Last job I left was after linking a major jewelry retailer up with Amazon.com, my boss was the panicky I'm-surrounded-with-incompetent-boobs type with just enough pointy haired manager to be more of a hindrance than a help. On December 17th (start of the peak of Christmas rush for online retail, considering shipping and all) starting at 2AM I sent a flood of "Invalid request, purchase order refused" emails to his account. Knowing he would check from his dial-up connection before coming into the office. The beauty was that he could not download all of the emails and his dial-up connection bogged, so he had a delightful drive into work. When he got there it was still 2 hours before anyone could tell him that nothing was wrong. I was kind of hoping for a spontaneous heart rupture but no such luck. Of course if you like the people you work for this type of prank just won't work, my situation was such that I could not trust the guy enough to put him down as a reference.
And to head off all of you out there carrying around the moral barometer: mutual respect and professionalism is a 2-way street so treat your employees right or suffer the wrath of those with nothing to loose!
If we execute all the virus writters then we can have a peacefull world ruled by crappy software and lazy coders. We can forget about encryption and nobody will need passwords. Can you feel the love?
The other day I was looking for a compact flash 802.11 card. I got scoffed at by the techie. "You either want a compact flash or you want a wireless card? What will it be!"
Get real. I'm no hacker but for every $5 million spent in developing this pipe dream tack 30 minutes on to the time it will take the hacker community to undo it. Or worse yet this is the making for the best back door ever. Well greedy bastards can dream can't they?
I'm still concider myself a Linux noobie which is great because that means that Linux still manages to amaze me. One of the collest tricks that I learned for migrating from windows is to repartition the drive so that you can pull off a dual boot.
I've struggled with windows dual boot for years and after enduring enough pain settled on having 2 master hdds that boot with either choice of OS by me swapping the data cable over. The flip side is that I cannot close the chasis to my box and my wife says I am destroying the estheics of my office, humph.
Well dual boot with linux using lilo absolutly rocks (grub is probably cool as well but as I said, I'm still a noob). I have my Win 98 box loaded with Mandrake 10 beta and the best part about it is that Linux automatically mounts my Windows partitions under mnt. Rather than copying files back and forth to keep my important docs I just left everything where it was. When I need something I just go and get it. This greatly simplifies zipping everything up and moving it to some obscure location, then looking for it later.
Not only that but if I am still using windows and I find a package that I want for Linux I might as well just download it in windows. It will just be waiting there for me when I am next in Linux.
Since the 80s I've learned umpteen different languages and forgoten most of them by now. What Open Source means to me is that developers, not marketing execs, decide how to make a language more attractive, usable, and stable. I have recently adopted Linux and Open Source solutions because after writting Visual Studio 6 applications for years I reallized that its all throw away code in.NET. If Java were Open Source I would be more motivated to use it knowing that a bad decision by Sun cannot destroy the language's future. And lets face it, Sun has made some bad decisions since its inception. My time is too valuable (too me) to waste learning something that already has a End of Life slated prior to the next big product push.
My official title is 'SQL Server Guru' and I am responsible for 5 servers at a retail mega-corp. If I am not relearning how to create a better wheel in.Net (from having previously known VS6), I am preparing for countless migrations. SQL7 to SQL2K, WinNT to Win2K, IIS whatever to whatever, not to mention countless security patches that all seem to break more than they fix. Not to mention dll hell and what happens when MDAC gets replaced with an older version. All this crap masquerades under the banner of 'Windows Interoperability'.
Take in contrast the AIX box I have that runs Apache (IBM's flavor) and uses perl and php to connect to Amazon.com. Our admins load whatever they want, if it breaks they back out their changes. I have a cd with all my code that I can deploy to any system I want, tweak 2 files and I'm back in production. We even had to rewrite parts of Curl to handle nonstandard headers. This machine has to be available 98% of the time. It has been up since November. My mission critical Windows machine has been up since middle of February.
It is more important to me that with a text editor and an internet connection I can fix ANYTHING. Than to be sold on software components that have a 3 year lifecycle.
Wow, that rant was better than therapy. Back to my damn migration plan.
PS: It is easier to run an enterprise with no Microsoft components than it is to run one with nothing but Microsoft components.
Since the early 80's I've been filling shoeboxes with copied Commie64 games, the 90 saw me in mass violations against Microsquish. Since changing to Linux I hav'nt broken any laws until now so SUE ME FIRST!!!
P.S: Sorry to the Commie64 game coders but my allowance was 75 cents a week!
Just read, ok I scaned, through that 1MB word doc. Try searching it for (Apache, Perl, PHP, Python, OpenOffice, Sendmail, mySQL). Guess what? 0 hits. But Oracle, BEA, Web Sphere, DB2 all show up. Wait I get it. Windows is cheaper than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a lot of expensive software. By the way that near 1MB word doc is smaller as an OpenOffice file. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Bill.
Amen Brother,
Im tired of getting looks like I fed people caster oil when I hear bitching about IE or Office and I recommend a free alternative. I install Mozilla on other people's systems when they beg me for help. Yesterday I got a call from a friend: "IE stopped working!!". "I installed mozilla on your system months ago.". "Hey, it works". "No shit". "But what about my favorites?". Click.
