Haven't you ever heard of a newsgroup killfile? Guess what? They were were around and extremely popular long before the "internet" went mainstream.
If I want to use someone's spam blacklist it's no different than if I want to use someone's killfile. You have to the right to speak, but I don't have to listen.
Well, if you did what we did and transition your SGI 02 R10-12ks to 2+Ghz PCs w/ a good quality graphics card, you can expect to see 5-10x the rendering performance at 1/3rd of the price.
If you're used to SGI's extremely high quality "no bullshit" service department you might be in for a rude surprise, however. Even the very high end Dell service plans will only get you someone who goes on site for 30mins to change a component. They neither have the willingness nor the ability to diagnose symptoms, and none of them know ANYTHING about Linux.
This can cause you a lot of pain and suffering if you have difficult-to-localize hardware issues in a demanding environment. My advice would be to either keep your own inventory for severe support scenarios, or go with a system vendor that provides a much higher quality level of field service than Dell's "partners".
I appreciate both teams. Mozilla was the little gecko engine that could, that never gave up and eventually plodded to stability. Mozilla is one of the most successful open source projects today and a major bastion against a microsoft-locked internet.
FirebirdSQL was born from Borland's utter mismanagement of Interbase. The only reason they didn't kill the product outright is because of the great user community. Only a determined and personally involved user community has salvaged the interbase code from years of neglect to a very respectable open source database system. Firebird is the leading developer of the interbase code today, eclipsing borland's own efforts in many areas. It is every bit as competitive a system as mysql and postgresql.
Both products clearly deserve respect and admiration. Anyone who disparages the core accomplishments of either group would be hard pressed to do better.
This makes the current scandal all the more sad. I think everyone who has ever seen a news group or a major mailing list understands the need for good etiquette on the net.
Regardless of the legal issues, it is bad etiquette for the mozilla folks to rename phoenix firebird. Of course the Mozilla folks *can* use phoenix, but it's not very nice. There's plenty of name space for everyone.. Be a good neighbor and pick a non-conflicting name. This is social skills 101, a total no-brainer- Don't alienate people for no good reason.
The Firebird (SQL) users should publicly appologize for advocating such guerilla protest tactics. I saddens me that many people's first impression of this great project will be formed from the emotional rantings of a minority. Do protest publicly, but do so with logic and reason.
Of course it makes sense to quarantine people who are ill with SARS. No one knows many hard facts about it yet, except that it can spread really fast and it can kill. Quarantine is perfectly logical at this stage. In my opinion, anyone who knowingly breaks quarantine and recklessly puts other people in danger should be treated as a criminal.
I worked for a company that supported telecommuters. The justified it on the grounds of office space savings. In order to qualify you had to have the following:
1. An area of your house dedicated exclusively to business-related work. It had to be one room with a closable door at a minimum. You had to buy a lockable file cabinet for confidential material and sign a document retention policy to insure that you knew what you were expected to back up (and where) and what you were expected to destroy.
2. An exclusive business phone line, which was patched into the company PBX and it effectively became just another extension, as if you were working at the company's office.
3. You were provided with a computer (usually a laptop) with dialup internet service. Some people negotiated various deals for broadband service. The computer was patched into the company's network using a VPN tunnel, and it effectively put you on the company's network just as if you were working at the company office.
4. You were provided with a peronal fax machine, a personal laser printer, an a cheap scanner.
5. Internal IM technology was used for normal chit-chat with people on the company's network to cut down on phone bills. Teleconferencing was used for meetings.
6. You had to be willing to be technically self-sufficent and do more self-tech-help than is normally expected.
7. You were expected to work regular business hours, the specifics of which were negotiable with your manager.
8. The telecommuter option was presented as a privilege that could be revoked at any time, and was automatically revoked if there were problems on your performance reviews.
--
In practice it worked out for about 2/3 of the people that tried it. Many people couldn't keep their equipment properly maintained and pissed off the IT group. When their equipment came back it would be full of porn, spyware, adware, and signs that their kids used it in a wrestling match.
Some other people got canned from the program because every time you called them for something they were either unavailable or trying to talk over their screaming children, which really got annoying.
Dialup was very painful for people who need to access large files. One marketing person (graphics intensive) person was taken off telecommuter status because they didn't have cable or DSL in their area, the company didn't want to spring for a dedicated line, and it was slowing everyone down waiting for them to download and process large images over a dialup line.
