i dunno - i don't think of perl as the same sort of tool as i do grep, awk, or sed. besides, what if your version of UNIX doesn't have a perl interpreter installed, and your company didn't pay for the c compiler licenses for your OS?
gotcha - i was thinking (incorrectly) it would work with enterprise mail, but under such a scheme one wouldn't need the enterprise features. Bravo! Next company I work for, I will use this idea to save us the cost and hassle of running BES.
Crossover Office may say that Office 2003 is well-supported, but Office apparently doesn't include Outlook. Crossover says that MS outlook 2003 has 'silver' level of support, and that Outlook 2k7 has Bronze, but I would heartily recommend you take those classifications with a HUGE grain of salt. I didn't have enough time to spend with WINE to try to get it to work, as this was for a work machine, not my home computer. It's possible that WINE would do ok after tweaking, but I couldn't get either 2k3 or 2k7 to work any better than Crossover Office with a rudimentary amount of configuration. I had the same problem that the OP has - migrated to 2k7, and suddenly lost my ability to connect to our mail server with Evolution. I tried Crossover, thinking I would foot the bill myself if it worked, but it wasn't really usable even with outlook 2003 (and my company has standardized on office 2007). Outlook 2007 was not even usable. I ended up doing what many have suggested here - running VirtualBox and using a VM to host my Windows-only programs (Office, Illustrator CS3, etc.). In seamless mode, it looks quite nice. While it isn't a truly seamless mode, I find that if I throw all of the Windows stuff on one desktop, it doesn't work much different than having the real machine run Windows natively. I would recommend virtualbox - you can't beat the cost, and it performs very nicely. I'm running it on an HP XW4400 workstation - Pentium D 3.4GHz with 2GB of RAM under Ubuntu Studio Edition x86. This setup works really well for me, and it's not like my machine is a powerhouse.
yeah, i was a pretty rabid fan of Hellgate, especially after they started testing 2.0. i think you're right, though. i'm pretty much out of luck. i had some hopes for age of conan, but not so much any more.
well, it's pretty simple what i want, actually. I guess you would say I'd prefer a twitch-style of play to something that feels like a hybrid turn-based combat system. If i'm going to spam-click my basic attack, it should go off as fast as it can, unless an enemy attack does something to interrupt it (like stun me, or whatever). If my rifle shoots 3 or 4 times per second, it should do that *every second* I hold the fire button down, until I run out of ammunition or overheat or get interrupted. It should not fire 3 or 4 rounds, wait for the monster to respond, and then fire 3 or 4 more rounds. i want combat to be simultaneous, not feel like we're watching the event queue in neverwinter or looking at the AP timer in fallout 2. My turn, monster's turn, my turn, monster's turn. That is how WoW feels to me, and the limited exposure I've had to WAR looks a lot like that. Which is why I asked for clarification. I won't get into the other things that piss me off to no end, like an 'aggro circle' of creatures, or having to build a character that minimizes attack timers to win in PvP. At the root, if the combat isn't turn-based, I don't want it to play like it's turn-based.
thank you for the feedback - it sounds more and more interesting to me. I don't mind cooldowns for certain abilities, as long as I've got one basic attack that's ready pretty much whenever i need it. I hate auto-attack - i want to feel involved in the combat. My question stems from something i've noticed from my hands-on time with WoW (disclaimer: i am not a subscriber) - combat in WoW really boils down to timing, it seems to me. since even the basic attacks are on a timer, you have to hope that the creature you're fighting either has a weak attack, or a slower timer than you. With ranged combat, for example, you try to engage a creature at maximum range, knowing that your ranged attack can be used every 1.5 seconds or whatever. Ranged combat is particularly unexciting, IMO. You know that for most creatures, you can get at least three shots in before he closes for melee - four, if you've set everything up perfectly. Since, for the grind monsters, you only need 4 shots to kill it, every combat simply becomes a matter of engaging at maximum range and hoping that he doesn't dodge/parry so you can move on to the next victim. it's not exciting, and it's not involving. it's (in my experience) a matter of queueing up your actions, and hoping they go off soon enough that the monster doesn't kill you.
WAR sounds intriguing, though. Thanks again for the description. It seems to me that since combat is a major part of every MMO, the actual gameplay mechanic should be the most important part, but it's rarely discussed.
can i ask how is the gameplay? All I've seen have been the videos ea mythic have occasionally released, and I have to tell you it looks decidedly unexciting. Activate Power, wait, monster activates, wait, you activate, etc.
