Why on earth was this modded down as flamebait? Advocating physical harm to spammers? Nah, happens constantly on/. Advocating physical harm to lawyers? No, same reason. It must be the suggestion to replace members of the public with blow-up dolls. OK, let's amend that: All members of the public will first be replaced by inflatable replicas, except for those too intelligent and valuable to be simulated by air and latex, such as Slashdot moderators. They will have the privilege and glory of being there in the flesh. Satisfied?
I pretty much agree with points 1 and 2. But have you tried Abiword or Wordperfect? Point 3 - GUI administration: I think you're talking about a corporate environment because you mention "people who hire sysadmins". I see where NT still has the advantage for small (less than 50 people) offices. But for widespread enterprise deployment, the increased efficiencies of Unix administration more than make up for the more expensive people. From what I've seen, desktop Unix admins are tremendously more efficient than desktop windows admins. 4. Easy software installs: The problem is constructing a trust framework that lets the user easily understand what privileges the package will have. In the windows world, users seem to have no control over what a software package will do to their systems. 5. Speed of X: I've found this mostly correlates with what graphics card you're using. With a high-end Matrox card, X has no speed problems. With a cheap card, X has serious problems, no matter how much CPU and RAM you throw at it.
Ever since PC-DOS, Microsoft has been steadily moving towards a completely closed platform. The Microsoft promise is that one entity will take responsibility for the proper functioning of the PC. In Microsoft's view, the only reasons to run "third-party" applications are:
business-specific code
Bleeding edge stuff they haven't rolled into Windows/Office yet.
Niche stuff that's very hard to write, like AutoCAD
A William Gibson quote says it best:
The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. "Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self."
While I consider Microsoft a harmful and unpleasant organism, I cannot condemn this particular action very wholeheartedly because it is simply a restatement of Microsoft's central imperative. Like the stinger on a wasp.
I love when people whine about the Valley. It's like standing on the railroad tracks when the train is coming and claiming that trains are obsolete and overrated. If you don't like or don't understand the valley, that's fine - just realize that it has a vast impact on your life. All this trumpeting of "Silicon Alley" etc. has the pathetic sound of England (no offense - just an example) trying to prove they're still a world power. Cmdr Taco says:
Case in point: the slides before the movie are all want ads for tech jobs for pre-IPO companies. Dozens of them.
So why is this bad exactly? You'd rather see commercials for carwashes or something? I like being in a place where the demand for technical people is high. Maybe Taco is seeing this from the employer's viewpoint now. From the article
The anthropologists likened computer programmers and engineers to "techno-missionaries," people who "seek a grander meaning to their jobs" and use an array of cellular phones and other gadgets to live on the cutting edge of "a progressive movement."
Ugh. I hate it when they confuse gadget-collection with being technical. I don't think that programmers are more likely to have cell phones than other professions. Actually, I think that salespeople and CEO's are the most enthusiastic users of PDA's, cellphones, etc. If we're on the cutting edge of a progressive movement, it has nothing to do with cell phones and everything to do with the internet and open source. Again from the article
Even more so than in banking, retail or other industries, women in the high-tech industry are notoriously contained in the "pink ghettos" of public relations, marketing and human resources.
They're making it sound as if women are deliberately excluded. It's not like there are thousands of women sitting at home submitting their kernel patches and wondering why "high-tech" (hate that phrase) companies won't hire them. Face it: the kind of people (self included) who get excited about operating systems/languages/network protocols are mostly male. Should we blame nature or nurture? I don't know, but I know we shouldn't blame employers.
Just imagine a small company with all its vital financial data housed on some remote M$ server, and now imagine the incentive that small companie to pays M$ monthly service fees to use and access it.
From what I've seen, a lot of small companies' survival depends on the continued functioning of a cheap IDE disk. If they bother to run backups at all, one or more of the following apply:
They never verify the tapes.
They store the tapes unprotected next to the server.
