You're right about he blue collar sorts not being offered this kind of package, but I suspect that you're wrong about the reasons. In general, these sort of openings don't involve an offer letter being extended several months before the expected start date. These kind of arrangements really only happen with professional jobs when it is difficult to fill a position immediately. If I need a custodian, or secretary, or groundskeeper I can put an ad in the paper and hire one who will start next week. If that doesn't work out I'll call a temp agency and they will find someone for me. In a booming economy however, you can't do that with people like accountants and engineers. The best way to hire them in is to get them signed up in the winter and have them start when they graudate from college in the spring.
I finally managed to get the.iso's downloaded on Saturday. Overall, I'd say that it's pretty good. It runs like a charm on my Athlon machine and even does a passable job running on a Pentium 120 machine that belongs to the guy in the cube next to me. I really like having the 2.4 kernel installed and synced up well with Hard Drake.
I do have a couple of beefs about it though. For some reason I can't su to root when logged into my user account. I assume this is some security setting, but I haven't found out how to disable it yet. Anyone know? Also, something is really fucked up with the fonts in Konqueror. They are just terrible, the letters are crooked and of varying sizes, pretty much makes every page look like it was written in 1337 5p34k. Anyone else notice this or know how to fix it?
Sandbags are great for eliminating vabrations. Most of the other posters on this thread have mentioned using something massive (like steel or granite) or something soft (like rubber or foam) to isolate your equipment from the vibrations. Sandbags have both qualities and are cheap as dirt too [ok, bad pun, couldn't help it]. Only thing to be careful of is making sure that your floor will support several hundred pounds of sand.
Hardware vendors aren't really in the business of selling hardware so much as they are in the business of integrating hardware with custom firmware and ASICs and selling the end product. The problem with handing out the driver source is that it likely gives more insight into exactly how their custom firmware and ASICs work. The actual process of soldering some chips onto the board is fairly easy and inexpensive, it's getting good firmware into the chips on the board and making the system work well together that's difficult. Anyone who buys a board can take it apart and look at each chip and look at the traces and be able to put together a pretty similar board without all that much work, so you have to protect the part that people can't just see and the best way to do that is to not release the source to the drivers.
The thing that I don't understand is why the license agreement that comes with most drivers prohibits me from making copies of the drivers. Honestly, are you going to sell any fewer products if I give a copy of the driver to my friend?
The point here isn't so much to be able to play music from this drive as it is to be able to rip minidiscs the way that you would rip a CD or write music direct to your minidisc in the same way that you might burn a CD to listen to in your car. If you want to listen to minidiscs in your car get a deck that supports it. I really like having minidiscs in the car, they have a shell on them like a 3.5" floppy disk that makes them much more difficult to scratch than CDs. It's true that they don't sound quite as good, but with a little road noise thrown in it's pretty hard to tell the difference.
If you do a good job of writing down who called and when they called you'll have the evidence you need to make it more than well worth while to take a 1/2 day off of work and sue them.Chances are that the judge hates telemarketers too and will have a very sympathetic ear.
Why not send the $49.95 straight to Madrake, instead of letting some department store skim $3 off that price?
Because I want the people at the department store to know that there is a market for Linux compatable hardware and Linux software. I want them to know that if they stock these products I will buy them. I want the department stores to place large orders with MandrakeSoft. I think that in the end this will have a much bigger impact on making Linux easily avaliable to everyone than ordering the box directly from linux-mandrake.com.
At least it's not your home phone number that doesn't exist. My sister and my grandparents live about 100 miles away from me and can't call me at home. Their phone company insists that my exchange doesn't exist. Despite months of complaining noone will accept responsibility for the problem. Frankly, I'm so sick of this that I'm getting rid of the landline alltogether. My cell phone is cheaper than my landline and has more features. Furthermore, when I move next month I know that I'll be able to put my cellphone in my pocket and take it with me. Last time I moved it took the phone company more than 2 months to activate my service. _____________
I think that I'm going to wait to upgrade until they have the boxed version in at Best Buy. It's not that I couldn't download it myself and burn it onto CDs and it's not that I want to support Best Buy. What I do want to support is being able to buy Linux software at local stores and I want to support the MandrakeSoft people too. They did a great job putting together 7.2 and that's more than enough reason for me to keep coming back for updates.
