This functionality is also possible on Linux or OS X using config files, in fact all the other features of using files apply (ability to replicate only certain changes, no boot delays waiting for group policy to be applied, ability to use compressed tools such as rsync to send not only configs but entire subtrees & application installs as well as settings). The registry's only pluses are that it's graphical -- which increases the number of low-skilled workers to use it -- and it's integrated into Windows. Group policy is just an implementation of registry data.
Have you ever tried to look at a user's registry through a WAN connection? You know, in the event that you need to investigate something but you can't knock the user off or assume control of their machine? It's like the Windows Event Log -- absolutely ridiculously huge and terribly slow to navigate. I can run a single ssh command to query 8 Linux servers at once and show all their results on a single screen -- almost as fast as I can type it.
But even tools that access the WMI interface are painfully slow -- try using Sysinternals' psinfo on a computer over a WAN connection. Takes over a minute to run in some cases!
I prefer simple, small and fast, thank you very much. The Windows Registry is none of these.
I wouldn't be surprised if that were true. You ultimately have to babysit a large number of people, all with conflicting schedules and goals (ever had more than 2 ppl need an item from a run?) and somehow organize them to work together at least part of the time. I would also expect this same skill would work well when herding cats.
I used to play WOW but the whining, the city chat, trying to find people for pickup groups or to fill a slot (b/c a handful of very large guilds had all the decent players), people signing up for raids and then not showing up (or showing up and leaving after half an hour), people using modems (can you believe it?), people unwilling to use Vent, etc etc was too much. I poured a lot of effort into trying to sustain a doomed guild at the end.
But, on a brighter topic, on sufficiently unbalanced servers and enough starting gold you can buy *all* the mats of a particular type and put them into the AH in limited quantities at ridiculous prices. People will start grinding those mats and soon (within a day or so) you will have an overabundance of them. Before that happens, switch to a different set of mats and buy them all. You may have to have some seed money to start, 200g is plenty. It will enable you to purchase at least 5-6 sets of things.
Also important is the *timing* of when you do this. On the Terrokar server I was on, the high population dwindled around 10pm ET, so you would put things in no later than 9 pm. Always give a buyout price!! Many people (esp high level toons) see nothing wrong with paying a load o' gold for something they feel is "beneath" them to grind.
AdBlock + NoScript. You won't be inconvenienced that way again. And after the first few weeks of approving / adding sites to your blocklist you'll speed right through your web time.
Heh. As a software developer I've seen ungodly messes, contorted SQL, you name it. People seem to think that because they once wrote a Crystal report to display a simple recordset with totals that they're a "report writer" and put that on their resume. Training them (the ones which can be trained anyway) is expensive and often frustrating, because if they cared enough to invest significant amounts of time toward learning the language(s) and tool(s) they profess to know, I wouldn't have realized they were deficient. When hiring, though, you don't easily know who took the 24-hour cram course and who really knows it without asking some questions which require actual working knowledge.
Things change so quickly in our industry that we all know people who were certified in Novell -- maybe the shining stars at that point in their careers -- but stopped learning at some point along the road and are now middle managers. They oversee a team which uses a language they don't understand and there is pressure to develop quickly for fear their position in the market will be eroded. So someone gets the idea to send an employee to a weekend seminar in some new language, or someone is hired with little programming experience. At first it is a great idea and a certain amount of prototyping is helpful.
However there needs to be a point where someone isn't just the VBA macro writer of the local branch office or the guru of Access but understands the way programming and debugging is performed, so that a successful product is produced. It takes longer, as they say, to code when you take care to use meaningful indentation and variable names, when you put comments in your code etc -- and it is totally faster in the short term to put out crap code in.NET or whatever language you prefer -- but the discipline you use pays off in the end. It is a disappointment when your weekend Excel macro project results in an hour of downtime because you forgot to include some logic. It's much worse when your spreadsheet results in an employee being fired or the branch being closed because the company relied on your data & logic and you failed. A more disciplined and experienced programmer has these things -- proper documentation, proper testing, and responsibility of data validation to offer. A higher bar to entry, in those cases, may result in fewer bad decisions. By making these languages more difficult for the average Joe to comprehend you get only the more intelligent people working on the problems.
