If your company can't afford extended downtime, then your company can't afford to not have a service contract on your hardware. The service contract is, of course, only as good as the company behind it. That's one of the reasons for buying gear from the grown-up companies.
Most of our gear is Sun (~100 mid-sized servers, say 6CPU each on average), and production is under expensive service contracts. When something goes boom, Sun is onsite, diagnosing as necessary and repairing ASAP. Parts orders are delivered in one hour. This is how you run a business. It's not expensive service, it's cheap insurance for the company.
Is racial hypersensitivity so RAMPANT in your country that you can actually find racial allegory offensive?
Maybe you missed the whole point of Planet of the Apes. Or maybe you're unable to understand that computers are pretty poor judges of content. At any rate, I can't believe that they bothered to write an article about this. Racial paranoia is getting sadder by the day over there.
Well, I didn't miss your point, although perhaps I didn't make myself clear.
You're taking Sun systems and gluing a big pile of open source stuff onto it, until Solaris looks like Some bizarre flavour of Linux. Call it GNU/solaris.
Some of what you say is true, or at least has been in the past. On the other hand, much of it is either (a) long-since fixed, or (b) the fault of poor coders. Solaris comes with SAMBA (PC-NFS hasn't been available for a few years now), Solaris comes with prstat, which is a much improved version of top, and so forth. Mentioning Amanda makes no sense to me, because it doesn't come with Solaris OR most Linux distros I've played with, but IS readily available for both. Furthermore, it's not replacing any proprietary (and unused) part of Solaris. At any rate, Amanda is nice if you want cheap backup and tape management on either platform. If you want scaleable enterprise-level backup and tape management, you spend the money to buy Netbackup--on either platform!
Running a Linux NIS server is just odd. Running a Linux NIS server because it has a pretty interface to manage the single easiest naming system invented is just sad.
In your previous post, you mentioned some of the things you don't like about Solaris (built-in tar, libraries that don't behave), which highlights where one of the key problems lies. There are two types of standards, of course: Formal and de facto. GNU software has a BAD habit of extending the formal standards, which leads to people relying on all of the extented behaviour. How many programs out there are so poorly written that they can't be compiled with anything except gcc and gmake? Too damned many! A similar problem is man pages that don't render in standard troff, but require groff instead. Lazy, poor, third-rate programming is the problem, not "proprietary tools." If these DEVELOPER problems were fixed, then most of the platform-dependent problems would go away.
At any rate, replacing Sun Cluster with Beowulf is still an odd decision, because the two products are designed for different purposes. The core purpose of Sun Cluster is high availability, whereas Beowulf is compute farming. Moving an HA environment to beowulf is risky and probably not well-thought out. Putting a compute farm on Sun Cluster is (likely to be) equally badly planned.
If I give you root access, you are by definition the administrator responsible for that box. If you get the root password, then my next act will also be my last as root--expire the root password, to force you to change it to something I don't know.
Nobody gets root access except senior admins. Nobody gets sudo access, except for admins and DBAs. These rules also bar former admins who are currently in a different role.
My question is why did you convince them to move from a Sun to a beowulf cluster? Was there a legitimate reason, or was it a pet love of Linux?
In addition to all of the perfectly relevant points that the other poster made, it comes down to this: Control. MS wants to control WHAT you watch, WHEN you watch it, HOW you watch it, and with WHOM you watch it. Having to control only one format is much cheaper.
That's nice. If you could turn some of that cynicism to the cult of open source, then you'd realise that one isn't necessarily any better than the other.
But forget it--just keep living in your little fantasy world.
Ummm...bloody hell. Exactly right. The original discussion about fun in the workplace is a perfect example of how management often misses the point entirely. If work is truly not a fun place to be, it's likely because the staff have had all of the interest and wit squeezed out of them, not because they need a bloody CIO mincing around in drag, while they work 60-hour weeks to desperately hold the company together.
Re:Also available on Amazon
on
Firefox Secrets
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is an attitude that's bugged me to no end.
Cheaper is cheaper. Why is it that so many people consider cheaper to be the ONLY criterion for shopping? Customer service? Ethics of the company? Convenience? Nope, if it's not cheaper, we're not buying it.
Given Amazon's long history of questionable behaviour, I think it's GOOD that/. doesn't actively promote it. If you really want to save your eleven cents and make sure your money goes to stupid patents, then I'm sure you can find Amazon on your own.
If you read the article, it talks about the radiation eating away at the robot's circuits. Still a bit cheesy, but at least _slightly_ more accurate than the AC post implied.
"There is nothing, though, that a stockholder couldn't learn by studying the market."
Um, how can I put this delicately?
