And please define it in the context of Pete Seeger, a couple of years ago, at 93, splitting his own firewood. Or me, in my sixties, changing my own oil under the vehicle (I know, you don't know *how* to change your oil....)
I've got that on my router. Let me start by saying this is *NOT* the poster child for F/OSS. In fact, if you aren't seriously into hardware, or systems administration, DON'T! Never in my decades of professional work have I ever seen a project where people would talk about their "favorite builds"... in fact, I'd never *ever* thought of putting those two words together.
I wanted one thing besides gigabit routing: the ASUS I have says it can serve as a prntserver for USB printers. Call ASUS, "oh, not that printer". So three? four? debrickings later, and a month of trying, and asking, and finding by googling, not onlist, I found a build that works.
Most of the time. After somewhere between a day and a couple of weeks of not printing, it forgets about the printer, and I have to reset USB on it (and that was what I found after months of fighting).
I want to upgrade, to make sure I don't have heartbleed on it (but I do have no remote admin, so it should be ok)... but WHAT THE HELL DO I UPGRADE TO? Multiple builders, apparently no regression testing, no formal releases....
For those of you here who have actually been around the block a few times, how many black or hispanic kids are there in in your kid's classes, as opposed to when you were a kid?
If you don't live in a city, how integrated is your neighborhood (oh, sorry, I know that (un)real estate agents get the cooties over that word, I meant "ethnically diverse")?
And if you personally can't deal with affirmative action because you think it kept you from getting into a school, or a job, then a) maybe there's another reason, like not enough of either, or b) maybe you *ain't* that good.
Corn's incredibly harsh on the soil. It annually needs a lot of fertilizer (that is, modern corn). Biofuels - pretty much everyone before the corn lobby got into it was talking lots of other, easy, fast-growing *weeds*, like switchgrass comes to mind. No fertilizer, etc... I mean, it's a *weed*.
But agribusiness industry (petrochemicals into fertilzer, for example) aren't interested in *that*....
All the idiot 20-somethings and 30-somethings who are *SURE* they're going to be millionaires, and so want to make sure millionaires pay lower taxes than they are now. And they'll never need to worry 'bout healthcare, and of *course* they'll retire at 40.....
Allow me to reiterate: there are two kinds of Republicans, Libertarians, and neoConfederate "Tea Partiers": millionaires, and suckers.
First, as some other folks have said, give them a weekly list, not every day, or every time one's announced.
Actually, that might burn them out... or, they might decide to batch them on their own, and think they'll get to it eventually.
Here's one: give them a weekly list, AND INSIST on a weekly meeting to discuss it. EVERY WEEK, without fail, without cancellations. Tell them that you'll also want a spot meeting, when you get critical updates (like yesterday's Java from Oracle, with it's 4 that had a CVA rating of 10 on a scale of 10). Insist that if you get those, they need to meet that day, or the next, or give you the pre-approval to put those in without consulting them.
The weekly meetings will get to them in relatively short order, they being so busy and all....
Also, here's another pushback: do you have a testing group, that runs regression tests before regular updates, and especially on ermergency ones? If no, question the committee how they expect you to regression test everything. Also, do you have test, as opposed to development systems? If not, that's another budget item the board needs to approve..
Make them do that real job, professionally. See how much they hate doing it, and maybe it'll go away.
Amen. The populace was to be armed to ->protect the country (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State). There's *nothing* in that about self-defense, or collecting nuts. Now, in what way are the gun nuts "defending the US"? If they want to, they're free to join the US Army, or maybe the National Guard.
And how many gun nuts who read and post to slashdot have ever used one in "self-defense"? (And, if so, did the cops agree?)
Note that until around 1980, *ALL* the decisions of the SCOTUS were for what I say above. Since then, it's all part of the real right wing agenda, to make this country what it's become: the home of the cowards and the terrified (they're *so* much easier to control).
mark, who grew up non-Black in a slum, has lived in rough city neighborhoods, and has *never*
needed a gun... but then, I'm not scared shitless of Those People
I mean, let's be real: the US right wants lower taxes, and to spend it on as little as possible (except for defense).
