I once worked at a now bankrupt floral company where my office overlooked the sales floor. At the time it was a Windows 95/98 shop -- all fifty or so PCs -- and I was trying to do a proof-of-concept PC to replace a couple servers. I configured Samba on a Linux machine then turned it on. I had another Windows 95 PC right next to it to test. The Win95 PC crashed. Odd I thought. Then I looked up and people are starting to stand up. PCs are crashing everywhere. The whole sales floor went down. Every machine is locked up. My immediate thought was that Samba was somehow causing this problem so I powered it down very quickly. I still don't know exactly what happened, but I get this weird glee in remembering the scene.
Fallout II is my alltime favorite game. I've been roaming the desert for months killing things. It's so much fun watching them roast. The turbo plasma rifle is nice...but you know what? I love taking out Enclave Patrol forces with a hunting or sniper rifle. I have a (real) Remington 700 Sendero in.223. Remarkable little weapon. I can hit a grapefruit at 250yds with it. And the people out my window... I dunno, they're starting to remind me of those raiders that killed poor Sulik. Walking by the street, oblivious...
I've been using Gentoo for a few weeks now. Not bad. The portage system is nice -- reminds me of Debian and hte BSD ports. Whether or not gentoo is any faster than a similarly configured RedHat or Mandrake machine is another story. I didn't notice any difference as far as performance is concerned versus identical machines running KDE 3.1 and RedHat or Mandrake.
I think RPM has been given a bad rap. Many of the problems people encounter with RPM are due to bad package creation -- poor spec files, wrong dependency lists -- and not inherent to RPM.
Memory leaks are often caused when using streaming applications because they tend to use a lot of bandwidth, causing your internet "pipe" to have what's known to us programmers as an "overflow condition". This problem is often exacerbated by having too many open ports. On Linux and BSD you can generally fix memory leaks by applying a tarball with the "patch" utility to the affected server.
Memory leaks were very common in older systems that used 'bubble memory' and lots of pointers.
Other things you can try are entering the BIOS and turning off the "memory hole". This is unnecessary for everything but OS/2 anyway. If you do need to keep the memory hole, you can try using the "finger" utility to plug the hole. This method is popular with Netherlands programmers.
I'm mean we all go on about how bad MS is but you can expect them to support everything forever can you?
No, you're right. But wouldn't it be great if you could had the source code available so that you could backport a fix? Granted NT is ancient in computer years, but lots of shops still use it extensively.
My neighborhood has a very high percentage of Linux computers. On my street fully half the machines are running Linux.
(fine print: 12 houses on the street. Of the approximately 30 machines on the street at least 14 of them are running some brand of Linux). Well, OK, I have all 14, but that doesn't change the truth.
I've worked at some large companies before. There's a prevailing attitude among many of the managers that "technical" knowledge should be separated completely from "business" decisions. It's not exactly that the nuts-and-bolts procedures are below them (though it can appear that way), but that they believe that efficient managers must not cloud their decisions with technical jargon. That is, business decisions are distinct from the process.
This leads to situations where a person who's relatively ignorant about technology and its merits can make decisions about the company's IT infrastructure, based only on vendors claims. So they add a layer of management below them, ostensibly to act as evaluators of technology and to report up to senior management. But shit flows downhill. Pretty soon you have middle-level, lower-level, and even *technicians* who want to abstract the nitty-gritty details.
At some point you need someone who can say, "This is shit." (Insert witty story about how this phrase becomes, "This product will aid growth and guarantee success in the market")
I'd disagree. I enjoyed the series but had many problems with the theatrical version.
The special effects in the series, at least for me, did not detract at all from the story; this was precisely because the series followed the essence and the ideas of the book if not precisely the images. Have you ever seen a play or an opera? Certainly no one would believe the sets are real, but the sets are there merely to advance the plot and the story. Too many productions rely on dramatic visuals but fail in the important story.
Now, though I don't believe that a movie should not deviate at all from a book, the movie took too many liberties with the story that it should have been called something else. Things such as the Beast Rabban/Feyd Rautha characters, rain on Dune, the removal of key plot events, the voice activated weapons, etc., were not in keeping with the book. To be done right, it would have required a LOTR scale but this was probably not even considered.