Insider trading is based on the premise that insiders have access to information that stockholders CAN'T learn by studying the market. And furthermore, it's a valid premise.
People keep buying MS software. They may gripe and complain and moan, but they KEEP GOING BACK TO MS!!!
As a company, how much money and resources should you put into keeping your customers happy when you won't lose them even if they're miserable? The answer is as little as possible. The current rule of business is to spend as little money as possible to keep your customers, while covering your ass from liability issues. Look at MS's actions for the last five years or so, and you'll realise that that's exactly what they've been doing, quite consciously and deliberately.
Of course, your claims are exactly as provable as those by the most rabid of creationists. All except Jesus, whose existence (as a man, all discussion of religion aside) has some pretty significant historical records to back it up.
Nonetheless, I have to wonder if your friend's name was Susan. It sounds too close to a friend of mine in California, some ten years back.
There's something else at play here, that also involves Sun, and it's their new high-end SPARC chips. Niagra is about to come out, and if you've got the money to play, it will surely blow the doors off of AMD's finest. (Intel can sit this round out).
As an aside, I agree entirely with your 'processor fanboy' comments. I've had Intel, AMD, Cyrix, and SPARC processors running my machines, and I'll happily support the company who is innovating and competing the most successfully.
I plowed about halfway through Cryptonomicon, then put it down and haven't got around to picking it up again. Fascinating stuff indeed, but it was really starting to cry out for a good firm editor. Someday I'll get around to picking it up again, but I'm currently not to excited by the prospect.
Am I the only one who feels this way about this book?
Setting aside the historical meaning of geek, I've almost never come across your definitions of the two, except occasionally on/.. Common use of the terms across most of Canada is precisely the opposite, i.e. geek is a backhanded compliment, nerd is an outright insult. Most people I've talked to across the (english-speaking) world would agree.
Slashdot Mirror
If your company can't afford extended downtime, then your company can't afford to not have a service contract on your hardware. The service contract is, of course, only as good as the company behind it. That's one of the reasons for buying gear from the grown-up companies.
Most of our gear is Sun (~100 mid-sized servers, say 6CPU each on average), and production is under expensive service contracts. When something goes boom, Sun is onsite, diagnosing as necessary and repairing ASAP. Parts orders are delivered in one hour. This is how you run a business.
It's not expensive service, it's cheap insurance for the company.
Exactly. And it's such a waste, given that there are several lifetimes worth of legitimate things to be pissed off about.
Is racial hypersensitivity so RAMPANT in your country that you can actually find racial allegory offensive?
Maybe you missed the whole point of Planet of the Apes. Or maybe you're unable to understand that computers are pretty poor judges of content. At any rate, I can't believe that they bothered to write an article about this. Racial paranoia is getting sadder by the day over there.
Well, I didn't miss your point, although perhaps I didn't make myself clear.
You're taking Sun systems and gluing a big pile of open source stuff onto it, until Solaris looks like Some bizarre flavour of Linux. Call it GNU/solaris.
Some of what you say is true, or at least has been in the past. On the other hand, much of it is either (a) long-since fixed, or (b) the fault of poor coders. Solaris comes with SAMBA (PC-NFS hasn't been available for a few years now), Solaris comes with prstat, which is a much improved version of top, and so forth. Mentioning Amanda makes no sense to me, because it doesn't come with Solaris OR most Linux distros I've played with, but IS readily available for both. Furthermore, it's not replacing any proprietary (and unused) part of Solaris. At any rate, Amanda is nice if you want cheap backup and tape management on either platform. If you want scaleable enterprise-level backup and tape management, you spend the money to buy Netbackup--on either platform!
Running a Linux NIS server is just odd. Running a Linux NIS server because it has a pretty interface to manage the single easiest naming system invented is just sad.
In your previous post, you mentioned some of the things you don't like about Solaris (built-in tar, libraries that don't behave), which highlights where one of the key problems lies. There are two types of standards, of course: Formal and de facto. GNU software has a BAD habit of extending the formal standards, which leads to people relying on all of the extented behaviour. How many programs out there are so poorly written that they can't be compiled with anything except gcc and gmake? Too damned many! A similar problem is man pages that don't render in standard troff, but require groff instead. Lazy, poor, third-rate programming is the problem, not "proprietary tools."
If these DEVELOPER problems were fixed, then most of the platform-dependent problems would go away.
At any rate, replacing Sun Cluster with Beowulf is still an odd decision, because the two products are designed for different purposes. The core purpose of Sun Cluster is high availability, whereas Beowulf is compute farming. Moving an HA environment to beowulf is risky and probably not well-thought out. Putting a compute farm on Sun Cluster is (likely to be) equally badly planned.
