I should clarify the above./bin/sh is what is used by all the start up scripts and possibly other system stuff. In Perl in the very least when you make a system() or exec() call it always uses/bin/sh. I suspect other languages probably are doing the same, but cannot guarantee that.
That's the user's login shell which is different from the system default shell. The system default shell is always/bin/sh which these days is a sym link to another shell. On Ubuntu that other shell is/bin/dash. In theory I could have just changed the symlink myself, but who knows what unexected issues I would be causing by doing so when Ubuntu clearly intended for me to be using dash as the default shell.
As a college drop out who is fairly successful but has also returned to college due to the whole "YOU MUST HAVE A DEGREE!!!!" craze, this is an idea that I frequently suggest should be how it's done. Not directly relevant to the degree? Cool, you have to show up and do what work you can, but why force people to try to become "experts" in things that they are not interested in and have little to no use for? In some ways working in the real world for several years and maturing before going back to school have made things easier for me. In some ways it has made it harder. Now I don't just suspect that I'm not likely to ever need the information from World History 101 to do my job, I KNOW I don't need it because I've been doing my job without it for years.
I have been told many times it's to make me more well rounded and ensure that I've been exposed to as many things as possible so that I can discover new things I enjoy. Those people can fuck off. Becoming "well rounded" is for people with spare time and money and/or a true interest in doing so. It's not required for most jobs, but they want to make the college education a requirement for those jobs anyway. With the time and money investment required for college, if it's so that I'm qualified for a job, then the classes that are not related to my job shouldn't affect my grade, future hireability, etc. prefereably I shouldn't even have to pay for or sit through those classes and it should maybe be more like a pure tech school/trade school sort of thing. Perhaps like an extended version of the certificate programs offered at some colleges.
It's funny that you mention using Ubuntu because you don't have time to troubleshoot weird stuff with Debian. I started with Slackware and ran it for years and built most stuff from source, so Debian of course feels like no work at all to set up, maintain, etc. most of the time anyway. I've never had weird bugs to work around in Debian except with Tomcat that I can remember.
I realize I'm an edge case here and not the norm, but I'm actually setting up Debian servers at work because I didn't have time to work around craziness in Ubuntu. I was preparing to move from RHEL to Ubuntu but my test run failed miserably. The dash shell handles system() calls differently than bash. We've got an in house developed app at work written in Perl that has a master daemon process that uses system() to fork off a child process to handle connections as needed. Unfortunately with dash, those new processes aren't actually children, they're their own process. So the parent has no idea what's going on with children (as they are not children now), only one connection at a time can be handled while the rest whine about the tcp port being in use since they are no longer children, the start/stop script can't find children, etc
Of course Debian is moving to the dash shell it seems, but they do provide a way to have bash be the default shell whereas I couldn't find a way in Ubuntu. I'm going to test to see if dpkg-reconfigure dash works to change the default shell for Ubuntu one of these days.
While the hacker one describes me nearly perfectly, aside from the hatred of smurfs, it would be interesting to see if you could show the same descriptions with the words hacker and geek removed and see how many other "normal" people think it fits them very closely, too.
Not really. The person I replied to said stock options, which based on the difference between the two, means the employees were going to have to buy them anyway. That's exactly what I was warning about. Being given the option to give your failing company some of your hard earned money as a reward for putting in extra work is bs.
Even if it were stock grants that the employees didn't have to pay for, being given stock in a failing company is hardly a reward to get all excited about although an improvement over having to pay for them.
If you had pointed out that the employees would want to watch out for the specific terminology to be sure of what they were being offered, that's one thing. To come in and point it out to me as if my point is worthless since I didn't use the right term is just pointless dick swinging because you knew the specific term for "being given stock for free" and I didn't.
And congrats on the low number. I'm very proud of you. Perhaps you could get a plaque hung on your wall that says "I've been hanging out on slashdot in mom mom's basement longer than most of these other guys." Maybe your mom will even put a gold star on it.
