphs aren't reliable. Instead he failed because he crumbled miserably under stress.
how careful you will be with secrets - he's putting this whole experience on the internet. who you trust - answering questions about himself, your example how normal do you look and how you react under pressure and stress - not breathing (out of extreme fear) while taking a polygraph
The interviewer in the car was correct in saying "You're getting defensive". In fact, the entire act of writing this story and justifying himself not getting the job, and criticizing the interview methods, is "being defensive". Overly defensive I'd say. He seems like a nice person, probably more well adjusted than most, but I can't say I'm disappointed that he didn't get the job.
Whether or not it's text-based won't really make a difference with this installer. I imagine you will have a choice of front-ends that all do the same thing when this moves out of beta. From the article:
"...but due to its modular design the developers can stick almost any front-end on it they like. There are already test builds using a GTK (ie: Gnome-style) GUI with mouse-driven menus etc, and if you really wanted to you could build a front-end using anything from a Braille device to Macromedia Flash."
zeal[ot] : eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something (Merriam-Webster)
terror[ist] : the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion (Merriam-Webster)
All terrorists are zealots, but not all zealots are terrorists. Do you think this "journalist" is too stupid to realize that? Or do you think he wanted to say "if you have an 'ardent interest' in Linux you're a terrorist" to guarantee some reaction? That's how it's flamebait.
Note Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and Windows 95 also are not affected by this issue. However, these products are no longer supported. Users of these products are strongly encouraged to upgrade to later versions.
WTF? How this translates to me - "If your computer is immune from these new strains of virii you are strongly encouraged to make it vulnerable."
Re:Please join the mandrake club.
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 1
Don't just "steal" Linux
That was modded insightful? Perhaps those moderators should acquaint themselves with GNU/Linux/OSS/GPL... You cannot steal what is given for free.
...you are going to get better higher quality software...
Better than who? I think you mean a higher quality distribution of the free software you're not directly contributing to. Which is not a bad thing. But you need to give the OSS software projects donations for better software.
I agree with the spirit of this post, that everyone should contribute whatever they can, in whatever form, to support Linux. If we don't nobody will. When Linux is on Joe Sixpack's home computer, he's not going to understand or give a crap about the spirit of OSS.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the same boat: love programming, got a job, program all day, personal projects weren't as fun. I decided it was my computing environment being the same old thing I see at work every day. So I downloaded Mandrake a year ago. I started shell scripting, then Tcl/Tk, read The C Programming Language (it's better with a *nix box), started learning assembly (which I've always wanted to learn to do well), and am currently enjoying learning my new favorite editor - vi.
My advice is to make your computing experience at home as different as possible from work. Don't use the language you'd normally use at work. Learn a new one. It's the thrill of discovery, mastering something new that you enjoy, and accomplishment that drew you to programming in the first place. You need to get all that back in the mix. The experience won't hurt your career either.
My point is that you must have been doing something *really* wrong
Nope, it's just that some packages just aren't available in any of the common repositories. Surely you don't think every program and every library ever written is available for every distro. You've obviously never packaged a program that used anything out of the ordinary. Good for you.
No thanks, I don't want a config tool that forces you to use it for everything you do...clobbering my changes
There you go missing the whole point again. Grandma is not going to be tweaking her config files. My point is urpmi might be nice, but if you're going to give grandma a tool, YaSt is better. We could go on talking about the merits or lack thereof of each forever. You know my opinion. And I'm the one that's more experienced since I've tried and used both, and you refuse to. So I'm done talking. How about we discuss religion or politics. Those issues ought to be settled in about the same amount of time.
And here if you can't get it from sourceforge:
Vega Strike
While I appreciate your advice, I never said I needed help installing RPMs or filing bugs. I have absolutely no problem with either. You're writing to someone that prefers to compile their own source code and compile the dependancies himself.
I think you might be missing the point of my posts, and the point of the story, which was Fedora deciding on urpmi as their new package front end. This, undoubtedly, is to increase user-friendliness. My point is, for the Joe Sixpacks of the world, you can't beat YaST. Also the story asked if this was a step closer to "Cross-distro RPMs". YaST proved (to me) that it could handle some RPMs better than the distro the RPMs were created for.
BTW - YaST was just GPL'd by SUSE (although it's not available for download yet). Try it and you'll see why they hung on to it so long.
If you had urpmi media available that had the required packages, then maybe you didn't update the medium
The update medium on my machines stay updated, and I have the original CDs and PLF in my sources also. Basically there aren't prebuilt packages for Mandrake for some relatively common libraries and programs, either officially or unofficially. That or the name of the package for Mandrake was not the standard name of the library/program.
