Having Linux etc. in a NAS is nice - but the features ZFS offers (almost no-cost snapshots, clones, RAID-levels, volume-expansion etc.pp - see the various articles on Wikipedia, OpenSolaris, Sun.com and solarisinternals, if you have been living under a rock for the past years) will *kill* every other filesystem (or push it back into a niche). It might also kill NetApp at the same time. OpenSolaris even has an iSCSI-Target. Yes, it needs a lot of RAM and a 64 Bit CPU to be useful - but in return, you get what was previously only available from NetApp , when you paid 6-figure sums.
Use of Linux will probably be relegated to little "NASlets" that for some reason can't or don't need to run ZFS/Solaris. Currently, both the license and arguing about the design seem to prevent the use of ZFS with Linux.....
Probably RedHat - it's IMO about as proprietary as the rest of the commercial Unices mentioned - if not more, if you consider Solaris vs. OpenSolaris. It has some nice kicks, but trying to do anything with it that doesn't come out-of-the-box is a nightmare. Just try maintaining a Typo3 installation on it...
But for the NYSE-stuff (which is probably mostly J2SE/J2EE stuff), it should be good. I'd still prefer Solaris for that, though.
> If someone has informed you that they are leaving the company, > the first thing that should happen is that your manager should > push a red button that instantly removes all access you have to > computers and badge-access doors (or get that process started),
You got that (partly) wrong. The problem is not that it doesn't get done on day one, the problem is that people don't do it at all and leave accounts open for months after people have departed. Freaking out when an employee leaves and calling "Defcon 1" is stupid.
> and the second thing is calling security to escort them out.
As numerous people have said, this just generates bad mood in other employees.
IMO, this practise is ridiculous in all cases other than when criminal offenses are involved.
There are positions that are connected with enough trust-level that the company might consider putting you on paid vacation for the time being - but that also creates a bad mood in the other employees. (Although a different kind - the individual can get a paid vacation for free)
I know these boiler-plate advice snippets very well, but they apply to supermaket till-girls at best: jobs with no deep knownledge and qualification, but some control over money (or otherwise valuable good). They also presume that the individual in question is totally and immediately replaceable - this is fictional at best. If you escort them out on the spot, they actually carry out more information than if you had let them finish their work and tell their replacement the basics of the job.
And, think about this: in Germany, people usually have three or six months "notice time". That means, you can't just fire them and be done with it. But it also means that the employee can't just go and leave over the weekend. Both have to find a way to get along for the rest of the time, because, like it or not, you always meet twice;-)
> Who buries a service startup in a combination of inittab and the/srv (?) directory?
Well, I hate it when someone starts daemontools from inittab. I usually create a normal startupscript. The BSDs I use don't have inittab anyway. The directory is called "service", in FreeBSD-land usually ln'ed to/var/service, where again the symlinks to the supervise-directories sit. FreeBSD also has a plugin-mechanism for mail-related commands. If setup correctly, "mailq" calls qmail-qstat. Obviously, your guy forgot to de-install the original MTA.
Bill Shupp's patch plus Matt Simerson's Mail-Toaster Perl-library still make a difference. With postfix or sendmail, you've got to write all the provisioning-tools yourself, but qmail+vpopmail+qmailadmin delivers something out-of-the-box.
> Word is a standard the way that FAT is a standard.
I'd like to propose the wording "widespread document-format". Calling it a standard is too much honour. It implies "interoperability", which clearly was never, is not now and will not be ever on MSFTs agenda.
> I'm kind of interested in hearing what's caused the turnaround for Dell over the past year or two.
That's easy. AAPL ate their lunch. When the market grows say 10% and one of your competitors grows 30% and your own growth is flat (at best), you know you're just a couple of quarters away from a big disaster. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out. Growth is hardly in selling laptops to new customers (just like the total number of people drinking beer is not going to increase significantly). So, you've got to appeal to your customers and even lure customers from other companies away. As the hardware is commodity (except AAPL), and people didn't exactly run down Dell's (virtual) shop doors to get a laptop with Vista, there's only Linux left. Fortunately (for Dell, and Linux), somebody at Dell was smart enough to figure all this out in advance and their lineup is now pretty good.
