Every male on my father's side has been diagnosed ADHD since 1969 (before then they diagnosed it as "dementia".. in fact they used to diagnose everything as dementia.. psychiatry, what a science). On my mother's side, about half of the males are diabetic and also are ADHD.
ADHD as a sysadmin and Ephedra as a wonder drug.
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As a systems administrator, ADHD has it's perks and drawbacks. It's perks are the times when you're in a very interrupt driven role. It's easy to change focus on the drop of a hat. The drawbacks are when you're project focused. It's easy to change focus on the drop of the hat.
I took Ritalin off and on from age 7-18. I stopped taking it, because at the time I hadn't had a dosage adjustment in several years, and my doctor just kept dolling out the same "30mg twice a day" settlement, and it didn't seem to have the affect that it used to.
I've tried many things since, ephedra, caffeine, ginseng, exercise/fresh air several times per day, etc. Eventually, once I get around to choosing a health insurance plan (that's the type of research that sucks, reading through dozens of pages of information on various health insurance plans for my company figuring out what is best), I'll get back on ritalin or an alternative. From what I remember, it involved a psychiatric evaluation and some observation & discussion before choosing a dosage, followed by regular (every other month) checkups from the doctor. It was especially annoying and expensive in the state of pennsylvania, because they required a physical every time a prescription was written, so my doctor would write several months at a time, ignoring the regulation. As usual, annoying drug addicts ruin everything.
Ephedra works best. Ephedra works better than ritalin did. Unfortunately in a very, very small percentage of the population it has bad side effects.. The funny thing is, a couple of high school students went and took 5 or 6 "stackers" or "yellow jackets" (common off the shelf variety) and then went and did football practice (I used to be in football, practice was brutal) and duh, they had heart attacks... In me, it allows me to focus on less things, finish projects, meet deadlines.. The only side effect is if I don't take one "stacker" per day, and I skip a week or so, the next time I take it alters my sleep patterns and I have to use a fair amount of will power to fix them. Taking more than one per day, and I'd be likely to stay up for 3 or 4 days.
Unfortunately it's now very hard to find, so I'm looking for new alternatives. I've been taking two half hour walks per day and showering right afterwards to help clear my mind, and that seems to be helping a bit.
I'll relate one thing. Interviews suck. Having to go over the same boring details to 4 or 5 people over and over again. The only thing worse than interviews for me are company meetings. Company meetings are the main reason I run my own consulting company, and will hopefully never work for a company I do not run again. I can't stand listening to some overpaid windbag from stanford go on and on about product scope and market analysis.
I live in this steel warehouse in san francisco, and cooling is never a problem.. Those few days a year that SF gets above 80 degrees, I turn on the big 4' fan that's downstairs (phase three power, woo hoo!) and it moves air around the entire warehouse as long as the doors are open.. you can feel that puppy if you're standing 60 feet away.
Re:Exactly how do you exterminate a gnome?
on
MIT Gnome Invasion
·
· Score: 1
The best place to post is craigslist.org, but there are really slim pickings.. As a consultant, I do pretty well, but I've got friends who are in college looking for CS internships, and friends who are looking for entry-level positions, and they're mostly working as waiters (making horrible tips).. The bay area is dead right now.. It'll be better, after it gets worse and more dead weight leaves..
"But as the technology gets better, the cost-effectiveness is becoming a compelling force. In five to 10 years this [electric instruments and related equipment] will all be digital anyway."
You've got millions of guitar players who scoff at the idea of a digital amp, which has been around for decades, and they think 5-10 years will be the conversion time? Eventually digital engineers will figure out their heads from their asses, and yeah it'll be a good idea, but I'll be in my late 40s by then..
My grandfather said to my father, about 40 years ago, "Son, digital electronics are for people who aren't intelligent enough to understand analog electronics". Sad, but true..
I paid $50 for my last guitar cable, and that was a rather mid-quality cable imho.. Just think.. cable manufacturers will be ripping off guitarists charging $50 for a 10' ethernet cable that cost them $0.01 to make:)
If only I'd have gone into the scsi cable industry, I'd be a rich thief right now!