Gotta be careful with the options deal. I have seen them given to the employees for free, but I have also seen (and currently work for) a place that just offers them at a "possibly" reduced price.
My employer tried that crap with me a few years ago when I asked for a raise. The stock price dropped to half of what my option price was set at before they could even get the paperwork to me and stayed at less than 10% of that price for a couple years and has not yet even returned to that price my options are at. Giving me the option to give some of my money back to you when I say I'm not paid enough is not logic that I can wrap my mind around.
And to answer the question now going through everyone's mind, yes, I am looking for another job now that I've gained enough experience from this one to hopefully land something good.
While I agree that you don't want to start filling scientific journals with stuff like this, what's wrong with the occasional one? Does doing something that gets kids excited about science and learning in general not, in the long run, likely increase our collective knowledge? Things like this encourage the children involved (and possibly many others who hear about it) to continue to think logically and take a scientific approach to thought and problem solving and may even result in a few being more likely to become actual scientists of some sort.
I am a bit demoralized nowadays about all this -- and I'd love to take action but I don't know how. So while we as nerds who normally argue, bitch, and complain can actually stand up and figure a way to do something about this (short of something 4chan would do), then I'd be all for it. Let's strategize. Let's plan. And let's execute in the perfect ways I know that we can do thousands of lines of code, deploying hundreds of servers, or anything else "IT" that we do.
I'm here to start the call to arms, I just don't know what to do after that.
This is my problem, too. Telling the government what we want and what is right hasn't worked. Voting hasn't worked. I'm certain there must be a few more steps we can take before attempting to shoot government leaders is the right answer, though. I just don't have a clue what those next steps might be.
Meh, screw those people. Everyone has their own preferences based on their experience and current needs. Nothing wrong with voicing them and explaining why.
Yeah, I've been in the big corp. environment earlier in my career. Definitely not my preferred environment, although at least at the lower levels I can deal with it. I much prefer the more mid-sized company setting... small enough that I feel like what I do and say matters, but just big enough to not have to cut too many corners or scrap good ideas/projects constantly due to lack of resources. The place I work at was there once upon a time.
Well, technically I'm a dev anyway. I just pretend to be a sys admin, dba, and support guy because they've fired everyone else.
It would drive me nuts going back to a system where I have to ask someone else to test stuff that may or may not work all the time rather than just doing it myself.
True, it would get out of hand with a large number of servers. Doesn't matter whether you're using pypi or CPAN there, though, they both suffer from the same problem when it comes to manually managing the configuration.
I'd love to have a more automated system like you've got going. Just don't have the expertise at the moment or the time get get the expertise. Management keeps letting people go and as much as I and upper management here don't like to admit it (although for different reasons), I just can't be an expert on everything.
I suppose once it becomes necessary, rather than just nice to have, I'll get on with sorting something like that out... of course with any luck I'll have moved on to somewhere that it's just not my job to be an expert on configuration management in the first place long before I hit that point here.
It's fairly straightforward where modules get installed. I personally find it great. When the distribution handles their pre-packaged modules sanely, it makes it very easy to tell which modules were installed by the distro and which from cpan. With python, at least on Debian, distro modules and pypi modules all get dumped in the same place. That gets a bit messy to me.
I also prefer CPAN with a more centralized repository for the code. Pypi seems to install crap from all over the place, it could pull from someone's personal website, sourceforge, wherever. It seems to me that CPAN is more likely to be more resilient and consistent than Pypi as Pypi ages and old modules stop being hosted and the centralized aspect gives at least a better possibility of having some sort of central checking for authenticity and a number of other possibilities that may or may not actually be happening - but they at least could.
If you've ever been involved in large scale Perl development, you'd also quickly discover that your distro of choice may not actually provide every useful Perl module. I've got a document I maintain for setting up new installations of our platform that includes a list of which modules to install from the apt repository and which modules need to be installed from CPAN either due to not existing in apt at all or needing functionality not included in the much older version of the module that is frequently included with Debian. It's not a huge list, but it's probably 10 modules that I install from CPAN, some of which install a few others as dependencies, although to be fair to hose dependencies may be included in apt as I just tell CPAN to auto install them currently.