The tape drive is a proprietary POS and they don't own a spare.
They aren't really backing up everything, because the business has evolved since they last designed a backup strategy.
They rotate the tapes in a simple cycle, thus ensuring that there is no backup more than a week old.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft. But realistically, they'd buy some EMC's and Suns and tape robots. They'd give some thought to data integrity just to avoid the bad PR.
The point about "balls" is a valid one though - as a customer, I'd steer clear of such schemes.
Disclaimer: this is the first I've heard of this scheme. I didn't see anything in the article about it. I speak from ignorance.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether the usability and compatibility improvements that Microsoft has built atop Windows 2000 will be enough to the transition for its users.
I find this sentence confusing in several ways:
What exactly has Microsoft built atop Whistler? I though the article dealt with Whistler itself.
Is there a word missing between "to" and "the"? I sense that the author was groping for something like "incentivize". Or perhaps "ease". It may seem a minor point, but the difficulty of choosing this word illuminates the shaky premise of the article, of which I'll say more below.
This sentence cites "compatibility improvements" while the rest of the article warns that consumers will experience jarring incompatibility with the Win95 family. In fact, this incompatibility is cited at the end of the article as the sole disadvantage of Whistler.
I'm starting to notice a pattern to these articles which appear in the MS-centric press whenever MS flogs a new product. The reviewers try to sound objective, hence the gravely cautious weighing of advantages and disadvantages. But the writer is trapped in a conceptual framework in which the consumer's only choice is to upgrade now or upgrade later. Rather like an election in a one-party state, where you're free to vote for the dictator or not.
It's striking how different this article is from anything reviewing goods or services available in a free market. The sense that the consumer is king, which has been such a great blessing of our capitalist system, is quite absent. In its place we see the harsh fiats of an all-powerful bureaucracy, such as the warning that Win98 (so recently announced!) will soon be unsupported.
I agree. Public schools are evil to the core. Because they devalue human intelligence and initiative, and because they champion mindless obedience and ass-kissing, they will repel the people who could help them and attract their true soulmates like Channel One and ZapMe.
Your demand for a quid pro quo is reasonable, but of course unrealistic. Any school administrator would rather spend $4000 of grant money on a bad PC than accept a free PC from some grubby hacker who thinks students have "rights". In the first case he's the hero who wrote the grant proposal, got the money, managed the project. Sure there are a few bugs to iron out, but he's on top of it. In the second case, he's merely the passive conduit that allows you to be the hero.
Also, in the first case he can be fed and fawned upon by a sharply dressed salesman who speaks of "leading education into the 21st century" or something. In the second, you will stare at him with disapproval and basically call him a human rights violator.
I'm amazed that adults can sentimentalize school into something noble, completely forgetting how viciously authoritarian it is.
Now I just need some idiot to "rebut" me on the grounds that his wife is a teacher and "overworked" and "underpaid".
I don't think that libertarians want kids to become corporate drones. The idea that kids can be deprived of free will and intelligence by a combination of forced advertising and administrative fascism is a bit naive. Unfortunately this view is held by both proponents and opponents of these harebrained schemes.
Remember the school in the south that tried to force all the students to wear Coke t-shirts? Did they really score big points with those students?
Kids are mostly trying to carve out their own identity. Anything mandated by the authorities is not cool.
I think libertarians want parents to buy education for their kids, rather than having it bought for them by a middleman (local government) with very different values. If a parent chooses to expose his child to propaganda, whether commercial, political or religious, to get lower tuition or better education, that's his decision.
Personally, I'd like my (hypothetical) kid to endure a barrage of well-crafted propaganda. The real world is full of propaganda and success depends partly on skepticism and critical thinking.
The trouble is usually that while the marketing department is running around shouting "We're hip! We're cyber-savvy! We have gigabit ethernet jacks in our skulls!", the rest of the company is fairly dubious about this whole world wide cybernet thing.
