Forgot to mention. My favorite method is to copy my OpenBSD downloads to my iBook, served as http with Apache when required I do local network installs where ever I need to take it.
Network installs are really nice, and doing it with just a floppy over a fast internet connection is excellent too.
I love OpenBSD. It's so clean it's clinical. The only time my OpenBSD machines have down time is when I'm upgrading them to the latest releases or patches.
Yes i realize you can isntall over the wire and then create an image, but not when you are on a slow link.
Actually, I just finished downloading OpenBSD 3.2 for i386. It stopped while I was sleeping so it could have come faster if my 56k ISP didn't have a time limit for dial-up connections.
Just grab the i386 directory with "wget -cr ftp-or-http...", burn it to/3.2/i386/ as a bootable CD using cdrom32.fs as the boot image.
You now have an i386 bootable OpenBSD 3.2 CD with just a 121MB download. If you don't want a GUI, you could omit the downloading of anything that starts with x to make it an even smaller download (67MB).
You could download the system and kernel sources, ports and packages if you want too...
I just did it over 56k no problem. I still like to buy OpenBSD CD's though. Now I'm off to get macppc and mac68k (my CD will also be macppc bootable)...
all your explanations of how pool balls move about a pool table are really basic physics.
Yes I know.
Rather than accusing the smart table of failing
I didn't accuse the smart table of anything. I'm just stating for anyone that might think that "angle of incidence = angle of reflection" is too simplistic for pool physics.
(getting the player to properly execute the shot, however, is another story).
Jeeze you think so Einstein? Humans are usually the weakest link in automated systems.
I don't think anyone would invest as much time as they likely did in creating a 'smart table' without realizing the balls have spin. I would guess their understanding of it all goes far deeper than your own.
I suppose you think that you are insulting me? First of all, there's no need to get defensive, I'm not attacking them. Second, I would bloody well hope that someone who sets out to make a "smart pool table" (whether as a non-technical visionary with money or a geek studying the physics) would know more about it than me, who hasn't studied it beyond mere curiosity.
but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it)
Cool, some people will get to watch their BSOD's a few seconds more.
On a serious note, I wonder if this could actually cause video card makers to make cards that use memory that does not have to be dynamically refreshed, since the monitor pixels can hold the image. Might reduce memory latency for the frame buffers of the future.
Re:smart pool table
on
Smart Pool Table
·
· Score: 4, Informative
All this "laser" business reminds me of an old episode of Quantum Leap.
Lasers are actually not practical for showing pool ball angles after the first bounce (even if the shooter takes imparted cushion spin into account with off centre shooting) due to the fact that the angle reduces after each successive bounce due to spin the cushions impart on the ball.
If you hit a ball hard at a moderate angle, intending to get the ball to bounce back and forth many times between two cushions, you will find that the angle will keep getting closer to 90 degrees to the cushions, until it actually appears that the ball is just bouncing back and forth parallel to the cushions 90 degrees to those being bounced off. Going from a moderate start angle to close to 90 degrees quite quickly.
I don't think photons suffer the imparted effects of cushion spin.
Also, not related to angle, but velocity, is that when a ball is first hit (on centre) it moves across the table surface initially without forward "rolling" spinning. The friction between the ball and table surface actually slows the ball down mostly up to the point where the rolling becomes "in step" with the velocity. When this ball hits a cushion, this rolling speed is slowed dramatically by the sudden braking effect of the ball pushing hard into the cushion and any rolling that remains after the bounce is quickly reversed as the ball now starts rolling in the opposite directing, again due to the friction of the ball against table surface. This in addition to energy being absorbed by the cushion (well, I don't like the term "absorbed" being used to describe energy "loss". The energy is converted to sound and heat) has the overall effect of making a ball travel much less than if it were to be hit with the same force without obstacles.
