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The Hacker Ethic and Linux Kernel 2.4
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The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Thanks a lot! (Score:1)
Next time, please think before you write.
imolton@techie.com - self confessed 'weirdo'
sysadmin ethic (Score:2)
;)
Mumblings of a real hacker.. (Score:2)
Just because you use Linux or BSD or whatever..._DOES NOT_ make you a hacker...when you start contibuting...you can than call yourself a hacker.
Re:Freshmeat.com? (Score:1)
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
Re:Couple o' points (Score:1)
You'd be surprised. Speaking with people in our data checking department in my company, which employs the largest number of low-paid workers in our business, it's clear that the vast majority have second and sometimes even third jobs.
Hmm, good point. Although I don't move solely in geek circles, all the people I've known working low-paid jobs have been young & single, and although they didn't like their lowly pay, they didn't need to work two jobs to get by, and they had plenty of free time to do what they wanted to do (as long as it wasn't expensive. Needless to say, "kicking back and watching TV" was a popular hobby).
However, that was in Sydney. I've since moved to London, and given how expensive it is to live here, and just how low-paid the low-paid jobs are, frankly, I'm amazed I can walk into a cafe and get served. I don't know how the staff haven't all starved to death.
I was at a coffee/bagel place a few months ago and got talking to the waitress. She saw nothing unusual in that she would be working 12 hours that day, and had jobs that kept her working 7 days a week.
That's fucked up. And something to think about if you're a sysadmin who works those kind of hours - 'cos you do have a choice, and you're probably getting paid 5 times as much as her.
Re:Couple o' points (Score:1)
1) If, like me, you don't have a development environment to play 2.4.0-pre? on, you sure as heck aren't going to slap it on your live application server and just pray. I hope.
If you don't have an environment that you can sling 2.4.0-pre11 on, then frankly, you don't have an environment that you can sling 2.4.0 on. It's really not that much different, Linus clearly said that it was more a "line in the sand" than a "right, now it's finished" release. If you only have a live application server, you'll be waiting a while before installing any 2.4.n series kernel on it.
Anyway, the sysadmin in the article was installing 2.4.0 on his desktop box, not a live server.
2) one point which I felt came across in the article was that the lines between 'work' and 'leisure' time have been blurred by the hacker ethic and mentality. I enjoy the job I do, even though it means sometimes working 70-80 hours a week, and some of the work I do I could easily classify as leisure because of my enjoyment of it.
Good call. Unfortunately my "work" and "leisure" are clearly delimited by the fact that my work is developing a Windows application. :-)
It all comes down to reasons for doing the job, you do it because you enjoy it, or you do it for the money.
Unfortunately I have no "commercial" experience doing the things I enjoy, so to pay the bills, I have to do the crap that people are willing to employ me to do. Ah well, it's surely better than driving a taxi or working at McDonalds, and I can post to Slashdot while I should be working.. ;-)
Couple o' points (Score:3)
1. Surely if this sysadmin was so excited about the prospect of Linux kernel 2.4.0, he would have been running one of the 2.4.0-pre n kernels on his box? Anyone who's keen enough to compile a kernel won't have spent the last year running 2.2 and fidgetting impatiently..
2. I find it interesting that he says "most hackers are able to earn their livelihood relatively easily, with enough leisure time to hack for the public good". Sure, most hackers find it easily to earn a livelihood, and a pretty damn good one at that. But I thought long work hours were commonly considered a scourge in this industry of ours? Any full time job leaves you with not too much leisure time, and if you're working much beyond the 9-to-5.. well.. I kind of doubt you'll have enough leisure time to do too much hacking. "A McDonald's cashier or a taxi driver is not so lucky". Well, maybe they're not so well paid, but I don't reckon someone working a menial job is going to have less free time than a pro geek. And you might find it easier to muster the enthusiasm to code for fun if you haven't been doing it for money all day. God knows I coded more for fun before I started working as a programmer..