I like Mandrake and its my current distro but I have never found anything useful on their site. My membership just expired and though I will probably buy stable 10.0 on CD I can't see myself joining the Club again.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows is already the most worthless OS out of the box, is it missing themes, sound effects, solitare? Bet its still just as responsive to viruses.
And to head off all of you out there carrying around the moral barometer: mutual respect and professionalism is a 2-way street so treat your employees right or suffer the wrath of those with nothing to loose!
If we execute all the virus writters then we can have a peacefull world ruled by crappy software and lazy coders. We can forget about encryption and nobody will need passwords. Can you feel the love?
The other day I was looking for a compact flash 802.11 card. I got scoffed at by the techie. "You either want a compact flash or you want a wireless card? What will it be!"
Get real. I'm no hacker but for every $5 million spent in developing this pipe dream tack 30 minutes on to the time it will take the hacker community to undo it. Or worse yet this is the making for the best back door ever. Well greedy bastards can dream can't they?
I'm still concider myself a Linux noobie which is great because that means that Linux still manages to amaze me. One of the collest tricks that I learned for migrating from windows is to repartition the drive so that you can pull off a dual boot.
I've struggled with windows dual boot for years and after enduring enough pain settled on having 2 master hdds that boot with either choice of OS by me swapping the data cable over. The flip side is that I cannot close the chasis to my box and my wife says I am destroying the estheics of my office, humph.
Well dual boot with linux using lilo absolutly rocks (grub is probably cool as well but as I said, I'm still a noob). I have my Win 98 box loaded with Mandrake 10 beta and the best part about it is that Linux automatically mounts my Windows partitions under mnt. Rather than copying files back and forth to keep my important docs I just left everything where it was. When I need something I just go and get it. This greatly simplifies zipping everything up and moving it to some obscure location, then looking for it later.
Not only that but if I am still using windows and I find a package that I want for Linux I might as well just download it in windows. It will just be waiting there for me when I am next in Linux.
Since the 80s I've learned umpteen different languages and forgoten most of them by now. What Open Source means to me is that developers, not marketing execs, decide how to make a language more attractive, usable, and stable. I have recently adopted Linux and Open Source solutions because after writting Visual Studio 6 applications for years I reallized that its all throw away code in .NET. If Java were Open Source I would be more motivated to use it knowing that a bad decision by Sun cannot destroy the language's future. And lets face it, Sun has made some bad decisions since its inception. My time is too valuable (too me) to waste learning something that already has a End of Life slated prior to the next big product push.
My official title is 'SQL Server Guru' and I am responsible for 5 servers at a retail mega-corp. If I am not relearning how to create a better wheel in .Net (from having previously known VS6), I am preparing for countless migrations. SQL7 to SQL2K, WinNT to Win2K, IIS whatever to whatever, not to mention countless security patches that all seem to break more than they fix. Not to mention dll hell and what happens when MDAC gets replaced with an older version. All this crap masquerades under the banner of 'Windows Interoperability'.
Take in contrast the AIX box I have that runs Apache (IBM's flavor) and uses perl and php to connect to Amazon.com. Our admins load whatever they want, if it breaks they back out their changes. I have a cd with all my code that I can deploy to any system I want, tweak 2 files and I'm back in production. We even had to rewrite parts of Curl to handle nonstandard headers. This machine has to be available 98% of the time. It has been up since November. My mission critical Windows machine has been up since middle of February.
It is more important to me that with a text editor and an internet connection I can fix ANYTHING. Than to be sold on software components that have a 3 year lifecycle.
Wow, that rant was better than therapy. Back to my damn migration plan.
PS: It is easier to run an enterprise with no Microsoft components than it is to run one with nothing but Microsoft components.
I could not get a reply to a job thats major requirement was proficiency in an application that I co-wrote. How's that for disappointing?
Since the early 80's I've been filling shoeboxes with copied Commie64 games, the 90 saw me in mass violations against Microsquish. Since changing to Linux I hav'nt broken any laws until now so SUE ME FIRST!!! P.S: Sorry to the Commie64 game coders but my allowance was 75 cents a week!
Just read, ok I scaned, through that 1MB word doc. Try searching it for (Apache, Perl, PHP, Python, OpenOffice, Sendmail, mySQL). Guess what? 0 hits. But Oracle, BEA, Web Sphere, DB2 all show up. Wait I get it. Windows is cheaper than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a lot of expensive software. By the way that near 1MB word doc is smaller as an OpenOffice file. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Bill.
Amen Brother, Im tired of getting looks like I fed people caster oil when I hear bitching about IE or Office and I recommend a free alternative. I install Mozilla on other people's systems when they beg me for help. Yesterday I got a call from a friend: "IE stopped working!!". "I installed mozilla on your system months ago.". "Hey, it works". "No shit". "But what about my favorites?". Click.
I like Mandrake and its my current distro but I have never found anything useful on their site. My membership just expired and though I will probably buy stable 10.0 on CD I can't see myself joining the Club again.