Case in point, I recently had a.NET developer ask me if his query was being delayed by daily pumps. His query cost was over 590. He didn't understand why testing the execution plan was necessary and why he needed to do it using a copy of production data rather than the few hundred rows in his test tables. By working with him and optimizing his query we got the cost down to 8. This person doesn't have what it takes to do this long-term (he says he's been doing SQL work since 1992!)
Anon for obv reasons.
So you're saying that Lambourghini needs to have a 30K version because you can't afford their current models? That's what you're basing this on, the price of the item and your willingness to pay it? The logic, it does not work.
Apple isn't a monopoly and they have a (relatively) tiny market share. They can charge whatever they want, albeit charging whatever the market will bear works best in the long run. The market will bear their prices... as proven by Apple's profitability. They don't want/need an $800 "real" (your words, not mine) desktop. You either pay their prices or you don't. They have many others lined up behind you who won't think twice about their prices. If you can't justify it, no sweat, use something else. It's not like you need to feel like less of a man because their product wasn't right for you.
No one's forcing you to use Apple stuff. After all they do not have the lion's share of the market.
If on the other hand you need their products, you have to abide by the terms of their license. Like it or not license terms come with every piece of software you install, even open-source software, with the obvious exceptions of software you create yourself or software someone else creates and gifts to you.
Who knows, by skipping the Apple software you may come up with something far better. It may be your destiny.
It was fairly widely known that these cheaper machines skimped on parts, support etc but the market for these machines (while they existed) was the cutthroat commodity market, much like today's PC industry. Caveat emptor and all that.
And yes, they caused some degree of confusion with consumers and hurt Apple's image, even though they weren't Apple products.
Exactly. And if Apple lets Psystar get away with it, then Apple gives up many of its rights to enforce the license later.
Ignoring it could mean a devaluation of the product's perception (cheapening), public confusion on what a "Mac" is (when the market is flooded with almost-compatibles such as the Hackintoshes), and loss of control of the product they've invested a lot of money in developing.
And yes if Microsoft were in this situation I would defend them as well -- I develop software for a living and I totally "get" what birthing a product of this complexity involves and how important it is to Apple's image to keep it untarnished.
If you bought a Mac Pro primarily to run Windows, you missed the point. The Apple solution only makes sense if your primary OS is OS X, otherwise you are absolutely correct that you can buy cheaper hardware for Windows.
That's not to say the Apple hardware is poor quality, it's just that the combination of OS X + the hardware is what you're paying for.
Wow, an intelligent comment on Slashdot? What is this world coming to?
Some of us do what we do only for the thrill of the challenge, the chance to learn something new, and watching what you build come to creation. The hours are long not just because people are being stretched more but because there's a level of interest which becomes an obsession at times. I know when I'm in my "groove" I tend to forget to eat, go home etc but that's part because it's exciting and part because as I get older it comes less frequently than it used to, and catching back up to where I was takes longer the next day.
If someone doesn't want Google to index it, use the robots.txt file to prevent indexing. That is what this file was designed for. Are you really that obtuse?
Try harder next time, Microsoft cheerleader. You've been so pro-Microsoft in your posting history that one has to wonder if you're just a paid shill rather than just misinfomed.
Bing results as good as Google's? Are you out of your mind?
The Wolfram Alpha crap is just that, mostly crap, useless to almost everyone. Microsoft couldn't have added a less important partner had they tried.
I totally agree. I won't lose any sleep over a $2 purchase. But at some point beyond that, there are a great number of apps which really should offer a trial period or lite version so you know what in the world you're buying before you purchase it. Too often all you get are some screenshots and a vague description, and I don't want to have to spend an hour Googling it.
That's not a defense of stealing it! Just a suggestion that the existing process -- which works pretty well -- has room for improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
This functionality is also possible on Linux or OS X using config files, in fact all the other features of using files apply (ability to replicate only certain changes, no boot delays waiting for group policy to be applied, ability to use compressed tools such as rsync to send not only configs but entire subtrees & application installs as well as settings). The registry's only pluses are that it's graphical -- which increases the number of low-skilled workers to use it -- and it's integrated into Windows. Group policy is just an implementation of registry data.