I'm really not qualified to give a comprehensive analysis of how the r* programs and.rhosts files are insecure. If you're looking for that check out CERT's web site, or read the entry-level books about computer security. I do know of a few of the major issues, however:
The major problems with the r* applications is that all network traffic between hosts is unencrypted. This makes it trivial for someone on the network to sniff passwords and command text. This is a whoppingly huge vulnerability, because people are inherently lazy and they will eventually do something over an r* command that compromises security to other systems. I know people that use rlogin to get to a machine that supports ssh, which they then use to get into a 3rd system... there's not much point in that. It's like taping a bunch of copied keys next to the lock they goes into. r* applications are the proverbial weakest link that undermines the security of everything attached to them.
Using ethernet switches instead of hubs doesn't fix the problem - There are large numbers of attack vectors for that setup as well. The r* protocols are very vulnerable to spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks at multiple network layers.
The same applies to.rhosts. Yes, it may be technically true that your "not transmitting the login password over the network", but you've pretty much opened the machine wide for anyone who can spoof an IP connection or manipulate the.rhosts file. Once again, you're creating a weak link that can bring down every system connected to it.
The r* protocols are vulnerable by their very design, not just from the usual buffer overruns and code logic errors (although there are those too).
Even looking at the problem from a practical point of view, the number of reported system compromises due to the use of the r* protocols is so staggering that people now assume that everyone understands not to run these services.
Heh, by your Nick I'll assume this a troll, but programmers are lazy above all things. They tend to consider a problem "solved" once it minimally works, and do not like to polish it off with things like error handling, documentation, security hardening, etc.
There's plenty of very talented programmers here who I constantly butt heads with because they do not want to update their apps which use rsh, rlogin, rwho,.rhosts files, and unauthenicated X sessions across the network, despite the fact that the risks are obvious and the solutions are relatively easy.
My experience with the Meyers-Briggs literature is that one of their core tennants is that none of their 16 major personality types is 'better' than another.
I don't believe this test was intended to be used for job discrimination. The seminars I attended focused on using the test as a tool to understand people's work strategies better, and better enable managers to play off of individual's strengths.
Using this kind of test for black-and-white discrimination would seem to be a perversion of its purpose. It seems tantamount to attending a "gender awareness" seminar and taking away the idea that it's too much trouble to hire women.
"Our help desk is pretty much a joke. Most people don't bother calling them, they go straight to the developers or whomever they think can actually help them. I am trying to work with the manager of the Help Desk group and give him some ideas of how to improve in some key areas. I would like some opinions on my approach, as well as any comments you feel pertinent to the situation."
Well, that sounds like most internal helpdesks that I've run across. The fundamental problem is that the frontline tier of people are often thick as bricks. Calling them up is just as bad as any other so-called tech support operation. You spend 20 minutes providing tracking information to someone who reads to you off some idiotic diagram that you should reboot. Lets face it, some helpdesk people, while eager and pleasant, are totally ignorant of the underlying mechanisms of the products they support and possess neither the faculties nor the ambition to diagnose a problem. Worse, if you attract too much attention from them they might disk-blast your system and ruin hours of customizations you might have set up.
Well, obviously my advice should never be applied in a formal business setting, because it is entirely coming from the point of the admin or developer who gets stuck taking up the slack of a bad helpdesk.
But, if you want to hear it anyway, here's what you do:
1. Don't hire helpdesk staff. Hire admins and junior admins that share helpdesk duties as part of their "apprenticeship".
2. (pipe dream) Put a computer in a room, loaded up with your company standard software. When you interview potential new hires, give them a simple task to do on the system. It should be something unfamiliar to them, but easy enough that they could figure out with 5 minutes of minimal effort. If the person does not at least make an attempt to solve the problem themselves, do not hire them.
3. Train your helpdesk staff to show users how to solve their own problems. Do not solve the problem for them while they are at lunch. If they call a helpdesk member over to do something, that person should stay at their desk and watch the entire time. They shouldn't go get coffee or talk with their neighbor. If you diagnose something over the phone, insist on an accurate description of symptoms. Don't settle for "It doesn't work" or "It's acting up". Let people know that you're there to help them, but that they have to be willing to help themselves. This is hard to do at first, but once you get going no one thinks anything of it, and users solve their own problems a lot more often.
4. Set up an intranet site/phone number where you can put status updates. Train people to visit it instead of each employee individually calling the helpdesk every 5 minutes when something goes wrong.
5. Have semi-annual fun training classes, where the helpdesk staff teach people to filter spam, use google, use tabs in mozilla, and generally introduce new pieces of consumer-level technology. Use these sessions to re-educate everyone about electronic security issues.
