In your sig, how can you really compare Microsoft to a fine Czechoslovakian pilsener.... Oh wait, are you talking about that American company which stole the Budweiser name? But they don't produce beer, at least according to this law. Come to think of it, producing a crappy knock off of something good, I think the comparison is apt.
I have always hated the file open dialog box on Red Hat and Oracle Enterprise Linux (haven't tried Fedora, but assume its the same), and assumed it was Gnome. When I got Ubuntu, I was presently surprised. That being said, I still like KDE a bit more, and it has better apps (Amarok, K3B, Konsole). If they could only lose that annoying bouncing cursor and naming everything with K:)
This is exactly the same effect the old Nextel "walkie-talkie" type phones have on other equipment. If it can do that to equipment, I wonder what it can do to us. I no longer carry my cell phone on my body if at all possible.
Exactly. Here is an article which should scare the shit out of any US slashdotter. Just because it is Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Diabold doesn't mean it can happen to other systems.
That assumes I have any control over the data centers, the management of them, or the equipment, which I don't. I just run the databases in them. I support database is in over 250 sites, some of which are thousands of miles away.
In our local (only 30 miles away) data center, we not only have rack UPS, but also redundant diesel CAT generators and a room full of batteries. It doesn't make any difference. In one power outage, the central UPS (run by another group) failed spectacularly and took a bunch of equipment down. Previously, that same group tried to convince us we didn't need the rack UPS because they had the central one. Our servers were were the only ones not hosed by the power outage due to our use of "unnecessary" rack UPS. Another power failure in the same data center caused a fire in the battery room. A few years ago, the RAID controller on one of our database servers took a shit. Didn't give any error messages, no red light, nothing. Just a corrupted redo logs like the write cache failure, even though there wasn't any power failure. Just tried to restart the database and wouldn't come up.
Out of supporting all of these databases, I have seen every kind of failure and then some, but have never lost anything. This is because I never trust "redundant" technologies. I expect and plan for failure, and always have at least two different types of backups, on two different technologies (like SAN and NAS, or tape backups and offsite standby databases). When the RAID controller on my databsase took a shit, I was able to recover since I also had a mirrored copy of the log on a separate SAN, and a completely different hardware path to the data.
If you actually have full control over the data centers where your systems run, and management actually listens to your recommendations, consider yourself very fortunate. It is not that way in most production shops.
I have been seeing these messages since the days of NT 4.0. While I usually see this message on a network copy, I have also seen it when with failing RAID controllers, drives, etc. Really fun when it is an Oracle database. At least I have good backups. I have lots of practice restoring...
Even stupider is the practice of write caching, which most junky Intel servers have enabled It goes like this:
For the first few years, everything is fine, as the write cache has a battery backup.
The battery fails, and there may or may not be a little orange light on the server that the local admin may or may not notice. Otherwise there is no indication of trouble.
The power fails, and the transactions that have been successfully "written" to disk are not.
Database is totally corrupt. Restore from last good backup and recover to some point before failure. With 250+ database servers, lots of practice doing this....
As a policy, we lose the write cache before putting a server into production, but there is nothing stopping a local sysadmin from renabling it to "improve" performance.
Microsoft has no monopoly on this type of stuff, but I am sure they are very good at it...
My introduction to computers came on a Heathkit H-89 my dad built, which I wrote a Pac-Man game using 8080 assembly. In todays world, I probably would have never got started.
I used to buy most of my electronics at Circuit City. I think I even had their credit card once. Back in the commission days, I was looking for a new CD player and asked the salesman if they had one with an odd feature that I wasn't sure even existed: A pitch control like on a turntable. Much to my surprise, he knew exactly what I was talking about and had one with it, which I bought. I'm sure he made a nice commission on it (it wasn't cheap), but I didn't care because I got what I wanted.
After Best Buy opened a store nearby, I still shopped at Circuit City, but less. That is when they dropped the commissioned sales, and Circuit City seemed like a junkier version of Best Buy. But I still bought Christmas gifts there as it was more convenient.
Until this year. When they fired their employees, I stopped shopping there and never plan to again.
Especially GW parkway from the Pentagon to Rosslyn. It is almost impossible to stay on it without accidentally winding up the wrong way going to Great Falls or Washington. But nothing compares to Fairfax county. In Fairfax county, I think the address and street naming system is used as a source of Brownian Motion for the Infinite Improbability Drive.