The technology behind James, who looks like a professional pool player
So he has a mullet, old faded AC/DC t-shirt (hanging out), worn out old blue jeans, home made tattoos that have H A T E on his fingers on one hand and L O V E on the other, a beer in hand and squinting from his cigarette smoke that he lit with his Harley Davidson Zippo lighter (he's never actually owned a Harley though) while he waits for his shot. When he takes his shot, he smashes the sweet baby Jesus out of it where ever possible.
Of course, the physics of pool has and never will enter his head, because pool comes naturally to him, what growing up in pool halls and all.
He's professional because he usually wins the local comp, which just covers his practice expenses.
Perhaps you meant Opera is trying to make their browser as unstable and feature-bare as Netscape 4 an Unix?
The instability of Netscape is just truely astounding. I still remember getting lots of "bus errors" when trying to run Netscape under Red Hat 5.0 and thinking that I was doing something wrong. ; )
Netscape 7 under Wintel seems a lot better, but I can't help but wonder why they would bother any more. I'm running it out of morbid curiosity, just wanting to see if they've upgraded the speed and stability from the Netscape 6 (molasses) release. Maybe they're trying to be a minority of minorities. I can't see any niche left that they could fit into, even if they could fix all the old problems.
Choose an arch and choose an OS and you can always be sure that Netscape will crash on it, right when you actually are about to do something at a stage that you think you should be cut-and-pasting, just in case.
Your average Slashdot poster is a zombie 365.25 days a year anyway.:)
I can see, not just by your 5 digit user id or your accurate depiction of the average/. user, that you've been around/. for a while. Taking into consideration leap "years" shows that you're one not to get caught out by/. loosers who rip to shreds any post that has too little information to convey the posters opinion absolutely completely. These/. loosers most often ram your own opinion down your throat as if it is thiers and nobody elses, as if you deserve it for not being quite verbose enough. They have a need to add and blow out of proportion the smallest and most irrelevant amount of information as if it is what matters most, in a pursuit to show everyone how much better they are than the original poster.
a web browser for freebsd is like playing quake on my stereo. freebsd, just like every other non-Mac, non-Windows OS, belongs on a server that nobody ever logs in to.
As far as I can remember, Quake was designed and built on NeXT machines, BTW.
The minds behind the production of the current Mac OS are the types that would run something like FreeBSD as a desktop. It's those types that create. The types who share your attitude are the types that take whatever is given to them, are not creative and try to appear like they matter when all they're really good at is shooting shit in Quake.
I don't disagree with any of your points. I just wanted to state the major advantages SCSI has over IDE, answering the "why would anyone use SCSI over IDE" type question.
Different horses for different courses. I wouldn't waste the money of a SCSI drive on a video editing workstation but I also would not choose IDE for a busy database.
I have a.45 semi-auto that can remove even those keys, one way or the other. They can either come out of their mouth or fingers, or then theres the other option, splattering those keys all over a wall.;)
Not only is it logical, but it is also very computer friendly since sorting datestamps that are in this format is easy: an ascending sort is a chronological sort.
Oh tell me about it. Today I was at a client site who complained that they couldn't find their latest backup files. Reason being, that they were naming their backup files with alpha numerics mixed throughout the files and more importantly without leading zeroes.
Result being, files being naturally sorted in WinNT 4 Windows Explorer that did not go in the order the dates did.
The users backups were there, but so hard to find that they called me in because they were worried that their backups were not working!
They were only weekly backups, so if they saved them as apYYYYWW.zip all would have appeared to be fine. Where ap is an abreviation of the application data being backed up, YYYY obviously year and WW the week of the year. apYYYYMMWWDD would be nicer so that in the future, referencing particular backup dates could be quicker.
Thanks for that link BTW. Now I have extra ammo. ; )
can anyone recommend some sites where there is some intelligent discussion of bsd news and issues
I prefer mailing lists. In fact, after signing up to some interesting OpenBSD lists (mostly just reading) I found I was reading OpenBSD a lot less and reading www.deadly.org a lot more (and wishing it had a lot more articles and discussion).