6. If you get users that intentionally break their computers hoping to get new systems, give them even older systems as replacements to set an example.
7. Have a published, fair system for replacing systems as they become obsolete. Don't play favourites.
8. Don't institute draconian anti-privacy policies that can be used to spy on users's desktops and/or read their email.
If you do even some of these things, your helpdesk will be efficient and respected vehicle for streamlining your entire business. If you go the traditional route you'll end up with a cost center full of what amounts to cheery office assistants.
I like Chimera a lot. It's near perfect for my usage, and I prefer it over Safari. My only suggustion is to add "close tab" buttons on each of the tabs, like galeon does under Linux. I miss these immensely for the easy, one-step ability to close tabs that *aren't* currently active.
Thanks for the all the open source browser beasts:) -OT
As strange as it may seem to a simple market interpretation, craptapular and trivial apps do sell under some OS's. One of the reasons may be that the cost of the development tools to make a better app on that OS are much more expensive than shelling out 10-20$ for a poor, but workable solution. There's an effective barrier to entry that acts to keep quality down at the lowest end of the software rung.
Does Cocoa Gestures and keyboard shortcuts let you close tabs other than the one that is currently open? If not, it isn't as convenient for me in most situations.
Tabs are a killer feature for me. Once I started using tabs in Galeon, all other browsers suddenly seemed awkward and frustrating to use over a long period of time. Right now I have 7 tabs open in Galeon, and I can easily read enough of the titles to know what page is what.
Many of the tabs have become a semi-permanent fixture in my browser, in that I use them for quick access to site multiple times a day. Some of the pages the tabs point at auto-refresh, so all I have to do is hit the tab to get a quick update for that set of information.
Another great way to use tabs is to index a string of links as you pursue it. It's like sticking your fingers in a choose-your-own-adventure book at each junction, for those who can remember ever doing that. Tabs make this very easy to do, much easier than bookmarks.
Tabs manage pop-ups more elegantly than full-pages. The pop ups do not obscure the previous pages, so you can read them only when you are ready.
One feature galeon has that complements tab-browsing is that it remembering your tabs and across sessions, so even if you have to reboot or accidently kill the webbrowser you can instantly get back a rich session that might otherwise take 10 minutes to set up.
I like Chimera a lot, but I still prefer galeon because Galeon puts close "X" buttons on each tab. If Chimera did that it would be perfect for me.
I can't even contemplate a tabless browser for anything more than rudimentary local HTML file viewing. People multitask, and tabs help you do this without wasting screen space or cluttering the task bar, which has enough applications to deal with as it is.
Until I see the DoomIV as Free Software, I can't consider this movement a success.
Better get coding then, or start nagging ID. Let us know how it works out for you.
Thankfully, your expert opinion of Free Software will not prevent me from using Mozilla and OpenOffice on Linux, along with the thousands of other open source tools and applications many companies and individuals depend on.
Since the vast majority Linux development tools are Free and installed by default by many distributions, there's less justification for someone to hack out a craptapular trivial app, closed source, and charge money for it. Most shareware apps are not advanced enough to compete with open source equivalents. If the shareware app is a simple accomplishment, which many are, someone will eventually scratch an itch, make an open source work-alike, and ever-after that open source app will gain the benefit of a wider pool of developers.
It would make more sense for someone seeking light income to either create a closed source app that is truly above-and-beyond anything currently open source, or to make their app open source and charge money for it under an honor/donation system, or for support, or for automatic updates, or in exchange for additional customization/integration work, or one of the other various schemes others have come up with.
It's the example MS and other closed-source OS vendors set with the exclusive and expensive licensing of developer tools and developer documentation, that encourages closed-source shareware. Thankfully, Linux is not hampered by these barriers to development.
The Quantum Guardian NAS servers sound like exactly what you want. It's turnkey hardware fileserver solution that uses Linux behind the scenes. I posted some detailed information about one of these devices here. It's a pretty polished system and you might want to take a look at it.
I've seen this phenomena before, and everyone has probably been exposed to it whether they understood it or not.
After putting enough time into something that turns out to be unsatisfying, sometimes your mind becomes it's own worst enemy. You don't want to stop, because doing that would be an admission that you've been wasting countless money and time for far too long. Facing that fact is often difficult for people to deal with, and so they will rationalize a reason for continuing their unsatisfying behavior, and display hostility to others who quit, because quitters disrupt the illusion that the activity still has merit.
Examples:
- Everquest and some other mud-like games.