Years ago there was an article in the Atari magazines _Antic_ and _STart_ (for 8-bit and STs respectively) that detailed how to make a WEFAX (weather facsimile) device for pulling weather images off a shortwave radio. I was able to built it but never had a shortwave radio so the thing just sat there. You could supposedly purchase cassette tapes of the signal, but that seemed vaguely ridiculous.
But using computers to do other things besides email and web browsing has always fascinated me. I'm now trying to get the GRASS system working so that I can create maps of my area. No luck so far, but success is imminent (I hope). If anyone knows of other projects that allow computers (running Linux in particular) to map the world, chart the weather, decode satellite images, etc., please let me know.
One of the first things learned in any communication class is to write for your audience. Unfortunately, this means that science stories are almost always diluted, misinterpreted, scoffed at, or ignored.
One major problem is that the state of science education, at least in the southeast United States, is pretty horrible. There are kids in college who don't know what DNA is, believe hoverboards are real, think creationism is as valid a theory as evolution, and think science is just a "religion". So the local newspaper tends to water down all the science stories (they're writing to, generally, a fifth grade reading level). In magazines, following human nature in distrusting what they cannot understand, they write articles that scoff or raise fear of science and scientists.
Another problem is that science often tends to be dull to the average person. It's not usually the ground-breaking theory that advance science so finding out that some particle doesn't decay as theory suggests would probably not make any headlines.
Yeah, at least that. Whenever there's a lawsuit about stealing story ideas someone will always show some biblical reference. And there was something like "Enemy Mine" in the Bible too.
Bleah.. It was Buck Rogers. I seem to recall some kid that looked like the "Eight is Enough" kid. It's been twenty years since I've watched an episode so they're starting to meld into this bad science-fiction mass.
Interesting comment. It seems that 90% of science fiction is regurgitating something from before. One of BG's episodes had Starbuck and a Cylon crashed on a planet. They overcame their differences to become friends. I've so far seen this in Barry Longyear's "Enemy Mine,", on Enterprise, ST:TOS, ST:TNG, Buck Rogers, etc., etc..
And the original BG was pretty bad. Things like the control yoke in their spaceships having buttons labelled "Turbo" (looking eerily similar to arcade controls of the era) to the names of the characters to Twiki and...well, you know.
My original post should have read "I can use Mathematica for almost all of my dabbling. Sometimes I play with MuPAD, R, GnuPLOT, Octave or Maxima."
It's a good package. Very stable and can handle everything I've needed. Honestly though, I've not used it extensively so it's easier for me to work with Mathematica or even MuPAD. After looking at it again, it looks like it's been improved considerably (nicer frontend) so I'll give a whirl.
Asking this question is no different from asking, "which programming language should I use?" without stating the purpose. Bash is great for scripting a daily ftp get, but inappropriate for drawing graphics.
I can use Mathematica for almost all of my dabbling. Sometimes I play with MuPAD, R, GnuPLOT, Octave or Mathematica to show a particular problem. Since these are also free (beer or speech, depending on package) I can be reasonably sure that everyone can get a hold of it.
For example, Octave is suitable for matrix manipulation. It does everything that I need it to do and can replace Mathematica for me. It's also fast enough (the longest calculation has taken just over a minute but it was a huge manipulation of some graphic data).
I've dabbled with some of the libraries but only for fun.
I guess what it comes down to is how comfortable are you with the package. By the time I try to write something in C using a dedicated library I can most likely do the same thing in Mathematica in a tenth of the time. Even if the execution speed was 100 times slower, the "real" time may not about to much.
It may come down to whether or not an analog device like the human brain can be sufficiently modeled my a digital simulation. Penrose doesn't seem to think so (The Emperor's New Mind), but I'm not sure. There's an argument that if the human brain can me modeled my rules then one could create a book similar to the "Turn the page to xx if you want to slay the dragon" types. By Following the rulesets, you could have an "intelligent" book by essentially turning pages. Of course, this is hypothetical because such a book would contain millions of pages, but it could exist.
