Really? That long? I must be dreaming, then, working here as a federal contractor in the health sector, where when the biggest thing I ordered, a honkin' huge RAID box, got here in 4 mos, and most servers are here in half that time. And as for drives, I think the 20 3TB WD Red drives I ordered were here in 2 weeks from the time I put in the order.....
Geez, are you stupid. I'm *sure* you have leverage with your employer, and you have all the benefits... right. You're posting here.... *I* am on lunch.....
You also love 60 or 80 hour weeks, and "sorry, we need you to finish that, we can't let you go on vacation", or just "whatever it takes", and you have no life.
mark "oh, right, as a developer or admin, you're "management", and so not elegible to have
any protection whatever"
I'd like to point out that *any* graduate of a foreign medical school (including Americans who might have gotten their MD in, say, Grenada) are *required*, by US federal law, to take the exams offered by the National Board of Medical Examiners for such. These are the same folks who US students talk of, when they say "the Boards".
mark
ObDisclosure: I worked for the Boards in the mid-eighties, and helped computerize the tests, so yes, I actually do know what I'm talking about.
And I wish RH would get a clue...
on
The Last GUADEC?
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· Score: 1
A year or so ago, I had to install FC17, I think it was, on a user's machine, and he wanted gnome 3.
That was the worst piece of crap I have *ever* seen as a gui.
Huge icons, basically filling the screen, that go transparent/invisible until you roll over them.... Who's this for, some 16 year olds who think it's K3WL!!! My stepson had that, I think, on ubuntu on his laptop, and things ending with a visual explosion? or starting or ending as though you were tearing a sheet of toilet paper?
*rolls eyes*
Yep, as the thing I read last year, I think, said, the typical laptop has more computing power than all the computers in the world in 1970... and 99% of its computing power is used for friggin' eye candy. Make it all run with the *blazing* speed of a '286....
Saw it. Was expecting fun monster movie, and that's what I got. Actually, it was Big Budget, live action and CGI straight anime (giant robots bashing fists? Suddenly appearing swords? absolutely anime).
Downside: due to timing, we saw 3-D. Don't. It was gratuitous, and during a number of the Big Fight Scenes, they'd layered it so densly that we couldn't tell what was happening.
Hollywood: lose the 3-D. Get plots, or when you see your revenues, you'll plotz.
One last comment (the reference is for extra points) on Pacific Rim: why didn't they bring out the obvious, best weapon against the critters... the Yamato?
Um, servers. Apple doesn't do servers - as I understand it, they finally killed off their little "server". Most of the rest: Unix, and overwhelmingly that Unix love child, Linux.
I work onsite for a federal contractor. In our division, we have well over 100 servers... one? two? run Windows server. Vastly cheaper - no "purchase" cost, unless you buy one of the corporate distros, like RedHat; ditto on annual maintenance fees. Many folks buy a few RHEL licenses... and use free distros for the rest of the servers.
How many thousands of years did it take for that warming... the equivalent of *one* century? But no, zillions of barrels of oil and coal, burned, can't *possibly* affect the whole world's climate, no, no....
As a President, I really disliked him, as he ramped up the military, when it really wasn't necessary, and played into the hands of the Republicans....
On the other hand, he's the greatest ex-President this country has had in my lifetime, standing for, well, what the US is *supposed* to stand for, and *claims* to stand for.
I don't do "sci-fi", that referring to a) mostly monster movies, or b) things so dumbed down as to be worthless....
And 3/4s of the posts here from gun nuts, as though the Second Amendment was going to save them (to paraphrase a quote from someone I used to know, "so, you're telling me that D-Day was unnecessary, since the Wehrmacht was sure to fall to the mighty French Resistance shortly").
Anyway, how 'bout relevant fiction: what comes to mind are things like Walter Jon Williams Hardwired, or Gibson's Neuromancer, or several by Bruce Sterling.