If I give you root access, you are by definition the administrator responsible for that box. If you get the root password, then my next act will also be my last as root--expire the root password, to force you to change it to something I don't know.
Nobody gets root access except senior admins. Nobody gets sudo access, except for admins and DBAs. These rules also bar former admins who are currently in a different role.
My question is why did you convince them to move from a Sun to a beowulf cluster? Was there a legitimate reason, or was it a pet love of Linux?
Fascinating. I can't imagine why you'd spend so much time beating a bunch of Sun's into pretending they're all Linux systems.
In addition to all of the perfectly relevant points that the other poster made, it comes down to this: Control. MS wants to control WHAT you watch, WHEN you watch it, HOW you watch it, and with WHOM you watch it. Having to control only one format is much cheaper.
That's nice. If you could turn some of that cynicism to the cult of open source, then you'd realise that one isn't necessarily any better than the other.
But forget it--just keep living in your little fantasy world.
Amen!
Ummm...bloody hell. Exactly right. The original discussion about fun in the workplace is a perfect example of how management often misses the point entirely. If work is truly not a fun place to be, it's likely because the staff have had all of the interest and wit squeezed out of them, not because they need a bloody CIO mincing around in drag, while they work 60-hour weeks to desperately hold the company together.
This is an attitude that's bugged me to no end.
/. doesn't actively promote it. If you really want to save your eleven cents and make sure your money goes to stupid patents, then I'm sure you can find Amazon on your own.
Cheaper is cheaper. Why is it that so many people consider cheaper to be the ONLY criterion for shopping? Customer service? Ethics of the company? Convenience? Nope, if it's not cheaper, we're not buying it.
Given Amazon's long history of questionable behaviour, I think it's GOOD that
"But I should crack a beer, it's the holidays."
Indeed you should. Anyone who refers to Bush as a hellspawned demon is someone I'd buy a drink for. Cheers!
Product comparison by reading the feature list on the back of the box. Now THAT'S a great idea! Saves the work of actually testing the products.
If you read the article, it talks about the radiation eating away at the robot's circuits. Still a bit cheesy, but at least _slightly_ more accurate than the AC post implied.
Just a note here.
Solaris x86, real Unix, free for download, runs on Intel (or much better, on AMD x64) systems.
"There is nothing, though, that a stockholder couldn't learn by studying the market."
Um, how can I put this delicately?
Insider trading is based on the premise that insiders have access to information that stockholders CAN'T learn by studying the market. And furthermore, it's a valid premise.
Same thing I wondered. "Did he chase after Condoleeza Rice this time?"
People keep buying MS software. They may gripe and complain and moan, but they KEEP GOING BACK TO MS!!!
As a company, how much money and resources should you put into keeping your customers happy when you won't lose them even if they're miserable? The answer is as little as possible. The current rule of business is to spend as little money as possible to keep your customers, while covering your ass from liability issues. Look at MS's actions for the last five years or so, and you'll realise that that's exactly what they've been doing, quite consciously and deliberately.
Given the Barenaked Ladies history it's not likely to, but they might write a song about it.
This isn't a mythbuster question, it's an "Ask mr. science" one. An electric heater is essentially 100% efficient, so do the math vs. cost of gas.
Of course, your claims are exactly as provable as those by the most rabid of creationists. All except Jesus, whose existence (as a man, all discussion of religion aside) has some pretty significant historical records to back it up.
Nonetheless, I have to wonder if your friend's name was Susan. It sounds too close to a friend of mine in California, some ten years back.
Suddenly? Suddenly??!
That stupid show is the most trashy, hypocritical, PREACHY piece of shite on TV. It gets turned off in my house very quickly now.
There's something else at play here, that also involves Sun, and it's their new high-end SPARC chips. Niagra is about to come out, and if you've got the money to play, it will surely blow the doors off of AMD's finest. (Intel can sit this round out).
As an aside, I agree entirely with your 'processor fanboy' comments. I've had Intel, AMD, Cyrix, and SPARC processors running my machines, and I'll happily support the company who is innovating and competing the most successfully.
I plowed about halfway through Cryptonomicon, then put it down and haven't got around to picking it up again. Fascinating stuff indeed, but it was really starting to cry out for a good firm editor. Someday I'll get around to picking it up again, but I'm currently not to excited by the prospect.
Am I the only one who feels this way about this book?
But does it have a readable style, and did it have a stern editor? Books like you've described can easily turn into self-indulgent navel-gazing.
Interesting, if nothing else.
/.. Common use of the terms across most of Canada is precisely the opposite, i.e. geek is a backhanded compliment, nerd is an outright insult. Most people I've talked to across the (english-speaking) world would agree.
Setting aside the historical meaning of geek, I've almost never come across your definitions of the two, except occasionally on