Personally, I have 1100 CDS, and not a single one of them is on a major label. The closest my cd collection gets to major labels is records off of hellcats records http://www.hell-cat.com which is owned by epitaph.. Frankly, there's just nothing on the radio that interests me. I have no interest in the latest techno, pop-punk, pop r&b, whatever album.. Never had, never will.
What this article really means?
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
(Marc Andreesen) I'm an egotistical, talentless hack who's latest stupid idea, loudcloud, failed, so I sold off half of the company to a bunch of Unsuspecting, good old boy rubes, since my status as "Internet Goldenboy" is in question. (/Marc Andreesen)
I used to work for a rather lame start-up, which was run by a member of the aohell/nutscrape cronie network of good old boys (that racist, ignorant, sexual harassing homophobic prick, The only person I know of to have a wired article about how much of a jerk he is. Opsware was crap. It was slow, buggy, and caused us downtime that wasn't really downtime according to loudcloud's incredible staff of marketing and law employees. We were a startup with low funding, yet we spent $800k a month for service from them that we could have built ourselves at exodus or equinix for $200k a month.
The sex pistols were just another pop band, plain and simple.. They weren't the first punk band, and they weren't the best.. They just got the most attention.. They were just in it for the money.. Don't believe me?
Walk down Market Street in San Francisco. Absolut Vodka has bought advertising rights with their name to have pointless posters on every bathroom kiosk saying "Absolut Sex Pistols"
Just more commercial bullshit.
In the immortal words of Wesley Willis
on
Superhero Smackdown
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Batman thought he was bad He was a fucking asshole in the first place He got knocked to the floor I wupped batman's ass! I wupped batman's ass! I wupped batman's ass!
Superman thought he was bad He was messing with my girlfriend I caught him in my room kissing her I took a rubber hose and flogged his rump
If anything I see more reason to use SCSI on
a workstation than on a small fileserver..
Ram is soooooooo cheap right now I can't see why you wouldn't just buy 4 gigs of ram, and cache all the most commonly accessed files in memory.. hell, buy a cheap used xeon box for a grand, and spend another 1600 buying 16 gigs of pc100 memory...
scsi on a personal workstation.. Here are some of the daily activities that slow me down where scsi would solve the problem :
Compilations
Finding files/directory tree searches
rsyncing my home directory onto another machine
those three things warranted to me the extra cost of scsi.. now I can compile a kernel while doing all my normal activities..
Is this any more special than the last time
slashdot announced an amazing terabyte arrayHere
Seriously though.. People's numbers are pretty far off. This can be done for about 3000.. Pricewatch
has 160 gig drives for $259.. 10 of these would give you over 1 terabyte in useable space in raid 1.. Or if you just cared about write performance, 6 of them for $1554 would give you a terabyte of useable storage.. another $600 to throw together a cheap pc and cheap ide raid cards.. you get it for under $2500.. big deal.
Lately I'm realizing how awful IDE really is.. I finally got around to throwing 2 36 gig ultra 160 drives on my box with an adaptec scsi card, running ext3 on top of a raid mirror.. more space than I need (I just keep all my mp3s on an IDE raid.. since my dragon motherboard has ide raid built in).. Since I've gone to scsi life has been happy. I can do things while compiling, while vacuuming my db, etc..
Funny how mac used scsi before the rest of us, huh?
Napster from an (ex)employee's perspective
on
Review of Pay Napster
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I worked at Napster for a year.
The only thing I can say is they are getting
what they deserve. Any company that treats people
like napster treated their employees, deserves
to die a slow painful death, what they are doing.
I was the 6th systems administrator in less than 2 years to quit, and apparently 4 have quit since I left. The only ironic part is after I left, they fired the main sources of problems.. their incompetent executive staff.. Their IT manager was fired thank goodness, he was a nepotism hire by their vp of engineering Eddie Kessler, who was also fired.
First off I disagree with your statement entirely. I think this world needs more specialists.. people who can become obsessed, fall in love with something then pursue it.. there are too many "social" beings who contribute nothing but more sniveling snotty-nosed brats.