The second argument is the "walk like a duck, talk like a duck." If you create a program/device that's on appearance indistinguishable from human intelligence, then does it matter how it works? The arguments for this run back to Descartes and argues that there is no mind-body dualism. The brain is the mind. The brain is a physical device. We can use digital devices to model an analog device. Therefore we should be able to model the brain with a sufficiently powerful computer.
In other words, we could use a digital computer to model a neural cell. If something occurs, perhaps on a quantum level, that prevents us from doing so, then perhaps it's not possible. Otherwise it's only a matter of time.
One of the problems with the Turing test is that it requires the computer to be indistinguishable from the human. Many have argued that this means that it should not answer questions such as, "What is the sin of 15 to the twentieth digit?" A question like, "What's the weather like?" should be answered with, "It's hot, but dry," rather than, "25 degrees Fahrenheit, chance of rain in the evening."
There's also the problem that non-AI entertainment software (Eliza, for one) can often do a remarkable job of mimicking human response without actually being "intelligent".
So lets say you're on site, and that openssh exploit that was reported a few weeks ago is used to install a backdoor that you have never seen before.
So you're not going to charge the customer for going to securityfocus.com to read up the solution to cleaning out the backdoor? Why not? Your entire response sounded kind of knee jerk.
As part of my normal process of keeping up to date, I will know how to remove rootkits. This is doubly true if the exploit has been there a few weeks ago. Sure, I'll charge for out-of-the-ordinary research (a cracked site being one of them), but if I contract to migrate Oracle/NT to Oracle/Linux (or even PostgreSQL/Linux) I wouldn't charge for research.
It's not an IT persons job to know every solution to every problem in the world. It's their job to asess a problem, research the solution(either through documentation or personal experience), and then apply it. Or are you one of those superhuman 7inuX d00dz l33t cr4ck3rs that can crack a password in under 60 seconds while some hot chick gives you a blowjob?
Wow. I didn't say anything at all like that, but I guess you needed some sort of argument to bolster the original FUD. I'll reiterate: What falls into the out-of-the-ordinary category for you seems to be wholly normal and obvious to me (and to many of my co-workers). As for cracking passwords, well, yes. I have cracked a few as part of routine security audits. Yes, routine audits. Day to day activity. Normal admin stuff.
Again, I provide free email evaluations if you're interested in freeing yourself from the Windows yoke. Let me know the details of that global shared object and I'll detail a Unix/Linux equivalent.
Oh yeah, some hot chicks have called me superhuman. Thanks for asking.
I'm replying to this obvious FUD because I don't want legitimate folks who are researching Linux read the parent and receive some bogus information: Web Server. Windows, go to add/remove software, add IIS. Run the microsoft management console, and tweak it to your delight, if you get stuck the help file is right there, or burn a call on the credit card to MS support.
Linux, go to apache.org, download the source, make install, go out and have a cig, come back and see if the compile is finished, go out to lunch, come back. Ok now you have to edit your rc.d scripts to run apache on start, do a little configuring in/usr/local/etc/apache, get stuck? Dig through millions of irrelevant howto's and newsgroups posts to find the answer. Live support? Go into IRC and get called n00b by every facist l33tist in there. Try a suggestion, and it breaks something else, rinse and repeat.
No. It's more like:
rpm -ivh apache-version-i386.rpm (by double-clicking the icon)
edit *one* file,/etc/httpd.conf to change the DocumentRoot (this can be done with a GUI).
chkconfig --level 2345 httpd on (again, possible with the GUI)
service httpd start (again, through a GUI)
It took me a good 4 years of tinkering with linux before I became proficient enough to run a server, compile my kernel (which is m00t these days because of modules) and basically make it do the same things my windows boxes do. Most of this time was spent wading through useless irrelevent documention, trial and error, ect.
Wow. Four years to learn to run a server and compile a kernel? My wife, a graphic arts/journalism major, did it twice while testing out some documentation I'd written. She had zero adminstration experience in either Windows or Linux. I didn't help her at all during the procedure.
I charge for my research time, don't know about you other IT guys out there, but everytime I read a howto, or browse support.microsoft.com i'm earning.
Sure I charge for research. I don't charge research fees for things that I should know before stepping foot on my clients' premises. But I suppose that this is one of the fundamental differences between Unix and Windows admins.