Is the combat system a lot like WoW? From the gameplay trailers I've seen, it sure seems like it. I'm really curious, despite the content cuts. But I am not thrilled at the idea of buying the game if, despite the cool extras, at the core it's got the WoW keypress/timer-style control.
do you have your krb5/pam/nss mashup set up to allow you to do single sign-on against an Active Directory?
I think the big thing that likewise tries to promote with their product is that it's a one-stop configuration for a variety of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.
I know it's possible to set up linux machines to do SSO against AD with krb5 and pam and everything else, but it's not exactly an easy process. with likewise, it's a really quick process to join an existing AD.
i've used the likewise thing - it's all right. seems to work pretty well, and if it helps me get *nix servers into the BS windows shop where I work, I'm all for it.
inverse square near the craft, inverse cube at distance, i thought. probably not an issue, anyway - if the craft needed to burn 1 gram of hydrogen per second, and the average particle density is 7 per cubic centimeter, the funnel would have to be stupidly big to capture enough hydrogen to feed it.
an ion drive takes atoms of an element and strips off some of the electrons in order to make the particle charged (ions). These charged particles are then directed through an aperture with an opposing charge, accelerating them. When an ion with a positive charge comes in contact with a free electron, it captures it, and the atom reverts back to a charge-neutral state.
a plasma is a gas that is energetic enough that the positively-charged nuclei and negatively-charged electrons circulate in a gas. As long as the energy levels are high enough, the nuclei will not capture the free electrons. the amount of charge carried in a plasma is a function of the ratio of ions and electrons versus neutral particles in the gas.
as for amouth - you really seem to have no idea how tenuous the intersteller medium (or solar wind, for that matter) is. at one astronomical unit, there are only about 7 protons per cubic centimeter. The further one goes from the sun, the more tenuous the solar wind gets. by the time you've passed the heliopause, the particle density is roughly one per cubic centimeter. Since even at earth distances the solar wind is so thin, your 'jet intake' (the actual collection radius of your "scoop) will have to be several hundred kilometers wide to bring in enough fuel to be useful. There is drag involved with such a scoop - both from the particles entering the scoop, as well as drag from the galactic magnetic field. You still have to provide power for the magnetic field, and if you're not fusing the material from the solar wind, you have to provide power to run your microwave heater to turn the fuel into plasma. there isn't enough material in between planets (or stars, for that matter) to be used as fuel for anything less than a technology-as-magic level.
yeah, designing and building a bussard collector isn't that hard, it just needs something that can generate a magnetic field that doesn't diminish as the inverse square of the distance, since your magnetic or electrostatic funnel would have to be huge to pull in enough material to be worthwhile (even inside the heliopause). unless you're planning on not using a vehicle with any live crew or any sort of electronic equipment. I'm sure the difficulty of initiating and sustaining a proton-proton fusion to generate plasma is just a quick fix (no doubt you've already figured out the materials and fuel source for your carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion catalyser), as are the problems associated with getting the ramjet to speeds above the solar wind (unless the vehicle is making a quick one-way trip into the sun).
not much to do there, at all. You should get right on it, and we'll be heading toward Mt. Lookitthat within a few months. *rolleyes*
did the OP mention he was working with uncompressed streams? I missed that. I must admit I am guilty of presuming he was using some sort of codec, dv or mpeg2.
theoretically, couldn't an encoder scan the data stream for keyframes, chunk the data from keyframe to the next keyframe, and then queue up the keyframe+delta information for multiple cores? That way, each core has something to do that isn't dependent upon the completion of something else. i'd think that n-1 cores/threads/whatever to process the chunked data, and the last core/thread/whatever to handle overhead and i/o scheduling would run pretty nicely on a multi-core machine.
The company I currently work for has a Barracuda. I think it does an OK job, but it's not fantastic. The Bayesian filter and spam scoring both need a bit of work. I have a fairly large non-spam database (per the Barracuda configuration information), and it frequently still lets spam in. In one instance, it will block one of those 'Extend your rod' messages, and yet then pass the same thing at a later time. I also despise the subscription model of the thing, though I suppose there's nothing keeping a company from continuing to run it once it can no longer receive firmware upgrades. It is easy to configure, but not so much so that someone who doesn't know what they are doing can set it up effectively. I think it would be worth the time and effort to set up ASSP or a postfix-based solution. It's a lot more flexible and configurable, and you won't have to pay upkeep on it to make sure that you continue to get the spam database updates, etc.