I'm thinking of a particular "high-tech" recruiter whose adds claim they are God's gift to the internet, and prominently feature an email address. Their actual policy, confirmed by employees there, is to delete all mail to that address. If you interview there, they'll ask you about Cobol and CICS. They've never heard of Perl.
Anyhow, I've never responded to an ad. I could write a book about the reasons for this, but in a nutshell it is not a good way to get a satisfying and high paying job. Instead, I find companies that are growing/receiving funding, and just drive there and talk to them.
I hear this meme a lot, and it makes me sad. Many places have a policy of ignoring all emailed resumes - they get way too many and assume that the job seeker is not serious. Please remember that everyone is overworked, busy, incompetent. If you want a job, go there in person.
You will bulk much larger in someone's mind if you've shaken hands with him than if you're just a disposable string of bytes.
First I'd contact the responsible person and find out what he's doing and why. If he's committed to NT, I'd just make sure we're on the same page wrt email, printing, DNS, etc. Fitting an NT box into a Unix environment can require some tweaking. If he's a bit unsure of his reasons for installing an NT box, and his desired application could be done well on Unix, I'd try to gently steer him in that direction. The key word is gently.
It would be wise to start a NT-admin mailing list so these guys can pool their knowledge of smooth integration into our network.
That was really well said. Before going to a new company, I always verify that I can run whatever OS I want, that I will have root on my desktop, and that nobody else will have root. I've yet to hear an objection. Maybe we're seeing a company-culture difference. I'm in Silicon Valley, where demand for techies is very high and unix is very popular. Reading slashdot I keep getting the impression that there are tons of clueless old-fashioned companies in the Midwest or something that underpay and disenfranchise their techies. I keep hearing "clueless management installed MSexchange over techies' protests." I think that many technical people must be unaware of their market value and mobility to stay in a place like that. Although the workstation is frequently the employer's property, I don't think it makes sense for the employer to exert absolute control over it. When you hire a craftsman, he may or may not bring his own tools, but he generally decides how to use those tools. Too many posters are citing the employer's mere ownership of computers and networks as the last word in this debate. I find the idea of submitting a business case silly and demeaning. The business case is simply that the emplyer needs my skills and can have them only on my terms.
Skywalker107, I find your idiotic punctuation habits fascinating. If you merely omitted punctuation, I would conclude that you were lazy or in a hurry. However, your use of a random-length string of multiple periods as a delimiter for incoherent sentence fragments seems an especially labor-intensive way of making an ass of yourself. As to your assertion:
We were all newbies once in our lives...some longer than others
A person entering a new domain is necessarily ignorant of that domain. If possessed of a modicum of common sense, he realizes that any question he might ask has undoubtedly been asked and answered before, and that it is therefore wiser to search in the obvious places than to burden the denizens of the internet with his ignorance. A post which advertises its authorship by a Newbie is typically a waste of time for both the poster and the respondents, if any. The only benefit (again, typically) which can arise from such a post is the forcible inculcation of clue in the poster. Skywalker107, I have never, in any domain, been a newbie in the sense in which you are a newbie and will probably remain one for life. If your writing style is intended to convey an image of a wine-sodden derelict collapsed in a gutter and muttering incoherently, you have succeeded.
To avoid any confusion, we have bumped the version of our current development branch to GCC 2.97.
If I understand this correctly, the GCC developers will increment the version number (yes I know it's not exactly an increment) in response to Red Hat's release of 2.96? And this going to avoid confusion?
The idea that a company, using a law only valid in America, will try and force any hardware manufacturers outside of America to implement something against their will is just laughable.
Let's take handheld radios as one of many examples. Every country has different laws about what frequencies amateurs can broadcast on, and what frequencies the public can listen to. (The US used to be an exception to that latter, but no more.) Radio manufacturers like Yaesu build these laws into their products so that if your radio is sold in South Korea, it will only xmit / receive what the South Korean authorities want it to. It happens that they made many radios easily hackable, but I assume that eventually the regulatory agencies will close this "loophole". So in a nutshell, Yaesu does not thumb their nose at national governments and attempt to sell equipment that violates national law. Rather, they find an economical way of making one product adaptable to myriad laws.