As far as desktop management is concerned, group policies, netlogon scripts, and active directory makes it easy enough for a child to manage a MS domain.
I'm not trying to bag on linux here, it's awesome to have a system that never crashes even on shitty hardware. If linux had gui based management tools that were on par with their MS counterparts, I would agree with the above quote. I've tried everything from linuxconf, to webmin and all tcl/tk tools in between, and yes they are quite good, but not nearly as good as what i've seen come out of redmond. None of these tools have anything even closeley resembling the functionality of creating a software group policy object that will install across 1000's of computers in an organization.
It's this dichotomy that always amused me. Every MCSE training shop I've seen in four states promises starting salaries around $65,000 for an MCSE. If Windows were indeed so easy to manage (a child could do it), then why the inflated salaries?
Lets talk about your software group policy object. How/what are you deploying? A permission change for a shared object? How are these thousands of computers configured and with what version of Windows and which Enterprise package? But instead of talking SMS or ADS, try looking at what you want to accomplish instead of Microsoft-speak. I guarantee that I can create an equivalent environment under Unix/Linux that will provide the same functionality.
I give free email evaluations for Windows shops considering the move to Linux. Contact me if interested.
Linux in schools is such a no-brainer that it's testament to the power of the Microsoft marketing machine that it's even an issue. For a server there's zero to minimal cost to implement a Linux solution. If you can set up a Windows server you can set up a Linux server. Every standard application has a gui configurator.
For workstation use it's a similar story. Students will need word processing, spreadsheets, scientific and math applications, maybe some programming tools for some classes. All of these are *standard* with any major Linux distribution. In other words, pay once for the CD (or even once for every seat) and you not only get the OS, but applications such as GNUPlot, maxima, SciLAB, MuPAD, OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric, etc..
The number of mathematics applications alone is worth buying a copy for every seat. Of course, a school wouldn't need to do so. But even if they did, the cost of the software alone would be a fraction of the Microsoft academic pricing with comparable software loaded.
1) The nerdy girl in your morning science class is going to be beautiful at 22 when you run into her in college. The hot little girl in your homeroom will be neither.
2) Don't, don't, don't think it'll be a good idea to use the dog clippers to trim the top of your head. You'll miss and need to make up some excuse that you were checking for 666.
3) Don't use silicone spray to lubricate the lawnmower. The gases are very flammable and you'll singe your lungs.
4) Have absolutely no moral dillemma about having fun with your girlfriend's hot little friend. Your girlfriend will dump you a week later for the SWAT sergeant.
5) Late at night, when everything is dark, do not blindly drink from the 1/2 gallon plastic jug in the back of the fridge. It will *look* like lemonade, but....
6) Have fun. Have lots of fun. Take lots of classes, even ones you don't need.
Man, I'd completely disagree. The first question had humor on many levels (pure slapstick, pun, innuendo, even elements of irony). It also had that "You idiot, someone stole out tent" bite, a dramatic flare. The original poster more than likely has a firm grounding in literature and in particular, comedy.
Of course, in many cases this is not true. I have several computers, and I use far less bandwidth than the guy with only a single PC who leaves Kazaa running 24/7.
Same here. I have many PCs but only browse the web on one at a time. But even if I have all of them downloading the latest Linux or FreeBSD ISOs, I'm still limited by the bandwidth. I can't use *more* than they allocated for me, only what I bought.
Anyhoo, I have a good ISP that doesn't worry about those things.
I fully support the space program, but not for the reasons you mention. I don't believe that the shuttle will lead to lower priced consumer goods, don't believe it'll anyway help us colonize other planets, don't believe that the shuttle can ever be made safe, don't believe it will ever be cost effective for putting satellites in space or ferrying astronauts to the ISS. The reason, IMHO, for a space program is that it awakens children to the wonders of science -- physics, math, biology. These were scientists aboard the shuttle, and, for the few times in US history, scientists and not sports players or rock and roll singers were/are the heroes. Think of it: our children idolize Eminem, Madonna and Shaq. Why? Because the other non-local, highly-publicized "heroes" don't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
I once worked at a now bankrupt floral company where my office overlooked the sales floor. At the time it was a Windows 95/98 shop -- all fifty or so PCs -- and I was trying to do a proof-of-concept PC to replace a couple servers. I configured Samba on a Linux machine then turned it on. I had another Windows 95 PC right next to it to test. The Win95 PC crashed. Odd I thought. Then I looked up and people are starting to stand up. PCs are crashing everywhere. The whole sales floor went down. Every machine is locked up. My immediate thought was that Samba was somehow causing this problem so I powered it down very quickly. I still don't know exactly what happened, but I get this weird glee in remembering the scene.
