As a professional Systems Administrator who prides themself on their professional conduct, I seriously hope that you are *not* a sysadmin. Such a stubborn, immature, bratty attitude is absolutely unprofessional. If you are incapable of divorcing egotistic impulses from professional conduct, you absolutely should not ever be working near critical systems of any kind.
Any good professional in the world should have some reasonable anticipation (and possibly first-hand experience) of the possibility of dealing with employers who are unfair, wrong, or just stupid. That never, in any way, justifies a retaliatory act of damage against that employer. If you think that it does, you should not be working with critical systems.
"The password is rot13 encrypted on the bottom of the beige stapler on my desk."
"There is no beige stapler on their desk."
"There was. Then someone must have stolen it."
Seriously, how could they possibly justify locking someone up for something like that?
I can think of a million variants like this, all of which could be equally plausible and basically impossible to prove.
Then the case becomes not something about criminally witholding information. It seems like the worst thing that could be charged would be some type of professional, criminal negligence which would have cost the company money. But in that case the territory becomes so murky and the lines of responsibility between the company, management, and employees so crisscrossed that it seems like it would be very difficult to successfully litigate against someone.
"GM crops terminate themselfs. they -can't- spread."
Is that why, a few years ago, american farmers had to literally dump nearly 10,000 tons of rice that had been contaminated with an untested, unapproved GM variety?
To add insult to injury, in order to protect Bayer, the FDA gave retroactive approval to LL601 even though it had still not been tested. The entire european market for long-grain rice has been closed to american farmers since then.
There's nothing like a government-sponsored biological catastrophe.
Since this thread went from the topic of checks to bank Überweisungen (German word for bank transfer), I'm surprised no one mentioned TAN numbers. At least with my german bank account, each überweisung required that a valid, unique TAN number be entered. The bank would send a list of fresh numbers every so often on one of those carbon papers where you peel the front side off to reveal the text. The lists would have many dozens of number, far more than the typical account holder would probably need, and whenever the new list arrived all the numbers on the old one would automatically expire.
I guess the equivalent would be requiring a unique number for each check that one wrote, which would probably much more secure than a signature.
The only down side is that it would be an inconvenience if you lose the list of TAN numbers although you could probably just go into a branch or even call to have a new one sent.
I also recall using Überweisungen for eBay purchases, and often wonder to what extent the existence of free bank transfers in the EU has had on eBay and Paypal. I do not know how such transactions would be handled in the case of a transaction dispute. Perhaps the bank would mitigate the dispute much like they do with credit card disputes. Maybe someone else can enlighten on this issue.
Thank you for this post. You have stated so many things so well. The employment climate that we IT workers labor under is every bit as draconian as you so eloquently depict!
These NC agreements are just one more thread in the larger tapestry of scam mentality operating in this country, as real innovation goes down the drain, more and more lawyers and sleezebags look for different ways to scam and take advantage of people, since they produce nothing of their own that has value.
The worst translation error I think I ever made was when I was in Germany and wanted to make a deposit to my new bank account I had opened. I was eager to be able to conduct myself in German for a business transaction, and confidently went up to the counter at the bank, cash in hand, and announced "Ich moechte eingeben" to which the staff within earshot all started laughing. I realized later when I checked with my friend that I had actually said "I would like to give in". I should have used the verb "einzahlen" - to deposit - instead of "eingeben" - to give in!
Uh yeah, would those 50's be the same ones that dumbass Truman supported the oppressive french puppet government in Vietnam, and the catastrophically misinformed foreign policies of his administration? Or when Diem's US puppet regime in South Vietnam declined to hold free elections as accorded by the Geneva conference of '54? Or perhaps the election of '55 which Diem rigged to receive 98.2 percent in blatant fraud which the US eagerly supported?
But yeah, I think managing to launch a tin-can with a radio transmitter into space with the help of a former nazi scientist is another scrap we should feed to the ignorant flag-waving dumbasses to be proud of.