Of course, if you code at work, you can always be hacking away on your own stuff without it being too obvious. That's how I taught myself Perl and Python (hey, one editor window full of code looks much like any other, from the distance between my desk and the boss's office!) ;-)
Typical Condescending Garbage (Score:5)
(That, and what are these examples supposed to be about? I know plenty of people who use 2.4 -- I ran the 2.3.X series pretty much for its entire duration and never had the problems they describe. Or maybe I just read the documentation.) But I digress.
Also, their idea of "the hacker ethic" sounds more like "the slacker ethic". Considering that hackers tend to work 80 hour weeks -- and not just because the threat of layoffs looms near -- I find that a bit insulting. Their assertion that "it's my life" has replaced "time is money" etc is largely missing the mark. Yes, a lot of people burned out during the dot-com boom and are no longer willing to live in their cubicles. And that's as it should be, no one should be willing to meet unreasonable demands on their time.
But the fact remains that a lot of conscienscious, dedicated hackers continnue to work a lot more than the standard 40-hour work week, whether it's actually necessary or not. If they're not really working on a company project, they're developing open source on the side, or learning Perl, or teaching themselves how device drivers work, or whatever. And the reason hackers are willing to spend this much time on what is ostensibly their career, is that they find the work interesting and stimulating. The rest of the world finds this amazing because they've settled for a career that doesn't bring them fulfillment. Tough. Do what you love, or do something else.
Hey sissy man (Score:1)
Mod -1 Motherfucking Flamebait, but that don't mean it's not true
kashani
It took him 2 days to get KDE2 running? (Score:1)
Or maybe I'm missing the whole point of the story
Re:In defense (Score:2)
Hackers: indispensable
Hacker Ethic: interesting
In defense (Score:5)
But I will say that the particular admin I was describing is, in my opinion, a really cool guy who is passionate about free software, works with it every day, and is knowledgeable about a ton of of complex technical issues.
I'll also say that those of you trying to pretend that sysadmins can't be hackers or vice versa are bigots, plain and simple. You're a disgrace.
My bad on the CERN/CERT typo and the freshmeat URL. Should be corrected by now.
Smart admins make great programmers (Score:1)
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:2)
Regards,
Nate
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:4)
As to your characterization of what is a hacker. I think you may very well be in agreement with most people who write code a lot. I.e., if one does not code, then one is not a hacker. Here 'hacker' is used like some kind of title. In that sense, you are being an elitist. However, to the rest of the world if your fingers make unix go, a hacker you be. I say unix because windows is too familiar to the average person to make it seem hackerish. However, with transparent eterms and kernel compiles zooming along, the average person goes "oo you're a hacker, huh?" The distinction is one of elitest jargon vs. everday jargon.
At the Linux conference, I wouldn't say 'me hacker', but everywhere else I would.
So fella, you are a bit cranky aren't you? I can understand your gripes about the people who got no work done. But don't mistake that for all the other quirky idiosyncratic and maddening individuals who get a hell of a lot of work done all the friggin' time.
This brings me to my gripe. I'm totally pissed off by engineers who think that hackers should do what they say. Look code monkeys, just because you sit around all day reciting 'if, then, else' doesn't mean you know how to build a network of 200 puters and make WinBlaBla, Sun, Linux, BSD, HP etc., interopate and stay up all friggin' year, ok? All I have to say to you all is NIS, NFS, autofs, bind, apache, IIS, Exchange Server, Black Orifice, samba, ipfilter, ifconfig opts, mtu, dhcp, bla, bla, fuckin bla. I stay up all night keeping up on trend after trend for this specific purpose, I buy book after book know the finest distinctions between OS'es. That's my job. Don't fuck with that. [ooo meee koong foo on yoooo ya fucka] [--battle-maneuvers --go-here].
If I am a code consumer, then let me tell you... it tastes like crap, but I still have to eat it, humph...
-Nate, the self-taught, muy scripting, mucho bullshit enduring, in order to support myself while in grad school, much essential member of the clan, if 'me', then 'go', else 'fucked', sorry it ain't my fault...
Unbeliveable (Score:1)
Reminds me why I dont read Salon.