There are, indeed, scientific programmers. Consider environmental companies - they do a lot of engineering, in terms of finding and catagorizing and cataloging pollution. Or there are some engineering firms - think of aerospace. Or there's the biosciences, which are big these days. We have a lot of such programmers here (I work for a US federal contractor in the health and human services area[1]). In my division, we've got folks working on things like protein folding[2], which takes *days* on a good-sized compute cluster. Fun stuff.
And for the liberidiots, "making money for folks who are already rich, but are desperate to get richer" is not doing a damn thing for the human race[3]. nor for the economy[4].
mark
1. Which shall remain nameless; anything I say should not be construed as speaking for my employer, my agency, the US federal government, or the view out of my window (assuming I even had a window). 2. The code we use was written by one of our researchers, and is used around the agency. 3. Given the massive relocation of wealth upwards, and the documented downwards movement of everyone
below the 1%, with the only new jobs "created" being sweat shops in places like Bangladesh, and minimum wage
"service sector" jobs here, this is a demonstrable fact. 4. krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/john-galt-and-the-theory-of-the-firm/
So, how old are you? I'm so old, I remember the USSR on current maps. You, on the other hand, seem to have missed the end of the Soviet Russia 20+ years ago....
Well, you could actually talk to others who you feel have a fair amount of credibility.
For example, almost all our servers (> 150) are from Sun (a very few), Penguin (a lot) and Dell (a lot). We decided several years ago to work to keep anyone from buying Sun/Oracle again.[1] A year or so ago, we decided we really didn't want Penguin any more.[2] I have not-wonderful opinions of HP[3], except for their laser printers.
Or third party vendors: these folks are Approved! (Yeah, but their website is user hostile, and I can't find what we need.)
Then there was Amazon. I was looking to buy a large batch of the new WD Red 3TB drives. Amazon had a really good price on them, and I needed to call, to find out if we could buy a batch (the page said limit 4). I got a woman who was neither in the US, nor spoke English as a first language, who kept repeating what I could read on Amazon's page, who clearly had *never* dealt with a company, only individual buyers, and literally didn't seem to understand me when I said I was with the US federal gov't. Oh, and when she brought the page up, for some reason it showed the drive with the cover plate removed, and the platters visible... and she asked *me* what it was, if it was a movie player. I gave up in frustration. My manager, who'd heard the end of that, suggested I call the sales manager for us that we'd worked with before. *She* knew her job, understood me the first time, and I had a really good quote, almost as good as Amazon's limited time offer, the next day.
When you find someone who actually knows their job, and their market, those are the folks you want to deal with.
1. I refer to dealing with Sun/Oracle "tech support" as self-abuse, after spending a month to finally get an FE out to replace a m/b and some other stuff, and that included two weeks of exchanging email with an engineer in Chile.... 2. Penguin's all Supermicro, and Supermicro has *real* problems, if not an actual lack of understanding, of the words "quality control". Penguin's tech support's ok, but.... 3. Very hard to find updates for older systems, very much similar to Sun/Oracle's We Want To Pwn You attitude.
mark
How does it stay DRM'd?
on
How DRM Won
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· Score: 1
I mean, I listen to streaming music stations, a lot. If I really wanted to, I could save it; certainly, if I use one of the flashplayers that come up in Linux for listening to sites with Winamp, I could save the flash with any number of plugins... and they *won't* have DRM.
On the other hand, they seem to be doing vastly better than the US these days - we have NO WAY to put someone in orbit (unless the Pentagon's got a black program).
We also had Challenger and Columbia. And on the latter note, I'll add that I believe my late ex's analysis, rather than the "it's falling insulation" answer. She was an engineer, and worked at the Cape for 17 years, including on the Shuttle, and she thought that some of the inspections that were supposed to be done were *not* being done, or not being done as frequently as they were supposed to have been... and that the hydraulic lines broke due to stress corrosion microcracking, and there went the aerilons.
So, how many astronauts/cosmonauts have the Russians lost lately?
Simple: hire real scum, with no ethics or morals, who don't care about anyone else. Certainly, you should not hire someone with even the slightest trace of idealism, or who actually *believes* in things like the US Constitution.