Microsoft has 2 "innovations" which are very unique to them and still persist in Windows (I haven't tried Vista yet):
The Microsoft Sort. In every version of Windows (at least since 95), explorer sorts file names and menu items in random order. In fact, they have a lot of code to ensure the start menu remains in the random order (theres a registry key and an option to "resort") for it. Explorer also adds new files to the bottom no matter how you have told it to sort. If files are being created rapidly in a folder, explorer can put the new files in the middle of a selection list of the older files you may be trying to delete.
Hide extensions of known file types - This wannabe Mac feature has been the default since Win95. Can anyone say "readme.txt.vbs"?
This class was conducted in house with about 100 people there. I don't remember the company that did the training, but it took them about 1/2 hour to get the laptop to boot (it kept getting the BSOD). Finally, when they did get it working, it was obviously they were just showing powerpoint slides of the handouts we already had. They didn't have computers for us surf pr0n when we wern't sleeping. My thought: "How am I going to survive 2 days of this? Can powerpoint poisoning be fatal?" Anyway, my co-worker and I ditched the class after the first break.
A close 2nd in 1986, was Windows 1.0 training, also in house I mean, how many ways can you configure a.PIF file? All for a crappy DOS shell that no one (as far as I know) has ever used? At least I survived death by boredom by playing Choplifter when the teacher wasn't looking.
Before he goes against one of the bosses, he says "I'm going to rip your head off and shit down your neck". After you beat the boss. After you finally beat the boss, he rips the bosses head off, breaks out his copy of the LA Times... and proceeds to take a dump on him. Had me rolling every time I beat that boss...
This is pretty similar to the driver experience I have for Dell Windows PCs:
Goto to support.dell.com
Enter service tag for PC
Click on the drivers link
Get a list of about 50 drivers. Attempt to guess which one works for your PC.
Reboot and repeat. Apparently providing the service tag is not enough for them to show you the relevant drivers for your PC.
If you want to install Windows on one of their servers, you have to use their server configuration CDs which are Linux, as the Windows CDs don't recognize the PERC controllers
I am writing this from a Dell Ubuntu PC, which I don't need to download drivers for, as all of the hardware is natively supported by Ubuntu. It is the sweetest PC I have ever owned.
About a year ago, there was a highway sign that warned of construction ahead. One day, instead of the construction warnings, it said "accident ahead", followed by "hacked by alpha". After that they turned off the sign (apparently they couldn't fix it). I always wondered if the sign was running Windows.
One thing that all spam messages must have, by definition: A website to sell their V14gra on. If you set up a botnet with 10,000 computers on it, you have the capacity to send 10 million messages a day for almost nothing. At the rate of.001%, that would be 100 orders a day.
Since 95% of all spam is blocked by filters, we have a way of making spam a lot more expensive. Simply set the filters to respond to the website on the blocked spam with opt-out messages. All of a sudden, the spammers website is slashdotted by opt-out messages from all of their blocked email. Imagine 100 orders and 9,499,900 opt-out requests a day. Kind-of changes the economic equation of spamming a bit.
I stopped going to CompUSA about 5 years ago. The ones in Alexandria and Tysons were a royal PITA to get to, the service sucked, yada-yada-yada... As soon as I tried Microcenter, it was game over for CompUSA. Microcenters service is great. I once bought a motherboard and CPU from them and borked the CPU when installing it. Microcenter replaced it, no questions asked, even though I broke it myself. Later, I went to get one of their bare-bones boxes. But I still needed an O/S and Windows 2000 was $199. Then I saw Red Hat 8 on the shelf next to it for $49, and the rest is history...
In my high school, we had TRS-80s, and the class was taught in BASIC. Since I already knew 8080 and 6502 assembly it was pretty boring. I don't remember too much of the class, except playing Zork on the school systems PDP-1170 through a teletype and an accoustic modem (about 60 baud), and giving the teacher answers to his own tests.
When I got my first C-64 as a kid in 1983, I knew assembly, but didn't have the $30 for the macro assembler cartridge. So I wrote my own, which supported the complete 6502 instruction set along with address labels, and an edlin style editor. In Commodore BASIC. I used it to program a simple Q*bert game using sprites. I guess it was the best $30 dollars I didn't spend.