Second, Shawn fanning is a fucking jock. Shawn gives hackers a bad name. He's big burly and looks like the kinda kids who used to harrass us back in high school for being overweight geeks.
Well I think the open-source nazis should back off on this. It has always been napster's policy to "look the other way" regarding open source clients connecting to the service.. Which means They are a company and probably won't open-source the napster server or client.. but they will not do anything to anyone who open sources their own napster-type server, or client which interfaces with napster.. no matter which way the napster client goes from what I've heard, they'll never stop others from connecting to their servers via 3rd party web/pc based clients.
I don't think it's an open source issue. I think we won't have true freedom for music until there are anti-trust lawsuits brought up by all member companies of the riaa, and those companies are forced to give back rights of music retroactively to all artists.
If there was a browser for linux that didn't crash as often as mozilla/netscape, It'd be worth $999.. I waste too much time dealing with netscape's problems.. and mozilla sucks ass. At least the slowaris dorks have internet explorer available to them and it's stable.. microsoft sucks ass.. but their browser works.
Netscape went downhill when they got bought out by aol.
at LEAST half of the unix guys I work with/have worked with did not finish college. Probably near 1/5th of them didn't even finish high school.
I think the reason a lot of unix shops don't hire interns is that there aren't that many kids in college into unix to begin with.. most college kids in comp sci right now are taking comp sci not because they love computing or are seriously into it.. they're into it for the money.. which doesn't relate well to unix/linux..
In america we take our good things for granted until something glitzy reinvents it.. They gave us a great analogy. Rock'n'roll.. great american art form.. ignored until a bunch of boring brits with stupid haircuts processed it, killed the art of the live performance with their un-reproducable recorded tracks (yeah the beatles started that lame trend) and spewed it back at us demanding all of our $$$ in exchange for their crap.
Now steve jobs does it again with his average products and over-active marketing morons.
I am not saying lose your culture. I say america is "the melting pot" so assimilate what it takes to thrive in this culture.
Amish are seperatists and not very american, no. Seperatists aren't american. They just invade space.
And maybe america a century ago was about becoming a melting pot.. but not any more. Look @ our pop culture that the world is constantly embracing. It's vanilla and bland, but everybody wants to be american (don't believe it.. go to tokyo and see the little brats trying to be like rap trash, etc..)
And my ancestors came over during the famine and kept to their own.. My generation in my family is the first that isn't 100% catholic-irish-american.. and also the first generation to have members of my family in about 140 years NOT living in row houses in an irish slum in pittsburgh. "keeping to your own" brings you down.
I've been thrust into different countries due to jobs and I adapted.
What mexican culture? Bad food (I don't care how many different names you have for it. ITS A F****** TACO), poverty, close family structure that encourages huge familes (ie overpopulation).. Get some sense. If you have no money, don't have 30 babies.
The spanish language is very, very harsh on the ears.. It's an ugly language. Italian,russian, czech, macedonian.. much more interesting languages to listen to/learn.
Oh come on man. This one was funny. That didn't deserve such a low moderation (saying this here because I've posted in this thread and can't meta moderate later on)
To be american is to accept the fact that our
government is run by a few socially/economically elite companies. To represent these companies we get a different executive every 4-8 years depending on his performance (how well he represents his employers, ie the corporate PACS that put him in office) and how much he beat his enemies (his PAC's competitors) down.
And we lie to ourselves that a dollar isn't equal to a vote.. I guess it's true now.. it's more like a billon dollaris is equal to a vote..
Agreed. America is america. It might be nice for someone to say "wow I paid attention in some boring georgraphy course in college, which was taught by a professor who disliked america".. but it's as lame as listening to richard stallman bitch and moan about people calling linux linux instead of gnu/linux.. We all bitched about the "web" for years but we eventually accepted it. The rest of the world considers the 50 united states of america to be "america".. then there is south america and canada.. you rarely even hear the term north america..
Slashdot Mirror
Replay uses VxWorks ..