This is what we do where I work, too. There are only 2 of us now, but it was pretty cool back before upper management laid everyone off. It definitely made for higher morale being able to easily communicate, both seriously and for fun, with co-workers and made staying late for projects not quite so awful.
I've also seen many good employees let go because the choice in who was laid off was based primarily on salary and cost savings to the company rather than skill. It also kind of makes you want to punch people in the throat when you're one of the people who was kept during those lay offs, although I guess knowing that you're the underpaid guy who management may or may not see as any good beats being the unpaid guy in the end.
I'm probably statistical noise here, much like one of the other commenters.
I use the windows key all the time. windows key -> r -> cmd -> enter in xp and win2k/2k3/etc. I also use it to bring up the search thing in win7. I almost always use the windows key to pull up my start menu even when using the mouse for the rest of the process, too. It's measurably quicker and smoother for me for some reason.
I also use my function keys for switching between terminals on a linux box/connected to the terminal of a linux VM in VMWare far more often than you'd expect.
We must know very different people. The vast majority of people downloading music and software that I know are doing it because they don't want to pay for it at all rather than that they don't want to pay for it before they know it's useful or enjoyable to them and they are not shy about admitting that.
I know there ARE people out there who pirate to test and then purchase. I've done that myself and you apparently do that, too.
I also do want to make it clear that I don't feel that how the media industry handles it is right. Pirating a $10-$15 cd which cost the publisher $2 to make and distribute should in no way result in anything other than going to small claims court. You get into less trouble trying to steal the CD from Best Buy than for downloading it and the theft caused a loss of physical inventory. I just believe there are likely a lot more people out there doing it just to get free stuff than you do and that the content owner/creator DOES have a right to get paid for its usage, despite what many (not all, probably not even a majority) on Slashdot think.
What about those people who continue to listen to it over and over and enjoy it but still don't buy it? Don't get me wrong, I don't feel that the BSA or *IAA are doing anything good, but it's quite as simple as you want to make it sound, either. As in many cases, there's a middle ground here that seems to be what is "right".
If I, as both a software developer and musician, create something and say "You have to give me $5 if you want to use it", then why should you not have to? I created it and that's the model I want to use to distribute it. Your choices are pay for it as I, the content creator request, or don't give me money AND don't use my product to show me that I have chosen a model that does not provide appropriate value to you.
I agree. This is a very big problem for me as management keeps cutting back the tech staff where I work.
I write the code, I test the code, I write the docs for people. I've tried explaining over and over again that this is terrible. I shouldn't be the final tester. I already think it works or I wouldn't have written it that way and wouldn't be at the point of testing. This affects my testing and causes me to miss things. I also know how it's supposed to work too well and so don't even think to try stupid stuff that users inevitably do which breaks stuff.
Documentation is similar. I know how it works and how it was intended to work. At times this makes things obvious to me that are not necessarily obvious to someone else and so they may not find their way into the documentation.
There's always money to be had, but everything doesn't always have to be about money. As I say in my post just above to the GP here, I was around in those BBS days he remembers. You can actually do something that provides other people with a service and costs you time and money without trying to make money off of it and just do it because it's fun. Back in the day even actual businesses did that sometimes. There was a great BBS that was completely free run by the newspaper back in my home town. It had a bunch of registered doors, IRC style chat, etc. and no advertising at all, not even for themselves that I can remember. It wasn't about money, tracking users, spreading their name, etc. Just providing something cool and fun for the community.
Slashdot Mirror
I should clarify the above. /bin/sh is what is used by all the start up scripts and possibly other system stuff. In Perl in the very least when you make a system() or exec() call it always uses /bin/sh. I suspect other languages probably are doing the same, but cannot guarantee that.