Re:Hacking and money... (Score:1)
</i></p>
<p>I don't know about that; my wife and I find that it's a fun challenge to feed our family of four nutritiously on less than $0.50/meal. It require time spent looking for good deals on bulk ingredients and cooking from scratch, but it's not that hard. Besides, my homemade sauces taste better on pasta than anything I've bought in a can. Lately we just can't bring ourselves to go to any fast food joints because it's hard to get a decent meal there for less than $10.00 (family of four, remember).</p>
<p>My point is that while I don't <i>need</i> to budget my money so closely, it's fun being able to invest $300+ per month toward retirement, donate to worthy charities, and not worry about bills. Watching my finances and budgeting frugally I'm able to keep a few hundred dollars more a year for myself than I would otherwise. I guess it all depends on how you define living comfortably and where you put your priorities, I just have things I'd rather spend money on than food.</p>
It's not the work ethic but the perception ... (Score:5)
If IT is to gain the natural prestige and social statues of other professions (ie not hacker but software engineering) then perhaps some careful though needs to be applied into thinking of a core concept around which you perpetuate teh good points. The medicals have the Hippocratic Oath, the lawyers have the client-attorney privilege. researchers the scientific method (repeatable evidence of theory), what has kackers got? What social/moral/ethical force is there to encourage quality code, open disclosure (e.g. witness Engineering responsibilty of professional negligence), and fair treatment of the suers and fellow hackers?
Perhaps someone should consider formulating a Code of the Hacker (CotH) like
#1 When in doubt, read and grok the code
#2 Honor thy source and those who have coded before thee
#3 Thou shalt not delete or corrupt data needlessly
#4 Avoid contaminating your only backup
#5 Covet not thy fellow hacker's interface or API
Perhaps the hacker mentality of caffeine-driven code-fests is a little dated (and expecially not appeal to the female-gender) and might need some seasoning to balance the serious professional aspects and the zen-like fun aspects as well.
LL
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:1)
progging is all well and good but some of us would rather focus on the interaction between packages, programs and os's.
neither can exist w/o the other.
ej
Re:Use test suites to test the new Linux kernels (Score:2)
Excellent! The article and, even more importantly, the activities to which it refers are exactly the sort of thing Linux needs most. Kudos to all who are involved in the grueling and usually thankless effort to bring Linux testing up to an acceptable level.
the most interesting quote was about freshmeat (Score:2)
I wonder if this is really happening...
Freshmeat.com? (Score:1)
--
40+ hour weeks (Score:1)
But since I'm not speaking from actual experience, I'm probably way off...
Re:In defense (Score:3)
I balked at the ~$25 price for a 200 page book (The Hacker Ethic)... If you've read "Hackers" (anyone) would you know whether this hacker ethic is in line with the book discussed in the article?
Specifically:
CERN Advisory (Score:5)
- Maybe because he and the other sysadmins were too busy upgrading Salon's version of BIND after a CERN advisory of a major security weakness.
I wonder what that CERN advisory said about BIND... Is it unstable? Will it decompose into a more stable program? What about radiation? Are billions of neutrinos, sparticles, and hadrons bombarding me right now? There's only a thin, wooden clost door in between me and the name server! Will I get super DNS powers? This is exciting!-Omar
Re:What a great article (Score:1)
bad boy, you sysadmin... (Score:2)
My mind instantly switched to prOn scenes...
Oh, wait a minute!
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:1)
No, you are not a Hacker. You are a "Protestant" (in terms of work ethic).
The two who were fired may well have been Hackers - and they were fired because they were not Protestants.
The Hacker ethic is better for the worker - but not necessarily more productive.
Re:In attack (Score:1)
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:2)
I think the main thing that mislead you was Andrew Leonard's interchanging of the words "geek" and "hacker". I would certainly qualify most PC gamers at the lanparties I go to as geeks, but almost none of them as "hackers," because they don't really hack anything. They all obviously love computers in general, as most of them are hardware geeks as well, but I don't think you can be called a "hacker" until you start tinkering around with the underlying substance that makes things work. (Be it source code or whatever.)