I'm not putting down urpmi, and YaST would choke if it couldn't find a package just like urpmi does. But, YaST is a vastly superior tool all around. It's comparable to Control Panel in Windows in every way, only better IMO. This, coupled with the fact that SUSE seems to have packages prebuilt for just about everything, make software installation a non-issue. That's saying a lot for a Linux distro as we all know. Windows users are always complaining about a two-click installation. Well, SUSE with YaST is it. I didn't think anything could be easier than Mandrake and urpmi, I was wrong.
Anecdotal for sure but: I've been using Mandrake and urpmi for about a year and a half now. I create my own RPMs for programs I install that don't have one, so that I can uninstall it easily if need be and to contribute something back to the community however small. I list all dependencies in the RPM exactly like I should, however urpmi never would automatically resolve those dependencies on another Mandrake box (the box the RPMs were built with of course had the dependents).
I decided to install SUSE last week for s#17s and giggles, and to see why it was so well thought of. YAST amazingly resolved those dependencies in my RPMs without a hiccup. Out of the 100s of packages I've installed I have not been in dependency hell once. I also like the fact that you can right-click on any RPM and click "Install with YAST" in the context menu. Very, very easy and nice. Not one problem so far installing software.
...then figure out a way to Six-Sigma and Shigijutsu it to the point where they lose a shit-load of money on it.
Amen. I'm working for GE right now. They took a great company, Six-Sigma'ed it and changed the culture so much the customers didn't like it, started losing money, now they're unloading it with an IPO.
Off topic I know but it never ceases to amaze me how management intentionally changes something that works to justify themselves existing. Take McDonalds for instance. Every couple of years for the past 10 or so they've changed something seemingly insignificant about the taste of the food. From keeping the food in little steam drawers, to changing the oil in the fries (they're no longer the best IMO), etc. Bit by bit they've changed something good, that made money, into crap. So they could put down on a piece of paper how many pennies per unit they saved. Each preceeding PHB has pulled the same thing and the cycle will continue until one day, you'll order a cheeseburger and get a pickle wrapped in newspaper. This goes on all over the place, like taking that one ounce out of the ketchup bottle and charging the same price, then the next PHB does it, and so on. All while gradually but surely ruining their products in the customer's eyes.
Besides not being exploitable by this bug:
[The ActiveX Plugin] is configured to only work with the Windows Media Player control.
You should read the description of the ActiveX Plugin. Having said that, the developer is assumably trying to get all ActiveX to work with Mozilla eventually. I think this should be taken out of the plugins list before Joe Sixpack finds it. The developer can release it on his own if he likes. But making it even possible for Mozilla to be as insecure as IE is not a good idea IMHO.
You claim you don't understand that programmers are paid to get a job done regardless of hours:
You are not paid to work 40 hours you are paid to get a job done? What the fuck?
Then you go on to explain it quite well:
Fixed pay, higher positions can have this. Anyone from movie stars to directors get a fixed amount but are supposed to do the job that needs to be done regardless of hours.
You don't have to be a movie star to have a "fixed pay". Most professionals in America have a version of it. Of course, in most businesses this usually means working more than 40 hours instead of less. Either way you get the same amount. Hours are not usually tracked in any official way. But yes, they'd notice if you worked 30 minutes a day and fire you. They just don't seem to notice when you're working 12.
Same thing here, started months ago, always in Georgia, 2 or 3 times a day during business hours.
The He in question a reference to something in the article. It has nothing to do with the title, and in the context in which the author meant it, yes it should have been capitalized (btw - learn to spell that word). Since you can't bother to be informed about what you're talking about, here you go...
"...computer architect, as he often describes himself -- a Silicon Valley deity, generally regarded as one of the most gifted..."
So does that mean if you come up with some novel idea, intel or some other big company should be able to profit from it, while you don't because they have the capital to persue the idea and you don't?
Not necessarily. But if you come up with some novel idea - have no intention of pursuing it, don't have the cash to pursue it anyway, and don't want to sell it - you shouldn't be allowed to sit back and keep society from benefiting from it. I don't know what the answer is, perhaps an "intention to pursue within n years" amendment to patent law, which went into effect when the patent was granted, and every time the patent changed ownership. So you couldn't hold an idea hostage for very long unless you actually used it. Maybe that would prevent companies from existing just to sue other companies.
The patents and dates are:
LaserDiscs were the first optical disc storage media, invented in the late 1960's by Philips. The compact disc was developed from this technology in 1980. The LD players were first available on the market in 1978, and first demonstrated in 1972. These players automatically played the video on the storage media, so this has been around for at least 30 years. It's also in CD players mentioned in earlier posts, which came just a little later. I often wonder if the employees of the US Patent Office came here, very recently, from another planet. That might explain why they have no clue about prior inventions.