Consider the Mafia as a good source of recruits. Or ex-members of Romania's Ceauescu, who had 1/3rd of the population spying on the rest. Or maybe right-wing racist, fascist skinheads.
There are plenty of organizations with little heirarchy that work well... they're called co-ops.
I have never heard of flat-pack, and the quick google I did found me (in addition to plenty of flat-pack kitchen stuff, and flat (apartment) management), was pure academic bs. Without some structure, trying to get anything done is like walking through mud, at best.
From Ms. Ellsworth's post, it reminds me very much of what, in the early nineties, was called matrix management - which also sounded good, but meant, in reality, we weren't sure *who* our managers were, and we were told that we had to act like "internal consultants", and find our own charges. Which, of course, was pure bs, and let the managers rate, and get that salary, and not have to actually do the work of managing those folks who they supposedly had budgetary authority over.
Every anarchy I've belonged to had management. What, you think *you* never belonged to an anarchy? "an-archy" means "no rulers", not chaotic lack of organization. This, of course, means that any club you've ever been a member of is an anarchy - you're a voluntary member, and the worst they can do is kick you out. BUT every one has a democratic management....
"Eco-friendly nature"? Does this include a) uncontrolled nuclear reactions (that thing up in the sky called the "sun"), b) volcanos, c) crushed under the weight of a mile or two of crust?
*sigh* I'm an environmentalist, but also know science, and idiot ideas are just that.
Go ahead, find an eco-friendly way, other than using water or solar-generated electric to produce aluminum. Or steel.
Yup. I'm in the US, but not an ignorant idiot. As a base, I use the definition of fascist of someone who speaks with more authority on the word than anyone here (or on Faux News): Mussolini, who liked to quote, "fascism is more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power". (Can you say, "Dick Cheney and Halliburton, boys and girls?").
But we've got fools here who try to argue that the Nazis weren't right wing (they used the word sociaism in their name!!!), presumably to try to pretend that they've always been the good guys, and no one on their side has ever been bad. (Meanwhile, most of us on the left have no problem considering Stalin a homocidal psychopath.)
Oh, and "slut"? "You're an ignorant slut, Jane", Rosanne Rosanadana to Jane Curtin, old Saturday Night Live skits. Ooops, sorry, that's from before you were born....
This is a completely idiotic idea. Oh, users might not see the Wonderful Ads, I mean, Website!
Yeah, and if I get hijacked, or go to something I was searching for answers to, but which turned out to be a fake (like Target, in the US, *always* producing a sponsored ad, no matter what I'm searching for), and is infected? If I don't have javascript enabled, a major attack vector is eliminated.
mark, who remembers that the *original* spec for the web was to display data the way the *users* wanted,
not the way the data source wanted
Hah - just what I said: Excerpt: A McDonald's franchise in Pennsylvania says it will give employees more payment options after it was sued by a former employee who says she was charged a fee to access her wages from a debit card. --- end excerpt ---
I'd get together with other managers (I assume you're one), and set up a budget discussion meeting. Then, I'd assume that he was expecting you to give a whatsitcalled, zero-based budget? where you start from zero, not from what you have. Perhaps a compare-and-contrast of zero-based and what you have now.
Heh, and, of course, if you went more heavily into Linux, with low-to-nothing licensing per workstation.... Esp. since you say you're an engineering organization, as good or better tools all run on Linux.
mark, at a civilian US government agency that does research, including with clusters....
ObDisclaimer: this is my opinion, and not that of a) my employer, b) the Agency I work for, c) the US federal gov't, or d) the view out my window (as if I had one).
Slashdot Mirror
Really? That long? I must be dreaming, then, working here as a federal contractor in the health sector, where when the biggest thing I ordered, a honkin' huge RAID box, got here in 4 mos, and most servers are here in half that time. And as for drives, I think the 20 3TB WD Red drives I ordered were here in 2 weeks from the time I put in the order.....
mark "not under the DoD like the NSA"
Geez, are you stupid. I'm *sure* you have leverage with your employer, and you have all the benefits... right. You're posting here.... *I* am on lunch.....