But, for the most part, I think being a "geek" is a resonable requirement for being able to configure, compile, and install a brand-new Linux kernel.
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:2)
Mwahaha, this is one of the best
if your fingers make unix go, a hacker you be
This qualifies as "inspirational quote of the day" for me.
Re:It's not the work ethic but the perception ... (Score:2)
The question is whether this is the "professional" image one wants to retain?
I'm admittedly not a hacker in the sense of writing a new kernel next thursday and having it ship on sunday, but...
I am very comfortable in my geekdom and pseudo-hackerdom and hope to continue to be so until I draw my dying breath.
Re:AMEN AMEN AMEN!!!! (Score:3)
I think she believes I'm being overly picky about the type of college I want to attend. Most people outline their young adult lives as such:
goto COLLEGE;
COLLEGE:
for (i = 0; i < 4; i++) { learn(); }
goto WORK;
My particular pseudocode goes as such:
goto COLLEGE
COLLEGE:
if (college == 'good') { learn_something(); }
if (made_friends && learn_something) {
graduate();
}
else {
find_new_college();
}
if (job != "sucking") { work(); }
(And yes, I realize that gotos in actual code are horrendous but sometimes they're an accurate analogy to real life.)
In other words, I want to be a geek, and I want to be happy being one. The only way I can be happy is by continuous learning, not by memorizing the tab-frame layout of the WinNT networking preferences box. Going back to the girlfriend issue, she's not aware yet that the vast majority of educational institutions simply do not offer Computer Science cirriculums for those who actually want to learn and broaden their horizons. Most seem tailored to those who want to learn the basics of Microsoft Networking and then run out and make the big bucks.
Until that times comes, it's back to educating myself and letting my girlfriend get angry at me from time to time. I simply eat, breathe, live, and worship computers and I sincerely hope that will never change while trying to keep my relationship intact.
Use test suites to test the new Linux kernels (Score:4)
You should do this kind of testing either to contribute to the kernel's development (this testing is more thorough than just casually trying it out), and especially if you're considering using a new kernel in a production system.
I welcome submissions of test suites to include in the article (or other articles to post at the Linux Quality Database [sunsite.dk] - you'll see if you check out the site that there's not much there yet, but I have great hopes for doing good with it).
There have been some new suites submitted, including PostgreSQL's regression tests [postgresql.org] and one or two others that I have not yet added. I'll be updating the article soon.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
Re:Hacking and money... (Score:1)
AMEN AMEN AMEN!!!! (Score:2)
Re:Typical Condescending Garbage (Score:1)
And if the guy's getting off on 2.4 and KDE so much, wouldn't he have had 2.3.* and at least a couple of KDE betas lying around for ages?
OT: most intesting quote. (Score:2)
I thought this was the most interesting part personally. I don't know one geek that goes through with most anything they say. Some are worse then others, my old roommate (no naming names) had an amazing way of saying "I'm going to do xxx" every day, every day it was different. everyday he wouldn't do anything. If he did actually start on anything he said he was going to do he would stop at the first road block, anything that would cause him to stop and think, solve a problem, he would quite.
his new roommate is AMAZINGLY bad. every single time I saw him we would say "Jon, I have this great Idea! I'm going to do bla bla bla, and it's going to have bla bla bla". then sometimes (if he's serious) about it, he might doodle a diagram of some system overview.. it was always a large complicated system, never a simple (do-able) project.
Another friend, talks in theory a lot, and through ideas around, bat rarely says he's actually going to "do something" unless he means it. if he says he's going to, he'll probably at least give it an honest effort. I can respect that.
Another trend is that all of the three are braggarts, strangely in sync with there ability to lie to themselves. The "AMAZINGLY" bad one has a tenendy to say things like, "This sucks! Wednesday I have to have lunch with the CEO of the company, because my flagship product I'm working on is so important. And then the day after that, I have to have lunch with the CTO of the company!", actually ok, that verbatim.
so is it just me or do most "hackers" talk a lot of smack, and rarely do jack?