That's the user's login shell which is different from the system default shell. The system default shell is always /bin/sh which these days is a sym link to another shell. On Ubuntu that other shell is /bin/dash. In theory I could have just changed the symlink myself, but who knows what unexected issues I would be causing by doing so when Ubuntu clearly intended for me to be using dash as the default shell.
As a college drop out who is fairly successful but has also returned to college due to the whole "YOU MUST HAVE A DEGREE!!!!" craze, this is an idea that I frequently suggest should be how it's done. Not directly relevant to the degree? Cool, you have to show up and do what work you can, but why force people to try to become "experts" in things that they are not interested in and have little to no use for? In some ways working in the real world for several years and maturing before going back to school have made things easier for me. In some ways it has made it harder. Now I don't just suspect that I'm not likely to ever need the information from World History 101 to do my job, I KNOW I don't need it because I've been doing my job without it for years.
I have been told many times it's to make me more well rounded and ensure that I've been exposed to as many things as possible so that I can discover new things I enjoy. Those people can fuck off. Becoming "well rounded" is for people with spare time and money and/or a true interest in doing so. It's not required for most jobs, but they want to make the college education a requirement for those jobs anyway. With the time and money investment required for college, if it's so that I'm qualified for a job, then the classes that are not related to my job shouldn't affect my grade, future hireability, etc. prefereably I shouldn't even have to pay for or sit through those classes and it should maybe be more like a pure tech school/trade school sort of thing. Perhaps like an extended version of the certificate programs offered at some colleges.
It's funny that you mention using Ubuntu because you don't have time to troubleshoot weird stuff with Debian. I started with Slackware and ran it for years and built most stuff from source, so Debian of course feels like no work at all to set up, maintain, etc. most of the time anyway. I've never had weird bugs to work around in Debian except with Tomcat that I can remember.
I realize I'm an edge case here and not the norm, but I'm actually setting up Debian servers at work because I didn't have time to work around craziness in Ubuntu. I was preparing to move from RHEL to Ubuntu but my test run failed miserably. The dash shell handles system() calls differently than bash. We've got an in house developed app at work written in Perl that has a master daemon process that uses system() to fork off a child process to handle connections as needed. Unfortunately with dash, those new processes aren't actually children, they're their own process. So the parent has no idea what's going on with children (as they are not children now), only one connection at a time can be handled while the rest whine about the tcp port being in use since they are no longer children, the start/stop script can't find children, etc
Of course Debian is moving to the dash shell it seems, but they do provide a way to have bash be the default shell whereas I couldn't find a way in Ubuntu. I'm going to test to see if dpkg-reconfigure dash works to change the default shell for Ubuntu one of these days.
While the hacker one describes me nearly perfectly, aside from the hatred of smurfs, it would be interesting to see if you could show the same descriptions with the words hacker and geek removed and see how many other "normal" people think it fits them very closely, too.
Not really. The person I replied to said stock options, which based on the difference between the two, means the employees were going to have to buy them anyway. That's exactly what I was warning about. Being given the option to give your failing company some of your hard earned money as a reward for putting in extra work is bs.
Even if it were stock grants that the employees didn't have to pay for, being given stock in a failing company is hardly a reward to get all excited about although an improvement over having to pay for them.
If you had pointed out that the employees would want to watch out for the specific terminology to be sure of what they were being offered, that's one thing. To come in and point it out to me as if my point is worthless since I didn't use the right term is just pointless dick swinging because you knew the specific term for "being given stock for free" and I didn't.
And congrats on the low number. I'm very proud of you. Perhaps you could get a plaque hung on your wall that says "I've been hanging out on slashdot in mom mom's basement longer than most of these other guys." Maybe your mom will even put a gold star on it.
Great, thanks for the fairly irrelevant bit of pedantry. It just wouldn't be slashdot without it.
Gotta be careful with the options deal. I have seen them given to the employees for free, but I have also seen (and currently work for) a place that just offers them at a "possibly" reduced price.