For all of you who really want to have this distro, I seriously suggest that you try to locate it at a local store and if you can't, ask for it.
Of course, my first thought was that you could just take a personal day...
I don't know about you, but I value my personal days at quite a bit more than $50 too. It's worth far more to me than $50 to not have to spend one of my days off in a courtroom (in fact, I'd really much rather be at work than in court) rather than saving it for a nice summer day and using it to golf or canoe. There have been a few people in the past year that I wanted to sue, but I really find that it's not worth the trouble just for the sake of getting back at someone. However, your desire for revenge may be stronger than mine, perhaps the satisfaction of being told that you're right is worth enough to you to take a vacation day. _____________
I agree with you that X-10 has it's drawbacks. It also has some real advantages. If you rent or move often, it's an ideal solution since none of the equipment is actually installed into the wall. It is also great for seasonal items like christmas lights. On the other hand, if I were building a house (gotta wait for the stock market to go up a little bit, probably a year or so... I hope anyway) I would look into a better system for running the lights and appliances.
As far as data networking goes, I'm renting an apartment now, so I'm stuck with cables running all over the floors. One useful thing is 1/2 round wire hiders that you can buy at any home improvement store. You can generally choose a color that more or less blends with your carpet. _____________
You will need to be careful if you release code to the open source community and plan to use it again in future projects which will not be open sourced. If you are using the GPL you will need to retain your copyright to your own work and keep it separate from any work to which anyone else contributes to. There is nothing preventing your from releasing your code under several different licences as long as you actually own the copyright to all the code involved. Once you begin incorporating other people's contributions into GPL'd code it's GPL'd. _____________
I agree with you that in many instances what would be lost by giving away the knowledge contained in source code would not be beneficial to a company and that for normal employees a blanket opensource clause in the contract might not be appropriate. When considering a contractor the situation is quite a bit different. A contractor is generally hired to complete one specific project which may or may not pertain to the company's core technology. If the contractor is being hired to develop software from an overhead rather than a development budget then it would likely be prudent to take a discount for having the development done and not be particularly concerned about giving the software away when it is finished.
As an example, I have a company which makes widgets and I need some inventory management software written. Inventory software is not directly related to the technology of making widgets and as a result I have few programmers on staff who would be proficient in writing such software. Therefore I decide to hire a contractor to write such software for me. Since this software is not core to my business I am quite sensitive to the price of obtaining such software. If someone were to offer me a price break in exchange for giving away the application when it is finished that's fine. I will get what I paid for (inventory software) and what else results from that is of little consequence to me. On the other hand, If I were running a company that produced inventory management software I would feel very differently about this situation. _____________
I never realized how much unions were like the mob's protection schemes.
Have you lived under a rock most of your life? In many cases Unions are mob protection schemes. In recent years the unions have improved their image a little bit, but it wasn't all that long ago that the teamsters union was run by the Mafia. _____________
Problem with the school of hard knocks is that nobody ever graduates. Everytime I think that I'm close to graduating they change the fsckin' requirements on me and I suddenly find myself starting my freshman year again. At least the tuition isn't all that bad. _____________
The problem with the business and marketing types is that they are the source of all things that engineering sorts don't like. From business and marketing sorts come things like budget constraints, schedule deadlines, ship dates and product requirements. The engineers provide things that the business sorts hate like schedule delays, purchase requests, expense reports and explanations of why the product requirements are impossible.