As the spokesperson says, it's more a question of perception than actual sales.
> If I had a HP printer who doesn't support Vista, > I'll blame HP for being to lazy to support my printer.
They're not too lazy. They just don't write any new driver for old printers. They expect you to buy a new printer with your new OS. Because, if they provided a new driver for an old printer they already sold, they'd have to spend some money (pay a dev-monkey) and yet make zero dollars out of it. Well, they'd make a couple of bucks out of the ink/toner stuff, but that's a different business-division - and as new printers are delivered with less and less ink/toner nowadays, people with new printers also quickly hurry to the stores and buy a replacement cartridge. So, IMO, the problem seems to be that consumers buy the wrong kind of printers (I guess it's only a problem with inkjet-printers, as you can print on any LaserJet with a suitable LaserJet driver, at least with CUPS:-))) from the wrong manufacturer.
Also, nobody forced anybody to buy a computer with Vista. Apple sells great Laptops and PCs without Windows. Dell sells cheap Ubuntu-boxes^Hn. SUN sells Solaris-Workstations.
They're pulling out of Germany. I don't know about the rest of Europe. After burning through the (estimated) loss of 800 millions Euro in ten years, they pulled the plug in July 2006 and sold the German business to the Metro Group. I just read in the German wikipedia-article that there was indeed no other Walmart-franchise in the rest of Europe. In Germany, nobody needed them - there were already lots of established players who want to drive prices down and each other out of business to be able to move the prices up again (ALDI, LIDL, said Metro Group etc.) I hate them all.
Because there's already a working, clean, stable, fast version of Windows. It's just not marketed to the end-user. It's called Windows Server 2003. Incidentially, Vista was developed from its source. The only thing that stop it from mass-adoption is the fact that some tools (like anti-virus etc.) require server-versions, but they have come down in price, too over the last years.
They could just recompile 2003 without all the server-tools and some ifdefs so that it doesn't say "Server" anymore and Joe Shmoe's antivirus installs on it. I don't know about DirectX etc. - but games are for consoles anyway;-)
But MSFT will like (or not know any better other than) to beat on the Vista dead-horse.
Good luck with that, Redmond. In the meantime, see Apple continue to grow its Mac-sales grow double digit every year.
If you do this, you have to understand you are asking people to do something unknown and a bit frightening,
The Head of IT in the German city of Schwäbisch Hall had the oldest female member of staff demo some day-to-day work (via a beamer) to the rest of the staff on the new linux desktops.
When the rest of the staff saw that even the old lady could master it, they couldn't complain about the system being "too complicated" whithout putting an egg on their own face...
This (true) story always reminds me of the morale that psychology matters even more than technical facts and orders.
> Yeah, I'm sure the "In Germany" part of your post was really necessary cause, you know, it doesn't happen anywhere else.
I must admit that I'm not familiar with the situation anywhere else in the world. It was a cheap shot, anyway, I didn't want to generalize. Though, the last sentence alone would probably already qualify for a "You must be new here" comment;-)
> I guess it isn't a far stretch to suspect that JFK was a rapist too.
Back then, there wasn't that much money to be made from book-deals and "exclusives", so most of his "victims" never spoke up, I guess.
But JFK appararently had a faible for relatively violent sexual practises - and he was a sex-addict. Those facts were well known (or at least, there were very loud rumors) in journalistic circles - but nobody wanted to write about it.
Still, JFK has a high reputation in the world. The uncoverings concerning his private life did next to nothing to reduce it.
The same with Bill Clinton. At least, he could show Europe and Japan on a map and thus the rest of the world got the feeling that he wasn't totally dependend on "advisors" and toadies.
> Some people have said that the "sweet spot" > for Vista performance is FOUR gigs of RAM.