Tens of thousands of iraqi civilians have not been killed nor maimed because of another country's bombs, evil politicians' lies, and general dirtbag behavior. Perhaps the greatest war crime of all time - the dumping of 80 million liters of dioxin-laced Agent Orange in the Mekong Delta - for which the war criminals have never been held to account - was not perpatrated by another country. Massive amounts of radioactive contamination in Afghanistan and Iraq were not caused by another country's weapons. And the US's dicatorial, bloody tyrant in east Asia, Suharto, just died. The US is in no position, in my opinion, to be trumpeting its "achievements".
"Yeah, I cured your acne. Sorry about the accidental leg amputation though!"
I agree with what (I think is) your sentiment completely. In fact, I find it exceptionally lame that, in the year 2008 on Planet Earth, a discussion topic on an internationally-used forum would be something like this. Aren't there enough jingoistic, nationalistic dumbass morons running around with US flags flapping from their SUVs and pickup trucks? Do we really need more of this crap here on Slashdot? I'm not sure what the association between US flags and car dealerships is, but if I see another row of them flapping above a row of brand-new, gas-guzzling, ecosystem-destroying, SUVs I'm going to puke.
I have suspected for a long time that the US Army's PSYOPS or some other covert domestic propaganda programs are actively influencing discussions on places like Slashdot. This certainly seems to confirm it.
I was going to comment and say something along these lines. But even more, I think that every major laptop vendor should get together and form a consortium to develop a common core OS based on Linux/BSD/whatever and accompanying suite of office applications for this platform that will be standard on all their models. Each company would also have an in-house team which deals exclusively with hardware compatibility issues between their models and the common core.
If every major vendor invested as much or nearly as much money per copy/machine that they now give to Microsoft, it would amount to a massive budget. After the intial phase of development, QA, and deployment, they could then all ditch Windows or offer it as a lesser-quality option for some of their models (e.g. it might not have guarantees of the same level of support as the primary OS).
One major thing about this approach, which includes developing an office suite and possibly re-doing window managers and entire desktop environments from scratch (I'm not happy about KDE nor Gnome too much), is that it would be developed by a well-funded, stable consortium which could afford to do releases of high-quality, thoroughly-tested and QAed software.
Also, another critical issue is that every major hardware vendor would have to sign on, and agree to commence development of drivers for all their products to work with this new OS.
Notice that this is almost exactly what Apple did, and they are kicking major ass because of it.
The OSS model is great for certain things - particularly large projects for server software like Apache - but the model is not, in my opionion, one that is really capable of ever resulting is stable, working, systems for desktop users (which now according to statistics are predominantly laptop users). The lack of serious QA, and the vast scope of the projects that volunteer developers try to undertake often with limited resources, simply cannot really ever result in something that is acceptably stable and useful for the standard desktop user.
It was heartening to see such encouraging words after watching that horrific video which made me want to cry just thinking about how profanely humans have abused this ancient, loving Earth we have inherited.
I also believe "The pen is mightier than the sword" and that, indeed, one day righteousnes, wisdom, and courage will prevail over ignorance, fear, and greed.
The problem is 2 laptops have German keyboards and one other one does not. I find the German keyboards superior for almost all keys - placement of comma, apostrophe, quote, pipe sign, left and right angle brackets, etc. - except the forward slash which requires shift+7; however, with tab completion for pathnames usually only the initial slash needs to be typed anyway. I also love the Alt Graph key and think it should be standard as right alt for for US keyboard layouts.
Typing exclusively on one type or the other is fine, I can adapt fairly quickly. But switching between the two kinds on a frequent basis can be a bit unnerving...
Powermanagement for laptops seems to have consistently been inconsistent. As someone who uses laptops regularlz, having basic functions like hibernation and going into sleep mode causing complete system lockups on a fairly regular basis is a pretty big show-stopper. While I'd love to see the range of supported hardware expanded, I would really love if existing things like ACPI and various suspend technologies worked better and more consistently. It seems every few releases it works for a while then it completely breaks again. I am about to downgrade a laptop from Ubuntu Gutsy back to Feisty for this very reason.
Having the ability to quickly suspend my machine and bring it up again is extremely high on the list of priorities.
What I'm trying to figure out: how the hell is this different than say putting Knoppix on a USB and having a large persistent home directory for all your data? If you really want to get fancy (putting standard Knoppix on the USB key is itself fairly easy) you can remaster Knoppix and add/remove applications at will. In fact, does not this solution completely blow the proposed MS/Sandisk one away?
