Set up Linux on a laptop or small PC, with the web server, database, and Bugzilla.
Take it in, show it to them.
Now, if they still refuse to deploy a non-Windows solution, then the answer is obvious.
Prep your resumeé, and start looking for another job.
You don't want to work for ANY shop that is so bigoted toward a given platform that they will not consider deploying a different platform when it has been demonstrated to be the best solution.
And before the Microsoft fans decend upon this post - I would give the exact same advice were the roles reversed - were the simplest solution a Windows solution but the shop was a "Linux or nothing" shop, I would still recommend pulling the big yellow handle.
If a shop lets bigotry and ignorance make their decisions for them, they are heading for trouble.
When you can see the iceberg in the distance, start looking for a way off the ship.
Listen, I've worked with people who had degrees from prestigious schools, and people with degrees from state universities. I've seen little correlation between where the degree came from and the skill of the person.
If you are a moron, you will not learn at the best of universities.
If you are gifted, you will learn at the lowest of universities.
You would be FAR better served by going to a school you can afford, that you may spend your time learning rather than working to earn enough to go to school.
If you want to build up your resume, work on projects that you can point to - being a contributor to, or better still the maintainer of a well known project will look much better on your resume than a degree with no other experience.
I'd be more concerned about trying to find a good internship during your summers off - that counts for a lot more when looking for a job.
If a program *requires* an external server to operate, and you don't control the external server, then you don't control the program - and thus you don't own it.
It is one thing for a game to say "Here's OUR online server which can direct you to other players, or you can enter your own server here."
It is QUITE ANOTHER to say "Here is our online server, unt YOU VILL FIND YOUR GAMES THROUGH IT ONLY! ONE GAME, ONE SERVER, ONE COMPANY!"
So remember from here on out, people - if you MUST use their server, and no other - you don't own the game.
If that is objectionable to you, DON'T BUY THE GAME.
I wonder how this shapes the thinking of a native Choktaw speaker - for example, if George tells Fred something using the "definitely true" tense, will Fred be more likely to swallow it without thinking than if the "uncheck third-party" tense were used?
And if so, would that mean that an unscrupulous person would be more likely to use the "definitely true" tense?
Imagine being able to look up an old Seinfeld, and then watch it for fifty cents.
Isn't this a violation of the Geneva convention?
Honestly - while there are great volumes of potentially good shows to index, the question is are those shows actually available to be indexed, or will this index be full of "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Fear Factor" and other utter dreck?
Of course, in many ways that will simply parallel the rest of the 'Net - I remember back when Alta Vista was king of the search engines having to add "and not homepage and not hotlinks and not 'jump page' and not 'cool links'" and half a dozen other terms to filter the crap out - unfortunately while Google does a fair job of picking out the gems from the trash it does not allow for that kind of boolean searching. Yes, you can enter exclusion terms, but Google seems to regard those more as a suggestion than as an absolute prohibition.
Also, given the absense of cross-links in TV, how will Google derive a pagerank-style metric for your search, to prevent your searches from being filled with results from "Maury" and "Jerry Springer"?
One wonders how many respondants to this story will have read the article before they click Submit....
(and yes, I DID read the article before posting this.)
This, unfortunately, is an all-too-common theme - a bunch of People With Too Damn Much Free Time Who Have Decided They Are The Guardians Of The Public Morals seeking to "protect" us from ourselves.
In addition to the question of "How many of you have played any of these games" I would add another - "How many of you have spent any time at all with your children today?"
Funny how these folks have plenty of time to have these meetings - they must REALLY spend a lot of time with their kids.
Just remember - whenever you have the chance to attend something like this - ask them "And how many games have your played with your children in the past month?"
No job is secure - I was laid off from my first job 8 months out of college, after working 4 months of 80 hour weeks, not because I wasn't good, but because management wanted to "put the fear" into the employees.
A verbal agreement is worth exactly the paper it is written upon. If they mean it, they will not object to writing it down on company letterhead, and signing it. If they are not willing to do so, then don't count on it happening - it may, it may not.
Remember the difference between good debt and bad debtgood debt
The item you are going into debt for will still have value or utility after being paid off.
bad debt
The item will be essentially worthless when it is paid off. Buying a computer on debt is almost always bad debt, buying too much car is bad debt, buying a house is almost always good debt.