Perhaps there will be a variant of SDMI for totalitarian regimes that prohibits the sharing of content not signed by the authorities. The sound card maker will set the "US mode" or "China mode" by blowing the right fuse in a chip before shipping.
If I understand your post correctly, AOL is demanding that packets from IM clients contain their copyright notice, thus hoping to use copyright law to ban interoperability.
I don't know if this is true, but a similar scheme was attempted and overturned by the courts. Sega designed a game console that would only play cartridges containing the Sega logo. They thought competitors would be unable to produce games for the console without violating Sega's trademark rights.
I don't think I'm missing much by reading a book in plain ASCII. If Bertie Wooster is striving to be a preux chevalier and I read it as preux chevalier, I don't feel deprived. Maybe you're thinking of some kind of specialized technical books where the italics really communicate something? Writers of good fiction generally communicate with words, not markup. (Yes, Tristram Shandy contains exceptions).
I think that advocating XML/SGML for Gutenberg is a typical case of geeks wanting more complexity because it's cool. Right now you can probably read the PG texts on any modern computer, without special software. Use lynx, vi, less, MS Word, Internet Explorer, whatever. If people have to use special software to parse or strip the markup tags, the barrier to exploring PG will be raised.
I'd rather that PG's volunteers have more time to scan in books and correct them. I want the writings of good authors, not the incidental craftsmanship of typesetters et al.
it's very hard to make a half-decent Gutenberg text viewer.
I run e-texts through a short script that strips the header and pipes the body through par. I set the width to 50 columns, as I find this very readable. Then I read them with less(1). I don't want something like Adobe Acrobat, which is slow and crippled and addicted to "page" metaphors from the tree world.
I think the idea of page numbers in an e-text is especially ridiculous. Page numbers are like inodes - an artifact of a particular storage mechanism. Even if you want greater document structure, the "page" is an entity which should certainly be discarded in translation from paper to bytes.
But too many sado-macho folk get an ego boost from mastering arcane, inconsistent, poorly-implemented interfaces.
I hear this complaint a lot from GUI advocates. What exactly are you referring to? Do you think that ls, for example, has "arcane, inconsistent, poorly-implemented" UI? The commands ls and tar both take an option -c, but it does different things. Is this what you're calling inconsistency? Because if it is, you must find a lot to complain about in the physical world. For example, a drill and a pistol both have a trigger, but one causes the 'muzzle' to rotate while the other causes a projectile to be launched.
It would damage their egos severely to find out that a trained monkey with a Mac can do immediately what it took them a day to figure out on Unix.
No. The time spent figuring things out on Unix is not wasted. Rather it's repaid with interest when the user progresses to harder challenges that can be overcome with some of the same tools. The trained monkey will be fast at handling the common problem (easy things very easy) and utterly dumbfounded when confronted with a moderately hard problem (hard things impossible.)
So, a question to all... how to you write your code so that it's flexible enough for translation, but not open to attack?
Well, the BSD's "solved" this by not allowing user-supplied string catalogs for suid root programs. I noticed that some messages on Bugtraq faulted application authors for writing printf(gettext("File %s not found"), buf); with the implication that the app author should check the return value of gettext. It seems more reasonable to me to modify the gettext function. Remember, it's called with string containing a certain number of printf format specifiers. The new string it retrieves from the database should contain the same specifiers in the same order, or gettext should return the original string. Isn't this better than modifying the tons of source code that use the localization info?
Are you talking about refunding the bundled Windows OS? If so, why would I ever think that I have a right to do that?