All I'm saying is that if people are hell-bent on running SCSI for some reason, they're more than welcome to.
SCSI has the ability to queue commands and re-order the pending commands in such a way as to reduce head movement. They can also read and write to the SCSI bus while they are carrying out received commands and share the SCSI bus bandwidth with more SCSI devices on the same bus.
An IDE bus can only service one command and one device at a time.
If a SCSI drive was working on one command fetching data and another four commands were pending: 1st near the start of the disk, 2nd near the end, 3rd near the start and 4th near the end, instead of the head movement going, start-end-start-end in the order that the commands were received by the drive, the drive could re-order the commands while it waits for the current command to complete so that the commands would be carried out: 1st, 3rd, 2nd then 4th so the head movement would go: start-start-end-end, reducing time to fetch the data due to reduced head movement. 1 full stroke versus 3.
For desktop apps, this doesn't matter so much. But for database servers which can tend to send lots of small requests scattered randomly around the disk, this can have a huge performance gain over IDE drives, many many times.
Perhaps Apple can remedy this a little with many drives. Maybe they can perform the re-ordering in their SCSI interface?.
Not my responsibility. Someone was hired for exactly this.
2. running a test environment using the new equipment.
Sure, well just go out and buy a spare PABX that meets exactly all firmware revisions in our production unit, just to test it out.
Your stupidity is astounding, and I feel sorry for your employer, who no doubt had to pay per hour while you did your learning on the job (probably overtime too, hmm?)
I wasn't supposed to be learning undocumented addressing codes. That is the point. I was just supposed to do the much lower level programming and manual labor.
The technical stuff was supposed to be figured out already.
Did you consider testing on one or two units to make sure it WOULD work before ripping out everyone's old units?
This was not my responsibility though. Trusting someone with many years of experience more than myself was obviously the wrong thing to do. I leanred valuable lessons from it.
You may have saved yourself (and the crew that works for you, if any) a lot of grief and a weekend if you had tested your implementation before implementing it.
Nobody worked under myself. It was NOT MY IMPLEMENTATION. I WISH IT WERE!
If he had done the testing and used his mad skillz to recover, then no problem, shit happens.
The testing was not up to me! Although I should have taken it upon myself to test one unit first and obviously would do that next time.
Have you never learned through failings?
My point was that he didn't do the testing and then thought the was a hero for fixing the problem that he created.
I didn't create the problem, though I was obviously a part of it. I'm glad I could fix it though. I'm not trying to impress you. Merely trying to point out that there are many moments in IT where comfort of staff is more important to productivity than how they look.
So to summarize: Without ever testing, he removed everyone's old phone, put in the new phones and tried to program them. This is after the expert "dropped" the new phones on him. He obviously knew that the "expert" had never visited the site, not doing any testing is negligence.
Actually, I did not know that the expert never visited the site until I queried how it could have been bungled so baddly.
This is clearly sloppy and unprofessional work, and I stand by my instinct to walk him out.
Not testing a phone first because I trusted someone who was hired as an expert beyond all experts in my whole country, was my failing.
That doesn't mean that I should be fired. I went to extrordinary lengths to rectify the problem. And lessons were learned.
Obviously I wouldn't trust anyone absolutely ever again and test for myself.
I was not the specially hired 'expert' though. Some guy flown in especially to design the roll-out was the one who was supposed to do the testing.
I received phones on a Friday afternoon and was told to have it done before Monday.
I should have tested one before starting the lot, I agree. But I was fresh out of NEAX training and I was assured by the expert with many more years of experience than myself, that it would be fine.
The lesson I learned was to never trust the judgement of anyone, regardless of how much more knowledge and experience they have than yourself. I think that is a pretty sad lesson.
You sound like just another seat-of-the-pants cowboy that gives IT a bad name.
Huh? As someone else put it "I fixed someone elses problem". The supposed expert was the cowboy, not me.