It seems again that there is a huge hype storm because of neophytes being amazed at a nominal use of some standard functionalities.
As someone who knows the difficulties of learning a foreign language, I sympathize with you regarding what happened. But it is also extremely funny considering that with this particular word the two meanings are so completely opposite one another. I can only imagine the confusion you must have initially felt after looking up the definition!
I admit that I was defensive because I felt that Cygwin was being dismissed in a way that was unfair to it. I understand about the nature of its not being a native shell and thank you for elucidating a bit more about its distinction with Monad.
I do not know how useful having a more integrated shell really would be for me however, and I would not doubt that Microsoft would do everything in their power to limit the functionality and interoperation of Cygwin with their applications and OS framework to the greatest extent possible.
In the end, I wasn't trying to even defend the usefulness of Cygwin per se as much as I was that of many of the excellent GNU utilities that it makes available. Ultimately I think trying to use a Microsoft platform for anything serious becomes inane.
How is running an rsync command via a shell script run by cron a "hog"? I'm sorry, but these unqualified criticisms or criticisms based on weird scenarios or uncommon features/usages are ridiculous.
Even if Cygwin had only 2 or 3 of the utiltities I listed above it would be eminently worth it.
To answer someone else, what native win32 term uses $TERM type xterm? Is there native BASH for win32? What about openssh, rsync, wget, and others? If they are not running under a BASH environment how are they being run?
Also, someone earlier complained about pathnames being inconsistent with Ruby. Ruby is available through cygwin also.
I don't mind fair criticisms, but seeing these unqualified comments about it being a "hog", or "sucking" or whatever is just pure bullshit made by incompentent people.
So let's review some of the useful utilities and features of cygwin in the midst of our baseless trashing of it, shall we?
Among other things, Cygwin provides (going through a more-or-less alphabetical list here):
antiword - command-line utility to convert MS Word docs into plain text autossh - ability to keep persistent ssh sessions between boxes BASH - need one say more? clamav - command-line virus scanner with very high reputation cron - ability to run cron scripts using standard cron interface cygrunsrv - control of services via command-line file - tool to identify file types less - the best command-line pager links - excellent command-line browser man - unix manpages ncftp - very useful ftp client netcat - excellent tool for diagnosing connectivty and other thins openssh - need more be said? this is the full implementation of openssh perl - need more be said? rsync - one of the most versatile file syncing utilities in existence rxvt - a first-class shell that also doesn't use some funky $TERM type which could cause potential problems on some remote systems (uses standard xterm type) ssmtp - way to speak smtp via command-line vim - the vim editor wget - extremely useful, highly versatile tool for fetching data from http and other servers
This is just a short list. Sorry, but it pisses me off to hear someone say "Cygwin is a hack" when they obviously lack sufficient knowledge and experience to understand or even begin to appreciate what it offers, and then proceeds to criticize it based on some whacky, oddball special case scenario using straw-dog logic.
GIMP as far as I knew was a gui app. I didn't even know there was a Cygwin port. I was mainly considering Cygwin in my original posting from the point of view of its command-line offerings. If GIMP has been ported to Cygwin I would say that that is a pretty marginal, specialized usage of Cygwin for whatever you are trying to do.
To use that as an example invalidating the usefulness of Cygwin is in fact ridiculous. I'm sure my mountain bike could also be adapted with a feature to make toast or something but I wouldn't trash its usefulness for riding on trails because it made inferior toast.
does "interesting" include things like scripts that can check status of running services, starting, or stopping services, or scripts to synchronize data between locations? what does "pipe[ing] output from GIMP straight to Photoshop" have to do with "anything that involves both Windows applications and CLI applications within Cygwin"? something is non-sequitur here...
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As a professional Systems Administrator who prides themself on their professional conduct, I seriously hope that you are *not* a sysadmin. Such a stubborn, immature, bratty attitude is absolutely unprofessional. If you are incapable of divorcing egotistic impulses from professional conduct, you absolutely should not ever be working near critical systems of any kind.