If you can live within smaller means, jump ship...
on
Disillusioned With IT?
·
· Score: 1
I was in the same spot in 2003 - I had been in the industry for a decade, and was just fed up with it. I'll tell you straight out, it's hard to keep up a lifestyle you've grown accustomed to while working in IT. If you can manage the lifestyle change, I'd say dump it. I was out of the IT market until this past summer, and I really regret getting back into it. The money's good (though not as good as it was back then), but I liked having my days off to myself, and I think I'd rather have that time than the extra money/goodies/whatever. It was pretty refreshing to know that I wasn't going to be required to work overtime or on my days off (as I'm writing this I'm finishing up a 12 hour day where I have been waiting for people to finish up so I can do my thing). It was a lot easier to plan vacations and long weekends, knowing that I wasn't expected to be on-call 24x7, regardless of what I'd been told to expect. I hate IT now - it's full of a lot of fscktards who know nothing at all, but have certifications to "prove" otherwise, and manage to charge an arm and a leg for substandard IT support. It's also full of people that think they can replace you with a drop of a hat, and love to second-guess your troubleshooting and technical recommendations (my best friend and I had a saying when we worked in IT at the same company - "everyone's a fucking computer genius, until it comes time to stay late and fix shit.") with knowledge they've gleaned from someone's blog or a magazine article. I guess my advice would be to make a decision about which is more important to you - making money to support your lifestyle as it is now, or making do with less so you can do something that makes you happy. The money's hard to live without, for a while anyway, but it's awesome to have time that belongs solely to you. Besides, it doesn't seem like those of us old-timers who've been around doing real IT work (not phone support at a call-center, or swapping toner cartridges) since before the Y2K thing are as respected for our knowledge and experience as we should be.
hahahahaha - RPG wasn't *that* bad, though I agree programming in it was certainly a time-consuming process. I never did get to use COBOL, because the company wouldn't pony up the cash for the languages. But what the hey - it made me appreciate what programming with hollerith cards would've been like;)
Slashdot Mirror
i dunno - i don't think of perl as the same sort of tool as i do grep, awk, or sed. besides, what if your version of UNIX doesn't have a perl interpreter installed, and your company didn't pay for the c compiler licenses for your OS?
grep and awk for the win.
seriously.
if you haven't said "oh shit" while doing something as root, you haven't done UNIX administration in a busy production environment.
sudo is for ubuntu wannabes - real UNIX admins don't sudo - they su - .
gotcha - i was thinking (incorrectly) it would work with enterprise mail, but under such a scheme one wouldn't need the enterprise features. Bravo! Next company I work for, I will use this idea to save us the cost and hassle of running BES.
what are you using for the user and host values? phone number for user and ??? for host? host.blackberry.net doesn't resolve.
very interesting - I'll have to try it out and see what happens. Thanks!
Crossover Office may say that Office 2003 is well-supported, but Office apparently doesn't include Outlook. Crossover says that MS outlook 2003 has 'silver' level of support, and that Outlook 2k7 has Bronze, but I would heartily recommend you take those classifications with a HUGE grain of salt.
I didn't have enough time to spend with WINE to try to get it to work, as this was for a work machine, not my home computer. It's possible that WINE would do ok after tweaking, but I couldn't get either 2k3 or 2k7 to work any better than Crossover Office with a rudimentary amount of configuration.
I had the same problem that the OP has - migrated to 2k7, and suddenly lost my ability to connect to our mail server with Evolution. I tried Crossover, thinking I would foot the bill myself if it worked, but it wasn't really usable even with outlook 2003 (and my company has standardized on office 2007). Outlook 2007 was not even usable.
I ended up doing what many have suggested here - running VirtualBox and using a VM to host my Windows-only programs (Office, Illustrator CS3, etc.). In seamless mode, it looks quite nice. While it isn't a truly seamless mode, I find that if I throw all of the Windows stuff on one desktop, it doesn't work much different than having the real machine run Windows natively.