My true failing was that I trusted this so called expert.
If people aren't able to dress with some semblance of style, they should go work somewhere else, somewhere less demanding (would you like fries with that?).
I've worked as a systems/network admin for stock exchanges to top tier law firms. Each of these companies allowed lax dress codes.
Ever worked an average of 14 hours a day, 6-7 days a week in a suit? Ever crawled under desks, floors, above ceilings, behind racks and between walls tracing cables? Ever worked out of hours when the air-con is typically off?
I once worked 27 hours straight on a weekend trying to find undocumented button addresses for new 'unsupported' digital handsets on an NEC NEAX PABX. I had a bunch of new handsets dropped on me by the NEAX 'expert' who was on a short contract (from overseas) to design the roll-out of these new units (D-Term V's), who incidentally NEVER actually attended the site in question to find out that our PABX did not support them at all, according to NEC and Telstra. So I find this out after removing everyones phone, their old 4 wire digital cards, and patching then replacing with new phones, 2 wire digital cards and patching and then.... the programming.... which didn't work. I was faced with undoing all this work or trying to first figure out if I could indeed make these units work fully. So eventually I did figure out all the addressing required, literally through manual brute-force trial and error. There was no way this mission critical dept could be without phones come Monday. After 27 hours, they were all completely working, to the shock of my IT work mates and NEC. How would you like to work 27 hours straight, without air-con, living off McDonalds, in a bloody suit?
Being a contractor, I was being paid hourly, so I wasn't a chump as some here might think.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always been a fan of FreeBSD. How does OpenBSD compare?
The install is a very straight forward, no nonsense bare bones affair. My installs typically take on the order of 3 (THREE) minutes.
The file system, config files and man pages are very clean. The resulting install is very tidy and pretty small. From there you add packages to taste.
Forgot to mention. My favorite method is to copy my OpenBSD downloads to my iBook, served as http with Apache when required I do local network installs where ever I need to take it.
Network installs are really nice, and doing it with just a floppy over a fast internet connection is excellent too.
I love OpenBSD. It's so clean it's clinical. The only time my OpenBSD machines have down time is when I'm upgrading them to the latest releases or patches.
Yes i realize you can isntall over the wire and then create an image, but not when you are on a slow link.
/3.2/i386/ as a bootable CD using cdrom32.fs as the boot image.
Actually, I just finished downloading OpenBSD 3.2 for i386. It stopped while I was sleeping so it could have come faster if my 56k ISP didn't have a time limit for dial-up connections.
Just grab the i386 directory with "wget -cr ftp-or-http...", burn it to
You now have an i386 bootable OpenBSD 3.2 CD with just a 121MB download. If you don't want a GUI, you could omit the downloading of anything that starts with x to make it an even smaller download (67MB).
You could download the system and kernel sources, ports and packages if you want too...
I just did it over 56k no problem. I still like to buy OpenBSD CD's though. Now I'm off to get macppc and mac68k (my CD will also be macppc bootable)...
all your explanations of how pool balls move about a pool table are really basic physics.
Yes I know.
Rather than accusing the smart table of failing
I didn't accuse the smart table of anything. I'm just stating for anyone that might think that "angle of incidence = angle of reflection" is too simplistic for pool physics.
(getting the player to properly execute the shot, however, is another story).
Jeeze you think so Einstein? Humans are usually the weakest link in automated systems.
I don't think anyone would invest as much time as they likely did in creating a 'smart table' without realizing the balls have spin. I would guess their understanding of it all goes far deeper than your own.
I suppose you think that you are insulting me? First of all, there's no need to get defensive, I'm not attacking them. Second, I would bloody well hope that someone who sets out to make a "smart pool table" (whether as a non-technical visionary with money or a geek studying the physics) would know more about it than me, who hasn't studied it beyond mere curiosity.
but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it)
Cool, some people will get to watch their BSOD's a few seconds more.