Fallout II is my alltime favorite game. I've been roaming the desert for months killing things. It's so much fun watching them roast. The turbo plasma rifle is nice...but you know what? I love taking out Enclave Patrol forces with a hunting or sniper rifle. I have a (real) Remington 700 Sendero in .223. Remarkable little weapon. I can hit a grapefruit at 250yds with it. And the people out my window... I dunno, they're starting to remind me of those raiders that killed poor Sulik. Walking by the street, oblivious...
I've been using Gentoo for a few weeks now. Not bad. The portage system is nice -- reminds me of Debian and hte BSD ports. Whether or not gentoo is any faster than a similarly configured RedHat or Mandrake machine is another story. I didn't notice any difference as far as performance is concerned versus identical machines running KDE 3.1 and RedHat or Mandrake.
I think RPM has been given a bad rap. Many of the problems people encounter with RPM are due to bad package creation -- poor spec files, wrong dependency lists -- and not inherent to RPM.
Memory leaks are often caused when using streaming applications because they tend to use a lot of bandwidth, causing your internet "pipe" to have what's known to us programmers as an "overflow condition". This problem is often exacerbated by having too many open ports. On Linux and BSD you can generally fix memory leaks by applying a tarball with the "patch" utility to the affected server.
Memory leaks were very common in older systems that used 'bubble memory' and lots of pointers.
Other things you can try are entering the BIOS and turning off the "memory hole". This is unnecessary for everything but OS/2 anyway. If you do need to keep the memory hole, you can try using the "finger" utility to plug the hole. This method is popular with Netherlands programmers.
HTH.
I'm mean we all go on about how bad MS is but you can expect them to support everything forever can you?
No, you're right. But wouldn't it be great if you could had the source code available so that you could backport a fix? Granted NT is ancient in computer years, but lots of shops still use it extensively.
I'd second this. Great movie.
My neighborhood has a very high percentage of Linux computers. On my street fully half the machines are running Linux.
(fine print: 12 houses on the street. Of the approximately 30 machines on the street at least 14 of them are running some brand of Linux). Well, OK, I have all 14, but that doesn't change the truth.
I've worked at some large companies before. There's a prevailing attitude among many of the managers that "technical" knowledge should be separated completely from "business" decisions. It's not exactly that the nuts-and-bolts procedures are below them (though it can appear that way), but that they believe that efficient managers must not cloud their decisions with technical jargon. That is, business decisions are distinct from the process.
This leads to situations where a person who's relatively ignorant about technology and its merits can make decisions about the company's IT infrastructure, based only on vendors claims. So they add a layer of management below them, ostensibly to act as evaluators of technology and to report up to senior management. But shit flows downhill. Pretty soon you have middle-level, lower-level, and even *technicians* who want to abstract the nitty-gritty details.
At some point you need someone who can say, "This is shit." (Insert witty story about how this phrase becomes, "This product will aid growth and guarantee success in the market")
I'd disagree. I enjoyed the series but had many problems with the theatrical version.
The special effects in the series, at least for me, did not detract at all from the story; this was precisely because the series followed the essence and the ideas of the book if not precisely the images. Have you ever seen a play or an opera? Certainly no one would believe the sets are real, but the sets are there merely to advance the plot and the story. Too many productions rely on dramatic visuals but fail in the important story.
Now, though I don't believe that a movie should not deviate at all from a book, the movie took too many liberties with the story that it should have been called something else. Things such as the Beast Rabban/Feyd Rautha characters, rain on Dune, the removal of key plot events, the voice activated weapons, etc., were not in keeping with the book. To be done right, it would have required a LOTR scale but this was probably not even considered.