I would recommend virtualbox - you can't beat the cost, and it performs very nicely. I'm running it on an HP XW4400 workstation - Pentium D 3.4GHz with 2GB of RAM under Ubuntu Studio Edition x86. This setup works really well for me, and it's not like my machine is a powerhouse.
yeah, i was a pretty rabid fan of Hellgate, especially after they started testing 2.0. i think you're right, though. i'm pretty much out of luck. i had some hopes for age of conan, but not so much any more.
dammit, reviewed it and everything - that should be 'aggro circle' for creatures.
well, it's pretty simple what i want, actually. I guess you would say I'd prefer a twitch-style of play to something that feels like a hybrid turn-based combat system. If i'm going to spam-click my basic attack, it should go off as fast as it can, unless an enemy attack does something to interrupt it (like stun me, or whatever). If my rifle shoots 3 or 4 times per second, it should do that *every second* I hold the fire button down, until I run out of ammunition or overheat or get interrupted. It should not fire 3 or 4 rounds, wait for the monster to respond, and then fire 3 or 4 more rounds. i want combat to be simultaneous, not feel like we're watching the event queue in neverwinter or looking at the AP timer in fallout 2. My turn, monster's turn, my turn, monster's turn. That is how WoW feels to me, and the limited exposure I've had to WAR looks a lot like that. Which is why I asked for clarification.
I won't get into the other things that piss me off to no end, like an 'aggro circle' of creatures, or having to build a character that minimizes attack timers to win in PvP.
At the root, if the combat isn't turn-based, I don't want it to play like it's turn-based.
thank you for the feedback - it sounds more and more interesting to me. I don't mind cooldowns for certain abilities, as long as I've got one basic attack that's ready pretty much whenever i need it. I hate auto-attack - i want to feel involved in the combat.
My question stems from something i've noticed from my hands-on time with WoW (disclaimer: i am not a subscriber) - combat in WoW really boils down to timing, it seems to me. since even the basic attacks are on a timer, you have to hope that the creature you're fighting either has a weak attack, or a slower timer than you. With ranged combat, for example, you try to engage a creature at maximum range, knowing that your ranged attack can be used every 1.5 seconds or whatever. Ranged combat is particularly unexciting, IMO. You know that for most creatures, you can get at least three shots in before he closes for melee - four, if you've set everything up perfectly. Since, for the grind monsters, you only need 4 shots to kill it, every combat simply becomes a matter of engaging at maximum range and hoping that he doesn't dodge/parry so you can move on to the next victim. it's not exciting, and it's not involving. it's (in my experience) a matter of queueing up your actions, and hoping they go off soon enough that the monster doesn't kill you.
WAR sounds intriguing, though. Thanks again for the description. It seems to me that since combat is a major part of every MMO, the actual gameplay mechanic should be the most important part, but it's rarely discussed.
can i ask how is the gameplay? All I've seen have been the videos ea mythic have occasionally released, and I have to tell you it looks decidedly unexciting. Activate Power, wait, monster activates, wait, you activate, etc.
Is the combat system a lot like WoW? From the gameplay trailers I've seen, it sure seems like it. I'm really curious, despite the content cuts. But I am not thrilled at the idea of buying the game if, despite the cool extras, at the core it's got the WoW keypress/timer-style control.
do you have your krb5/pam/nss mashup set up to allow you to do single sign-on against an Active Directory?
I think the big thing that likewise tries to promote with their product is that it's a one-stop configuration for a variety of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.
I know it's possible to set up linux machines to do SSO against AD with krb5 and pam and everything else, but it's not exactly an easy process. with likewise, it's a really quick process to join an existing AD.
i've used the likewise thing - it's all right. seems to work pretty well, and if it helps me get *nix servers into the BS windows shop where I work, I'm all for it.
inverse square near the craft, inverse cube at distance, i thought. probably not an issue, anyway - if the craft needed to burn 1 gram of hydrogen per second, and the average particle density is 7 per cubic centimeter, the funnel would have to be stupidly big to capture enough hydrogen to feed it.
an ion drive takes atoms of an element and strips off some of the electrons in order to make the particle charged (ions). These charged particles are then directed through an aperture with an opposing charge, accelerating them. When an ion with a positive charge comes in contact with a free electron, it captures it, and the atom reverts back to a charge-neutral state.
a plasma is a gas that is energetic enough that the positively-charged nuclei and negatively-charged electrons circulate in a gas. As long as the energy levels are high enough, the nuclei will not capture the free electrons. the amount of charge carried in a plasma is a function of the ratio of ions and electrons versus neutral particles in the gas.
damn, ignorant with a typo - ah, well...
flamebait? fuck off, you ingnorant moderators.