You also love 60 or 80 hour weeks, and "sorry, we need you to finish that, we can't let you go on vacation", or just "whatever it takes", and you have no life.
mark "oh, right, as a developer or admin, you're "management", and so not elegible to have
any protection whatever"
I'd like to point out that *any* graduate of a foreign medical school (including Americans who might have gotten their MD in, say, Grenada) are *required*, by US federal law, to take the exams offered by the National Board of Medical Examiners for such. These are the same folks who US students talk of, when they say "the Boards".
mark
ObDisclosure: I worked for the Boards in the mid-eighties, and helped computerize the tests, so yes, I actually do know what I'm talking about.
A year or so ago, I had to install FC17, I think it was, on a user's machine, and he wanted gnome 3.
That was the worst piece of crap I have *ever* seen as a gui.
Huge icons, basically filling the screen, that go transparent/invisible until you roll over them.... Who's this for, some 16 year olds who think it's K3WL!!! My stepson had that, I think, on ubuntu on his laptop, and things ending with a visual explosion? or starting or ending as though you were tearing a sheet of toilet paper?
*rolls eyes*
Yep, as the thing I read last year, I think, said, the typical laptop has more computing power than all the computers in the world in 1970... and 99% of its computing power is used for friggin' eye candy. Make it all run with the *blazing* speed of a '286....
mark
Saw it. Was expecting fun monster movie, and that's what I got. Actually, it was Big Budget, live action and CGI straight anime (giant robots bashing fists? Suddenly appearing swords? absolutely anime).
Downside: due to timing, we saw 3-D. Don't. It was gratuitous, and during a number of the Big Fight Scenes, they'd layered it so densly that we couldn't tell what was happening.
Hollywood: lose the 3-D. Get plots, or when you see your revenues, you'll plotz.
One last comment (the reference is for extra points) on Pacific Rim: why didn't they bring out the obvious, best weapon against the critters... the Yamato?
mark
Um, servers. Apple doesn't do servers - as I understand it, they finally killed off their little "server". Most of the rest: Unix, and overwhelmingly that Unix love child, Linux.
I work onsite for a federal contractor. In our division, we have well over 100 servers... one? two? run Windows server. Vastly cheaper - no "purchase" cost, unless you buy one of the corporate distros, like RedHat; ditto on annual maintenance fees. Many folks buy a few RHEL licenses... and use free distros for the rest of the servers.
mark, sr. systems administrator
How many thousands of years did it take for that warming... the equivalent of *one* century? But no, zillions of barrels of oil and coal, burned, can't *possibly* affect the whole world's climate, no, no....
mark
As a President, I really disliked him, as he ramped up the military, when it really wasn't necessary, and played into the hands of the Republicans....
On the other hand, he's the greatest ex-President this country has had in my lifetime, standing for, well, what the US is *supposed* to stand for, and *claims* to stand for.
mark
I don't do "sci-fi", that referring to a) mostly monster movies, or b) things so dumbed down as to be worthless....
And 3/4s of the posts here from gun nuts, as though the Second Amendment was going to save them (to paraphrase a quote from someone I used to know, "so, you're telling me that D-Day was unnecessary, since the Wehrmacht was sure to fall to the mighty French Resistance shortly").
Anyway, how 'bout relevant fiction: what comes to mind are things like Walter Jon Williams Hardwired, or Gibson's Neuromancer, or several by Bruce Sterling.
mark, who actually reads
Where's Helium around that delta?
mark "and is Dejah Thoris lounging by the Aeolian Riviera?"
There are, indeed, scientific programmers. Consider environmental companies - they do a lot of engineering, in terms of finding and catagorizing and cataloging pollution. Or there are some engineering firms - think of aerospace. Or there's the biosciences, which are big these days. We have a lot of such programmers here (I work for a US federal contractor in the health and human services area[1]). In my division, we've got folks working on things like protein folding[2], which takes *days* on a good-sized compute cluster. Fun stuff.