The NIH, arguably the largest, and possibly best medical research organization in the world, has had their funding either stagnant or cut (remember the Sequester - it's still there). They then allege that corporate and academic research will take its place, and do better.
Riiight.
Where do the academics get theif funding? Surprise, a lot comes from the NIH.
Corporations, doing basic research, that may eventually lead to important discoveries? I mean, *really*, what kind of ROI is there for this quarter or the next quarter in *that*?
mark
ObUSTaxDeadlineDay: simplify the 1040:... eliminate forms D (capital gains) and B (dividends and interest)... roll them *DIRECTLY* INTO GROSS INCOME, and tax them *ALL* at the full rate, not 15% or less. And shut up, slashdotters, not mnore than 10 of you makes any major percentage of your income via stock trading, nor is ever likely to.
I almost forgot: if the miner's pver 30, and doesn't get a BS degree, what HR moron is even going to consider them? Who's actually going to *hire* them, when so many people with a lot of experience and degrees (and are over 30 or 40) are having trouble finding and keeping work?
Retraining does *NOTHING* if you don't have any reasonable expectation of finding a job.... (Oh, and you should expect to pick up yourself and maybe your family from where your family's lived for maybe generations, and move somewherre else....)
mark "come the Revolution, we'll lead HR depts into the parking lot, throw asphault on them, and PAVE THEM
INTO THE ROADWAY, so that they'll provide *some* social utility...."
I realize that you're an 0.01% Australian who bought citizenship in the US, so perhaps you might have one of your lawyers explain the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, that mentioned indentured servitude.
And then you can tell us how all of *your* employees get 10% over base salary while they're on-call, and what your *official* comp time policy is. Oh, and about the annual bonuses *all* of *them* get.
Alternatively, FOAD. I haven't answered any since I worked for a Baby Bell in the mid-nineties, and have no intention of ever doing so.
Someone who wants to set up one or more test boxes, and let the END USERS try it out and get used to it? Doesn't that violate what MBAs are taught, that only upper managers know enough to design stuff (even if they've just been hired from another industry)?
Seriously, I'd start out with several boxes, and *ask* if someone(s) would be willing to try it out, noting that XP *must* go away. I'd also recommend *NOT* using a bleeding-edge Linux like, Fedora, or any of them that have tons of updates almost daily. Go for an enterprise distro (ok, I'm biased: we use CentOS (== RHEL), becuase the enterprise distros' big emphasis is on STABILITY, and reliability, not the latestgreatestneetk3wlcrap. Note also that enterprise distros have five or 10 *years* of support, so you'll see the bugfixes and security patches for that length of time.
As a personal side note, when did the GOP bring up a bill to force all insurance companies to offer medical coverage to *all*, and not refuse due to "pre-existing conditions"? Did I miss that?
Did they also have, in the same bill that I missed, where > 80% (or is it > 90%) of the insurance money was to be spent on healthcare, and 10% on "administrative costs" (including CEO's bonuses)?
You also can't teach some Kewl White Boys how to code, either - over the decades, I've had to deal with utter *crap*, with inconsistancies, lack or piss-poor error handling, and on and on.
Current pet peeve: a few months ago, I had to build BioPerl as an rpm at work. It took, on and off, about a month - some modules had hard-coded/usr/perl,/usr/bin/perl//usr/local/bin/perl into them; then there were the documented circular dependencies....
Oh, and if you want to teach everyone to code, and give them a job (yours?), then who are you going to get to fix your car, or your plumbing?
Flat files? What was the world's *largest* database, at least as of 6 or 8 years ago, is Daytona, with trillions of records. It's Bellcore, it's flat files, they write quesies in C... and it's the record of every phonecall ever made, back to "Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you".
What data and metadata do they have on the President, and his advisors, and the Cabinet? I mean, if they were listening to Prime Minister Merkel of Germany, and on, and on, why wouldn't they listen locally, if only to ensure their own funding?
Given the way so much stuff - including internal to companies I've worked for, no way. Links work... if you're on the internal network, not outside. Software runs SO FAST... until you're not on the intranet, and then it's a dog.