My employer tried that crap with me a few years ago when I asked for a raise. The stock price dropped to half of what my option price was set at before they could even get the paperwork to me and stayed at less than 10% of that price for a couple years and has not yet even returned to that price my options are at. Giving me the option to give some of my money back to you when I say I'm not paid enough is not logic that I can wrap my mind around.
And to answer the question now going through everyone's mind, yes, I am looking for another job now that I've gained enough experience from this one to hopefully land something good.
While I agree that you don't want to start filling scientific journals with stuff like this, what's wrong with the occasional one? Does doing something that gets kids excited about science and learning in general not, in the long run, likely increase our collective knowledge? Things like this encourage the children involved (and possibly many others who hear about it) to continue to think logically and take a scientific approach to thought and problem solving and may even result in a few being more likely to become actual scientists of some sort.
I like the way you think
I am a bit demoralized nowadays about all this -- and I'd love to take action but I don't know how. So while we as nerds who normally argue, bitch, and complain can actually stand up and figure a way to do something about this (short of something 4chan would do), then I'd be all for it. Let's strategize. Let's plan. And let's execute in the perfect ways I know that we can do thousands of lines of code, deploying hundreds of servers, or anything else "IT" that we do.
I'm here to start the call to arms, I just don't know what to do after that.
This is my problem, too. Telling the government what we want and what is right hasn't worked. Voting hasn't worked. I'm certain there must be a few more steps we can take before attempting to shoot government leaders is the right answer, though. I just don't have a clue what those next steps might be.
Meh, screw those people. Everyone has their own preferences based on their experience and current needs. Nothing wrong with voicing them and explaining why.
Yeah, I've been in the big corp. environment earlier in my career. Definitely not my preferred environment, although at least at the lower levels I can deal with it. I much prefer the more mid-sized company setting... small enough that I feel like what I do and say matters, but just big enough to not have to cut too many corners or scrap good ideas/projects constantly due to lack of resources. The place I work at was there once upon a time.
Well, technically I'm a dev anyway. I just pretend to be a sys admin, dba, and support guy because they've fired everyone else.
It would drive me nuts going back to a system where I have to ask someone else to test stuff that may or may not work all the time rather than just doing it myself.
True, it would get out of hand with a large number of servers. Doesn't matter whether you're using pypi or CPAN there, though, they both suffer from the same problem when it comes to manually managing the configuration.
I'd love to have a more automated system like you've got going. Just don't have the expertise at the moment or the time get get the expertise. Management keeps letting people go and as much as I and upper management here don't like to admit it (although for different reasons), I just can't be an expert on everything.
I suppose once it becomes necessary, rather than just nice to have, I'll get on with sorting something like that out... of course with any luck I'll have moved on to somewhere that it's just not my job to be an expert on configuration management in the first place long before I hit that point here.
It's fairly straightforward where modules get installed. I personally find it great. When the distribution handles their pre-packaged modules sanely, it makes it very easy to tell which modules were installed by the distro and which from cpan. With python, at least on Debian, distro modules and pypi modules all get dumped in the same place. That gets a bit messy to me.
I also prefer CPAN with a more centralized repository for the code. Pypi seems to install crap from all over the place, it could pull from someone's personal website, sourceforge, wherever. It seems to me that CPAN is more likely to be more resilient and consistent than Pypi as Pypi ages and old modules stop being hosted and the centralized aspect gives at least a better possibility of having some sort of central checking for authenticity and a number of other possibilities that may or may not actually be happening - but they at least could.
If you've ever been involved in large scale Perl development, you'd also quickly discover that your distro of choice may not actually provide every useful Perl module. I've got a document I maintain for setting up new installations of our platform that includes a list of which modules to install from the apt repository and which modules need to be installed from CPAN either due to not existing in apt at all or needing functionality not included in the much older version of the module that is frequently included with Debian. It's not a huge list, but it's probably 10 modules that I install from CPAN, some of which install a few others as dependencies, although to be fair to hose dependencies may be included in apt as I just tell CPAN to auto install them currently.