Every male on my father's side has been .. in fact they used to diagnose everything as dementia.. psychiatry, what a science). On my mother's side, about half of the males are diabetic and also are ADHD.
diagnosed ADHD since 1969 (before then they diagnosed it as "dementia"
As a systems administrator, ADHD has it's perks and drawbacks. It's perks are the times when you're in a very interrupt driven role. It's easy to change focus on the drop of a hat. The drawbacks are when you're project focused. It's easy to change focus on the drop of the hat.
I took Ritalin off and on from age 7-18. I stopped taking it, because at the time I hadn't had a dosage adjustment in several years, and my doctor just kept dolling out the same "30mg twice a day" settlement, and it didn't seem to have the affect that it used to.
I've tried many things since, ephedra, caffeine, ginseng, exercise/fresh air several times per day, etc. Eventually, once I get around to choosing a health insurance plan (that's the type of research that sucks, reading through dozens of pages of information on various health insurance plans for my company figuring out what is best), I'll get back on ritalin or an alternative. From what I remember, it involved a psychiatric evaluation and some observation & discussion before choosing a dosage, followed by regular (every other month) checkups from the doctor. It was especially annoying and expensive in the state of pennsylvania, because they required a physical every time a prescription was written, so my doctor would write several months at a time, ignoring the regulation. As usual, annoying drug addicts ruin everything.
Ephedra works best. Ephedra works better than ritalin did. Unfortunately in a very, very small percentage of the population it has bad side effects.. The funny thing is, a couple of high school students went and took 5 or 6 "stackers" or "yellow jackets" (common off the shelf variety) and then went and did football practice (I used to be in football, practice was brutal) and duh, they had heart attacks... In me, it allows me to focus on less things, finish projects, meet deadlines.. The only side effect is if I don't take one "stacker" per day, and I skip a week or so, the next time I take it alters my sleep patterns and I have to use a fair amount of will power to fix them. Taking more than one per day, and I'd be likely to stay up for 3 or 4 days.
Unfortunately it's now very hard to find, so I'm looking for new alternatives. I've been taking two half hour walks per day and showering right afterwards to help clear my mind, and that seems to be helping a bit.
I'll relate one thing. Interviews suck. Having
to go over the same boring details to 4 or 5 people over and over again. The only thing worse than interviews for me are company meetings. Company meetings are the main reason I run my own consulting company, and will hopefully never work for a company I do not run again. I can't stand listening to some overpaid windbag from stanford go on and on about product scope and market analysis.
I live in this steel warehouse in san francisco, and cooling is never a problem.. Those few days a year that SF gets above 80 degrees, I turn on the big 4' fan that's downstairs (phase three power, woo hoo!) and it moves air around the entire warehouse as long as the doors are open.. you can feel that puppy if you're standing 60 feet away.
Actually, wouldn't this be Kappa Delta Epislon?
The best place to post is craigslist.org, but there are really slim pickings.. As a consultant, I do pretty well, but I've got friends who are in college looking for CS internships, and friends who are looking for entry-level positions, and they're mostly working as waiters (making horrible tips).. The bay area is dead right now.. It'll be better, after it gets worse and more dead weight leaves..
"But as the technology gets better, the cost-effectiveness is becoming a compelling force. In five to 10 years this [electric instruments and related equipment] will all be digital anyway."
:)
You've got millions of guitar players who scoff
at the idea of a digital amp, which has been around for decades, and they think 5-10 years will be the conversion time? Eventually digital engineers will figure out their heads from their asses, and yeah it'll be a good idea, but I'll be in my late 40s by then..
My grandfather said to my father, about 40 years ago, "Son, digital electronics are for people who aren't intelligent enough to understand analog electronics". Sad, but true..
I paid $50 for my last guitar cable, and that
was a rather mid-quality cable imho.. Just think.. cable manufacturers will be ripping off guitarists charging $50 for a 10' ethernet cable that cost them $0.01 to make
If only I'd have gone into the scsi cable industry, I'd be a rich thief right now!
Personally, I have 1100 CDS, and not a single one
of them is on a major label. The closest my cd
collection gets to major labels is records off of hellcats records http://www.hell-cat.com which is owned by epitaph.. Frankly, there's just nothing on the radio that interests me. I have no interest in the latest techno, pop-punk, pop r&b, whatever album.. Never had, never will.