On a serious note, I wonder if this could actually cause video card makers to make cards that use memory that does not have to be dynamically refreshed, since the monitor pixels can hold the image. Might reduce memory latency for the frame buffers of the future.
All this "laser" business reminds me of an old episode of Quantum Leap.
Lasers are actually not practical for showing pool ball angles after the first bounce (even if the shooter takes imparted cushion spin into account with off centre shooting) due to the fact that the angle reduces after each successive bounce due to spin the cushions impart on the ball.
If you hit a ball hard at a moderate angle, intending to get the ball to bounce back and forth many times between two cushions, you will find that the angle will keep getting closer to 90 degrees to the cushions, until it actually appears that the ball is just bouncing back and forth parallel to the cushions 90 degrees to those being bounced off. Going from a moderate start angle to close to 90 degrees quite quickly.
I don't think photons suffer the imparted effects of cushion spin.
Also, not related to angle, but velocity, is that when a ball is first hit (on centre) it moves across the table surface initially without forward "rolling" spinning. The friction between the ball and table surface actually slows the ball down mostly up to the point where the rolling becomes "in step" with the velocity. When this ball hits a cushion, this rolling speed is slowed dramatically by the sudden braking effect of the ball pushing hard into the cushion and any rolling that remains after the bounce is quickly reversed as the ball now starts rolling in the opposite directing, again due to the friction of the ball against table surface. This in addition to energy being absorbed by the cushion (well, I don't like the term "absorbed" being used to describe energy "loss". The energy is converted to sound and heat) has the overall effect of making a ball travel much less than if it were to be hit with the same force without obstacles.
The technology behind James, who looks like a professional pool player
So he has a mullet, old faded AC/DC t-shirt (hanging out), worn out old blue jeans, home made tattoos that have H A T E on his fingers on one hand and L O V E on the other, a beer in hand and squinting from his cigarette smoke that he lit with his Harley Davidson Zippo lighter (he's never actually owned a Harley though) while he waits for his shot. When he takes his shot, he smashes the sweet baby Jesus out of it where ever possible.
Of course, the physics of pool has and never will enter his head, because pool comes naturally to him, what growing up in pool halls and all.
He's professional because he usually wins the local comp, which just covers his practice expenses.
Perhaps you meant Opera is trying to make their browser as unstable and feature-bare as Netscape 4 an Unix?
The instability of Netscape is just truely astounding. I still remember getting lots of "bus errors" when trying to run Netscape under Red Hat 5.0 and thinking that I was doing something wrong. ; )
Netscape 7 under Wintel seems a lot better, but I can't help but wonder why they would bother any more. I'm running it out of morbid curiosity, just wanting to see if they've upgraded the speed and stability from the Netscape 6 (molasses) release. Maybe they're trying to be a minority of minorities. I can't see any niche left that they could fit into, even if they could fix all the old problems.
Choose an arch and choose an OS and you can always be sure that Netscape will crash on it, right when you actually are about to do something at a stage that you think you should be cut-and-pasting, just in case.
Your average Slashdot poster is a zombie 365.25 days a year anyway. :)
/. user, that you've been around /. for a while. Taking into consideration leap "years" shows that you're one not to get caught out by /. loosers who rip to shreds any post that has too little information to convey the posters opinion absolutely completely. These /. loosers most often ram your own opinion down your throat as if it is thiers and nobody elses, as if you deserve it for not being quite verbose enough. They have a need to add and blow out of proportion the smallest and most irrelevant amount of information as if it is what matters most, in a pursuit to show everyone how much better they are than the original poster.
I can see, not just by your 5 digit user id or your accurate depiction of the average
I stand ready, poised for such a reply.
a web browser for freebsd is like playing quake on my stereo. freebsd, just like every other non-Mac, non-Windows OS, belongs on a server that nobody ever logs in to.
As far as I can remember, Quake was designed and built on NeXT machines, BTW.