Years ago there was an article in the Atari magazines _Antic_ and _STart_ (for 8-bit and STs respectively) that detailed how to make a WEFAX (weather facsimile) device for pulling weather images off a shortwave radio. I was able to built it but never had a shortwave radio so the thing just sat there. You could supposedly purchase cassette tapes of the signal, but that seemed vaguely ridiculous.
But using computers to do other things besides email and web browsing has always fascinated me. I'm now trying to get the GRASS system working so that I can create maps of my area. No luck so far, but success is imminent (I hope). If anyone knows of other projects that allow computers (running Linux in particular) to map the world, chart the weather, decode satellite images, etc., please let me know.
One of the first things learned in any communication class is to write for your audience. Unfortunately, this means that science stories are almost always diluted, misinterpreted, scoffed at, or ignored.
One major problem is that the state of science education, at least in the southeast United States, is pretty horrible. There are kids in college who don't know what DNA is, believe hoverboards are real, think creationism is as valid a theory as evolution, and think science is just a "religion". So the local newspaper tends to water down all the science stories (they're writing to, generally, a fifth grade reading level). In magazines, following human nature in distrusting what they cannot understand, they write articles that scoff or raise fear of science and scientists.
Another problem is that science often tends to be dull to the average person. It's not usually the ground-breaking theory that advance science so finding out that some particle doesn't decay as theory suggests would probably not make any headlines.
Yeah, at least that. Whenever there's a lawsuit about stealing story ideas someone will always show some biblical reference. And there was something like "Enemy Mine" in the Bible too.
Bleah.. It was Buck Rogers. I seem to recall some kid that looked like the "Eight is Enough" kid. It's been twenty years since I've watched an episode so they're starting to meld into this bad science-fiction mass.
Interesting comment. It seems that 90% of science fiction is regurgitating something from before. One of BG's episodes had Starbuck and a Cylon crashed on a planet. They overcame their differences to become friends. I've so far seen this in Barry Longyear's "Enemy Mine,", on Enterprise, ST:TOS, ST:TNG, Buck Rogers, etc., etc..
And the original BG was pretty bad. Things like the control yoke in their spaceships having buttons labelled "Turbo" (looking eerily similar to arcade controls of the era) to the names of the characters to Twiki and...well, you know.
My original post should have read "I can use Mathematica for almost all of my dabbling. Sometimes I play with MuPAD, R, GnuPLOT, Octave or Maxima."
It's a good package. Very stable and can handle everything I've needed. Honestly though, I've not used it extensively so it's easier for me to work with Mathematica or even MuPAD. After looking at it again, it looks like it's been improved considerably (nicer frontend) so I'll give a whirl.
Asking this question is no different from asking, "which programming language should I use?" without stating the purpose. Bash is great for scripting a daily ftp get, but inappropriate for drawing graphics.
I can use Mathematica for almost all of my dabbling. Sometimes I play with MuPAD, R, GnuPLOT, Octave or Mathematica to show a particular problem. Since these are also free (beer or speech, depending on package) I can be reasonably sure that everyone can get a hold of it.
For example, Octave is suitable for matrix manipulation. It does everything that I need it to do and can replace Mathematica for me. It's also fast enough (the longest calculation has taken just over a minute but it was a huge manipulation of some graphic data).
I've dabbled with some of the libraries but only for fun.
I guess what it comes down to is how comfortable are you with the package. By the time I try to write something in C using a dedicated library I can most likely do the same thing in Mathematica in a tenth of the time. Even if the execution speed was 100 times slower, the "real" time may not about to much.
It may come down to whether or not an analog device like the human brain can be sufficiently modeled my a digital simulation. Penrose doesn't seem to think so (The Emperor's New Mind), but I'm not sure. There's an argument that if the human brain can me modeled my rules then one could create a book similar to the "Turn the page to xx if you want to slay the dragon" types. By Following the rulesets, you could have an "intelligent" book by essentially turning pages. Of course, this is hypothetical because such a book would contain millions of pages, but it could exist.