A good management team will go a long way toward helping these two different groups realise what each other's neads are and finding a way to work together to actually get products shipped. _____________
Well, garsh, maybe if we can't use newfangled proprietary software on these old computers, we should put free software like Linux on them!You raise something of a point there, but Linux isn't any great silver bullet either. If you want to be able to browse the web you're going to need a little bit of power, older machines aren't going to be able to do a good job of running Konqueror and Netscape for Linux is a real RAM hog. I'm typing this here on a 486-75 Dell laptop I had to search around a bit to find some RAM upgrades (teamexcess.com and computergeeks.com have good selections of old and used computer parts) but I've now got it running RedHat 6.0 and hooked up to my cable modem. I certianly wouldn't want to be stuck with this as my only computer, but it's at least somewhat functional. On the other hand, Windows 95 + IE will take up a little smaller RAM footprint than Linux 2.2 + KDE 1.1 + Netscape 4.5. _____________
You mentioned dedicated wordprocessors a couple of times there. I hadn't really thought much about their death, not that I really miss them or anything. I suspect that they were killed more by ink jet printers and cheap workgroup lasers than my cheaper computers. The niche they seemed to fill was allowing poor typists to product professional looking documents (in the standard of the day) which is something that just wasn't possible to do with a personal computer attached to a 9-pin (or even a 24-pin) dot-matrix printer. There were a few places that had access to a $20k laser printer but they certianly didn't exist in most offices and never in a private home. Today I can get a cheap laser printer for $300 that produces better looking documents than any typewriter and for about the same money I could also get a color inkjet that can print out magazine quality full color pages. The dedicated word processor was great when it could do everything that a computer based word processor could do and make better hard copies, but that day is over. _____________
If the court rules against this guy, does that mean the next time a Congressional representative starts reading the D.C. phonebook to keep a bill from a vote that police will burst in and arrest him or her?
At issue here is that the rules of the forum were not being followed. The United Sates Senate allows filabuster as a strategic tool. The House or Representatives does not. Neither of them allow you to just walk in and participate in the debate. The issue is following the rules of the forum not making court rulings about the s/n ratio in a given place. _____________
What you've proposed here looks pretty similar to the IP agreements that I've seen in the past with one notable exception. It seems commonplace for the company to stipulate that any inventions that are the result of knowledge gained from your work belong to the company regardless of when or where work on this project took place. When applied to physical objects this seems to make sense, but it gets kind of fuzzy when you start talking about software developers. At my job I write software that interfaces with hardware components and networking protocols. If I were to completely eliminate those areas from my choices of personal projects I'm really not left with much in the way of useful software. The one consolation that I have is that I develop DOS and Windows software at work and play with Linux and PalmOS in my free time. I hope that the platform differences will be sufficient to distance my personal projects from my work should any disagreement arise. _____________
Recycling food oil can be done. I read recently (Feb. sometime) in the local paper (Cedar Rapids Gazette, I'd give a link to their website, but it sucks and the archive online only goes back a week) about a guy in Mason City, IA who converted his diesel VW Rabbit to run on used deep fryer oil. Local resturants were more than happy to give the stuff to him since it costs them money to have it hauled away normally.
The problem with using byproducts for fuel is that they will sometime become insufficient to supply energy needs. The reason that gasoline is used to power automobiles is that it was a very cheap by product of making kerosine which was used for lighting at the turn of the centruy. Now that demand has obviously been reversed. I don't think that there is really enough supply of used fry grease to power the world's automobile population. Therefore we really need to look at sources of fuel that actually have the possibility of actually meeting the demand. _____________
What's so hard about backing up your data files before you do a reinstall? OpenSSH likes to install them on/usr/local/etc/ssh_host_key,/usr/local/etc/ssh_host_dsa_key,/usr/local/etc/ssh_host_rsa_key,/usr/local/etc/ssh_host_key.pub,/usr/local/etc/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub, and/usr/local/etc/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub. If you back these up before you wipe things and put them back when you're done it's all better. You won't have these problems anymore. Some linux distros might want to put them in/etc rather than in/usr/local/etc, but nonetheless you just need to make backups of unreplaceable data before you do wiping the drives. It's just not that hard. _____________
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about he blue collar sorts not being offered this kind of package, but I suspect that you're wrong about the reasons. In general, these sort of openings don't involve an offer letter being extended several months before the expected start date. These kind of arrangements really only happen with professional jobs when it is difficult to fill a position immediately. If I need a custodian, or secretary, or groundskeeper I can put an ad in the paper and hire one who will start next week. If that doesn't work out I'll call a temp agency and they will find someone for me. In a booming economy however, you can't do that with people like accountants and engineers. The best way to hire them in is to get them signed up in the winter and have them start when they graudate from college in the spring.
Thanks for the tip there. That cleared all my font problems right up.
