As you probably have not noticed but will now recognize since I'm pointing it out, I haven't really posted here since June or so. Why? I have been far to preoccupied with other things to post anything, and far too bitter to be bothered when I'm not. Considering that, as well as the fact that people don't ask me things I'd share for free anymore, and GnuJersey.org's imminent shutdown, I see no reason to pretend like I'm ever going to post again.
I have other interesting things in mind for the future, but we'll see what happens.
*Poof*, suckas!
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
15 October 2007
12 August 2007
I Realy Don't Care
Rant
I really don’t care.
I don’t care that your computer is infested with spyware, causing pictures to open up by themselves. I don’t care how much money you spent just to have a giant, 2.8GHz paperweight. I don’t care that your network is home to names, home addresses, and social security numbers of 10,000 individuals, and protected by security which my cat could break through. One more time: I don’t care.
At the end of the day, there is one thing I do care about. You annoying wanna-be power users. I hate you. I despise you. I hope you get crippling arthritis in your fingers and can never type again.
Why on earth do you think that being able to change passwords and set a few profile restrictions on your domain controller makes you qualified to be your company’s domain administrator? Half the professional techs I know aren’t qualified to be administrators for a Windows domain, and you think a few help documents you found on the Internet are better than their years of experience and training?
“No, I didn’t graduate from medical school, but I found some tutorials on the web that will get me through your appendectomy.”
Sure, you go ahead and believe that, but when you make the 11 o’clock news because the 10,000 records of names, addresses, and social security numbers you maintain wound up on the Internet, don’t call me. I’m not going to touch it. I warned you about passwords that can be cracked faster than you can enter them.
As you are not qualified to do the job, you certainly aren’t qualified to dish out advice about it. Thanks you you, I have to waste my time telling others like you and novice users alike how they aren’t as impenetrable as they think just because they installed a desktop firewall or are behind a NAT router. Since you are the long-time trusted source for information (that guy in accounting who is really good with computers, or your nephew who plays computer games a lot) there is no way I convince victims of your ignorance to trust my advice.
False authority syndrome sucks. Look it up.
On the rare occasion I do feel sorry enough for you to get involved if your tragic technical situations, shut the hell up and let me do my job. I don’t need you second guessing my every decision, and demanding I explain everything I do. When the bill gets run up because you won’t leave me alone, or because your network looks like it was designed by retarded lemming, just shut up and pay the bill.
I could have redeployed all of your repaired workstations in a fraction of the time, but considering that I had to manually set up every printer on your network by hand instead of pointing to a share on the server, well, your lucky it didn’t take even longer. Sure, I’ll recover old, tainted profiles off of your dying machines and manually move them to a new workstation, but its going to cost you. Your employees were too dumb and hardheaded to save documents to the server share? Sorry, they are gone. I told you about folder redirection, and the ability to, for the most part, keep users from saving documents to their local machines, but you didn’t listen.
But, in the end, I don’t care. You’ve dug your own grave, and its yours to lie in. If you pay me enough, I’ll pretend to care, at least for a little while. If you’ve got the money, I’ll be over here playing with my Mac and Linux boxes. No, don’t ask me to explain those to you.
I really don’t care.
I don’t care that your computer is infested with spyware, causing pictures to open up by themselves. I don’t care how much money you spent just to have a giant, 2.8GHz paperweight. I don’t care that your network is home to names, home addresses, and social security numbers of 10,000 individuals, and protected by security which my cat could break through. One more time: I don’t care.
At the end of the day, there is one thing I do care about. You annoying wanna-be power users. I hate you. I despise you. I hope you get crippling arthritis in your fingers and can never type again.
Why on earth do you think that being able to change passwords and set a few profile restrictions on your domain controller makes you qualified to be your company’s domain administrator? Half the professional techs I know aren’t qualified to be administrators for a Windows domain, and you think a few help documents you found on the Internet are better than their years of experience and training?
“No, I didn’t graduate from medical school, but I found some tutorials on the web that will get me through your appendectomy.”
Sure, you go ahead and believe that, but when you make the 11 o’clock news because the 10,000 records of names, addresses, and social security numbers you maintain wound up on the Internet, don’t call me. I’m not going to touch it. I warned you about passwords that can be cracked faster than you can enter them.
As you are not qualified to do the job, you certainly aren’t qualified to dish out advice about it. Thanks you you, I have to waste my time telling others like you and novice users alike how they aren’t as impenetrable as they think just because they installed a desktop firewall or are behind a NAT router. Since you are the long-time trusted source for information (that guy in accounting who is really good with computers, or your nephew who plays computer games a lot) there is no way I convince victims of your ignorance to trust my advice.