I just bought one of those Dell E521 DC Athlons. One problem with the pre-installed Vista is all the crap that comes with it. Google Desktop, Roxio, an Antivirus Tool. On first start (with 1 GB of RAM), it would crawl and thrash the harddisk like there was no tomorrow. My MacMini G4 felt much snappier in comparison... When I added the additional 2 GBs I had bought (I was only running Vista to update the BIOS and the BIOS of the DVD-burner - the box will run FreeBSD and/or Solaris), it got better. But still - Vista is a really crazy OS. Though (or maybe even just because) a lot of complexity is hidden from the user, you've sometimes got to be very knowledgable to do "the right thing". And the strange quirks and idiosynrasis of the interface... I think, using Vista could drive me seriously crazy. If I had to use it daily, over time, I'd get mad. It was OK for those few minutes (I installed Safari, just for kicks) - but using it daily? No, thank you.
Back to the original "sweet-spot"-debate: I'm well aware that one can probably tune Vista so that it performs well - but how many people do that? It will happen in the corporate world, but what most people will get as a first-impression is simply: slow-as-molasses.
MacOS X Tiger (and I assume the upcoming Leopard, too) ship with no 3rd-party software installed (except for Flash and Java). Clean desktop. Clean statusbar.
Ironically, this is one of the results of the anti-trust lawsuit, that allowed OEM to install whatever software they wanted onto the pre-installed Windoze. Now, some do (and Dell isn't the worst offender - by no degree) and the result is mayhem for most everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
Having Linux etc. in a NAS is nice - but the features ZFS offers (almost no-cost snapshots, clones, RAID-levels, volume-expansion etc.pp - see the various articles on Wikipedia, OpenSolaris, Sun.com and solarisinternals, if you have been living under a rock for the past years) will *kill* every other filesystem (or push it back into a niche).
It might also kill NetApp at the same time.
OpenSolaris even has an iSCSI-Target.
Yes, it needs a lot of RAM and a 64 Bit CPU to be useful - but in return, you get what was previously only available from NetApp , when you paid 6-figure sums.
Use of Linux will probably be relegated to little "NASlets" that for some reason can't or don't need to run ZFS/Solaris.
Currently, both the license and arguing about the design seem to prevent the use of ZFS with Linux.....
Linux from Scratch?
Probably RedHat - it's IMO about as proprietary as the rest of the commercial Unices mentioned - if not more, if you consider Solaris vs. OpenSolaris.
It has some nice kicks, but trying to do anything with it that doesn't come out-of-the-box is a nightmare.
Just try maintaining a Typo3 installation on it...
But for the NYSE-stuff (which is probably mostly J2SE/J2EE stuff), it should be good.
I'd still prefer Solaris for that, though.
> NEWS FLASH: Massive, One-Of-A-Kind Contraption
> With Millions Of Parts In Hostile,
You forgot to add:
"All from the lowest bidder".
...it will also make Leopard even faster.
Aggressive Key-Accounting and the general uninformed public will keep MSFT afloat, though.
Cancel-or-Allow RSI will be on the rise, too.
> If someone has informed you that they are leaving the company,
;-)
> the first thing that should happen is that your manager should
> push a red button that instantly removes all access you have to
> computers and badge-access doors (or get that process started),
You got that (partly) wrong.
The problem is not that it doesn't get done on day one, the problem is
that people don't do it at all and leave accounts open for months
after people have departed.
Freaking out when an employee leaves and calling "Defcon 1" is stupid.
> and the second thing is calling security to escort them out.
As numerous people have said, this just generates bad mood in
other employees.
IMO, this practise is ridiculous in all cases other than when criminal offenses
are involved.
There are positions that are connected with enough trust-level that the company
might consider putting you on paid vacation for the time being - but that also
creates a bad mood in the other employees.
(Although a different kind - the individual can get a paid vacation for free)
I know these boiler-plate advice snippets very well, but they apply to supermaket till-girls at best:
jobs with no deep knownledge and qualification, but some control over money (or otherwise valuable good).
They also presume that the individual in question is totally and immediately replaceable - this is fictional at best.
If you escort them out on the spot, they actually carry out more information than if you had let them finish their work and tell their replacement the basics of the job.