Thus, live within your means - that means PLANNING on becoming unemployed, no matter if you are a contractor or a regular employee. You may be making mad money, but don't buy the new car, plasma TV, overpriced game console, overpriced computer, etc. - save every dollar you can and a little extra. Get your necessities out of the way first, then worry about your luxuries - you need a place to live, you don't need a NonMindO PayStation MegaDeluxe.
The best possible state to be in is debt free. If you can, buy a cheap car, a cheap single-wide mobile home on a cheap lot, and pay them off. When you are debt-free, and even better have a significant amount of money in the bank, you can face possible lay-offs with a smile - your ass is covered. (And before somebody talks about the "tax advantages" of a mortgage - If you have to pay $10000 in interest to a banker to avoid paying $3000 in taxes you are still $7000 down).
Those things said - if the job looks interesting, go ahead and hire on. If you follow my advice above, you will be able to deal with whatever curves they throw at you - promotion to regular employee, lay-off, whatever.
The thing that worries me is the "based on" bit - just as "StarShip Troopers" was "based on" the book by Robert Heinlein - in that some of the character names were used, but that's about it.
If Watchmen the movie is "based on" Watchmen the graphic novel in the same way, I suggest installing seat belts in all the theaters to prevent the audience from being pulled from their seats by the suction of the movie.
If, on the other hand, this movie is a reasonably faithful rendition of the graphic novel... then count me in.
The reason I suggested using Linux rather than a Windows or DOS derivative was the idea that a virus written to infect Windows would be vastly less likely to be able to infect a Linux system.
That's also why the only file I suggested using from the victim was the NTFS DLL, and that only because of the legality of distributing the NTFS DLL.
Granted, in theory a system booting from CD would not fetch anything from the victim and would not be at risk, but you know what they say about theory and practice - in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
What surprises me is the fact that Mr. Gibson is able to find web sites that do "drive-by-installation" that are not taken down immediately.
You'd think that the hosts of "Innovators of Wrestling" would yank it if it were downloading crap onto people's computers without their knowledge - in violation of the LAW!
But then again, I've seen how well most System AdminDUHstrators manage their sites; perhaps my surprise is simply the result of my moring coffee not kicking in yet.
And here is a question for the class to consider: Given the difficulty of removing spyware in a machine which is running the spyware, why has somebody not taken Knoppix, Wine, the NT filesystem wrapper code, and a virus cleaner, and created a boot disk that would
mount the users disk using the NTFS in the kernel
locate the native NTFS DLL, MD5 check it, and assuming it is not corrupt use it to mount the system R/W
Use winelib to access the registry and clean it
Run the filescan and purge to remove the infections
. That way, you would need to reboot twice (once to boot into the CD, once back into Windows).
Granted, for me this question is of academic interest only - I don't run Windows anymore. But for those of us who have relatives still stuck in purgatory, this might be a better way to run.
"WindRiver portayed their tool as being able to do those things, thus I made the wrong decision based upon the false claims of the manufacturer."
You see, WRS would have you believe that VxWorks has a reasonable disk subsystem, even though they have no option of using DMA for the data transfers, a fact they convienently don't make available.
WRS had a port of XFree available for VxWorks. However, they did not release the source for it, and they stopped supporting it, and thus it fell behind in support for the video chips now in use. Of course, they did not inform developers of their impending decision to drop support until it was too late.
WRS has a TCP/IP stack. However, they did NOT have support for DHCP, nor DNS, and on certain platforms their stack has gross errors (e.g. packets being shifted by one byte so that when the reach the application they are corrupted.)
WRS claims to have board support packages so that you don't have to develop them. They don't mention that they don't support half the hardware on most boards (e.g. they don't enable the cache on XScale processors, halving the speed of the processor).
WRS claimed they would support development under Linux as a host OS "within a couple of months" - that was back in 1998. They started supporting development under Linux this year - and then not very well.
Yes, I choose the wrong tool for the job - because WRS did not correctly represent their tool's capabilities and there was no other way to evaluate the capabilities of the tool.
I as well have had the misfortune to pick WindRiver as the core OS for my project, and have had no end of problems.
Part of the problem in my case was that VxWorks is for smaller embedded systems, which my project is NOT. I need fast disk storage, I need graphics, I need networking, I need things that VxWorks just doesn't provide very well.
Were I able to change one decision about the design of my project, I would have gone with Linux instead.