Still, the AVI mime types are video/msvideo, video/x-msvideo, video/avi. AVI was developed by Microsoft to add multimedia capabilities to Windows. When I see the extension "avi" I think Microsoft, regardless of what platform it was encoded on or how it was encoded.
Is it just me or is there something blasphemous about a video of Linus in MS-Video format?
Hey cool, just saw your reply. A little late now. :) I see YMMV with this one anyway with Linux, which I use, and would want it to work with in case I needed/wanted to transfer something to their machine. I ended up getting 2 64MB PNY drives for about $29 each.
My algorithm is very simple: if (snailmail==bill) { toTrash snailmail; } Really. I pay bills using an online service through my bank. For bills that I can't get electronically, I still pay them using the service. So, there is a record of me paying the bill through the service along with account numbers, etc, and there is a record in my online check register of the money going out and to whom it was paid. And for bills that I do get electronically, there is all of the above plus the actual online copy of the bill - in the highly unlikely event I need to see it again. I don't feel the need to keep paper.
Right on! I did the same thing for two family members that take work home with them often and lug a 100MB Zip drive with them. You can 128MB USB drives for about US$45 and they're way more convenient.
No actually he/she is not wrong.
According to the IRS: The 8 percent refers to an allocation required on the 8027 tip-reporting forms when the total amount of tips reported for any payroll period is less than 8 percent of total gross receipts. There is a widely held misperception that as long as employees in an establishment are reporting 8 percent neither they nor the establishment are vulnerable to an audit. THIS IS FALSE. If servers are not reporting an average of 8 percent, this triggers certain requirements for employers -- i.e., you must allocate a tip amount of 8 percent to each server.
Restaurants are only required to make 8 percent mandatory if the total tip amounts reported by the entire staff together is under 8 percent of total sales for any given pay period. That would mean that about half of the customers could not tip, and 8 percent still wouldn't be mandatory according to the law. You could get $0 in tips for a pay period, and as long as everyone else got average, or even below-average, tips you should get your entire pay check. Restaurants probably do the 8 percent across the board to save on their own bookkeeping costs. This may or may not be legal. I am not a lawyer.
Because a)According to MS this is a "critical" patch, b)It wasn't issued when it should have been, it was "missed", and c)If MS's own update system didn't have a flaw of some sort, you still wouldn't have the patch.
If a known critical Linux patch was withheld or otherwise delayed for any reason, you can very safely bet that it would be all over Slashdot too. I don't know why you would categorize this as "understandable".
You hit the nail on the head here. The author thinks he failed the polygraph because polygraphs aren't reliable. Instead he failed because he crumbled miserably under stress.
how careful you will be with secrets - he's putting this whole experience on the internet.
who you trust - answering questions about himself, your example
how normal do you look and how you react under pressure and stress - not breathing (out of extreme fear) while taking a polygraph
The interviewer in the car was correct in saying "You're getting defensive". In fact, the entire act of writing this story and justifying himself not getting the job, and criticizing the interview methods, is "being defensive". Overly defensive I'd say. He seems like a nice person, probably more well adjusted than most, but I can't say I'm disappointed that he didn't get the job.
Whether or not it's text-based won't really make a difference with this installer. I imagine you will have a choice of front-ends that all do the same thing when this moves out of beta. From the article:
"...but due to its modular design the developers can stick almost any front-end on it they like. There are already test builds using a GTK (ie: Gnome-style) GUI with mouse-driven menus etc, and if you really wanted to you could build a front-end using anything from a Braille device to Macromedia Flash."
zeal[ot] : eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something (Merriam-Webster)
terror[ist] : the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion (Merriam-Webster)
All terrorists are zealots, but not all zealots are terrorists. Do you think this "journalist" is too stupid to realize that? Or do you think he wanted to say "if you have an 'ardent interest' in Linux you're a terrorist" to guarantee some reaction? That's how it's flamebait.
From Microsoft:
Note Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and Windows 95 also are not affected by this issue. However, these products are no longer supported. Users of these products are strongly encouraged to upgrade to later versions.
WTF? How this translates to me - "If your computer is immune from these new strains of virii you are strongly encouraged to make it vulnerable."
Don't just "steal" Linux
That was modded insightful? Perhaps those moderators should acquaint themselves with GNU/Linux/OSS/GPL... You cannot steal what is given for free.
Better than who? I think you mean a higher quality distribution of the free software you're not directly contributing to. Which is not a bad thing. But you need to give the OSS software projects donations for better software.
I agree with the spirit of this post, that everyone should contribute whatever they can, in whatever form, to support Linux. If we don't nobody will. When Linux is on Joe Sixpack's home computer, he's not going to understand or give a crap about the spirit of OSS.