The minds behind the production of the current Mac OS are the types that would run something like FreeBSD as a desktop. It's those types that create. The types who share your attitude are the types that take whatever is given to them, are not creative and try to appear like they matter when all they're really good at is shooting shit in Quake.
Hi,
I don't disagree with any of your points. I just wanted to state the major advantages SCSI has over IDE, answering the "why would anyone use SCSI over IDE" type question.
Different horses for different courses. I wouldn't waste the money of a SCSI drive on a video editing workstation but I also would not choose IDE for a busy database.
In the only safe place: the users' head.
.45 semi-auto that can remove even those keys, one way or the other. They can either come out of their mouth or fingers, or then theres the other option, splattering those keys all over a wall. ;)
I have a
Not only is it logical, but it is also very computer friendly since sorting datestamps that are in this format is easy: an ascending sort is a chronological sort.
Oh tell me about it. Today I was at a client site who complained that they couldn't find their latest backup files. Reason being, that they were naming their backup files with alpha numerics mixed throughout the files and more importantly without leading zeroes.
Result being, files being naturally sorted in WinNT 4 Windows Explorer that did not go in the order the dates did.
The users backups were there, but so hard to find that they called me in because they were worried that their backups were not working!
They were only weekly backups, so if they saved them as apYYYYWW.zip all would have appeared to be fine. Where ap is an abreviation of the application data being backed up, YYYY obviously year and WW the week of the year. apYYYYMMWWDD would be nicer so that in the future, referencing particular backup dates could be quicker.
Thanks for that link BTW. Now I have extra ammo. ; )
Bugger, sorry. That should read "I found I was reading /. a lot less and reading www.deadly.org a lot more".
can anyone recommend some sites where there is some intelligent discussion of bsd news and issues
I prefer mailing lists. In fact, after signing up to some interesting OpenBSD lists (mostly just reading) I found I was reading OpenBSD a lot less and reading www.deadly.org a lot more (and wishing it had a lot more articles and discussion).
because it makes more sense. month, then day. increasing specificity.
I think it doesn't make more sense, because as you say, the year is on the end.
DDMMYYYY makes a lot more sense than MMDDYYYY.
Medium significance, lower significance and then higher significance makes little sense.
Of course, the most logical approach is, YYYYMMDD, with significance than follows closer the way we count.
All I'm saying is that if people are hell-bent on running SCSI for some reason, they're more than welcome to.
SCSI has the ability to queue commands and re-order the pending commands in such a way as to reduce head movement. They can also read and write to the SCSI bus while they are carrying out received commands and share the SCSI bus bandwidth with more SCSI devices on the same bus.
An IDE bus can only service one command and one device at a time.
If a SCSI drive was working on one command fetching data and another four commands were pending: 1st near the start of the disk, 2nd near the end, 3rd near the start and 4th near the end, instead of the head movement going, start-end-start-end in the order that the commands were received by the drive, the drive could re-order the commands while it waits for the current command to complete so that the commands would be carried out: 1st, 3rd, 2nd then 4th so the head movement would go: start-start-end-end, reducing time to fetch the data due to reduced head movement. 1 full stroke versus 3.
For desktop apps, this doesn't matter so much. But for database servers which can tend to send lots of small requests scattered randomly around the disk, this can have a huge performance gain over IDE drives, many many times.
Perhaps Apple can remedy this a little with many drives. Maybe they can perform the re-ordering in their SCSI interface?.
1. testing the solution
Not my responsibility. Someone was hired for exactly this.
2. running a test environment using the new equipment.
Sure, well just go out and buy a spare PABX that meets exactly all firmware revisions in our production unit, just to test it out.
Your stupidity is astounding, and I feel sorry for your employer, who no doubt had to pay per hour while you did your learning on the job (probably overtime too, hmm?)
I wasn't supposed to be learning undocumented addressing codes. That is the point. I was just supposed to do the much lower level programming and manual labor.
The technical stuff was supposed to be figured out already.