False authority syndrome sucks. Look it up.
On the rare occasion I do feel sorry enough for you to get involved if your tragic technical situations, shut the hell up and let me do my job. I don’t need you second guessing my every decision, and demanding I explain everything I do. When the bill gets run up because you won’t leave me alone, or because your network looks like it was designed by retarded lemming, just shut up and pay the bill.
I could have redeployed all of your repaired workstations in a fraction of the time, but considering that I had to manually set up every printer on your network by hand instead of pointing to a share on the server, well, your lucky it didn’t take even longer. Sure, I’ll recover old, tainted profiles off of your dying machines and manually move them to a new workstation, but its going to cost you. Your employees were too dumb and hardheaded to save documents to the server share? Sorry, they are gone. I told you about folder redirection, and the ability to, for the most part, keep users from saving documents to their local machines, but you didn’t listen.
But, in the end, I don’t care. You’ve dug your own grave, and its yours to lie in. If you pay me enough, I’ll pretend to care, at least for a little while. If you’ve got the money, I’ll be over here playing with my Mac and Linux boxes. No, don’t ask me to explain those to you.
01 June 2007
Open Source Public Relations
Marketing says “Buy me.” PR says, “Its OK, go ahead.”
To be blunt, open source public relations sucks. Linux public relations sucks. (While the open source and Linux communities are very close, there are members of one who are not members of the other. Despite this, I will henceforth refer to both groups simply as the open source community.) If the open source community expects any significant adoption of their ideals and products, decent public relations is a necessity. This is due to the nature of the community and the market.
With the exception of Apache, user bases of various open source software products are far below that of commercial rivals. The results are a smaller talent pool, fewer businesses or business-like points of contact for help, and most importantly, greater effect of a single individual on the image of the user and support community as a whole. As members of the community, we must recognize this and attempt to keep our perception positive, and remain active in public relations to that end.
Would you send your child into someone's household storm?
We tend to be a very passionate bunch. While people rage on and fight wars over issues of religion and politics, we do the same over software licenses and patents, feature sets, and implementation details. Its human nature to get defensive, and often offensive, when it comes to beliefs. Being passionate about something is a good thing, but perhaps we need to keep our passions behind closed doors. When outsiders look in, without context and understanding, how are they likely to perceive conflict? Will they see colleagues battling things out for the greater good of the product and community? Will they see unprofessional people who are still emotionally children crying over bruised egos? Regardless of what the truth is, its the perception that matters
Consider for a moment a household in turmoil. Most of us know at least one. It could be parents who are constantly fighting, or perhaps its a single parent with questionable friends or a poor choice for a love interest. Maybe its just the family that is falling apart because nothing seems to be going right. Regardless, would you send your child into such a household to stay even a night? Nobody is perfect, but when you see significant, obvious problems which could affect your child, could you really send them into the fire? The situation may not seem relevant, but the reality is its more significant than most would believe.
Technology is becoming a greater and more significant part of our lives every day. It could be your business and the hopes, dreams, and mortgage it carries that is effected by your technology choices. Maybe its the memories of a lost loved one immortalized in digital photos and video clips. It could also be your finances, your recreation time, your educational tool, or your connections to distant friends. Software, operating systems, media formats – they can all be key parts of our lives. Who are you going to trust that to?
Who's legs to stand on?
Most people don't have the passion about technology that we do, so choices are made in a much more practical way. Would you trust your digital life to a successful business with strong leaders, excellent market position, and the ability to command and define the landscape? Would you trust it to a bunch of people in the game as a hobby who's allegiance is fleeting, and needs defined by ideals instead of practicality? To us, the decision is clear. The problem is, its also clear to the people we seek to bring on board.
We have to understand the needs of others, and what is important to them. We can't even begin to speak to them on the right level until we know where they are coming from. We can't possibly devalue the importance of going with the crowed when we don't even know why other's have made that choice in the first place.
Do you care?
You can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, but there is more to the situation than saving users from themselves. Today, the open source community doesn't have the power it needs to drive the world in the direction it wants. We dig and we claw, we make some headway, but in the end we are still being kept down. If we are to reform or eliminate software patents, promote and standardize open formats, eliminate DRM, or accomplish any of our other far-reaching goals, we need all of the help we can get. Let's present the best of ourselves to others, and seek to understand their wants and needs. Maybe if we work on our PR, we can rally more troops to the cause.