And for the liberidiots, "making money for folks who are already rich, but are desperate to get richer" is not doing a damn thing for the human race[3]. nor for the economy[4].
mark
1. Which shall remain nameless; anything I say should not be construed as speaking for my employer, my agency, the US federal government, or the view out of my window (assuming I even had a window).
2. The code we use was written by one of our researchers, and is used around the agency.
3. Given the massive relocation of wealth upwards, and the documented downwards movement of everyone
below the 1%, with the only new jobs "created" being sweat shops in places like Bangladesh, and minimum wage
"service sector" jobs here, this is a demonstrable fact.
4. krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/john-galt-and-the-theory-of-the-firm/
So, how old are you? I'm so old, I remember the USSR on current maps. You, on the other hand, seem to have missed the end of the Soviet Russia 20+ years ago....
mark
Well, you could actually talk to others who you feel have a fair amount of credibility.
For example, almost all our servers (> 150) are from Sun (a very few), Penguin (a lot) and Dell (a lot). We decided several years ago to work to keep anyone from buying Sun/Oracle again.[1] A year or so ago, we decided we really didn't want Penguin any more.[2] I have not-wonderful opinions of HP[3], except for their laser printers.
Or third party vendors: these folks are Approved! (Yeah, but their website is user hostile, and I can't find what we need.)
Then there was Amazon. I was looking to buy a large batch of the new WD Red 3TB drives. Amazon had a really good price on them, and I needed to call, to find out if we could buy a batch (the page said limit 4). I got a woman who was neither in the US, nor spoke English as a first language, who kept repeating what I could read on Amazon's page, who clearly had *never* dealt with a company, only individual buyers, and literally didn't seem to understand me when I said I was with the US federal gov't. Oh, and when she brought the page up, for some reason it showed the drive with the cover plate removed, and the platters visible... and she asked *me* what it was, if it was a movie player. I gave up in frustration. My manager, who'd heard the end of that, suggested I call the sales manager for us that we'd worked with before. *She* knew her job, understood me the first time, and I had a really good quote, almost as good as Amazon's limited time offer, the next day.
When you find someone who actually knows their job, and their market, those are the folks you want to deal with.
1. I refer to dealing with Sun/Oracle "tech support" as self-abuse, after spending a month to finally get an FE out to replace a m/b and some other stuff, and that included two weeks of exchanging email with an engineer in Chile....
2. Penguin's all Supermicro, and Supermicro has *real* problems, if not an actual lack of understanding, of the words "quality control". Penguin's tech support's ok, but....
3. Very hard to find updates for older systems, very much similar to Sun/Oracle's We Want To Pwn You attitude.
mark
I mean, I listen to streaming music stations, a lot. If I really wanted to, I could save it; certainly, if I use one of the flashplayers that come up in Linux for listening to sites with Winamp, I could save the flash with any number of plugins... and they *won't* have DRM.
iSomethingorothers, not so much.
mark
The Russians are using contractors, now?
On the other hand, they seem to be doing vastly better than the US these days - we have NO WAY to put someone in orbit (unless the Pentagon's got a black program).
We also had Challenger and Columbia. And on the latter note, I'll add that I believe my late ex's analysis, rather than the "it's falling insulation" answer. She was an engineer, and worked at the Cape for 17 years, including on the Shuttle, and she thought that some of the inspections that were supposed to be done were *not* being done, or not being done as frequently as they were supposed to have been... and that the hydraulic lines broke due to stress corrosion microcracking, and there went the aerilons.
So, how many astronauts/cosmonauts have the Russians lost lately?
mark
Simple: hire real scum, with no ethics or morals, who don't care about anyone else. Certainly, you should not hire someone with even the slightest trace of idealism, or who actually *believes* in things like the US Constitution.