For the simple reason that Microsoft guarranteed that right in the so-called "End User License Agreement" which they packaged with the OS distribution media. In order to give this purported agreement a semblance of legality, Microsoft wrote that if the purchaser does not accept the "agreement" he can return the OS to the vendor for a full refund.
I don't intend to buy a copy of Windows if I don't want it. So I will never have a need for a refund.
I agree. Companies that pre-install windows don't have the best prices. Besides, why deal with someone like that when you can avoid it?
I agree that it's silly to evade language comparisons with the excuse that they're not directly comparable. Perl and Python are similar enough to invite comparison. They are both high-level interpreted (effectively) languages. Here are the main differences as I see them:
Python uses indentation as punctuation. This could be great or terrible. Look at it this way - if you write perl per `perldoc perlstyle` you're describing block structures twice - once with indentation level, and once with braces. This naturally leads to errors where the indentation (highly visible) is correct but a brace is missing or extra. Python lets the visible thing (indentation) take on the syntactic role. The downside, if any, is that you lose the freedom to indent code however you want.
Python is believed to have better object-orientation than Perl. Since I don't have the OO religion, this makes very little impression on me.
Python is purist/academic in flavor, while Perl is eclectic/pragmatic. Perl's power is strongly tied to its mixed ancestry. Perl basically swallowed C, shell, and either sed or awk.
Last time I checked, Python's regular expressions were inferior to Perl's in speed, ease of notation, and power/comprehensiveness. This may not be true anymore.
In case it's not obvious, I'm a bit biased towards Perl. I program a lot in Perl and never in Python. The one place I can imagine Python being superior is a largish team of newbie programmers. The enforced indentation would help ensure uniformity of style, and the bias towards object orientation might encourage modular and reusable code.
"One of the things we're telling our athletes if there are any questions - if it's Nike or Speedo or somebody - just be interviewed." In other words, if the text is a question and answer format rather than a personal diary, than that's not likely to raise a flag, said Condron.
Q: So what's new in the Olympic compound? A: Well, today they're setting up a propane-powered branding iron to brand corporate logos on our cheeks. At first I was kind of put off by that, but you know what they say: "No pain, no gain."
If you're still using lynx, you're really missing out.
I like w3m, but I still use lynx for most of my browsing. W3m supports tables, and tables are mostly abused on the web. For example, when reading slashdot I'm not interested in the "design" of the page - I just want the content. If I use w3m, there are wasted margins on the side of the terminal caused by the table layout. Also, w3m doesn't display the page until it's completely downloaded. Lynx let's you start reading (and scrolling) when only a small part of the page is downloaded.
I use w3m mainly for streetprices.com and ebay. These are sites that actually used tables for tabular information, rather than "graphic design" wankery.
Here's an open question: what can we (we meaning the slashdot crew) do to get people to read the stories before posting?
The posting form could require some information from the article. It could be multiple choice, i.e. "According to the cited URL, the exploit affects:"
Only Word
Word and Excel
Word, Excel and Powerpoint
Word and Powerpoint
Three questions would give a 1/64 chance of guessing correctly. If the questions are answered incorrectly,/. could redirect to the cited URL. All of this could be scripted around by a determined adversary, but I don't think the obvious-askers are determined adversaries.
There are no jobs out there where you get to do all the things you want to do, with all the toys you want to play with.
I don't know what geographic region you're attempting to describe, but speaking for Silicon Valley, there are so many cool jobs here that the hard part is choosing. Lots of technical people here are 100% anti-microsoft and won't take a job that involves it. There are so many companies centered around perl+linux+mysql or perl+solaris+oracle or whatever that there's no reason on earth to work in a mixed or microsoft shop. My current job has pretty much let me play with all my favorite things - even things like postscript which I didn't initially think had any relevance. My contact with Microsoft has been mostly limited to mocking its shortcomings and acting smug when some MS-based FPOS pukes all over itself. (Yes, as you can tell, there are rotting bits of MS wedged into the dark recesses of this company - probably put there to entertain the UNIX geeks by spontaneously bursting into flame.) In short: the message which you are sending, Keel, that it's an employer's market and workers must accept what they're given, is absolutely wrong with regard to the valley. Here, at least, it's the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth was this modded down as flamebait? /.