WRS *used* to have something to offer, in that they provided a real-time OS and hardware driver bundles (board support packages in WRS-speak). However, they no longer provide great value in that area - Linux has far better hardware support, and for any reasonably complex project will scale down as well as VxWorks will scale up.
He is limited by the memory bandwidth of his video card.
2048x1536*80Hz = 251,658,240251,658,240 pixels per second.
At 24 bit color, assuming that the video card actually uses 32 bits per pixel to keep things dword aligned, yields 1,006,632,960 bytes per second. Depending upon how wide the video chips path to memory is, and how fast it is, that could saturate the memory bandwidth.
By going to 16 bits, he halves the memory bandwidth needed.
Cedega is based on the Wine codebase before Wine converted to GPL - in fact, that was part of the motivation for Wine to convert from a more BSD-ish license to GPL.
However, Transgaming does give code back to Wine occasionally, and some Wine contributors will allow Transgaming to also distribute their changes.
No, it IS pretty much impossible. The reradiated signal from an antenna would be indistinguisable from any other reflections in the environment, from reradiation by J. Random MetalObject in the environment.
1) They have a 12V car battery and a couple of jumper cables throwing 3 foot arcs on a pool.
2) They state that "the iron in his blood conducted the electricity". Yes, and all those polar ions in his blood stood around picking their valence shells, while the iron locked in its nice little hemoglobin cages conducted the electricity.
3) The perennial "zoom in on an image forever" problem others have noticed.
4) "Oooh, we found an omnidirectional transmitter - let's trace the signal back to the reciever!"
Now, I can understand the occasional stretch to make the story interesting, but most of the time the stuff they get horribly wrong they could just as easily gotten right.
And we won't even talk about the fact that these guys spend WAY too much time on each case - like there isn't a backlog of corpses stacked up outside the building because they are tying the whole department for a week on this one case.
"aer burries" - the aer could be a simple transposition on the keyboard, but to get "buRRies" from "buried" is a bit of a stretch.
The repeated misspelling of "paNNels" is also questionable.
Given that a design engineer must be able to communicate, and thus to write, and thus to spell, I find this post questionable. The basic facts are not necessarily wrong, but the spelling is iffy at best.
You don't need much modulation of the light beam - just a percent or so will be enough to detect, and you won't see a percent modulation with your eye (unless you have a reference to compare against).
Yes, you aren't going to be pushing 20Hz-20kHz across this - between the thermal mass of the filament and the slow response of the CdS cell you're going to be lucky to get 3kHz, but that is good enough for voice.
Slashdot Mirror
Set up Linux on a laptop or small PC, with the web server, database, and Bugzilla.
Take it in, show it to them.
Now, if they still refuse to deploy a non-Windows solution, then the answer is obvious.
Prep your resumeé, and start looking for another job.
You don't want to work for ANY shop that is so bigoted toward a given platform that they will not consider deploying a different platform when it has been demonstrated to be the best solution.
And before the Microsoft fans decend upon this post - I would give the exact same advice were the roles reversed - were the simplest solution a Windows solution but the shop was a "Linux or nothing" shop, I would still recommend pulling the big yellow handle.
If a shop lets bigotry and ignorance make their decisions for them, they are heading for trouble.
When you can see the iceberg in the distance, start looking for a way off the ship.
Listen, I've worked with people who had degrees from prestigious schools, and people with degrees from state universities. I've seen little correlation between where the degree came from and the skill of the person.
If you are a moron, you will not learn at the best of universities.
If you are gifted, you will learn at the lowest of universities.
You would be FAR better served by going to a school you can afford, that you may spend your time learning rather than working to earn enough to go to school.
If you want to build up your resume, work on projects that you can point to - being a contributor to, or better still the maintainer of a well known project will look much better on your resume than a degree with no other experience.
I'd be more concerned about trying to find a good internship during your summers off - that counts for a lot more when looking for a job.
(spoken to Rick Berman)
My name is Gene Roddenberry.
You killed my franchise.
Prepare to die.
If you don't control it, you don't own it.
If a program *requires* an external server to operate, and you don't control the external server, then you don't control the program - and thus you don't own it.
It is one thing for a game to say "Here's OUR online server which can direct you to other players, or you can enter your own server here."
It is QUITE ANOTHER to say "Here is our online server, unt YOU VILL FIND YOUR GAMES THROUGH IT ONLY! ONE GAME, ONE SERVER, ONE COMPANY!"
So remember from here on out, people - if you MUST use their server, and no other - you don't own the game.