- A company that continues to use an inferior product simply because they were conned into spending an excessive amount of money on it originally.
- People that linger too long in obviously bad relationships
Write down the cost of a 200GB IDE hard drive (the western digital ones are quite speedy and have 8MB cache). Then add the cost of IDE/SCSI converter.
Now, compare that figure with the cost of a 200GB SCSI drive- *IF* you can even find such a beast.
For bonus points, figure out how much an 8-drive IDE RAID enclosure that presents a SCSI interface to a host computer, or an 8-drive 3ware internal RAID controller will save you when populated with 200GB IDE drives over a pure SCSI solution.
Many usage patterns need high capacity, but not require the benefits that high end SCSI drives provide over IDE. Why pay 5X as much for them if you don't need to?
With a 5-fold savings, you can buy more drives and use a RAID, increasing both your reliability and your performance over a single scsi drive solution.
Sounds like a perfect case for small claims court. You can submit a claim yourself and do not need a lawyer. You may have to wait a while to get a hearing scheduled but once that starts the whole thing is usually over in minutes. You should be able to get them to settle with you, because it will cost them more than 22$ in time just to show up and defend themselves.
Even if they do show up, having the printed tickets as evidence should give you an easy win.
I just looked at a Quantum Guardian 4400 NAS device recently.
It's a 1U rackmount system with four IDE drives, a custom motherboard that sports a 1Ghz PIII and two onboard gigabit ethernet controllers, usb, a serial port, and two onboard promise IDE controllers.
The NAS boots linux (a 2.4.18 variant) off of some kind of flash chip and then uses linux's software raid and LVM to manage the drives. The drives are formatted using the XFS filesystem
You use a small self-contained java application to initially set the IP address, and thereafter you can use a web browser to administer it. It has features up the ying-yang, including various backup options, automated updates, failover, load balancing, and synchronizing with peer NAS devices. It supports a full suite of filesharing protocols and has quota support, access control, etc.
You can even enable an SSHD server and log in, although I haven't been able to find the root password yet. I don't know if quantum will provide it willingly or if you will have to aquire it yourself.
I benchmarked it's NFS performance against similar configurations we've built in house and it is well optimized for latency and bandwidth in the ranges allowed by gigabit ethernet. In particular there were no lengthy pauses that we sometimes see on ext3-based systems.
I was impressed with how well they were able to polish the box and make it appear that so many different, complex filesharing subsystems and features were seemlessly integrated.
Slashdot Mirror
Errr, buy a cheap hub and be done with it if you're router is a T1 or less. It will run virtually forever without impacting performance.
If you are a hardware snob then go out and buy an expensive hub to the specifications you desire. All the big boys make them.
Haven't you ever heard of a newsgroup killfile? Guess what? They were were around and extremely popular long before the "internet" went mainstream.
If I want to use someone's spam blacklist it's no different than if I want to use someone's killfile. You have to the right to speak, but I don't have to listen.
Well, if you did what we did and transition your SGI 02 R10-12ks to 2+Ghz PCs w/ a good quality graphics card, you can expect to see 5-10x the rendering performance at 1/3rd of the price.
If you're used to SGI's extremely high quality "no bullshit" service department you might be in for a rude surprise, however. Even the very high end Dell service plans will only get you someone who goes on site for 30mins to change a component. They neither have the willingness nor the ability to diagnose symptoms, and none of them know ANYTHING about Linux.
This can cause you a lot of pain and suffering if you have difficult-to-localize hardware issues in a demanding environment. My advice would be to either keep your own inventory for severe support scenarios, or go with a system vendor that provides a much higher quality level of field service than Dell's "partners".
I appreciate both teams. Mozilla was the little gecko engine that could, that never gave up and eventually plodded to stability. Mozilla is one of the most successful open source projects today and a major bastion against a microsoft-locked internet.
FirebirdSQL was born from Borland's utter mismanagement of Interbase. The only reason they didn't kill the product outright is because of the great user community. Only a determined and personally involved user community has salvaged the interbase code from years of neglect to a very respectable open source database system. Firebird
is the leading developer of the interbase code today, eclipsing borland's own efforts in many areas. It is every bit as competitive a system as mysql and postgresql.
Both products clearly deserve respect and admiration. Anyone who disparages the core accomplishments of either group would be hard pressed to do better.
This makes the current scandal all the more sad. I think everyone who has ever seen a news group or a major mailing list understands the need for good etiquette on the net.