Have you ever tried to look at a user's registry through a WAN connection? You know, in the event that you need to investigate something but you can't knock the user off or assume control of their machine? It's like the Windows Event Log -- absolutely ridiculously huge and terribly slow to navigate. I can run a single ssh command to query 8 Linux servers at once and show all their results on a single screen -- almost as fast as I can type it.
But even tools that access the WMI interface are painfully slow -- try using Sysinternals' psinfo on a computer over a WAN connection. Takes over a minute to run in some cases!
I prefer simple, small and fast, thank you very much. The Windows Registry is none of these.
Well that makes at least 2 of us who understand this "story"
I wouldn't be surprised if that were true. You ultimately have to babysit a large number of people, all with conflicting schedules and goals (ever had more than 2 ppl need an item from a run?) and somehow organize them to work together at least part of the time. I would also expect this same skill would work well when herding cats.
I used to play WOW but the whining, the city chat, trying to find people for pickup groups or to fill a slot (b/c a handful of very large guilds had all the decent players), people signing up for raids and then not showing up (or showing up and leaving after half an hour), people using modems (can you believe it?), people unwilling to use Vent, etc etc was too much. I poured a lot of effort into trying to sustain a doomed guild at the end.
But, on a brighter topic, on sufficiently unbalanced servers and enough starting gold you can buy *all* the mats of a particular type and put them into the AH in limited quantities at ridiculous prices. People will start grinding those mats and soon (within a day or so) you will have an overabundance of them. Before that happens, switch to a different set of mats and buy them all. You may have to have some seed money to start, 200g is plenty. It will enable you to purchase at least 5-6 sets of things.
Also important is the *timing* of when you do this. On the Terrokar server I was on, the high population dwindled around 10pm ET, so you would put things in no later than 9 pm. Always give a buyout price!! Many people (esp high level toons) see nothing wrong with paying a load o' gold for something they feel is "beneath" them to grind.
I already had the ads AdBlock'd -- but I have the option too. I figured I'd just leave it unchecked since it doesn't do anything for me.
AdBlock + NoScript. You won't be inconvenienced that way again. And after the first few weeks of approving / adding sites to your blocklist you'll speed right through your web time.
oops clicked too quickly
Heh. As a software developer I've seen ungodly messes, contorted SQL, you name it. People seem to think that because they once wrote a Crystal report to display a simple recordset with totals that they're a "report writer" and put that on their resume. Training them (the ones which can be trained anyway) is expensive and often frustrating, because if they cared enough to invest significant amounts of time toward learning the language(s) and tool(s) they profess to know, I wouldn't have realized they were deficient. When hiring, though, you don't easily know who took the 24-hour cram course and who really knows it without asking some questions which require actual working knowledge.
.NET or whatever language you prefer -- but the discipline you use pays off in the end. It is a disappointment when your weekend Excel macro project results in an hour of downtime because you forgot to include some logic. It's much worse when your spreadsheet results in an employee being fired or the branch being closed because the company relied on your data & logic and you failed. A more disciplined and experienced programmer has these things -- proper documentation, proper testing, and responsibility of data validation to offer. A higher bar to entry, in those cases, may result in fewer bad decisions. By making these languages more difficult for the average Joe to comprehend you get only the more intelligent people working on the problems.
.NET developer ask me if his query was being delayed by daily pumps. His query cost was over 590. He didn't understand why testing the execution plan was necessary and why he needed to do it using a copy of production data rather than the few hundred rows in his test tables. By working with him and optimizing his query we got the cost down to 8. This person doesn't have what it takes to do this long-term (he says he's been doing SQL work since 1992!)
Anon for obv reasons.
Things change so quickly in our industry that we all know people who were certified in Novell -- maybe the shining stars at that point in their careers -- but stopped learning at some point along the road and are now middle managers. They oversee a team which uses a language they don't understand and there is pressure to develop quickly for fear their position in the market will be eroded. So someone gets the idea to send an employee to a weekend seminar in some new language, or someone is hired with little programming experience. At first it is a great idea and a certain amount of prototyping is helpful.