This is what we do where I work, too. There are only 2 of us now, but it was pretty cool back before upper management laid everyone off. It definitely made for higher morale being able to easily communicate, both seriously and for fun, with co-workers and made staying late for projects not quite so awful.
I've also seen many good employees let go because the choice in who was laid off was based primarily on salary and cost savings to the company rather than skill. It also kind of makes you want to punch people in the throat when you're one of the people who was kept during those lay offs, although I guess knowing that you're the underpaid guy who management may or may not see as any good beats being the unpaid guy in the end.
I'm probably statistical noise here, much like one of the other commenters.
I use the windows key all the time. windows key -> r -> cmd -> enter in xp and win2k/2k3/etc. I also use it to bring up the search thing in win7. I almost always use the windows key to pull up my start menu even when using the mouse for the rest of the process, too. It's measurably quicker and smoother for me for some reason.
I also use my function keys for switching between terminals on a linux box/connected to the terminal of a linux VM in VMWare far more often than you'd expect.
I also use ctrl-f5 pretty regularly.
And you have iron-clad proof that these same people wouldn't be failing school or divorcing over something else, were it not for WoW being there?
Yeah my wife is sleeping with me again :P
I never stopped playing WoW, but she's still sleeping with me.
We must know very different people. The vast majority of people downloading music and software that I know are doing it because they don't want to pay for it at all rather than that they don't want to pay for it before they know it's useful or enjoyable to them and they are not shy about admitting that.
I know there ARE people out there who pirate to test and then purchase. I've done that myself and you apparently do that, too.
I also do want to make it clear that I don't feel that how the media industry handles it is right. Pirating a $10-$15 cd which cost the publisher $2 to make and distribute should in no way result in anything other than going to small claims court. You get into less trouble trying to steal the CD from Best Buy than for downloading it and the theft caused a loss of physical inventory. I just believe there are likely a lot more people out there doing it just to get free stuff than you do and that the content owner/creator DOES have a right to get paid for its usage, despite what many (not all, probably not even a majority) on Slashdot think.
What about those people who continue to listen to it over and over and enjoy it but still don't buy it? Don't get me wrong, I don't feel that the BSA or *IAA are doing anything good, but it's quite as simple as you want to make it sound, either. As in many cases, there's a middle ground here that seems to be what is "right".
If I, as both a software developer and musician, create something and say "You have to give me $5 if you want to use it", then why should you not have to? I created it and that's the model I want to use to distribute it. Your choices are pay for it as I, the content creator request, or don't give me money AND don't use my product to show me that I have chosen a model that does not provide appropriate value to you.
Some of us are waiting on our pre-orders to even ship. Fucking Amazon. This is why I normally refuse to pre-order anything.
I agree. This is a very big problem for me as management keeps cutting back the tech staff where I work.
I write the code, I test the code, I write the docs for people. I've tried explaining over and over again that this is terrible. I shouldn't be the final tester. I already think it works or I wouldn't have written it that way and wouldn't be at the point of testing. This affects my testing and causes me to miss things. I also know how it's supposed to work too well and so don't even think to try stupid stuff that users inevitably do which breaks stuff.
Documentation is similar. I know how it works and how it was intended to work. At times this makes things obvious to me that are not necessarily obvious to someone else and so they may not find their way into the documentation.
There's always money to be had, but everything doesn't always have to be about money. As I say in my post just above to the GP here, I was around in those BBS days he remembers. You can actually do something that provides other people with a service and costs you time and money without trying to make money off of it and just do it because it's fun. Back in the day even actual businesses did that sometimes. There was a great BBS that was completely free run by the newspaper back in my home town. It had a bunch of registered doors, IRC style chat, etc. and no advertising at all, not even for themselves that I can remember. It wasn't about money, tracking users, spreading their name, etc. Just providing something cool and fun for the community.