Did you consider testing on one or two units to make sure it WOULD work before ripping out everyone's old units?
This was not my responsibility though. Trusting someone with many years of experience more than myself was obviously the wrong thing to do. I leanred valuable lessons from it.
You may have saved yourself (and the crew that works for you, if any) a lot of grief and a weekend if you had tested your implementation before implementing it.
Nobody worked under myself. It was NOT MY IMPLEMENTATION. I WISH IT WERE!
If he had done the testing and used his mad skillz to recover, then no problem, shit happens.
The testing was not up to me! Although I should have taken it upon myself to test one unit first and obviously would do that next time.
Have you never learned through failings?
My point was that he didn't do the testing and then thought the was a hero for fixing the problem that he created.
I didn't create the problem, though I was obviously a part of it. I'm glad I could fix it though. I'm not trying to impress you. Merely trying to point out that there are many moments in IT where comfort of staff is more important to productivity than how they look.
So to summarize:
Without ever testing, he removed everyone's old phone, put in the new phones and tried to program them. This is after the expert "dropped" the new phones on him. He obviously knew that the "expert" had never visited the site, not doing any testing is negligence.
Actually, I did not know that the expert never visited the site until I queried how it could have been bungled so baddly.
This is clearly sloppy and unprofessional work, and I stand by my instinct to walk him out.
Not testing a phone first because I trusted someone who was hired as an expert beyond all experts in my whole country, was my failing.
That doesn't mean that I should be fired. I went to extrordinary lengths to rectify the problem. And lessons were learned.
Obviously I wouldn't trust anyone absolutely ever again and test for myself.
I was not the specially hired 'expert' though. Some guy flown in especially to design the roll-out was the one who was supposed to do the testing.
I received phones on a Friday afternoon and was told to have it done before Monday.
I should have tested one before starting the lot, I agree. But I was fresh out of NEAX training and I was assured by the expert with many more years of experience than myself, that it would be fine.
The lesson I learned was to never trust the judgement of anyone, regardless of how much more knowledge and experience they have than yourself. I think that is a pretty sad lesson.
You sound like just another seat-of-the-pants cowboy that gives IT a bad name.
Huh? As someone else put it "I fixed someone elses problem". The supposed expert was the cowboy, not me.
My true failing was that I trusted this so called expert.
Paid by the hour?
(which, if you are reading this, you are not)
How ridiculous. 148.
If people aren't able to dress with some semblance of style, they should go work somewhere else, somewhere less demanding (would you like fries with that?).
I've worked as a systems/network admin for stock exchanges to top tier law firms. Each of these companies allowed lax dress codes.
Ever worked an average of 14 hours a day, 6-7 days a week in a suit? Ever crawled under desks, floors, above ceilings, behind racks and between walls tracing cables? Ever worked out of hours when the air-con is typically off?
I once worked 27 hours straight on a weekend trying to find undocumented button addresses for new 'unsupported' digital handsets on an NEC NEAX PABX. I had a bunch of new handsets dropped on me by the NEAX 'expert' who was on a short contract (from overseas) to design the roll-out of these new units (D-Term V's), who incidentally NEVER actually attended the site in question to find out that our PABX did not support them at all, according to NEC and Telstra. So I find this out after removing everyones phone, their old 4 wire digital cards, and patching then replacing with new phones, 2 wire digital cards and patching and then.... the programming.... which didn't work. I was faced with undoing all this work or trying to first figure out if I could indeed make these units work fully. So eventually I did figure out all the addressing required, literally through manual brute-force trial and error. There was no way this mission critical dept could be without phones come Monday. After 27 hours, they were all completely working, to the shock of my IT work mates and NEC. How would you like to work 27 hours straight, without air-con, living off McDonalds, in a bloody suit?
Being a contractor, I was being paid hourly, so I wasn't a chump as some here might think.
"'Anything you can make work for 1 year, we can make work for 4 days,' Chen says, summing up his commercial philosophy.'"