I do have a couple of beefs about it though. For some reason I can't su to root when logged into my user account. I assume this is some security setting, but I haven't found out how to disable it yet. Anyone know? Also, something is really fucked up with the fonts in Konqueror. They are just terrible, the letters are crooked and of varying sizes, pretty much makes every page look like it was written in 1337 5p34k. Anyone else notice this or know how to fix it?
Sandbags are great for eliminating vabrations. Most of the other posters on this thread have mentioned using something massive (like steel or granite) or something soft (like rubber or foam) to isolate your equipment from the vibrations. Sandbags have both qualities and are cheap as dirt too [ok, bad pun, couldn't help it]. Only thing to be careful of is making sure that your floor will support several hundred pounds of sand.
The thing that I don't understand is why the license agreement that comes with most drivers prohibits me from making copies of the drivers. Honestly, are you going to sell any fewer products if I give a copy of the driver to my friend?
The point here isn't so much to be able to play music from this drive as it is to be able to rip minidiscs the way that you would rip a CD or write music direct to your minidisc in the same way that you might burn a CD to listen to in your car. If you want to listen to minidiscs in your car get a deck that supports it. I really like having minidiscs in the car, they have a shell on them like a 3.5" floppy disk that makes them much more difficult to scratch than CDs. It's true that they don't sound quite as good, but with a little road noise thrown in it's pretty hard to tell the difference.
If you do a good job of writing down who called and when they called you'll have the evidence you need to make it more than well worth while to take a 1/2 day off of work and sue them.Chances are that the judge hates telemarketers too and will have a very sympathetic ear.
What you are asking for is smaller, less intrusive ads. You also wish for the advertising to be informative, useful and entertaining.
Please forgive my lack of understanding here. It just seems that it'd be pretty had to have all of that at once.
Why is Jesse Jackson signing his name as "Resident George Bush"?
Because I want the people at the department store to know that there is a market for Linux compatable hardware and Linux software. I want them to know that if they stock these products I will buy them. I want the department stores to place large orders with MandrakeSoft. I think that in the end this will have a much bigger impact on making Linux easily avaliable to everyone than ordering the box directly from linux-mandrake.com.
At least it's not your home phone number that doesn't exist. My sister and my grandparents live about 100 miles away from me and can't call me at home. Their phone company insists that my exchange doesn't exist. Despite months of complaining noone will accept responsibility for the problem. Frankly, I'm so sick of this that I'm getting rid of the landline alltogether. My cell phone is cheaper than my landline and has more features. Furthermore, when I move next month I know that I'll be able to put my cellphone in my pocket and take it with me. Last time I moved it took the phone company more than 2 months to activate my service.
_____________
For all of you who really want to have this distro, I seriously suggest that you try to locate it at a local store and if you can't, ask for it.
I don't know about you, but I value my personal days at quite a bit more than $50 too. It's worth far more to me than $50 to not have to spend one of my days off in a courtroom (in fact, I'd really much rather be at work than in court) rather than saving it for a nice summer day and using it to golf or canoe. There have been a few people in the past year that I wanted to sue, but I really find that it's not worth the trouble just for the sake of getting back at someone. However, your desire for revenge may be stronger than mine, perhaps the satisfaction of being told that you're right is worth enough to you to take a vacation day.
_____________
As far as data networking goes, I'm renting an apartment now, so I'm stuck with cables running all over the floors. One useful thing is 1/2 round wire hiders that you can buy at any home improvement store. You can generally choose a color that more or less blends with your carpet.
_____________
You will need to be careful if you release code to the open source community and plan to use it again in future projects which will not be open sourced. If you are using the GPL you will need to retain your copyright to your own work and keep it separate from any work to which anyone else contributes to. There is nothing preventing your from releasing your code under several different licences as long as you actually own the copyright to all the code involved. Once you begin incorporating other people's contributions into GPL'd code it's GPL'd.
_____________
As an example, I have a company which makes widgets and I need some inventory management software written. Inventory software is not directly related to the technology of making widgets and as a result I have few programmers on staff who would be proficient in writing such software. Therefore I decide to hire a contractor to write such software for me. Since this software is not core to my business I am quite sensitive to the price of obtaining such software. If someone were to offer me a price break in exchange for giving away the application when it is finished that's fine. I will get what I paid for (inventory software) and what else results from that is of little consequence to me. On the other hand, If I were running a company that produced inventory management software I would feel very differently about this situation.