Any good professional in the world should have some reasonable anticipation (and possibly first-hand experience) of the possibility of dealing with employers who are unfair, wrong, or just stupid. That never, in any way, justifies a retaliatory act of damage against that employer. If you think that it does, you should not be working with critical systems.
"The password is rot13 encrypted on the bottom of the beige stapler on my desk."
"There is no beige stapler on their desk."
"There was. Then someone must have stolen it."
Seriously, how could they possibly justify locking someone up for something like that?
I can think of a million variants like this, all of which could be equally plausible and basically impossible to prove.
Then the case becomes not something about criminally witholding information. It seems like the worst thing that could be charged would be some type of professional, criminal negligence which would have cost the company money. But in that case the territory becomes so murky and the lines of responsibility between the company, management, and employees so crisscrossed that it seems like it would be very difficult to successfully litigate against someone.
"GM crops terminate themselfs. they -can't- spread."
Is that why, a few years ago, american farmers had to literally dump nearly 10,000 tons of rice that had been contaminated with an untested, unapproved GM variety?
To add insult to injury, in order to protect Bayer, the FDA gave retroactive approval to LL601 even though it had still not been tested. The entire european market for long-grain rice has been closed to american farmers since then.
There's nothing like a government-sponsored biological catastrophe.
Since this thread went from the topic of checks to bank Überweisungen (German word for bank transfer), I'm surprised no one mentioned TAN numbers. At least with my german bank account, each überweisung required that a valid, unique TAN number be entered. The bank would send a list of fresh numbers every so often on one of those carbon papers where you peel the front side off to reveal the text. The lists would have many dozens of number, far more than the typical account holder would probably need, and whenever the new list arrived all the numbers on the old one would automatically expire.
I guess the equivalent would be requiring a unique number for each check that one wrote, which would probably much more secure than a signature.
The only down side is that it would be an inconvenience if you lose the list of TAN numbers although you could probably just go into a branch or even call to have a new one sent.
I also recall using Überweisungen for eBay purchases, and often wonder to what extent the existence of free bank transfers in the EU has had on eBay and Paypal. I do not know how such transactions would be handled in the case of a transaction dispute. Perhaps the bank would mitigate the dispute much like they do with credit card disputes. Maybe someone else can enlighten on this issue.
Thank you for this post. You have stated so many things so well. The employment climate that we IT workers labor under is every bit as draconian as you so eloquently depict!
These NC agreements are just one more thread in the larger tapestry of scam mentality operating in this country, as real innovation goes down the drain, more and more lawyers and sleezebags look for different ways to scam and take advantage of people, since they produce nothing of their own that has value.
The worst translation error I think I ever made was when I was in Germany and wanted to make a deposit to my new bank account I had opened. I was eager to be able to conduct myself in German for a business transaction, and confidently went up to the counter at the bank, cash in hand, and announced "Ich moechte eingeben" to which the staff within earshot all started laughing. I realized later when I checked with my friend that I had actually said "I would like to give in". I should have used the verb "einzahlen" - to deposit - instead of "eingeben" - to give in!
Uh yeah, would those 50's be the same ones that dumbass Truman supported the oppressive french puppet government in Vietnam, and the catastrophically misinformed foreign policies of his administration? Or when Diem's US puppet regime in South Vietnam declined to hold free elections as accorded by the Geneva conference of '54? Or perhaps the election of '55 which Diem rigged to receive 98.2 percent in blatant fraud which the US eagerly supported?
But yeah, I think managing to launch a tin-can with a radio transmitter into space with the help of a former nazi scientist is another scrap we should feed to the ignorant flag-waving dumbasses to be proud of.
Tens of thousands of iraqi civilians have not been killed nor maimed because of another country's bombs, evil politicians' lies, and general dirtbag behavior. Perhaps the greatest war crime of all time - the dumping of 80 million liters of dioxin-laced Agent Orange in the Mekong Delta - for which the war criminals have never been held to account - was not perpatrated by another country. Massive amounts of radioactive contamination in Afghanistan and Iraq were not caused by another country's weapons. And the US's dicatorial, bloody tyrant in east Asia, Suharto, just died. The US is in no position, in my opinion, to be trumpeting its "achievements".