The second argument is the "walk like a duck, talk like a duck." If you create a program/device that's on appearance indistinguishable from human intelligence, then does it matter how it works? The arguments for this run back to Descartes and argues that there is no mind-body dualism. The brain is the mind. The brain is a physical device. We can use digital devices to model an analog device. Therefore we should be able to model the brain with a sufficiently powerful computer.
In other words, we could use a digital computer to model a neural cell. If something occurs, perhaps on a quantum level, that prevents us from doing so, then perhaps it's not possible. Otherwise it's only a matter of time.
One of the problems with the Turing test is that it requires the computer to be indistinguishable from the human. Many have argued that this means that it should not answer questions such as, "What is the sin of 15 to the twentieth digit?" A question like, "What's the weather like?" should be answered with, "It's hot, but dry," rather than, "25 degrees Fahrenheit, chance of rain in the evening."
There's also the problem that non-AI entertainment software (Eliza, for one) can often do a remarkable job of mimicking human response without actually being "intelligent".
So lets say you're on site, and that openssh exploit that was reported a few weeks ago is used to install a backdoor that you have never seen before.
So you're not going to charge the customer for going to securityfocus.com to read up the solution to cleaning out the backdoor? Why not? Your entire response sounded kind of knee jerk.
As part of my normal process of keeping up to date, I will know how to remove rootkits. This is doubly true if the exploit has been there a few weeks ago. Sure, I'll charge for out-of-the-ordinary research (a cracked site being one of them), but if I contract to migrate Oracle/NT to Oracle/Linux (or even PostgreSQL/Linux) I wouldn't charge for research.
It's not an IT persons job to know every solution to every problem in the world. It's their job to asess a problem, research the solution(either through documentation or personal experience), and then apply it. Or are you one of those superhuman 7inuX d00dz l33t cr4ck3rs that can crack a password in under 60 seconds while some hot chick gives you a blowjob?
Wow. I didn't say anything at all like that, but I guess you needed some sort of argument to bolster the original FUD. I'll reiterate: What falls into the out-of-the-ordinary category for you seems to be wholly normal and obvious to me (and to many of my co-workers). As for cracking passwords, well, yes. I have cracked a few as part of routine security audits. Yes, routine audits. Day to day activity. Normal admin stuff.
Again, I provide free email evaluations if you're interested in freeing yourself from the Windows yoke. Let me know the details of that global shared object and I'll detail a Unix/Linux equivalent.
Oh yeah, some hot chicks have called me superhuman. Thanks for asking.
I'm replying to this obvious FUD because I don't want legitimate folks who are researching Linux read the parent and receive some bogus information:
/usr/local/etc/apache, get stuck? Dig through millions of irrelevant howto's and newsgroups posts to find the answer. Live support? Go into IRC and get called n00b by every facist l33tist in there. Try a suggestion, and it breaks something else, rinse and repeat.
/etc/httpd.conf to change the DocumentRoot (this can be done with a GUI).
Web Server.
Windows, go to add/remove software, add IIS. Run the microsoft management console, and tweak it to your delight, if you get stuck the help file is right there, or burn a call on the credit card to MS support.
Linux, go to apache.org, download the source, make install, go out and have a cig, come back and see if the compile is finished, go out to lunch, come back. Ok now you have to edit your rc.d scripts to run apache on start, do a little configuring in
No. It's more like:
rpm -ivh apache-version-i386.rpm (by double-clicking the icon)
edit *one* file,
chkconfig --level 2345 httpd on (again, possible with the GUI)
service httpd start (again, through a GUI)
It took me a good 4 years of tinkering with linux before I became proficient enough to run a server, compile my kernel (which is m00t these days because of modules) and basically make it do the same things my windows boxes do. Most of this time was spent wading through useless irrelevent documention, trial and error, ect.
Wow. Four years to learn to run a server and compile a kernel? My wife, a graphic arts/journalism major, did it twice while testing out some documentation I'd written. She had zero adminstration experience in either Windows or Linux. I didn't help her at all during the procedure.
I charge for my research time, don't know about you other IT guys out there, but everytime I read a howto, or browse support.microsoft.com i'm earning.