And, think about this: in Germany, people usually have three or six months "notice time". That means, you can't just fire them and be done with it.
But it also means that the employee can't just go and leave over the weekend. Both have to find a way to get along for the rest of the time, because, like it or not, you always meet twice
> Who buries a service startup in a combination of inittab and the /srv (?) directory?
/var/service, where again the symlinks to the supervise-directories sit.
Well, I hate it when someone starts daemontools from inittab.
I usually create a normal startupscript. The BSDs I use don't have inittab anyway.
The directory is called "service", in FreeBSD-land usually ln'ed to
FreeBSD also has a plugin-mechanism for mail-related commands. If setup correctly, "mailq" calls qmail-qstat.
Obviously, your guy forgot to de-install the original MTA.
Well, and where are the commandline tools?
I only see a web-interface.
Bill Shupp's patch plus Matt Simerson's Mail-Toaster Perl-library still make a difference.
With postfix or sendmail, you've got to write all the provisioning-tools yourself, but qmail+vpopmail+qmailadmin delivers something out-of-the-box.
http://www.shupp.org/
http://mail-toaster.org/
Jesus Christ.
I hope, they still publish text-stories then.
Not some youtube-clone-mee2-bs.
> The purpose of speed limits on interstates is for safety and fuel efficiency.
LOL. With a SUV? Or any other of the 90% gas-guzzler cars currently on your streets?
> Word is a standard the way that FAT is a standard.
I'd like to propose the wording "widespread document-format".
Calling it a standard is too much honour. It implies "interoperability", which clearly was never, is not now and will not be ever on MSFTs agenda.
Did anybody also notice the irony of the SunFire ad at the top?
> I'm kind of interested in hearing what's caused the turnaround for Dell over the past year or two.
That's easy. AAPL ate their lunch.
When the market grows say 10% and one of your competitors grows 30% and your own growth is flat (at best), you know you're just a couple of quarters away from a big disaster.
You don't have to be a genius to figure that out.
Growth is hardly in selling laptops to new customers (just like the total number of people drinking beer is not going to increase significantly).
So, you've got to appeal to your customers and even lure customers from other companies away.
As the hardware is commodity (except AAPL), and people didn't exactly run down Dell's (virtual) shop doors to get a laptop with Vista, there's only Linux left. Fortunately (for Dell, and Linux), somebody at Dell was smart enough to figure all this out in advance and their lineup is now pretty good.
As the spokesperson says, it's more a question of perception than actual sales.
> If I had a HP printer who doesn't support Vista,
:-))) from the wrong manufacturer.
> I'll blame HP for being to lazy to support my printer.
They're not too lazy. They just don't write any new driver for old printers.
They expect you to buy a new printer with your new OS.
Because, if they provided a new driver for an old printer they already sold, they'd have to spend some money (pay a dev-monkey) and yet make zero dollars out of it.
Well, they'd make a couple of bucks out of the ink/toner stuff, but that's a different business-division - and as new printers are delivered with less and less ink/toner nowadays, people with new printers also quickly hurry to the stores and buy a replacement cartridge.
So, IMO, the problem seems to be that consumers buy the wrong kind of printers (I guess it's only a problem with inkjet-printers, as you can print on any LaserJet with a suitable LaserJet driver, at least with CUPS
Also, nobody forced anybody to buy a computer with Vista. Apple sells great Laptops and PCs without Windows. Dell sells cheap Ubuntu-boxes^Hn. SUN sells Solaris-Workstations.
They're pulling out of Germany. I don't know about the rest of Europe.
After burning through the (estimated) loss of 800 millions Euro in ten years, they pulled the plug in July 2006 and sold the German business to the Metro Group.
I just read in the German wikipedia-article that there was indeed no other Walmart-franchise in the rest of Europe.
In Germany, nobody needed them - there were already lots of established players who want to drive prices down and each other out of business to be able to move the prices up again (ALDI, LIDL, said Metro Group etc.)
I hate them all.
Just like the iPhone, until Steve unwrapped it one day.
Because there's already a working, clean, stable, fast version of Windows.