And developers always get and test on the hottest machines or servers... never mind the 95% of the folks going to that site, or using that software, are 1-2 generations of hardware back, and again, it runs like a dog, or requires you to buy new hardware.
So if you did it on superdooperpowerfast cloud hardware, you'd still not see how *users* see it.
So, you want to pay, um, $400 every other year, or $800 for both, as the cameras break, or get broken, or the software goes buggy, or one of the vulnerabilities are found, and someone hacks your rear vision?
And for the moron who says get rid of all mirrors, I want your car taken away from you, and you banned from driving for the rest of your life.
mark "for our next trick, we'll do the same for the fools doing their makeup while driving"
The US is *still* doing this crap, presumably to cater to the folks who were for the dictator Batista, or the Mafia, who's still pissed at loosing all the money from those casinos?
Why is the US so in bed with China, if those in the "intelligence community" (for values of each of those words approaching zero as a limit) are so desperate to bring down China?
Having just done something very un-slashdot-like (well, it *used* to be what a lot of us did, but not the last few years), i noted that it was hitting in the midst of a famine... which is when a) many, many people would have weakened immune systems, and b) did you unbelievably rich folks, who can eat three meals a day (or more)(or supersized) without thinking about it think that the concept of stewed rat was only in, say, Monty Python?
And if the fleas hit the folks catching them, and then it mutated, or there were both strains.....
94% of waiters will be replaced with automation? Ah, they didn't even do that in the old Horn and Hardart Automats. Do you *really* want all your meals out to be buffet style? Or is that all of them are prepacked and they nuke it for you? In that case, why go out?
Or, for that matter, would you trust a completely automated fast food joint? Wait until the first lawsuits over someone getting sick, or dying, becuase some sensor went off.
Reatil salespeople? You mean, like in the supermarkets with self-check? Those folks who come over to deal with when it goes off - they're not people?
And, for that matter, if you raise the minimum wage - and do NOT try to claim that most folks working minimum wage are teenagers living at home; that's an outright and provable lie - some of those folks might be able to go down to one or two jobs, instead of two or three. Or, if you raise it to a living wage, as some cities have done, or are doing, even more can go down to holding down one job.
But so many of you are stupid fools who think that working 80 hour weeks means you're Important, rather than that your manager sees you have no life whatever of your own, and that they own you.
mark
-- "There's a sucker born every minute" - PT Barnum
I have long said I preferred elegant to clever code. When I get a phone call on Friday, at 16:15, or 02:00 some night, I want to leave on time, or go back to sleep that night, *NOT* spend hours figuring out how this bit of cleverness is broken, or how someone's "the code's more compact!" is suitable for entry in the Obfuscated C contest.
But to write elegant code, you need to a) know what you're trying to accomplish; b) tell your manager, or whoever, that no, you can't make that kind of major change without their $$$ signoff on a change to the schedule, complete with specing out the change, and its affects on everything else; c) having the time to write, test, and debug the code, and this does *NOT* include drinking a six-pack of Mountain Dew a day, and doing 80+ hour weeks.
Yes, I *have* had jobs like that. And 70+ or 80+ hour weeks result in a *lot* less "productivity" than the old 40-hour week (and try looking up where that number came from... the name Ford may surprise you in that....).
mark "as opposed to managers w/ MBA, who think that you can point and click a good system"
The year before the US, under Bush and Cheney and Rummy, invaded and conquered Iraq (for no particulatly good reason), there was a naval exercise imitating the invasion.. Gen. Shinsecki, on the defending forces, blew up a number of ships, including, IIRC, an aircraft carrier, by sending small fishing vessels, much harder-to-hit targets than capital ships, in packed with HE.
My personal bet on this imitation Nimitz is that it's a target, to work out similarly effective attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Please define "old people". Please define "physical labor".
And please define it in the context of Pete Seeger, a couple of years ago, at 93, splitting his own firewood. Or me, in my sixties, changing my own oil under the vehicle (I know, you don't know *how* to change your oil....)
mark
I've got that on my router. Let me start by saying this is *NOT* the poster child for F/OSS. In fact, if you aren't seriously into hardware, or systems administration, DON'T! Never in my decades of professional work have I ever seen a project where people would talk about their "favorite builds"... in fact, I'd never *ever* thought of putting those two words together.