Advocating physical harm to spammers? Nah, happens constantly on
Advocating physical harm to lawyers? No, same reason.
It must be the suggestion to replace members of the public with blow-up dolls. OK, let's amend that:
All members of the public will first be replaced by inflatable replicas, except for those too intelligent and valuable to be simulated by air and latex, such as Slashdot moderators. They will have the privilege and glory of being there in the flesh. Satisfied?
I pretty much agree with points 1 and 2. But have you tried Abiword or Wordperfect?
Point 3 - GUI administration: I think you're talking about a corporate environment because you mention "people who hire sysadmins". I see where NT still has the advantage for small (less than 50 people) offices. But for widespread enterprise deployment, the increased efficiencies of Unix administration more than make up for the more expensive people. From what I've seen, desktop Unix admins are tremendously more efficient than desktop windows admins.
4. Easy software installs: The problem is constructing a trust framework that lets the user easily understand what privileges the package will have. In the windows world, users seem to have no control over what a software package will do to their systems.
5. Speed of X: I've found this mostly correlates with what graphics card you're using. With a high-end Matrox card, X has no speed problems. With a cheap card, X has serious problems, no matter how much CPU and RAM you throw at it.
A William Gibson quote says it best:
While I consider Microsoft a harmful and unpleasant organism, I cannot condemn this particular action very wholeheartedly because it is simply a restatement of Microsoft's central imperative. Like the stinger on a wasp.
Cmdr Taco says:So why is this bad exactly? You'd rather see commercials for carwashes or something? I like being in a place where the demand for technical people is high. Maybe Taco is seeing this from the employer's viewpoint now.
From the article
Ugh. I hate it when they confuse gadget-collection with being technical. I don't think that programmers are more likely to have cell phones than other professions. Actually, I think that salespeople and CEO's are the most enthusiastic users of PDA's, cellphones, etc. If we're on the cutting edge of a progressive movement, it has nothing to do with cell phones and everything to do with the internet and open source.
Again from the articleThey're making it sound as if women are deliberately excluded. It's not like there are thousands of women sitting at home submitting their kernel patches and wondering why "high-tech" (hate that phrase) companies won't hire them. Face it: the kind of people (self included) who get excited about operating systems/languages/network protocols are mostly male. Should we blame nature or nurture? I don't know, but I know we shouldn't blame employers.
- They never verify the tapes.
- They store the tapes unprotected next to the server.
- The tape drive is a proprietary POS and they don't own a spare.
- They aren't really backing up everything, because the business has evolved since they last designed a backup strategy.
- They rotate the tapes in a simple cycle, thus ensuring that there is no backup more than a week old.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft. But realistically, they'd buy some EMC's and Suns and tape robots. They'd give some thought to data integrity just to avoid the bad PR.The point about "balls" is a valid one though - as a customer, I'd steer clear of such schemes.
Disclaimer: this is the first I've heard of this scheme. I didn't see anything in the article about it. I speak from ignorance.
- What exactly has Microsoft built atop Whistler? I though the article dealt with Whistler itself.
- Is there a word missing between "to" and "the"? I sense that the author was groping for something like "incentivize". Or perhaps "ease". It may seem a minor point, but the difficulty of choosing this word illuminates the shaky premise of the article, of which I'll say more below.
- This sentence cites "compatibility improvements" while the rest of the article warns that consumers will experience jarring incompatibility with the Win95 family. In fact, this incompatibility is cited at the end of the article as the sole disadvantage of Whistler.