-Jon
Streamripper [sourceforge.net]
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? Some definitions first (Score:1)
But I never, ever thought that such a relationship between a "recreational" hack and real work hacking would be understood by the coding methodists. Some people work through a problem in order, and organized. They do well, and they are usually very good teachers. A hacker builds up a ridiculously large body of knowledge about coding, os quirks, configs, styles of development, architectures, systems and services, and then, just sort of starts to "get it" when presented with a new problem.
Those of you who have had this happen know what I'm talking about. Just, well, "feeling" where the problem should be in the code, and it's there. Some of my coworkers called it "zenning" the code. I like that term. Hacking is a term of honor, and I'm not there yet.
Open your mind. Read the Jargon File
The Jargon File [tuxedo.org] on tuxedo.org.
Enjoy or don't. Disagree or don't. But always, always think and consider.
Re:Still C... (Score:1)
Re:Freshmeat.com? (Score:1)
Re:40+ hour weeks (Score:1)
Actually you aren't too far off. The place I work at, while the immediate bosses/environments are cool, the higher ups (ie: VPs, CEO) have this mentality of 'If the user doesn't see it or isn't immediately affected by it, it doesn't exist'.
The worst example was when we requested an admittedly hefty set of upgrades that would help the programmers and admins do their jobs much more efficiently and much faster, these upgrades were also requested to overcome certain looming limitations to the hardware we were working on. We were turned down specifically because 'there was no immediate noticable advantage to the user to justify the expense'. Frustrating.
Kind of missing my point... (Score:1)
* I was taking pot shots at the profession of systems administrator.
* I was implying that sys admins couldn't be hackers.
Neither of these is the case, nor was I implying them.
I did use the term "glorified sys admin" once in the post, so I guess shame on me. I do think that some of the conclusions people took away from post were kind of a stretch but so be it.
What I was railing against was applying the term hacker to someone just because they run a particular operating system, exhibit odd behavior or spend all day staring at a screen.
(This description seems to sum up the person the author of the article is focusing on)
None of these things in and of themselves make you a hacker, a geek maybe, but not a hacker.
If anything, hacking is about results and effectiveness, not superficial appearances.
The article seemed to be all about superficiality, which is why I had a negative reaction to it.
I also had a bad reaction to the article due to what I felt was a strong similarity between the attributes of a supposed hacker that the author chose to dwell on and some of the traits exhibited by two ex-coworkers.
The author seemed to be overly impressed by the fact the sys admin in the article was installing the 2.4 kernel, or because he was
Like the author, my ex-coworkers seemed to revel in the superficial.
They had just the appropriate number of Linux posters put up in their cubes, the obligatory tux stuffed animal, an impressive library of virtually unused technical books (mostly Oreilly, of course) on their shelves, several PC's in their cubes, each running a different distro of Linux (which seemed to change weekly).
Despite all these trappings, they were useless when it came time to doing actual work, such as installing and appropriately configuring our development/test systems (Solaris + custom app), scripting in Perl/DBI, configuring and tuning Oracle, working on the load balancing/DNS component of our solution or developing any other aspects of the service.
Requests for them to do work were greeted with some flip response and then right back to making yet another failed attempt to correctly compile enlightment or get transparent e-terms working.
Given what I read in the article, the author would probably consider my ex-coworkers hackers as well and of he would be outrageously incorrect.
Slackers and phonies maybe, but definitely not hackers.
Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:3)
I use open source software all the time, like so:
Configure --options-go-here
make
make install
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
Sometimes I even have to perform small customizations to a piece of open source code prior to performing the steps mentioned above.
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
Sometimes installs have problems and I need to review and make small fixes to what make install (or what ever the installer is) is doing in order for things to install cleanly.
Doing this does not make me a hacker.
What all these things make me is an educated consumer of open source code, nothing more.
Hackers are the people who actually do the hard work of the writing the software that the rest of us use to get our work done.
I really doubt the glorified sys admin in the article will be writing the next version of Perl or Apache anytime soon.
He's a code consumer like the rest of us, and apparently one with out much in the way of time management skills.