I wanted one thing besides gigabit routing: the ASUS I have says it can serve as a prntserver for USB printers. Call ASUS, "oh, not that printer". So three? four? debrickings later, and a month of trying, and asking, and finding by googling, not onlist, I found a build that works.
Most of the time. After somewhere between a day and a couple of weeks of not printing, it forgets about the printer, and I have to reset USB on it (and that was what I found after months of fighting).
I want to upgrade, to make sure I don't have heartbleed on it (but I do have no remote admin, so it should be ok)... but WHAT THE HELL DO I UPGRADE TO? Multiple builders, apparently no regression testing, no formal releases....
mark, putting up with it
For those of you here who have actually been around the block a few times, how many black or hispanic kids are there in in your kid's classes, as opposed to when you were a kid?
If you don't live in a city, how integrated is your neighborhood (oh, sorry, I know that (un)real estate agents get the cooties over that word, I meant "ethnically diverse")?
And if you personally can't deal with affirmative action because you think it kept you from getting into a school, or a job, then a) maybe there's another reason, like not enough of either, or b) maybe you *ain't* that good.
mark "and no, it won't help me personally"
Corn's incredibly harsh on the soil. It annually needs a lot of fertilizer (that is, modern corn). Biofuels - pretty much everyone before the corn lobby got into it was talking lots of other, easy, fast-growing *weeds*, like switchgrass comes to mind. No fertilizer, etc... I mean, it's a *weed*.
But agribusiness industry (petrochemicals into fertilzer, for example) aren't interested in *that*....
mark
All the idiot 20-somethings and 30-somethings who are *SURE* they're going to be millionaires, and so want to make sure millionaires pay lower taxes than they are now. And they'll never need to worry 'bout healthcare, and of *course* they'll retire at 40.....
Allow me to reiterate: there are two kinds of Republicans, Libertarians, and neoConfederate "Tea Partiers": millionaires, and suckers.
mark
Depending on your tastes.... Mother Earth News?
mark
First, as some other folks have said, give them a weekly list, not every day, or every time one's announced.
Actually, that might burn them out... or, they might decide to batch them on their own, and think they'll get to it eventually.
Here's one: give them a weekly list, AND INSIST on a weekly meeting to discuss it. EVERY WEEK, without fail, without cancellations. Tell them that you'll also want a spot meeting, when you get critical updates (like yesterday's Java from Oracle, with it's 4 that had a CVA rating of 10 on a scale of 10). Insist that if you get those, they need to meet that day, or the next, or give you the pre-approval to put those in without consulting them.
The weekly meetings will get to them in relatively short order, they being so busy and all....
Also, here's another pushback: do you have a testing group, that runs regression tests before regular updates, and especially on ermergency ones? If no, question the committee how they expect you to regression test everything. Also, do you have test, as opposed to development systems? If not, that's another budget item the board needs to approve..
Make them do that real job, professionally. See how much they hate doing it, and maybe it'll go away.
mark
Not looking at all the libertarians here, are you? Skimming their posts? It's *much* worse than it was 10 or 12 years ago....
mark
Amen. The populace was to be armed to ->protect the country (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State). There's *nothing* in that about self-defense, or collecting nuts. Now, in what way are the gun nuts "defending the US"? If they want to, they're free to join the US Army, or maybe the National Guard.
And how many gun nuts who read and post to slashdot have ever used one in "self-defense"? (And, if so, did the cops agree?)
Note that until around 1980, *ALL* the decisions of the SCOTUS were for what I say above. Since then, it's all part of the real right wing agenda, to make this country what it's become: the home of the cowards and the terrified (they're *so* much easier to control).
mark, who grew up non-Black in a slum, has lived in rough city neighborhoods, and has *never*
needed a gun... but then, I'm not scared shitless of Those People
I mean, let's be real: the US right wants lower taxes, and to spend it on as little as possible (except for defense).