I'm starting to notice a pattern to these articles which appear in the MS-centric press whenever MS flogs a new product. The reviewers try to sound objective, hence the gravely cautious weighing of advantages and disadvantages. But the writer is trapped in a conceptual framework in which the consumer's only choice is to upgrade now or upgrade later. Rather like an election in a one-party state, where you're free to vote for the dictator or not.It's striking how different this article is from anything reviewing goods or services available in a free market. The sense that the consumer is king, which has been such a great blessing of our capitalist system, is quite absent. In its place we see the harsh fiats of an all-powerful bureaucracy, such as the warning that Win98 (so recently announced!) will soon be unsupported.
Your demand for a quid pro quo is reasonable, but of course unrealistic. Any school administrator would rather spend $4000 of grant money on a bad PC than accept a free PC from some grubby hacker who thinks students have "rights". In the first case he's the hero who wrote the grant proposal, got the money, managed the project. Sure there are a few bugs to iron out, but he's on top of it. In the second case, he's merely the passive conduit that allows you to be the hero.
Also, in the first case he can be fed and fawned upon by a sharply dressed salesman who speaks of "leading education into the 21st century" or something. In the second, you will stare at him with disapproval and basically call him a human rights violator.
I'm amazed that adults can sentimentalize school into something noble, completely forgetting how viciously authoritarian it is.
Now I just need some idiot to "rebut" me on the grounds that his wife is a teacher and "overworked" and "underpaid".
Remember the school in the south that tried to force all the students to wear Coke t-shirts? Did they really score big points with those students?
Kids are mostly trying to carve out their own identity. Anything mandated by the authorities is not cool.
I think libertarians want parents to buy education for their kids, rather than having it bought for them by a middleman (local government) with very different values. If a parent chooses to expose his child to propaganda, whether commercial, political or religious, to get lower tuition or better education, that's his decision.
Personally, I'd like my (hypothetical) kid to endure a barrage of well-crafted propaganda. The real world is full of propaganda and success depends partly on skepticism and critical thinking.
I'm thinking of a particular "high-tech" recruiter whose adds claim they are God's gift to the internet, and prominently feature an email address. Their actual policy, confirmed by employees there, is to delete all mail to that address. If you interview there, they'll ask you about Cobol and CICS. They've never heard of Perl.
Anyhow, I've never responded to an ad. I could write a book about the reasons for this, but in a nutshell it is not a good way to get a satisfying and high paying job. Instead, I find companies that are growing/receiving funding, and just drive there and talk to them.
I hear this meme a lot, and it makes me sad. Many places have a policy of ignoring all emailed resumes - they get way too many and assume that the job seeker is not serious. Please remember that everyone is overworked, busy, incompetent. If you want a job, go there in person.
You will bulk much larger in someone's mind if you've shaken hands with him than if you're just a disposable string of bytes.
First I'd contact the responsible person and find out what he's doing and why. If he's committed to NT, I'd just make sure we're on the same page wrt email, printing, DNS, etc. Fitting an NT box into a Unix environment can require some tweaking.
If he's a bit unsure of his reasons for installing an NT box, and his desired application could be done well on Unix, I'd try to gently steer him in that direction. The key word is gently.
It would be wise to start a NT-admin mailing list so these guys can pool their knowledge of smooth integration into our network.
That was really well said.
Before going to a new company, I always verify that I can run whatever OS I want, that I will have root on my desktop, and that nobody else will have root. I've yet to hear an objection.
Maybe we're seeing a company-culture difference. I'm in Silicon Valley, where demand for techies is very high and unix is very popular. Reading slashdot I keep getting the impression that there are tons of clueless old-fashioned companies in the Midwest or something that underpay and disenfranchise their techies. I keep hearing "clueless management installed MSexchange over techies' protests." I think that many technical people must be unaware of their market value and mobility to stay in a place like that.
Although the workstation is frequently the employer's property, I don't think it makes sense for the employer to exert absolute control over it. When you hire a craftsman, he may or may not bring his own tools, but he generally decides how to use those tools. Too many posters are citing the employer's mere ownership of computers and networks as the last word in this debate.