Throughout the 1980's, I had C-64s and C-128s, and the graphics and sound were awesome. In 1987, the VIC-II graphic architecture was 5 years old, but the graphics and sound still beat almost everything else except the Amiga. There were a lot of great games I played then, Gunship, Defender of the Crown, Aliens, California Games, others
I just downloaded a C-64 emulator and the ROMS for some of my favorite games from the 1980s. The first time I tried Aliens, the graphics and sound seemed cheesy. Then I remembered that PCs had 4 color CGA graphics and no sound back then. I started playing the game, and immediately forgot about the graphics. The first level on the planet has you controlling 4 marines in the aliens nest on a split screen. I was addicted again! In California Games, I can even get my skateboarder sprite to catch air off the screen, just like 20 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
In your sig, how can you really compare Microsoft to a fine Czechoslovakian pilsener.... Oh wait, are you talking about that American company which stole the Budweiser name? But they don't produce beer, at least according to this law. Come to think of it, producing a crappy knock off of something good, I think the comparison is apt.
I have always hated the file open dialog box on Red Hat and Oracle Enterprise Linux (haven't tried Fedora, but assume its the same), and assumed it was Gnome. When I got Ubuntu, I was presently surprised. That being said, I still like KDE a bit more, and it has better apps (Amarok, K3B, Konsole). If they could only lose that annoying bouncing cursor and naming everything with K :)
I have one of those, waiting for the right time. It wouldn't work in the server room though. Too noisy. Much better in the PHB's office.
Apparently. Look at how his post was modded.
This is exactly the same effect the old Nextel "walkie-talkie" type phones have on other equipment. If it can do that to equipment, I wonder what it can do to us. I no longer carry my cell phone on my body if at all possible.
Exactly. Here is an article which should scare the shit out of any US slashdotter. Just because it is Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Diabold doesn't mean it can happen to other systems.
That assumes I have any control over the data centers, the management of them, or the equipment, which I don't. I just run the databases in them. I support database is in over 250 sites, some of which are thousands of miles away.
In our local (only 30 miles away) data center, we not only have rack UPS, but also redundant diesel CAT generators and a room full of batteries. It doesn't make any difference. In one power outage, the central UPS (run by another group) failed spectacularly and took a bunch of equipment down. Previously, that same group tried to convince us we didn't need the rack UPS because they had the central one. Our servers were were the only ones not hosed by the power outage due to our use of "unnecessary" rack UPS. Another power failure in the same data center caused a fire in the battery room. A few years ago, the RAID controller on one of our database servers took a shit. Didn't give any error messages, no red light, nothing. Just a corrupted redo logs like the write cache failure, even though there wasn't any power failure. Just tried to restart the database and wouldn't come up.
Out of supporting all of these databases, I have seen every kind of failure and then some, but have never lost anything. This is because I never trust "redundant" technologies. I expect and plan for failure, and always have at least two different types of backups, on two different technologies (like SAN and NAS, or tape backups and offsite standby databases). When the RAID controller on my databsase took a shit, I was able to recover since I also had a mirrored copy of the log on a separate SAN, and a completely different hardware path to the data.
If you actually have full control over the data centers where your systems run, and management actually listens to your recommendations, consider yourself very fortunate. It is not that way in most production shops.
I have been seeing these messages since the days of NT 4.0. While I usually see this message on a network copy, I have also seen it when with failing RAID controllers, drives, etc. Really fun when it is an Oracle database. At least I have good backups. I have lots of practice restoring...
Even stupider is the practice of write caching, which most junky Intel servers have enabled It goes like this:
Microsoft has no monopoly on this type of stuff, but I am sure they are very good at it...
A wet bar would be nice, or at least a brewery instead of the usual water cooler. Would really improve morale...
My introduction to computers came on a Heathkit H-89 my dad built, which I wrote a Pac-Man game using 8080 assembly. In todays world, I probably would have never got started.
And of course, the One Correct Way to represent hex numbers is with upper case letters, and the One Correct Editor is VI.
I used to buy most of my electronics at Circuit City. I think I even had their credit card once. Back in the commission days, I was looking for a new CD player and asked the salesman if they had one with an odd feature that I wasn't sure even existed: A pitch control like on a turntable. Much to my surprise, he knew exactly what I was talking about and had one with it, which I bought. I'm sure he made a nice commission on it (it wasn't cheap), but I didn't care because I got what I wanted.
After Best Buy opened a store nearby, I still shopped at Circuit City, but less. That is when they dropped the commissioned sales, and Circuit City seemed like a junkier version of Best Buy. But I still bought Christmas gifts there as it was more convenient.
Until this year. When they fired their employees, I stopped shopping there and never plan to again.
Electric motors are known for their torque. It is not that hard to make a fast electric car like this one.
Classic! I wish I still had mod points...