Consider the Mafia as a good source of recruits. Or ex-members of Romania's Ceauescu, who had 1/3rd of the population spying on the rest. Or maybe right-wing racist, fascist skinheads.
mark
There are plenty of organizations with little heirarchy that work well... they're called co-ops.
I have never heard of flat-pack, and the quick google I did found me (in addition to plenty of flat-pack kitchen stuff, and flat (apartment) management), was pure academic bs. Without some structure, trying to get anything done is like walking through mud, at best.
From Ms. Ellsworth's post, it reminds me very much of what, in the early nineties, was called matrix management - which also sounded good, but meant, in reality, we weren't sure *who* our managers were, and we were told that we had to act like "internal consultants", and find our own charges. Which, of course, was pure bs, and let the managers rate, and get that salary, and not have to actually do the work of managing those folks who they supposedly had budgetary authority over.
Every anarchy I've belonged to had management. What, you think *you* never belonged to an anarchy? "an-archy" means "no rulers", not chaotic lack of organization. This, of course, means that any club you've ever been a member of is an anarchy - you're a voluntary member, and the worst they can do is kick you out. BUT every one has a democratic management....
mark
Right: NOAA, with people with a scientific background, cleaned theirs up. EDA, presumably full of MBA's, don't have a clue.
Besides, they're doing *such* a good job promoting enconomic growth in the US....
mark
Reunite Gondwanaland! - the Pangaean Liberation Front.
mark
"Eco-friendly nature"? Does this include a) uncontrolled nuclear reactions (that thing up in the sky called the "sun"), b) volcanos, c) crushed under the weight of a mile or two of crust?
*sigh* I'm an environmentalist, but also know science, and idiot ideas are just that.
Go ahead, find an eco-friendly way, other than using water or solar-generated electric to produce aluminum. Or steel.
mark
Yup. I'm in the US, but not an ignorant idiot. As a base, I use the definition of fascist of someone who speaks with more authority on the word than anyone here (or on Faux News): Mussolini, who liked to quote, "fascism is more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power". (Can you say, "Dick Cheney and Halliburton, boys and girls?").
But we've got fools here who try to argue that the Nazis weren't right wing (they used the word sociaism in their name!!!), presumably to try to pretend that they've always been the good guys, and no one on their side has ever been bad. (Meanwhile, most of us on the left have no problem considering Stalin a homocidal psychopath.)
Oh, and "slut"? "You're an ignorant slut, Jane", Rosanne Rosanadana to Jane Curtin, old Saturday Night Live skits. Ooops, sorry, that's from before you were born....
mark
"Far left propaganda machines"?
What Americans know of the left is what Good Germans knew of Jews in the late thirties, you ignorant slut.
mark
This is a completely idiotic idea. Oh, users might not see the Wonderful Ads, I mean, Website!
Yeah, and if I get hijacked, or go to something I was searching for answers to, but which turned out to be a fake (like Target, in the US, *always* producing a sponsored ad, no matter what I'm searching for), and is infected? If I don't have javascript enabled, a major attack vector is eliminated.
mark, who remembers that the *original* spec for the web was to display data the way the *users* wanted,
not the way the data source wanted
Hah - just what I said:
Excerpt:
A McDonald's franchise in Pennsylvania says it will give employees more payment options after it was sued by a former employee who says she was charged a fee to access her wages from a debit card.
--- end excerpt ---
mark
I'd get together with other managers (I assume you're one), and set up a budget discussion meeting. Then, I'd assume that he was expecting you to give a whatsitcalled, zero-based budget? where you start from zero, not from what you have. Perhaps a compare-and-contrast of zero-based and what you have now.
Heh, and, of course, if you went more heavily into Linux, with low-to-nothing licensing per workstation.... Esp. since you say you're an engineering organization, as good or better tools all run on Linux.
mark, at a civilian US government agency that does research, including with clusters....
ObDisclaimer: this is my opinion, and not that of a) my employer, b) the Agency I work for, c) the US federal gov't, or d) the view out my window (as if I had one).