The NIH, arguably the largest, and possibly best medical research organization in the world, has had their funding either stagnant or cut (remember the Sequester - it's still there). They then allege that corporate and academic research will take its place, and do better.
Riiight.
Where do the academics get theif funding? Surprise, a lot comes from the NIH.
Corporations, doing basic research, that may eventually lead to important discoveries? I mean, *really*, what kind of ROI is there for this quarter or the next quarter in *that*?
mark
ObUSTaxDeadlineDay: simplify the 1040:... eliminate forms D (capital gains) and B (dividends and interest)... roll them *DIRECTLY* INTO GROSS INCOME, and tax them *ALL* at the full rate, not 15% or less. And shut up, slashdotters, not mnore than 10 of you makes any major percentage of your income via stock trading, nor is ever likely to.
I almost forgot: if the miner's pver 30, and doesn't get a BS degree, what HR moron is even going to consider them? Who's actually going to *hire* them, when so many people with a lot of experience and degrees (and are over 30 or 40) are having trouble finding and keeping work?
Retraining does *NOTHING* if you don't have any reasonable expectation of finding a job.... (Oh, and you should expect to pick up yourself and maybe your family from where your family's lived for maybe generations, and move somewherre else....)
mark "come the Revolution, we'll lead HR depts into the parking lot, throw asphault on them, and PAVE THEM
INTO THE ROADWAY, so that they'll provide *some* social utility...."
calls this absurd".
Dear Rupert F.* Murdoch,
I realize that you're an 0.01% Australian who bought citizenship in the US, so perhaps you might have one of your lawyers explain the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, that mentioned indentured servitude.
And then you can tell us how all of *your* employees get 10% over base salary while they're on-call, and what your *official* comp time policy is. Oh, and about the annual bonuses *all* of *them* get.
Alternatively, FOAD. I haven't answered any since I worked for a Baby Bell in the mid-nineties, and have no intention of ever doing so.
mark
* fscking
Someone who wants to set up one or more test boxes, and let the END USERS try it out and get used to it? Doesn't that violate what MBAs are taught, that only upper managers know enough to design stuff (even if they've just been hired from another industry)?
Seriously, I'd start out with several boxes, and *ask* if someone(s) would be willing to try it out, noting that XP *must* go away. I'd also recommend *NOT* using a bleeding-edge Linux like, Fedora, or any of them that have tons of updates almost daily. Go for an enterprise distro (ok, I'm biased: we use CentOS (== RHEL), becuase the enterprise distros' big emphasis is on STABILITY, and reliability, not the latestgreatestneetk3wlcrap. Note also that enterprise distros have five or 10 *years* of support, so you'll see the bugfixes and security patches for that length of time.
mark
As a personal side note, when did the GOP bring up a bill to force all insurance companies to offer medical coverage to *all*, and not refuse due to "pre-existing conditions"? Did I miss that?
Did they also have, in the same bill that I missed, where > 80% (or is it > 90%) of the insurance money was to be spent on healthcare, and 10% on "administrative costs" (including CEO's bonuses)?
mark, in the home of the cowards and suckers
You also can't teach some Kewl White Boys how to code, either - over the decades, I've had to deal with utter *crap*, with inconsistancies, lack or piss-poor error handling, and on and on.
Current pet peeve: a few months ago, I had to build BioPerl as an rpm at work. It took, on and off, about a month - some modules had hard-coded /usr/perl, /usr/bin/perl/ /usr/local/bin/perl into them; then there were the documented circular dependencies....
Oh, and if you want to teach everyone to code, and give them a job (yours?), then who are you going to get to fix your car, or your plumbing?
mark
Flat files? What was the world's *largest* database, at least as of 6 or 8 years ago, is Daytona, with trillions of records. It's Bellcore, it's flat files, they write quesies in C... and it's the record of every phonecall ever made, back to "Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you".
mark
The ones that were fixed by the updates for all RHEL-derived distros, like CentOS, a month ago?
mark
What data and metadata do they have on the President, and his advisors, and the Cabinet? I mean, if they were listening to Prime Minister Merkel of Germany, and on, and on, why wouldn't they listen locally, if only to ensure their own funding?
mark
Given the way so much stuff - including internal to companies I've worked for, no way. Links work... if you're on the internal network, not outside. Software runs SO FAST... until you're not on the intranet, and then it's a dog.