To be blunt, open source public relations sucks. Linux public relations sucks. (While the open source and Linux communities are very close, there are members of one who are not members of the other. Despite this, I will henceforth refer to both groups simply as the open source community.) If the open source community expects any significant adoption of their ideals and products, decent public relations is a necessity. This is due to the nature of the community and the market.
With the exception of Apache, user bases of various open source software products are far below that of commercial rivals. The results are a smaller talent pool, fewer businesses or business-like points of contact for help, and most importantly, greater effect of a single individual on the image of the user and support community as a whole. As members of the community, we must recognize this and attempt to keep our perception positive, and remain active in public relations to that end.
Would you send your child into someone's household storm?
We tend to be a very passionate bunch. While people rage on and fight wars over issues of religion and politics, we do the same over software licenses and patents, feature sets, and implementation details. Its human nature to get defensive, and often offensive, when it comes to beliefs. Being passionate about something is a good thing, but perhaps we need to keep our passions behind closed doors. When outsiders look in, without context and understanding, how are they likely to perceive conflict? Will they see colleagues battling things out for the greater good of the product and community? Will they see unprofessional people who are still emotionally children crying over bruised egos? Regardless of what the truth is, its the perception that matters
Consider for a moment a household in turmoil. Most of us know at least one. It could be parents who are constantly fighting, or perhaps its a single parent with questionable friends or a poor choice for a love interest. Maybe its just the family that is falling apart because nothing seems to be going right. Regardless, would you send your child into such a household to stay even a night? Nobody is perfect, but when you see significant, obvious problems which could affect your child, could you really send them into the fire? The situation may not seem relevant, but the reality is its more significant than most would believe.
Technology is becoming a greater and more significant part of our lives every day. It could be your business and the hopes, dreams, and mortgage it carries that is effected by your technology choices. Maybe its the memories of a lost loved one immortalized in digital photos and video clips. It could also be your finances, your recreation time, your educational tool, or your connections to distant friends. Software, operating systems, media formats – they can all be key parts of our lives. Who are you going to trust that to?
Who's legs to stand on?
Most people don't have the passion about technology that we do, so choices are made in a much more practical way. Would you trust your digital life to a successful business with strong leaders, excellent market position, and the ability to command and define the landscape? Would you trust it to a bunch of people in the game as a hobby who's allegiance is fleeting, and needs defined by ideals instead of practicality? To us, the decision is clear. The problem is, its also clear to the people we seek to bring on board.
We have to understand the needs of others, and what is important to them. We can't even begin to speak to them on the right level until we know where they are coming from. We can't possibly devalue the importance of going with the crowed when we don't even know why other's have made that choice in the first place.
Do you care?
You can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, but there is more to the situation than saving users from themselves. Today, the open source community doesn't have the power it needs to drive the world in the direction it wants. We dig and we claw, we make some headway, but in the end we are still being kept down. If we are to reform or eliminate software patents, promote and standardize open formats, eliminate DRM, or accomplish any of our other far-reaching goals, we need all of the help we can get. Let's present the best of ourselves to others, and seek to understand their wants and needs. Maybe if we work on our PR, we can rally more troops to the cause.
13 May 2007
Bad Programming
Rant
The self-checkout kiosk at the local supermarket blocked, waiting for employee input instead of giving me errors. Why? Bad programming.
Planet keeps brining up my old posts if I modify them (typically to correct errors). Why? Yup. Bad programming.
Bad programming doesn't necessarily mean bugs and buffer overflows. It also means bad predictions about program flow. If a narrow sequence of events is all code can accommodate without some easy and automatic method to attempt recovery and/or to bring things back on track, its badly programmed.
Programmers aren't mind readers, but they need to consider the "what ifs". When a program behaves in a manner that is just plain stupid, its probably badly designed!
The self-checkout kiosk at the local supermarket blocked, waiting for employee input instead of giving me errors. Why? Bad programming.
Planet keeps brining up my old posts if I modify them (typically to correct errors). Why? Yup. Bad programming.
Bad programming doesn't necessarily mean bugs and buffer overflows. It also means bad predictions about program flow. If a narrow sequence of events is all code can accommodate without some easy and automatic method to attempt recovery and/or to bring things back on track, its badly programmed.
Programmers aren't mind readers, but they need to consider the "what ifs". When a program behaves in a manner that is just plain stupid, its probably badly designed!
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