"Yeah, I cured your acne. Sorry about the accidental leg amputation though!"
I agree with what (I think is) your sentiment completely. In fact, I find it exceptionally lame that, in the year 2008 on Planet Earth, a discussion topic on an internationally-used forum would be something like this. Aren't there enough jingoistic, nationalistic dumbass morons running around with US flags flapping from their SUVs and pickup trucks? Do we really need more of this crap here on Slashdot? I'm not sure what the association between US flags and car dealerships is, but if I see another row of them flapping above a row of brand-new, gas-guzzling, ecosystem-destroying, SUVs I'm going to puke.
I have suspected for a long time that the US Army's PSYOPS or some other covert domestic propaganda programs are actively influencing discussions on places like Slashdot. This certainly seems to confirm it.
I was going to comment and say something along these lines. But even more, I think that every major laptop vendor should get together and form a consortium to develop a common core OS based on Linux/BSD/whatever and accompanying suite of office applications for this platform that will be standard on all their models. Each company would also have an in-house team which deals exclusively with hardware compatibility issues between their models and the common core.
If every major vendor invested as much or nearly as much money per copy/machine that they now give to Microsoft, it would amount to a massive budget. After the intial phase of development, QA, and deployment, they could then all ditch Windows or offer it as a lesser-quality option for some of their models (e.g. it might not have guarantees of the same level of support as the primary OS).
One major thing about this approach, which includes developing an office suite and possibly re-doing window managers and entire desktop environments from scratch (I'm not happy about KDE nor Gnome too much), is that it would be developed by a well-funded, stable consortium which could afford to do releases of high-quality, thoroughly-tested and QAed software.
Also, another critical issue is that every major hardware vendor would have to sign on, and agree to commence development of drivers for all their products to work with this new OS.
Notice that this is almost exactly what Apple did, and they are kicking major ass because of it.
The OSS model is great for certain things - particularly large projects for server software like Apache - but the model is not, in my opionion, one that is really capable of ever resulting is stable, working, systems for desktop users (which now according to statistics are predominantly laptop users). The lack of serious QA, and the vast scope of the projects that volunteer developers try to undertake often with limited resources, simply cannot really ever result in something that is acceptably stable and useful for the standard desktop user.
It was heartening to see such encouraging words after watching that horrific video which made me want to cry just thinking about how profanely humans have abused this ancient, loving Earth we have inherited.
I also believe "The pen is mightier than the sword" and that, indeed, one day righteousnes, wisdom, and courage will prevail over ignorance, fear, and greed.
The problem is 2 laptops have German keyboards and one other one does not. I find the German keyboards superior for almost all keys - placement of comma, apostrophe, quote, pipe sign, left and right angle brackets, etc. - except the forward slash which requires shift+7; however, with tab completion for pathnames usually only the initial slash needs to be typed anyway. I also love the Alt Graph key and think it should be standard as right alt for for US keyboard layouts.
Typing exclusively on one type or the other is fine, I can adapt fairly quickly. But switching between the two kinds on a frequent basis can be a bit unnerving...
Powermanagement for laptops seems to have consistently been inconsistent. As someone who uses laptops regularlz, having basic functions like hibernation and going into sleep mode causing complete system lockups on a fairly regular basis is a pretty big show-stopper. While I'd love to see the range of supported hardware expanded, I would really love if existing things like ACPI and various suspend technologies worked better and more consistently. It seems every few releases it works for a while then it completely breaks again. I am about to downgrade a laptop from Ubuntu Gutsy back to Feisty for this very reason.
Having the ability to quickly suspend my machine and bring it up again is extremely high on the list of priorities.
Other excuses notwithstanding, I am not onlz disappointed but also disgusted by it.
This microcode update is being provided to eliminate two issues:
A possible processor marginality
A potential source of unpredictable system behavior
For my system, there has already been one other update released since the one that fixed the microcode.
Also interesting to note what that they mention on the same page:
This microcode update has no performance impact and is a complete solution for these issues.
Interesting how Germany compares with other companies on this map produced by Privacy International on leading surveillance societies in the world. 02/11/2006 is a bit old however in terms of the Internet and privacy matters.
