[volunteers] Linux Compatible equipment available at bargain prices...

[Rick Moen]

[I'm going to assume Luke dropped into private mail by accident.  If
not, sorry about that, but one should explain _why_ one is dropping from
a public discussion into private mail, please, to clarify that it's
intentional.  Thanks.]

Quoting Luke S Crawford (lsc at prgmr.com):

> Hey, I have a bunch of server-class garbage in my garage;  I've given 
> most of it away.  If you want 1GB fibre channel or 18G scsi or fibre 
> channel or socket 604 xeons, I have a lot.   shit, you come and
> help me clean out the garage and I won't charge you.  

Eh, I draw a big distinction between 18GB SCSI drives -- which really
_are_ aspiring landfill in 2009 -- and $99 working Dell PowerEdge 2650
1U servers, especially if those happen to be fully loaded with RAM.

Anyway, the Volunteers list has almost nothing being posted to it, 
beyond my occasional briefings on how our systems work, and a small
amount of sporadic other traffic.

> My point is that even if the product is interesting, SPAM  should be
> discouraged.   If every local company that has cool linux products
> got to send me a mail, I'd have nothing else.   

Er...

Every local company that has cool Linux products does _not_ get to reach
the Volunteers mailing list.  Thousands of posts per year go straight
into the oubliette, in fact.  This particular one got manually approved
by yrs. truly as a one-off exception because I thought it looked
distinctively interesting.

If you're suggesting that my doing somehow opens any sort of floodgate,
you would be simply incorrect.  Ain't so.

> Actually, I /really/ like what you have done with the jobs list.  It's
> advertising, but it's a specific kind and I can dump it in to a folder
> where I can look at it when I want to read that kind of advertising.


Thanks.  In that case, I merely apply the documented set of rules (on
http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/jobs) with complete and total
impariality.  I end up rejecting, even excluding outright spam, about
80% of serious non-spam jobs postings because the sender has flubbed on
of the really basic, well-documented rules:

   "Posted jobs must be Unix- or Linux-centric (AIX, HP-UX, IRIX,
   Solaris, etc. all OK). Having Linux or Unix as a nice-to-have is not
   enough."

   "Fulltime positions must be within a 75-mile radius of San Jose. No
   exceptions.  Contract positions may be anywhere."

Those are really, _really_ simple rules, and an endless supply of
corporate HR people and headhunters routinely blow them.  In each case,
I send back a reject notice politely pointing the poster to the
particular thing he/she screwed up, and inviting him/her to try again
with the error fixed (if it's an appropriate posting at all).

(There are a couple of other really brief, simple rules, but the above
are the ones posters most often disregard.)