I find the idea of submitting a business case silly and demeaning. The business case is simply that the emplyer needs my skills and can have them only on my terms.
As to your assertion: A person entering a new domain is necessarily ignorant of that domain. If possessed of a modicum of common sense, he realizes that any question he might ask has undoubtedly been asked and answered before, and that it is therefore wiser to search in the obvious places than to burden the denizens of the internet with his ignorance. A post which advertises its authorship by a Newbie is typically a waste of time for both the poster and the respondents, if any. The only benefit (again, typically) which can arise from such a post is the forcible inculcation of clue in the poster.
Skywalker107, I have never, in any domain, been a newbie in the sense in which you are a newbie and will probably remain one for life. If your writing style is intended to convey an image of a wine-sodden derelict collapsed in a gutter and muttering incoherently, you have succeeded.
Perhaps there will be a variant of SDMI for totalitarian regimes that prohibits the sharing of content not signed by the authorities. The sound card maker will set the "US mode" or "China mode" by blowing the right fuse in a chip before shipping.
I don't know if this is true, but a similar scheme was attempted and overturned by the courts. Sega designed a game console that would only play cartridges containing the Sega logo. They thought competitors would be unable to produce games for the console without violating Sega's trademark rights.
The court ruled that
Of course, copyright != patent, but I think the precedent is applicable.I think that advocating XML/SGML for Gutenberg is a typical case of geeks wanting more complexity because it's cool. Right now you can probably read the PG texts on any modern computer, without special software. Use lynx, vi, less, MS Word, Internet Explorer, whatever. If people have to use special software to parse or strip the markup tags, the barrier to exploring PG will be raised.
I'd rather that PG's volunteers have more time to scan in books and correct them. I want the writings of good authors, not the incidental craftsmanship of typesetters et al.
I run e-texts through a short script that strips the header and pipes the body through par. I set the width to 50 columns, as I find this very readable. Then I read them with less(1). I don't want something like Adobe Acrobat, which is slow and crippled and addicted to "page" metaphors from the tree world.I think the idea of page numbers in an e-text is especially ridiculous. Page numbers are like inodes - an artifact of a particular storage mechanism. Even if you want greater document structure, the "page" is an entity which should certainly be discarded in translation from paper to bytes.
- Python uses indentation as punctuation. This could be great or terrible. Look at it this way - if you write perl per `perldoc perlstyle` you're describing block structures twice - once with indentation level, and once with braces. This naturally leads to errors where the indentation (highly visible) is correct but a brace is missing or extra. Python lets the visible thing (indentation) take on the syntactic role. The downside, if any, is that you lose the freedom to indent code however you want.
- Python is believed to have better object-orientation than Perl. Since I don't have the OO religion, this makes very little impression on me.
- Python is purist/academic in flavor, while Perl is eclectic/pragmatic. Perl's power is strongly tied to its mixed ancestry. Perl basically swallowed C, shell, and either sed or awk.
- Last time I checked, Python's regular expressions were inferior to Perl's in speed, ease of notation, and power/comprehensiveness. This may not be true anymore.
In case it's not obvious, I'm a bit biased towards Perl. I program a lot in Perl and never in Python. The one place I can imagine Python being superior is a largish team of newbie programmers. The enforced indentation would help ensure uniformity of style, and the bias towards object orientation might encourage modular and reusable code.A: Well, today they're setting up a propane-powered branding iron to brand corporate logos on our cheeks. At first I was kind of put off by that, but you know what they say: "No pain, no gain."
I use w3m mainly for streetprices.com and ebay. These are sites that actually used tables for tabular information, rather than "graphic design" wankery.
In short: the message which you are sending, Keel, that it's an employer's market and workers must accept what they're given, is absolutely wrong with regard to the valley. Here, at least, it's the other way around.