If that is objectionable to you, DON'T BUY THE GAME.
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
;)
Is this something you know first-hand, or something you were told?
That's easy - disbelieve them both.
Scientists are sometimes wrong, and sometimes right.
Marketing types always lie.
Ergo, the only solution that satifies both axioms is that the statement is false, and that the scientist is wrong.
I wonder how this shapes the thinking of a native Choktaw speaker - for example, if George tells Fred something using the "definitely true" tense, will Fred be more likely to swallow it without thinking than if the "uncheck third-party" tense were used?
And if so, would that mean that an unscrupulous person would be more likely to use the "definitely true" tense?
Would marketing types use it exclusively?
Isn't this a violation of the Geneva convention?
Honestly - while there are great volumes of potentially good shows to index, the question is are those shows actually available to be indexed, or will this index be full of "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Fear Factor" and other utter dreck?
Of course, in many ways that will simply parallel the rest of the 'Net - I remember back when Alta Vista was king of the search engines having to add "and not homepage and not hotlinks and not 'jump page' and not 'cool links'" and half a dozen other terms to filter the crap out - unfortunately while Google does a fair job of picking out the gems from the trash it does not allow for that kind of boolean searching. Yes, you can enter exclusion terms, but Google seems to regard those more as a suggestion than as an absolute prohibition.
Also, given the absense of cross-links in TV, how will Google derive a pagerank-style metric for your search, to prevent your searches from being filled with results from "Maury" and "Jerry Springer"?
Building a throne out of AOL CDs is one thing.
Building a throne out of AOL CDs would be far more apropos.
One wonders how many respondants to this story will have read the article before they click Submit....
(and yes, I DID read the article before posting this.)
This, unfortunately, is an all-too-common theme - a bunch of People With Too Damn Much Free Time Who Have Decided They Are The Guardians Of The Public Morals seeking to "protect" us from ourselves.
In addition to the question of "How many of you have played any of these games" I would add another - "How many of you have spent any time at all with your children today?"
Funny how these folks have plenty of time to have these meetings - they must REALLY spend a lot of time with their kids.
Just remember - whenever you have the chance to attend something like this - ask them "And how many games have your played with your children in the past month?"
It's much more statisfying that saying STFU.
Those things said - if the job looks interesting, go ahead and hire on. If you follow my advice above, you will be able to deal with whatever curves they throw at you - promotion to regular employee, lay-off, whatever.
The thing that worries me is the "based on" bit - just as "StarShip Troopers" was "based on" the book by Robert Heinlein - in that some of the character names were used, but that's about it.
If Watchmen the movie is "based on" Watchmen the graphic novel in the same way, I suggest installing seat belts in all the theaters to prevent the audience from being pulled from their seats by the suction of the movie.
If, on the other hand, this movie is a reasonably faithful rendition of the graphic novel... then count me in.
The reason I suggested using Linux rather than a Windows or DOS derivative was the idea that a virus written to infect Windows would be vastly less likely to be able to infect a Linux system.
That's also why the only file I suggested using from the victim was the NTFS DLL, and that only because of the legality of distributing the NTFS DLL.
Granted, in theory a system booting from CD would not fetch anything from the victim and would not be at risk, but you know what they say about theory and practice - in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
You'd think that the hosts of "Innovators of Wrestling" would yank it if it were downloading crap onto people's computers without their knowledge - in violation of the LAW!
But then again, I've seen how well most System AdminDUHstrators manage their sites; perhaps my surprise is simply the result of my moring coffee not kicking in yet.
And here is a question for the class to consider: Given the difficulty of removing spyware in a machine which is running the spyware, why has somebody not taken Knoppix, Wine, the NT filesystem wrapper code, and a virus cleaner, and created a boot disk that would
- mount the users disk using the NTFS in the kernel
- locate the native NTFS DLL, MD5 check it, and assuming it is not corrupt use it to mount the system R/W
- Use winelib to access the registry and clean it
- Run the filescan and purge to remove the infections
. That way, you would need to reboot twice (once to boot into the CD, once back into Windows).Granted, for me this question is of academic interest only - I don't run Windows anymore. But for those of us who have relatives still stuck in purgatory, this might be a better way to run.
The word you are looking for is vulpine.
It's called:
"WindRiver portayed their tool as being able to do those things, thus I made the wrong decision based upon the false claims of the manufacturer."