What I'm trying to figure out: how the hell is this different than say putting Knoppix on a USB and having a large persistent home directory for all your data? If you really want to get fancy (putting standard Knoppix on the USB key is itself fairly easy) you can remaster Knoppix and add/remove applications at will. In fact, does not this solution completely blow the proposed MS/Sandisk one away?
It seems again that there is a huge hype storm because of neophytes being amazed at a nominal use of some standard functionalities.
As someone who knows the difficulties of learning a foreign language, I sympathize with you regarding what happened. But it is also extremely funny considering that with this particular word the two meanings are so completely opposite one another. I can only imagine the confusion you must have initially felt after looking up the definition!
I admit that I was defensive because I felt that Cygwin was being dismissed in a way that was unfair to it. I understand about the nature of its not being a native shell and thank you for elucidating a bit more about its distinction with Monad.
I do not know how useful having a more integrated shell really would be for me however, and I would not doubt that Microsoft would do everything in their power to limit the functionality and interoperation of Cygwin with their applications and OS framework to the greatest extent possible.
In the end, I wasn't trying to even defend the usefulness of Cygwin per se as much as I was that of many of the excellent GNU utilities that it makes available. Ultimately I think trying to use a Microsoft platform for anything serious becomes inane.
How is running an rsync command via a shell script run by cron a "hog"? I'm sorry, but these unqualified criticisms or criticisms based on weird scenarios or uncommon features/usages are ridiculous.
Even if Cygwin had only 2 or 3 of the utiltities I listed above it would be eminently worth it.
To answer someone else, what native win32 term uses $TERM type xterm? Is there native BASH for win32? What about openssh, rsync, wget, and others? If they are not running under a BASH environment how are they being run?
Also, someone earlier complained about pathnames being inconsistent with Ruby. Ruby is available through cygwin also.
I don't mind fair criticisms, but seeing these unqualified comments about it being a "hog", or "sucking" or whatever is just pure bullshit made by incompentent people.
So let's review some of the useful utilities and features of cygwin in the midst of our baseless trashing of it, shall we?
Among other things, Cygwin provides (going through a more-or-less alphabetical list here):
antiword - command-line utility to convert MS Word docs into plain text
autossh - ability to keep persistent ssh sessions between boxes
BASH - need one say more?
clamav - command-line virus scanner with very high reputation
cron - ability to run cron scripts using standard cron interface
cygrunsrv - control of services via command-line
file - tool to identify file types
less - the best command-line pager
links - excellent command-line browser
man - unix manpages
ncftp - very useful ftp client
netcat - excellent tool for diagnosing connectivty and other thins
openssh - need more be said? this is the full implementation of openssh
perl - need more be said?
rsync - one of the most versatile file syncing utilities in existence
rxvt - a first-class shell that also doesn't use some funky $TERM type which could cause potential problems on some remote systems (uses standard xterm type)
ssmtp - way to speak smtp via command-line
vim - the vim editor
wget - extremely useful, highly versatile tool for fetching data from http and other servers
This is just a short list. Sorry, but it pisses me off to hear someone say "Cygwin is a hack" when they obviously lack sufficient knowledge and experience to understand or even begin to appreciate what it offers, and then proceeds to criticize it based on some whacky, oddball special case scenario using straw-dog logic.
GIMP as far as I knew was a gui app. I didn't even know there was a Cygwin port. I was mainly considering Cygwin in my original posting from the point of view of its command-line offerings. If GIMP has been ported to Cygwin I would say that that is a pretty marginal, specialized usage of Cygwin for whatever you are trying to do.
To use that as an example invalidating the usefulness of Cygwin is in fact ridiculous. I'm sure my mountain bike could also be adapted with a feature to make toast or something but I wouldn't trash its usefulness for riding on trails because it made inferior toast.
does "interesting" include things like scripts that can check status of running services, starting, or stopping services, or scripts to synchronize data between locations? what does "pipe[ing] output from GIMP straight to Photoshop" have to do with "anything that involves both Windows applications and CLI applications within Cygwin"? something is non-sequitur here...
What is wrong with Cygwin? How can he bash Cygwin (sorry, no pun intended) without even bothering to say anything about it?