(Marc Andreesen)
I'm an egotistical, talentless hack who's latest
stupid idea, loudcloud, failed, so I sold off half
of the company to a bunch of Unsuspecting, good old boy rubes, since my status as "Internet Goldenboy" is in question.
(/Marc Andreesen)
I used to work for a rather lame start-up, which was run by a member of the aohell/nutscrape
cronie network of good old boys (that racist, ignorant, sexual harassing homophobic prick, The only person I know of to have a wired article about how much of a jerk he is. Opsware was
crap. It was slow, buggy, and caused us downtime
that wasn't really downtime according to loudcloud's incredible staff of marketing and law
employees. We were a startup with low funding, yet we spent $800k a month for service from them that we could have built ourselves at exodus or equinix for $200k a month.
If anybody wants information on a REAL movement
in automated systems administration, go to Infrastructures.org A movement based on Steve Traugott's Usenix presentation Bootstrapping the infrastructure.
The sex pistols were just another pop band, plain
and simple.. They weren't the first punk band,
and they weren't the best.. They just got the most
attention.. They were just in it for the money..
Don't believe me?
Walk down Market Street in San Francisco. Absolut Vodka has bought advertising rights with their name to have pointless posters on every bathroom kiosk saying "Absolut Sex Pistols"
Just more commercial bullshit.
Batman thought he was bad
He was a fucking asshole in the first place
He got knocked to the floor
I wupped batman's ass!
I wupped batman's ass!
I wupped batman's ass!
Superman thought he was bad
He was messing with my girlfriend
I caught him in my room kissing her
I took a rubber hose and flogged his rump
I whipped Superman's ass (repeat 4 times)
Wesley Willis Song Generator
Read the book "Man of lightning" It shows a lot
of truths about tesla..
For example, Tesla holds the patent for wirelss
transmission, not marconi.
Without tesla we'd have power statiosn every few
miles because.. well. DC doesn't go too damned far..
If anything I see more reason to use SCSI on
a workstation than on a small fileserver..
Ram is soooooooo cheap right now I can't see why you wouldn't just buy 4 gigs of ram, and cache all the most commonly accessed files in memory.. hell, buy a cheap used xeon box for a grand, and spend another 1600 buying 16 gigs of pc100 memory...
scsi on a personal workstation.. Here are some of the daily activities that slow me down where scsi would solve the problem :
Compilations
Finding files/directory tree searches
rsyncing my home directory onto another machine
those three things warranted to me the extra cost of scsi.. now I can compile a kernel while doing all my normal activities..
Is this any more special than the last time
.. 10 of these would give you over 1 terabyte in useable space in raid 1.. Or if you just cared about write performance, 6 of them for $1554 would give you a terabyte of useable storage.. another $600 to throw together a cheap pc and cheap ide raid cards.. you get it for under $2500.. big deal.
slashdot announced an amazing terabyte arrayHere
Seriously though.. People's numbers are pretty far off. This can be done for about 3000.. Pricewatch
has 160 gig drives for $259
Lately I'm realizing how awful IDE really is.. I finally got around to throwing 2 36 gig ultra 160 drives on my box with an adaptec scsi card, running ext3 on top of a raid mirror.. more space than I need (I just keep all my mp3s on an IDE raid.. since my dragon motherboard has ide raid built in).. Since I've gone to scsi life has been happy. I can do things while compiling, while vacuuming my db, etc..
Funny how mac used scsi before the rest of us, huh?
I worked at Napster for a year.
The only thing I can say is they are getting
what they deserve. Any company that treats people
like napster treated their employees, deserves
to die a slow painful death, what they are doing.
I was the 6th systems administrator in less than 2 years to quit, and apparently 4 have quit since I left. The only ironic part is after I left, they fired the main sources of problems.. their incompetent executive staff.. Their IT manager was fired thank goodness, he was a nepotism hire by their vp of engineering Eddie Kessler, who was also fired.
Let them rot, and let the music be free.
First off I disagree with your statement entirely. I think this world needs more specialists.. people who can become obsessed, fall in love with something then pursue it.. there are too many "social" beings who contribute nothing but more sniveling snotty-nosed brats.