You see, WRS would have you believe that VxWorks has a reasonable disk subsystem, even though they have no option of using DMA for the data transfers, a fact they convienently don't make available.
WRS had a port of XFree available for VxWorks. However, they did not release the source for it, and they stopped supporting it, and thus it fell behind in support for the video chips now in use. Of course, they did not inform developers of their impending decision to drop support until it was too late.
WRS has a TCP/IP stack. However, they did NOT have support for DHCP, nor DNS, and on certain platforms their stack has gross errors (e.g. packets being shifted by one byte so that when the reach the application they are corrupted.)
WRS claims to have board support packages so that you don't have to develop them. They don't mention that they don't support half the hardware on most boards (e.g. they don't enable the cache on XScale processors, halving the speed of the processor).
WRS claimed they would support development under Linux as a host OS "within a couple of months" - that was back in 1998. They started supporting development under Linux this year - and then not very well.
Yes, I choose the wrong tool for the job - because WRS did not correctly represent their tool's capabilities and there was no other way to evaluate the capabilities of the tool.
I as well have had the misfortune to pick WindRiver as the core OS for my project, and have had no end of problems.
Part of the problem in my case was that VxWorks is for smaller embedded systems, which my project is NOT. I need fast disk storage, I need graphics, I need networking, I need things that VxWorks just doesn't provide very well.
Were I able to change one decision about the design of my project, I would have gone with Linux instead.
WRS *used* to have something to offer, in that they provided a real-time OS and hardware driver bundles (board support packages in WRS-speak). However, they no longer provide great value in that area - Linux has far better hardware support, and for any reasonably complex project will scale down as well as VxWorks will scale up.
He is limited by the memory bandwidth of his video card.
2048x1536*80Hz = 251,658,240251,658,240 pixels per second.
At 24 bit color, assuming that the video card actually uses 32 bits per pixel to keep things dword aligned, yields 1,006,632,960 bytes per second. Depending upon how wide the video chips path to memory is, and how fast it is, that could saturate the memory bandwidth.
By going to 16 bits, he halves the memory bandwidth needed.
Cedega is based on the Wine codebase before Wine converted to GPL - in fact, that was part of the motivation for Wine to convert from a more BSD-ish license to GPL.
However, Transgaming does give code back to Wine occasionally, and some Wine contributors will allow Transgaming to also distribute their changes.
Gee. Thanks. Yet another mental image I neither needed nor wanted. That ranks (in all senses of the word) right up there with tubgirl and goatse.
Does anybody know when Steve's birthday is? I'd like to get him a monocle, a fake scar, and a white cat.
I think he can pull that look off better than Bill can.
Either that, or a pinstripe suit - so he can do the "Nice OS you have hear. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it" thing better.
No, it IS pretty much impossible. The reradiated signal from an antenna would be indistinguisable from any other reflections in the environment, from reradiation by J. Random MetalObject in the environment.
No, I design radio for a living - it's bullshit.
I can't stand the errors on this show:
1) They have a 12V car battery and a couple of jumper cables throwing 3 foot arcs on a pool.
2) They state that "the iron in his blood conducted the electricity". Yes, and all those polar ions in his blood stood around picking their valence shells, while the iron locked in its nice little hemoglobin cages conducted the electricity.
3) The perennial "zoom in on an image forever" problem others have noticed.
4) "Oooh, we found an omnidirectional transmitter - let's trace the signal back to the reciever!"
Now, I can understand the occasional stretch to make the story interesting, but most of the time the stuff they get horribly wrong they could just as easily gotten right.
And we won't even talk about the fact that these guys spend WAY too much time on each case - like there isn't a backlog of corpses stacked up outside the building because they are tying the whole department for a week on this one case.
Let's see:
"aer burries" - the aer could be a simple transposition on the keyboard, but to get "buRRies" from "buried" is a bit of a stretch.
The repeated misspelling of "paNNels" is also questionable.
Given that a design engineer must be able to communicate, and thus to write, and thus to spell, I find this post questionable. The basic facts are not necessarily wrong, but the spelling is iffy at best.
Yes, it will work - I've done it myself.
You don't need much modulation of the light beam - just a percent or so will be enough to detect, and you won't see a percent modulation with your eye (unless you have a reference to compare against).
Yes, you aren't going to be pushing 20Hz-20kHz across this - between the thermal mass of the filament and the slow response of the CdS cell you're going to be lucky to get 3kHz, but that is good enough for voice.