However there needs to be a point where someone isn't just the VBA macro writer of the local branch office or the guru of Access but understands the way programming and debugging is performed, so that a successful product is produced. It takes longer, as they say, to code when you take care to use meaningful indentation and variable names, when you put comments in your code etc -- and it is totally faster in the short term to put out crap code in
Case in point, I recently had a
So you're saying that Lambourghini needs to have a 30K version because you can't afford their current models? That's what you're basing this on, the price of the item and your willingness to pay it? The logic, it does not work.
Apple isn't a monopoly and they have a (relatively) tiny market share. They can charge whatever they want, albeit charging whatever the market will bear works best in the long run. The market will bear their prices... as proven by Apple's profitability. They don't want/need an $800 "real" (your words, not mine) desktop. You either pay their prices or you don't. They have many others lined up behind you who won't think twice about their prices. If you can't justify it, no sweat, use something else. It's not like you need to feel like less of a man because their product wasn't right for you.
No one's forcing you to use Apple stuff. After all they do not have the lion's share of the market.
If on the other hand you need their products, you have to abide by the terms of their license. Like it or not license terms come with every piece of software you install, even open-source software, with the obvious exceptions of software you create yourself or software someone else creates and gifts to you.
Who knows, by skipping the Apple software you may come up with something far better. It may be your destiny.
It was fairly widely known that these cheaper machines skimped on parts, support etc but the market for these machines (while they existed) was the cutthroat commodity market, much like today's PC industry. Caveat emptor and all that.
And yes, they caused some degree of confusion with consumers and hurt Apple's image, even though they weren't Apple products.
Exactly. And if Apple lets Psystar get away with it, then Apple gives up many of its rights to enforce the license later.
Ignoring it could mean a devaluation of the product's perception (cheapening), public confusion on what a "Mac" is (when the market is flooded with almost-compatibles such as the Hackintoshes), and loss of control of the product they've invested a lot of money in developing.
And yes if Microsoft were in this situation I would defend them as well -- I develop software for a living and I totally "get" what birthing a product of this complexity involves and how important it is to Apple's image to keep it untarnished.
+1 understands the issue
If you bought a Mac Pro primarily to run Windows, you missed the point. The Apple solution only makes sense if your primary OS is OS X, otherwise you are absolutely correct that you can buy cheaper hardware for Windows.
That's not to say the Apple hardware is poor quality, it's just that the combination of OS X + the hardware is what you're paying for.
Based on Sony's rootkit incidents, I most certainly would respond differently if Sony was involved.
The Apple stuff meets my needs, YMMV. <shrug> If it doesn't work there are a lot of other vendors out there.
I wish you were wrong.
We never learn, do we?
Did I miss something or did you just totally change topics twice in your post? Haircut? Vacation?
Go outside, you need some fresh air!
Wow, an intelligent comment on Slashdot? What is this world coming to?
Some of us do what we do only for the thrill of the challenge, the chance to learn something new, and watching what you build come to creation. The hours are long not just because people are being stretched more but because there's a level of interest which becomes an obsession at times. I know when I'm in my "groove" I tend to forget to eat, go home etc but that's part because it's exciting and part because as I get older it comes less frequently than it used to, and catching back up to where I was takes longer the next day.
If someone doesn't want Google to index it, use the robots.txt file to prevent indexing. That is what this file was designed for. Are you really that obtuse?
Try harder next time, Microsoft cheerleader. You've been so pro-Microsoft in your posting history that one has to wonder if you're just a paid shill rather than just misinfomed.
Bing results as good as Google's? Are you out of your mind?
The Wolfram Alpha crap is just that, mostly crap, useless to almost everyone. Microsoft couldn't have added a less important partner had they tried.
...and the sad part is you got modded "offtopic" while the GP was "insightful".
The modding system gets worse every day.
I totally agree. I won't lose any sleep over a $2 purchase. But at some point beyond that, there are a great number of apps which really should offer a trial period or lite version so you know what in the world you're buying before you purchase it. Too often all you get are some screenshots and a vague description, and I don't want to have to spend an hour Googling it.
That's not a defense of stealing it! Just a suggestion that the existing process -- which works pretty well -- has room for improvement.
Right there with you. I've been around since Red Hat 5.2, which I purchased.
Mod parent up. Finally, someone "gets" it.
The vulnerability is extended to anyone who VNC's into a system. There may be other attack vectors as well.