Sure I charge for research. I don't charge research fees for things that I should know before stepping foot on my clients' premises. But I suppose that this is one of the fundamental differences between Unix and Windows admins.
As far as desktop management is concerned, group policies, netlogon scripts, and active directory makes it easy enough for a child to manage a MS domain.
I'm not trying to bag on linux here, it's awesome to have a system that never crashes even on shitty hardware. If linux had gui based management tools that were on par with their MS counterparts, I would agree with the above quote. I've tried everything from linuxconf, to webmin and all tcl/tk tools in between, and yes they are quite good, but not nearly as good as what i've seen come out of redmond. None of these tools have anything even closeley resembling the functionality of creating a software group policy object that will install across 1000's of computers in an organization.
It's this dichotomy that always amused me. Every MCSE training shop I've seen in four states promises starting salaries around $65,000 for an MCSE. If Windows were indeed so easy to manage (a child could do it), then why the inflated salaries?
Lets talk about your software group policy object. How/what are you deploying? A permission change for a shared object? How are these thousands of computers configured and with what version of Windows and which Enterprise package? But instead of talking SMS or ADS, try looking at what you want to accomplish instead of Microsoft-speak. I guarantee that I can create an equivalent environment under Unix/Linux that will provide the same functionality.
I give free email evaluations for Windows shops considering the move to Linux. Contact me if interested.
Linux in schools is such a no-brainer that it's testament to the power of the Microsoft marketing machine that it's even an issue. For a server there's zero to minimal cost to implement a Linux solution. If you can set up a Windows server you can set up a Linux server. Every standard application has a gui configurator.
For workstation use it's a similar story. Students will need word processing, spreadsheets, scientific and math applications, maybe some programming tools for some classes. All of these are *standard* with any major Linux distribution. In other words, pay once for the CD (or even once for every seat) and you not only get the OS, but applications such as GNUPlot, maxima, SciLAB, MuPAD, OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric, etc..
The number of mathematics applications alone is worth buying a copy for every seat. Of course, a school wouldn't need to do so. But even if they did, the cost of the software alone would be a fraction of the Microsoft academic pricing with comparable software loaded.
1) The nerdy girl in your morning science class is going to be beautiful at 22 when you run into her in college. The hot little girl in your homeroom will be neither.
2) Don't, don't, don't think it'll be a good idea to use the dog clippers to trim the top of your head. You'll miss and need to make up some excuse that you were checking for 666.
3) Don't use silicone spray to lubricate the lawnmower. The gases are very flammable and you'll singe your lungs.
4) Have absolutely no moral dillemma about having fun with your girlfriend's hot little friend. Your girlfriend will dump you a week later for the SWAT sergeant.
5) Late at night, when everything is dark, do not blindly drink from the 1/2 gallon plastic jug in the back of the fridge. It will *look* like lemonade, but....
6) Have fun. Have lots of fun. Take lots of classes, even ones you don't need.
Man, I'd completely disagree. The first question had humor on many levels (pure slapstick, pun, innuendo, even elements of irony). It also had that "You idiot, someone stole out tent" bite, a dramatic flare. The original poster more than likely has a firm grounding in literature and in particular, comedy.
Of course, in many cases this is not true. I have several computers, and I use far less bandwidth than the guy with only a single PC who leaves Kazaa running 24/7.
Same here. I have many PCs but only browse the web on one at a time. But even if I have all of them downloading the latest Linux or FreeBSD ISOs, I'm still limited by the bandwidth. I can't use *more* than they allocated for me, only what I bought.
Anyhoo, I have a good ISP that doesn't worry about those things.
I fully support the space program, but not for the reasons you mention. I don't believe that the shuttle will lead to lower priced consumer goods, don't believe it'll anyway help us colonize other planets, don't believe that the shuttle can ever be made safe, don't believe it will ever be cost effective for putting satellites in space or ferrying astronauts to the ISS. The reason, IMHO, for a space program is that it awakens children to the wonders of science -- physics, math, biology. These were scientists aboard the shuttle, and, for the few times in US history, scientists and not sports players or rock and roll singers were/are the heroes. Think of it: our children idolize Eminem, Madonna and Shaq. Why? Because the other non-local, highly-publicized "heroes" don't exist.