as for amouth - you really seem to have no idea how tenuous the intersteller medium (or solar wind, for that matter) is. at one astronomical unit, there are only about 7 protons per cubic centimeter. The further one goes from the sun, the more tenuous the solar wind gets. by the time you've passed the heliopause, the particle density is roughly one per cubic centimeter. Since even at earth distances the solar wind is so thin, your 'jet intake' (the actual collection radius of your "scoop) will have to be several hundred kilometers wide to bring in enough fuel to be useful. There is drag involved with such a scoop - both from the particles entering the scoop, as well as drag from the galactic magnetic field. You still have to provide power for the magnetic field, and if you're not fusing the material from the solar wind, you have to provide power to run your microwave heater to turn the fuel into plasma. there isn't enough material in between planets (or stars, for that matter) to be used as fuel for anything less than a technology-as-magic level.
yeah, designing and building a bussard collector isn't that hard, it just needs something that can generate a magnetic field that doesn't diminish as the inverse square of the distance, since your magnetic or electrostatic funnel would have to be huge to pull in enough material to be worthwhile (even inside the heliopause). unless you're planning on not using a vehicle with any live crew or any sort of electronic equipment. I'm sure the difficulty of initiating and sustaining a proton-proton fusion to generate plasma is just a quick fix (no doubt you've already figured out the materials and fuel source for your carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion catalyser), as are the problems associated with getting the ramjet to speeds above the solar wind (unless the vehicle is making a quick one-way trip into the sun).
not much to do there, at all. You should get right on it, and we'll be heading toward Mt. Lookitthat within a few months. *rolleyes*
did the OP mention he was working with uncompressed streams? I missed that. I must admit I am guilty of presuming he was using some sort of codec, dv or mpeg2.
theoretically, couldn't an encoder scan the data stream for keyframes, chunk the data from keyframe to the next keyframe, and then queue up the keyframe+delta information for multiple cores? That way, each core has something to do that isn't dependent upon the completion of something else.
i'd think that n-1 cores/threads/whatever to process the chunked data, and the last core/thread/whatever to handle overhead and i/o scheduling would run pretty nicely on a multi-core machine.
The company I currently work for has a Barracuda. I think it does an OK job, but it's not fantastic.
The Bayesian filter and spam scoring both need a bit of work. I have a fairly large non-spam database (per the Barracuda configuration information), and it frequently still lets spam in. In one instance, it will block one of those 'Extend your rod' messages, and yet then pass the same thing at a later time.
I also despise the subscription model of the thing, though I suppose there's nothing keeping a company from continuing to run it once it can no longer receive firmware upgrades.
It is easy to configure, but not so much so that someone who doesn't know what they are doing can set it up effectively. I think it would be worth the time and effort to set up ASSP or a postfix-based solution. It's a lot more flexible and configurable, and you won't have to pay upkeep on it to make sure that you continue to get the spam database updates, etc.
I was in the same spot in 2003 - I had been in the industry for a decade, and was just fed up with it. I'll tell you straight out, it's hard to keep up a lifestyle you've grown accustomed to while working in IT. If you can manage the lifestyle change, I'd say dump it. I was out of the IT market until this past summer, and I really regret getting back into it. The money's good (though not as good as it was back then), but I liked having my days off to myself, and I think I'd rather have that time than the extra money/goodies/whatever. It was pretty refreshing to know that I wasn't going to be required to work overtime or on my days off (as I'm writing this I'm finishing up a 12 hour day where I have been waiting for people to finish up so I can do my thing). It was a lot easier to plan vacations and long weekends, knowing that I wasn't expected to be on-call 24x7, regardless of what I'd been told to expect.
I hate IT now - it's full of a lot of fscktards who know nothing at all, but have certifications to "prove" otherwise, and manage to charge an arm and a leg for substandard IT support. It's also full of people that think they can replace you with a drop of a hat, and love to second-guess your troubleshooting and technical recommendations (my best friend and I had a saying when we worked in IT at the same company - "everyone's a fucking computer genius, until it comes time to stay late and fix shit.") with knowledge they've gleaned from someone's blog or a magazine article.
I guess my advice would be to make a decision about which is more important to you - making money to support your lifestyle as it is now, or making do with less so you can do something that makes you happy. The money's hard to live without, for a while anyway, but it's awesome to have time that belongs solely to you.
Besides, it doesn't seem like those of us old-timers who've been around doing real IT work (not phone support at a call-center, or swapping toner cartridges) since before the Y2K thing are as respected for our knowledge and experience as we should be.
"... and Dude, `chinaman' is not the preferred nomenclature."
hahahahaha - RPG wasn't *that* bad, though I agree programming in it was certainly a time-consuming process. I never did get to use COBOL, because the company wouldn't pony up the cash for the languages. But what the hey - it made me appreciate what programming with hollerith cards would've been like ;)