Second, Shawn fanning is a fucking jock. Shawn gives hackers a bad name. He's big burly and looks like the kinda kids who used to harrass us back in high school for being overweight geeks.
Well I think the open-source nazis should back off on this. It has always been napster's policy to "look the other way" regarding open source clients connecting to the service.. Which means They are a company and probably won't open-source the napster server or client.. but they will not do anything to anyone who open sources their own napster-type server, or client which interfaces with napster.. no matter which way the napster client goes from what I've heard, they'll never stop others from connecting to their servers via 3rd party web/pc based clients. I don't think it's an open source issue. I think we won't have true freedom for music until there are anti-trust lawsuits brought up by all member companies of the riaa, and those companies are forced to give back rights of music retroactively to all artists.
If there was a browser for linux that didn't crash as often as mozilla/netscape, It'd be worth $999 .. I waste too much time dealing with netscape's problems.. and mozilla sucks ass. At least the slowaris dorks have internet explorer available to them and it's stable.. microsoft sucks ass.. but their browser works.
Netscape went downhill when they got bought out by aol.
Dude. What crack are you smoking?
..
at LEAST half of the unix guys I work with/have worked with did not finish college. Probably near 1/5th of them didn't even finish high school.
I think the reason a lot of unix shops don't hire interns is that there aren't that many kids in college into unix to begin with.. most college kids in comp sci right now are taking comp sci not because they love computing or are seriously into it.. they're into it for the money.. which doesn't relate well to unix/linux
In america we take our good things for granted until something glitzy reinvents it.. They gave us a great analogy. Rock'n'roll .. great american art form.. ignored until a bunch of boring brits with stupid haircuts processed it, killed the art of the live performance with their un-reproducable recorded tracks (yeah the beatles started that lame trend) and spewed it back at us demanding all of our $$$ in exchange for their crap.
Now steve jobs does it again with his average products and over-active marketing morons.
I am not saying lose your culture. I say america is "the melting pot" so assimilate what it takes to thrive in this culture.
.. Get some sense. If you have no money, don't have 30 babies.
.. much more interesting languages to listen to/learn.
Amish are seperatists and not very american, no. Seperatists aren't american. They just invade space.
And maybe america a century ago was about becoming a melting pot.. but not any more. Look @ our pop culture that the world is constantly embracing. It's vanilla and bland, but everybody wants to be american (don't believe it.. go to tokyo and see the little brats trying to be like rap trash, etc..)
And my ancestors came over during the famine and kept to their own.. My generation in my family is the first that isn't 100% catholic-irish-american.. and also the first generation to have members of my family in about 140 years NOT living in row houses in an irish slum in pittsburgh. "keeping to your own" brings you down.
I've been thrust into different countries due to jobs and I adapted.
What mexican culture? Bad food (I don't care how many different names you have for it. ITS A F****** TACO), poverty, close family structure that encourages huge familes (ie overpopulation)
The spanish language is very, very harsh on the ears.. It's an ugly language. Italian,russian, czech, macedonian
Oh come on. You know you haven't made it in america unless you're wearing an italian suit, driving a german car, and talking on a japanese cell phone!
Oh come on man. This one was funny. That didn't deserve such a low moderation (saying this here because I've posted in this thread and can't meta moderate later on)
To be american is to accept the fact that our
government is run by a few socially/economically elite companies. To represent these companies we get a different executive every 4-8 years depending on his performance (how well he represents his employers, ie the corporate PACS that put him in office) and how much he beat his enemies (his PAC's competitors) down.
And we lie to ourselves that a dollar isn't equal to a vote.. I guess it's true now.. it's more like a billon dollaris is equal to a vote..
Agreed. America is america. It might be nice for someone to say "wow I paid attention in some boring georgraphy course in college, which was taught by a professor who disliked america".. but it's as lame as listening to richard stallman bitch and moan about people calling linux linux instead of gnu/linux .. We all bitched about the "web" for years but we eventually accepted it. The rest of the world considers the 50 united states of america to be "america" .. then there is south america and canada.. you rarely even hear the term north america..