Especially GW parkway from the Pentagon to Rosslyn. It is almost impossible to stay on it without accidentally winding up the wrong way going to Great Falls or Washington. But nothing compares to Fairfax county. In Fairfax county, I think the address and street naming system is used as a source of Brownian Motion for the Infinite Improbability Drive.
This class was conducted in house with about 100 people there. I don't remember the company that did the training, but it took them about 1/2 hour to get the laptop to boot (it kept getting the BSOD). Finally, when they did get it working, it was obviously they were just showing powerpoint slides of the handouts we already had. They didn't have computers for us surf pr0n when we wern't sleeping. My thought: "How am I going to survive 2 days of this? Can powerpoint poisoning be fatal?" Anyway, my co-worker and I ditched the class after the first break.
A close 2nd in 1986, was Windows 1.0 training, also in house I mean, how many ways can you configure a .PIF file? All for a crappy DOS shell that no one (as far as I know) has ever used? At least I survived death by boredom by playing Choplifter when the teacher wasn't looking.
Before he goes against one of the bosses, he says "I'm going to rip your head off and shit down your neck". After you beat the boss. After you finally beat the boss, he rips the bosses head off, breaks out his copy of the LA Times... and proceeds to take a dump on him. Had me rolling every time I beat that boss...
This is pretty similar to the driver experience I have for Dell Windows PCs:
If you want to install Windows on one of their servers, you have to use their server configuration CDs which are Linux, as the Windows CDs don't recognize the PERC controllers
I am writing this from a Dell Ubuntu PC, which I don't need to download drivers for, as all of the hardware is natively supported by Ubuntu. It is the sweetest PC I have ever owned.
About a year ago, there was a highway sign that warned of construction ahead. One day, instead of the construction warnings, it said "accident ahead", followed by "hacked by alpha". After that they turned off the sign (apparently they couldn't fix it). I always wondered if the sign was running Windows.
One thing that all spam messages must have, by definition: A website to sell their V14gra on. If you set up a botnet with 10,000 computers on it, you have the capacity to send 10 million messages a day for almost nothing. At the rate of .001%, that would be 100 orders a day.
Since 95% of all spam is blocked by filters, we have a way of making spam a lot more expensive. Simply set the filters to respond to the website on the blocked spam with opt-out messages. All of a sudden, the spammers website is slashdotted by opt-out messages from all of their blocked email. Imagine 100 orders and 9,499,900 opt-out requests a day. Kind-of changes the economic equation of spamming a bit.
How about the lesson learned in Season 1, Episode 22, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street?
I stopped going to CompUSA about 5 years ago. The ones in Alexandria and Tysons were a royal PITA to get to, the service sucked, yada-yada-yada... As soon as I tried Microcenter, it was game over for CompUSA. Microcenters service is great. I once bought a motherboard and CPU from them and borked the CPU when installing it. Microcenter replaced it, no questions asked, even though I broke it myself. Later, I went to get one of their bare-bones boxes. But I still needed an O/S and Windows 2000 was $199. Then I saw Red Hat 8 on the shelf next to it for $49, and the rest is history...
In my high school, we had TRS-80s, and the class was taught in BASIC. Since I already knew 8080 and 6502 assembly it was pretty boring. I don't remember too much of the class, except playing Zork on the school systems PDP-1170 through a teletype and an accoustic modem (about 60 baud), and giving the teacher answers to his own tests.
When I got my first C-64 as a kid in 1983, I knew assembly, but didn't have the $30 for the macro assembler cartridge. So I wrote my own, which supported the complete 6502 instruction set along with address labels, and an edlin style editor. In Commodore BASIC. I used it to program a simple Q*bert game using sprites. I guess it was the best $30 dollars I didn't spend.
Throughout the 1980's, I had C-64s and C-128s, and the graphics and sound were awesome. In 1987, the VIC-II graphic architecture was 5 years old, but the graphics and sound still beat almost everything else except the Amiga. There were a lot of great games I played then, Gunship, Defender of the Crown, Aliens, California Games, others
I just downloaded a C-64 emulator and the ROMS for some of my favorite games from the 1980s. The first time I tried Aliens, the graphics and sound seemed cheesy. Then I remembered that PCs had 4 color CGA graphics and no sound back then. I started playing the game, and immediately forgot about the graphics. The first level on the planet has you controlling 4 marines in the aliens nest on a split screen. I was addicted again! In California Games, I can even get my skateboarder sprite to catch air off the screen, just like 20 years ago.