;-)
It's just not marketed to the end-user.
It's called Windows Server 2003.
Incidentially, Vista was developed from its source.
The only thing that stop it from mass-adoption is the fact that some tools (like anti-virus etc.) require server-versions, but they have come down in price, too over the last years.
They could just recompile 2003 without all the server-tools and some ifdefs so that it doesn't say "Server" anymore and Joe Shmoe's antivirus installs on it.
I don't know about DirectX etc. - but games are for consoles anyway
But MSFT will like (or not know any better other than) to beat on the Vista dead-horse.
Good luck with that, Redmond. In the meantime, see Apple continue to grow its Mac-sales grow double digit every year.
cheers,
Rainer
The Head of IT in the German city of Schwäbisch Hall had the oldest female member of staff demo some day-to-day work (via a beamer) to the rest of the staff on the new linux desktops.
When the rest of the staff saw that even the old lady could master it, they couldn't complain about the system being "too complicated" whithout putting an egg on their own face...
This (true) story always reminds me of the morale that psychology matters even more than technical facts and orders.
RT Does all that.
And more.
(Together with its "cousin" RTFM)
Advice: Install FreeBSD 6.2, update the ports and install it via the ports-system.
Installing and using RT is one of the most sensible things you can do in IT.
> Yeah, I'm sure the "In Germany" part of your post was really necessary cause, you know, it doesn't happen anywhere else.
;-)
I must admit that I'm not familiar with the situation anywhere else in the world.
It was a cheap shot, anyway, I didn't want to generalize.
Though, the last sentence alone would probably already qualify for a "You must be new here" comment
> What laws would EVER get 90% approval?!
In Germany, the laws that increase the salary of the politicians usually get 100% approval...
> The plural of hardware is hardware, not hardwares.
> Does slashdot not have a "check spelling" feature on the submission page?
You must be new here.
Back then, there wasn't that much money to be made from book-deals and "exclusives", so most of his "victims" never spoke up, I guess.
But JFK appararently had a faible for relatively violent sexual practises - and he was a sex-addict. Those facts were well known (or at least, there were very loud rumors) in journalistic circles - but nobody wanted to write about it.
Still, JFK has a high reputation in the world. The uncoverings concerning his private life did next to nothing to reduce it.
The same with Bill Clinton. At least, he could show Europe and Japan on a map and thus the rest of the world got the feeling that he wasn't totally dependend on "advisors" and toadies.
> Some people have said that the "sweet spot"
> for Vista performance is FOUR gigs of RAM.
I just bought one of those Dell E521 DC Athlons.
One problem with the pre-installed Vista is all the crap that comes with it.
Google Desktop, Roxio, an Antivirus Tool. On first start (with 1 GB of RAM), it would crawl and thrash the harddisk like there was no tomorrow.
My MacMini G4 felt much snappier in comparison...
When I added the additional 2 GBs I had bought (I was only running Vista to update the BIOS and the BIOS of the DVD-burner - the box will run FreeBSD and/or Solaris), it got better.
But still - Vista is a really crazy OS. Though (or maybe even just because) a lot of complexity is hidden from the user, you've sometimes got to be very knowledgable to do "the right thing". And the strange quirks and idiosynrasis of the interface...
I think, using Vista could drive me seriously crazy. If I had to use it daily, over time, I'd get mad. It was OK for those few minutes (I installed Safari, just for kicks) - but using it daily? No, thank you.
Back to the original "sweet-spot"-debate: I'm well aware that one can probably tune Vista so that it performs well - but how many people do that?
It will happen in the corporate world, but what most people will get as a first-impression is simply: slow-as-molasses.
MacOS X Tiger (and I assume the upcoming Leopard, too) ship with no 3rd-party software installed (except for Flash and Java).
Clean desktop.
Clean statusbar.
Ironically, this is one of the results of the anti-trust lawsuit, that allowed OEM to install whatever software they wanted onto the pre-installed Windoze.
Now, some do (and Dell isn't the worst offender - by no degree) and the result is mayhem for most everybody.
Finally, the words make sense.