Which brings me to my second point...
Our development group "had" two induhviduals who exhibited many of the same behaviors as the one mentioned in the article.
They spent inordinate amounts of time building the current latest pen-ultimate Linux desktop, spent weeks are the holy grail of the perfect configuration of enlightment, had impressive arrays of hardware on their desk, were always suggesting that we use some obscure but "cool" open source tool to do a job and then spending weeks trying to build said tool only to come up weeks later with neither the tool or the work completed. On top of this they would come and go as they pleased, showing up at 11 and then bailing at 5, as well as constantly blowing off meetings.
After about 5-6 months of zero productivity they were both fired, and good riddance.
And now my point, the behavior of these two induhviduals seemed very close to that described in the article. This behavior seems to be linked to being a hacker and in fact the article is promoting the book "The Hacker Ethic". I think this is erroneous; the name of the article should be changed to "Hunting the wild poser" or maybe even "hunting the wild wanna-be".
I'm confused.... (Score:1)
Does this guy sound like a petulant child because he's a hacker or because he's a sysadmin? "I don't like the way Freshmeat(.com?) looks, so I won't send them my script (which I haven't even written yet)! Waaaah." Or is it just my imagination?
What a great article (Score:2)
Fortunately, I am now working at a place where this sort of behavior is encouraged. Do your work, work as hard as you need to to get the job done, and work as much as you need to stay sane. We have almost daily Nerf Wars in the office, even the sales people join in sometimes. We have fun, and everyone is striving to learn and absorb more information, which when it all boils down, that's what the 'hacker ethic' is all about anyway.
Re:I want to know hacker kung fu! (Score:1)
Richy C.
Re:What a great article (Score:1)
Re:what a dumb article (Score:1)
Your distinction, while techically probably accurate is not quite so relevant in the context of the article. I personally thought it was a good article and made a couple of good points about the privileged status that programmers enjoy in this economy. Anyway...
Later on...
Re:I want to know hacker kung fu! (Score:1)
When your hands fly over the keyboard,
code flows out of your fingers - apparently without thinking,
and you are one with your computer,
then you do the hacker kung fu.
Sometimes it really happens
Yes! (Score:1)
But sometimes a deadline really helps inspiration
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:1)
Well granted, just because we "just" manipulate the pre-existing code to fit our needs and maybe kick out a few perl scripts to get some things done and perl is about as much of a language as HTML. We are not winidiots either. Hackers IMHO are not always code hackers, they can sometimes be the people that implement the software. Perhaps if we did have that big of head about us, we would call ourselves "System Intergration Engineers", however we do not, well not all of us.
We make things work, we "hack" the hardware, software, whatever we have to do to make it work. That in is IMO is hacking. Granted sometimes Sys Admins waste a lot of time on getting uncompleted code to work and it fails, however the wiser of us, do that in our off time and then if it works bring it up for the management after we know we can make it work. Perhaps you should just give your sys admin a big hug and you will feel better. :) Just my little rant.
Re:Hacking and money... (Score:1)
Lucky me, the first thing I saw when I was born wasn't the doctor, it was an Atari 400 =) So I spend my days PEEKing and POKEing and here I am now with a confortable no-stress job at the government waiting for the master database to screw up, at which point I will repair it and get back to being lazy. The pay is more than 3 times what I'd be making at McPizzaWay, and I don't need to spend half my salary on therapy to get my mind off chainsaws ("ya want fresh meat ? how about the manager over there ?"). It's a dull job, but it allows me to tinker with other things and doesn't put much strain on my brain.
Sure, I could be making more money doing some bullshit IT job, which in here is basically 10% programming, 90% sucking up. No thanks, I'd rather be lazy and burn cd's all day. I make enough money to be able to ignore it, and that's all that matters to me. I can spend the rest of my time playing everquest or working on my relationship with a clear mind. The importance of money decreases exponentially as its amount increases linearly. For the lazy minded, that means having 10$ compared to 0$ is a big difference, but having 42000 compared to 39000 is just more taxes to pay.