_____________
Have you lived under a rock most of your life? In many cases Unions are mob protection schemes. In recent years the unions have improved their image a little bit, but it wasn't all that long ago that the teamsters union was run by the Mafia.
_____________
Problem with the school of hard knocks is that nobody ever graduates. Everytime I think that I'm close to graduating they change the fsckin' requirements on me and I suddenly find myself starting my freshman year again. At least the tuition isn't all that bad.
_____________
A good management team will go a long way toward helping these two different groups realise what each other's neads are and finding a way to work together to actually get products shipped.
_____________
Well, garsh, maybe if we can't use newfangled proprietary software on these old computers, we should put free software like Linux on them!You raise something of a point there, but Linux isn't any great silver bullet either. If you want to be able to browse the web you're going to need a little bit of power, older machines aren't going to be able to do a good job of running Konqueror and Netscape for Linux is a real RAM hog. I'm typing this here on a 486-75 Dell laptop I had to search around a bit to find some RAM upgrades (teamexcess.com and computergeeks.com have good selections of old and used computer parts) but I've now got it running RedHat 6.0 and hooked up to my cable modem. I certianly wouldn't want to be stuck with this as my only computer, but it's at least somewhat functional. On the other hand, Windows 95 + IE will take up a little smaller RAM footprint than Linux 2.2 + KDE 1.1 + Netscape 4.5.
_____________
You mentioned dedicated wordprocessors a couple of times there. I hadn't really thought much about their death, not that I really miss them or anything. I suspect that they were killed more by ink jet printers and cheap workgroup lasers than my cheaper computers. The niche they seemed to fill was allowing poor typists to product professional looking documents (in the standard of the day) which is something that just wasn't possible to do with a personal computer attached to a 9-pin (or even a 24-pin) dot-matrix printer. There were a few places that had access to a $20k laser printer but they certianly didn't exist in most offices and never in a private home. Today I can get a cheap laser printer for $300 that produces better looking documents than any typewriter and for about the same money I could also get a color inkjet that can print out magazine quality full color pages. The dedicated word processor was great when it could do everything that a computer based word processor could do and make better hard copies, but that day is over.
_____________
At issue here is that the rules of the forum were not being followed. The United Sates Senate allows filabuster as a strategic tool. The House or Representatives does not. Neither of them allow you to just walk in and participate in the debate. The issue is following the rules of the forum not making court rulings about the s/n ratio in a given place.
_____________
What you've proposed here looks pretty similar to the IP agreements that I've seen in the past with one notable exception. It seems commonplace for the company to stipulate that any inventions that are the result of knowledge gained from your work belong to the company regardless of when or where work on this project took place. When applied to physical objects this seems to make sense, but it gets kind of fuzzy when you start talking about software developers. At my job I write software that interfaces with hardware components and networking protocols. If I were to completely eliminate those areas from my choices of personal projects I'm really not left with much in the way of useful software. The one consolation that I have is that I develop DOS and Windows software at work and play with Linux and PalmOS in my free time. I hope that the platform differences will be sufficient to distance my personal projects from my work should any disagreement arise.
_____________
The problem with using byproducts for fuel is that they will sometime become insufficient to supply energy needs. The reason that gasoline is used to power automobiles is that it was a very cheap by product of making kerosine which was used for lighting at the turn of the centruy. Now that demand has obviously been reversed. I don't think that there is really enough supply of used fry grease to power the world's automobile population. Therefore we really need to look at sources of fuel that actually have the possibility of actually meeting the demand.
_____________
What's so hard about backing up your data files before you do a reinstall? OpenSSH likes to install them on /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_key, /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_dsa_key, /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_rsa_key, /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_key.pub, /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub, and /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub. If you back these up before you wipe things and put them back when you're done it's all better. You won't have these problems anymore. Some linux distros might want to put them in /etc rather than in /usr/local/etc, but nonetheless you just need to make backups of unreplaceable data before you do wiping the drives. It's just not that hard.
_____________