And developers always get and test on the hottest machines or servers... never mind the 95% of the folks going to that site, or using that software, are 1-2 generations of hardware back, and again, it runs like a dog, or requires you to buy new hardware.
So if you did it on superdooperpowerfast cloud hardware, you'd still not see how *users* see it.
mark
So, you want to pay, um, $400 every other year, or $800 for both, as the cameras break, or get broken, or the software goes buggy, or one of the vulnerabilities are found, and someone hacks your rear vision?
And for the moron who says get rid of all mirrors, I want your car taken away from you, and you banned from driving for the rest of your life.
mark "for our next trick, we'll do the same for the fools doing their makeup while driving"
The US is *still* doing this crap, presumably to cater to the folks who were for the dictator Batista, or the Mafia, who's still pissed at loosing all the money from those casinos?
Why is the US so in bed with China, if those in the "intelligence community" (for values of each of those words approaching zero as a limit) are so desperate to bring down China?
I want my tax dolars wasted on this back.
mark
Having just done something very un-slashdot-like (well, it *used* to be what a lot of us did, but not the last few years), i noted that it was hitting in the midst of a famine... which is when a) many, many people would have weakened immune systems, and b) did you unbelievably rich folks, who can eat three meals a day (or more)(or supersized) without thinking about it think that the concept of stewed rat was only in, say, Monty Python?
And if the fleas hit the folks catching them, and then it mutated, or there were both strains.....
mark
94% of waiters will be replaced with automation? Ah, they didn't even do that in the old Horn and Hardart Automats. Do you *really* want all your meals out to be buffet style? Or is that all of them are prepacked and they nuke it for you? In that case, why go out?
Or, for that matter, would you trust a completely automated fast food joint? Wait until the first lawsuits over someone getting sick, or dying, becuase some sensor went off.
Reatil salespeople? You mean, like in the supermarkets with self-check? Those folks who come over to deal with when it goes off - they're not people?
And, for that matter, if you raise the minimum wage - and do NOT try to claim that most folks working minimum wage are teenagers living at home; that's an outright and provable lie - some of those folks might be able to go down to one or two jobs, instead of two or three. Or, if you raise it to a living wage, as some cities have done, or are doing, even more can go down to holding down one job.
But so many of you are stupid fools who think that working 80 hour weeks means you're Important, rather than that your manager sees you have no life whatever of your own, and that they own you.
mark
--
"There's a sucker born every minute" - PT Barnum
I have long said I preferred elegant to clever code. When I get a phone call on Friday, at 16:15, or 02:00 some night, I want to leave on time, or go back to sleep that night, *NOT* spend hours figuring out how this bit of cleverness is broken, or how someone's "the code's more compact!" is suitable for entry in the Obfuscated C contest.
But to write elegant code, you need to a) know what you're trying to accomplish; b) tell your manager, or whoever, that no, you can't make that kind of major change without their $$$ signoff on a change to the schedule, complete with specing out the change, and its affects on everything else; c) having the time to write, test, and debug the code, and this does *NOT* include drinking a six-pack of Mountain Dew a day, and doing 80+ hour weeks.
Yes, I *have* had jobs like that. And 70+ or 80+ hour weeks result in a *lot* less "productivity" than the old 40-hour week (and try looking up where that number came from... the name Ford may surprise you in that....).
mark "as opposed to managers w/ MBA, who think that you can point and click a good system"
The year before the US, under Bush and Cheney and Rummy, invaded and conquered Iraq (for no particulatly good reason), there was a naval exercise imitating the invasion.. Gen. Shinsecki, on the defending forces, blew up a number of ships, including, IIRC, an aircraft carrier, by sending small fishing vessels, much harder-to-hit targets than capital ships, in packed with HE.
My personal bet on this imitation Nimitz is that it's a target, to work out similarly effective attacks.
I know, no fun, nothing to laugh at....
mark