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:1)
What's the word for someone who ... (Score:4)
Yes, you have a valid point - as skillful as a sys admin might be, sys admin != hacker. But it's also a skill that is not really trainable. You have to understand these beasts, these boxen, you have to grok rebuilding kernels, understand stacks and weak points, and be able to decipher CERN reports. It is a skilled industry.
As another said: To the casual Windows user, anyone with these skills is a hacker. These people also know that they would never put hacker on a business card, never expect to hear Cox's name mentioned in the same breath as their own.
It seems easy and trivial to us, but these are skills, often bought with the currency of time, a social life, and popularity in high school. We are being rewarded now, with high-paying jobs, management that doesn't understand us but lets us do our thing, and the ability to play with our favorite toys. Surprise, Surprise, we keep the business going, in a business where they are starting to measure the dollars lost per minute of server down time.
The hacker ethic is alive and well, even in these folks who touch code once every two weeks. Don't start pissing games because they haven't re-written a kernel.
Re:Typical Condescending Garbage (Score:1)
Re:Typical Condescending Garbage (Score:1)
Well, I at least I proved that moderators aren't aware of what a
Anyway, for the record: I don't have anything against KDE (or Gnome, or, or), except when it starts to get in the way of the free choice.
Does Salon like to run unattributed quotes? (Score:1)
I honestly can't remember.
Gonna make money off of this here information revolution- even if I have to step on my own beliefs to do it. [ridiculopathy.com]
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:2)
There are equivalent desktop applications for everything you use under Windows:
Word -- AbiWord, KWord, Siag
Excel -- KSpread, Gnumeric, Pathetic Writer
Photoshop -- Gimp
and so forth. They discover that while it's easy to compile a table like that, the quality of those Linux apps ranges from slipshod to unusable and wonder what the hell the Linux advocates are thinking.
The answer is that those advocates aren't using Linux for any real work - they're just downloading, patching and compiling over and over again. If that's what you enjoy, then KSpread and Gnumeric are much better than Excel. And I love tinkering with KSpread but I get my work done in Excel.
And for crying out loud, of course KDE works with 2.4. As if no one thought of 2.4 support until this pinhead and his friend decided to add it?
The KDE 2.0 installation has been fraught with setbacks and unexplained crashes, and is very poorly documented. "I'm finding this difficult," says the sysadmin, fully aware of the implication that if this is tricky for him to master, then it would be well nigh impossible for the average person.
I'm a biologist, not a hacker, and compiling KDE is trivial.
One quibble, though, gustar; penultimate means "second-most," not "most."
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:1)
Re:Typical Condescending Garbage (Score:2)
kinda dumb + kinda enthusiastic + very busy
I find that most hackers are:
very intelligent + socially backward (sometimes) + usually busy
Re:Couple o' points (Score:1)
1) If, like me, you don't have a development environment to play 2.4.0-pre? on, you sure as heck aren't going to slap it on your live application server and just pray. I hope.
2) one point which I felt came across in the article was that the lines between 'work' and 'leisure' time have been blurred by the hacker ethic and mentality. I enjoy the job I do, even though it means sometimes working 70-80 hours a week, and some of the work I do I could easily classify as leisure because of my enjoyment of it.
It all comes down to reasons for doing the job, you do it because you enjoy it, or you do it for the money. Some of the lucky ones manage both (Although I'm still working on the money part;-)
just my E0.02.
Craig.
what a dumb article (Score:1)
Mods (Score:1)
In this context that is
I want to know hacker kung fu! (Score:1)
Free code is the only rule (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:What a great article (Score:1)
Moz.
Re:Hacking and money... (Score:1)
Re:Hunting the wild Hacker? I think not... (Score:1)
Re:Typical Condescending Garbage (Score:1)
If playing guitar on the job counts as slacking, I will never be accused of it. I am about as musically inclined as I am inclined to run a marathon. I just would like to know where you got the impression that this guy was slacking. The article talks about how hackers don't have to worry about job security so they can afford to have a relaxed atmosphere; but, that is not really the same thing as never working. It is the fact that a hacker put in 80 hour work weeks that will make sure he gets a job no matter what kind of $h^t hits the fan.
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"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Re:Typical Condescending Garbage (Score:1)
Seriously. The best part about Unix is not being stuck with one window manager. I have several on my machine and actually use a rarer one for daily use. But, KDE... well, I suppose; if it is the only thing you have, and it allows you to open four or five xterms, I could survive.
I'm actually a huge VI fan, not an emacs one.
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"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Re:Hacking and money... (Score:1)
This comes out to about 42 cents a day, assuming I eat all three. I usually only eat two of the three. Which would average to about 28.6 cents. You can figure it out yourself but that makes $2.00 - $3.01 a week. Well under eight dollars for two.
Yes, this is what I really eat most of the time. Although I went out and bought other stuff to live on recently. I spent just over $30.00 for a good 5 weeks worth of food. Although the stuff not on this list will go a lot sooner. But it is near the beginning of the semester, I can afford to splurge.
It will be noted that I did not include the price of beer in the cost above. It fluctuates way to much. I love good beer, so at the beginning of a semester I buy expensive stuff. But when the you only have $13.00 and two weeks to go, you will buy the cheapest beer you can find... or call in favors. {Will program for beer. Yoy can pay me later.} You have to be careful with that though. You are not the only broke person at the end of the semester.
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"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Hacking and money... (Score:5)
Although many people out there might call this bull-poop, the idea certainly is more than just existant. I would say it is almost prevelent. It is very easy to confuse a good programmer with a hacker until you add all the traits together and while this one is not required, I look for it more than the others. I can respect a person more who gets into computers for the love of it and not the money. Too many people here at my school just want to make ungodly salaries and think computers are the way to do it.
I never was this way (desiring large sums of money). I still am not this way. Even though I am not a poor programmer, I find it feels wrong to charge people for something I enjoy doing so much. Although I get beer out of it sometimes. ;-)
I think this boils down to the one precept I base my life on. Sell what you need to survive (well maybe survive comfortably) and give the rest away. It is nice to spread $8.00 for two weeks of food, but you wouldn't want to do that once you are out of college.
"When you enjoy this as much as I do, accepting money has to be prostitution in 48 out of 50 states!" -- annonymous hacker after 27 hour coding session.
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"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Weren't hackers supposed to be naughty? (Score:2)
Call me old fashioned, but a hacker, IMHO, is someone who "hacks" into things... whether it be Defense Department computers or computer game code or whatever. There has to mystery about it; there has to be figuring out how things work on your own, understanding the computer at the most basic level, and then fooling or changing the system...
I blame the media. In their urge to make computers sound cool, everyone's a hacker. It used to be an elite group. (One I'm not, BTW, in any way part of... except maybe for when I used to use a hex editor to give myself unlimited lives or money in computer games...<g>)
I don't think anything done with setting-up or configuring open-source, by definition, could be considered "hacking", since it's all there in the open. Discovering and exploiting its weaknesses, on the other hand, could be.
Re:Couple o' points (Score:2)
I'm not saying everyone on minimum wage works like this. But it's interesting that of those who don't that I personally know, I'd put them as "hackers in another context." Example: The PADI dive instructor I know, who makes minimum wage as a dive store clerk, works relatively "normal" hours, but is clearly in it because the minimal overtime (instructing) is something he loves doing.
I rated the article as being +5 Insightful, not for what it told the rest of the world about hackers, but the comments that ought to have made a few slashdotters who make the usual comments about how anyone on minimum wage can afford to do anything and have time to do anything else and if you don't like a job, well, you can just quit it and find a better one step back and think a bit.
That said, one of the examples, the taxi driver, is maybe off base as well. Majority of taxi drivers I've met also fit into Salon's hacker ethic. Again they're doing a job they like, and do the overtime for the job as well as the money.
We're pretty lucky when it comes down to it. How many dive instructors, taxi drivers, or Slashdot reading computer programmers would swap for a collection of jobs at McDs/bagel houses, data cleaning services, and house cleaning maid services?
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"