Regardless of the legal issues, it is bad etiquette for the mozilla folks to rename phoenix firebird. Of course the Mozilla folks *can* use phoenix, but it's not very nice. There's plenty of name space for everyone.. Be a good neighbor and pick a non-conflicting name. This is social skills 101, a total no-brainer- Don't alienate people for no good reason.
The Firebird (SQL) users should publicly appologize for advocating such guerilla protest tactics. I saddens me that many people's first impression of this great project will be formed from the emotional rantings of a minority. Do protest publicly, but do so with logic and reason.
I hope this all blows over quickly.
Of course it makes sense to quarantine people who are ill with SARS. No one knows many hard facts about it yet, except that it can spread really fast and it can kill. Quarantine is perfectly logical at this stage. In my opinion, anyone who knowingly breaks quarantine and recklessly puts other people in danger should be treated as a criminal.
I worked for a company that supported telecommuters. The justified it on the grounds of office space savings. In order to qualify you had to have the following:
1. An area of your house dedicated exclusively to business-related work. It had to be one room with a closable door at a minimum. You had to buy a lockable file cabinet for confidential material and sign a document retention policy to insure that you knew what you were expected to back up (and where) and what you were expected to destroy.
2. An exclusive business phone line, which was patched into the company PBX and it effectively became just another extension, as if you were working at the company's office.
3. You were provided with a computer (usually a laptop) with dialup internet service. Some people negotiated various deals for broadband service. The computer was patched into the company's network using a VPN tunnel, and it effectively put you on the company's network just as if you were working at the company office.
4. You were provided with a peronal fax machine, a personal laser printer, an a cheap scanner.
5. Internal IM technology was used for normal chit-chat with people on the company's network to cut down on phone bills. Teleconferencing was used for meetings.
6. You had to be willing to be technically self-sufficent and do more self-tech-help than is normally expected.
7. You were expected to work regular business hours, the specifics of which were negotiable with your manager.
8. The telecommuter option was presented as a privilege that could be revoked at any time, and was automatically revoked if there were problems on your performance reviews.
--
In practice it worked out for about 2/3 of the people that tried it. Many people couldn't keep their equipment properly maintained and pissed off the IT group. When their equipment came back it would be full of porn, spyware, adware, and signs that their kids used it in a wrestling match.
Some other people got canned from the program because every time you called them for something they were either unavailable or trying to talk over their screaming children, which really got annoying.
Dialup was very painful for people who need to access large files. One marketing person (graphics intensive) person was taken off telecommuter status because they didn't have cable or DSL in their area, the company didn't want to spring for a dedicated line, and it was slowing everyone down waiting for them to download and process large images over a dialup line.
Did anyone else read the title of this article and expect to see Jon Katz's name under it, back from the killfile? :P
I'm really not qualified to give a comprehensive analysis of how the r* programs and .rhosts files are insecure. If you're looking for that check out CERT's web site, or read the entry-level books about computer security. I do know of a few of the major issues, however:
.rhosts. Yes, it may be technically true that your "not transmitting the login password over the network", but you've pretty much opened the machine wide for anyone who can spoof an IP connection or manipulate the .rhosts file. Once again, you're creating a weak link that can bring down every system connected to it.
The major problems with the r* applications is that all network traffic between hosts is unencrypted. This makes it trivial for someone on the network to sniff passwords and command text. This is a whoppingly huge vulnerability, because people are inherently lazy and they will eventually do something over an r* command that compromises security to other systems. I know people that use rlogin to get to a machine that supports ssh, which they then use to get into a 3rd system... there's not much point in that. It's like taping a bunch of copied keys next to the lock they goes into. r* applications are the proverbial weakest link that undermines the security of everything attached to them.
Using ethernet switches instead of hubs doesn't fix the problem - There are large numbers of attack vectors for that setup as well. The r* protocols are very vulnerable to spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks at multiple network layers.
The same applies to
The r* protocols are vulnerable by their very design, not just from the usual buffer overruns and code logic errors (although there are those too).
Even looking at the problem from a practical point of view, the number of reported system compromises due to the use of the r* protocols is so staggering that people now assume that everyone understands not to run these services.
Heh, by your Nick I'll assume this a troll, but programmers are lazy above all things. They tend to consider a problem "solved" once it minimally works, and do not like to polish it off with things like error handling, documentation, security hardening, etc.
.rhosts files, and unauthenicated X sessions across the network, despite the fact that the risks are obvious and the solutions are relatively easy.
There's plenty of very talented programmers here who I constantly butt heads with because they do not want to update their apps which use rsh, rlogin, rwho,
I think that the choices are:
350$/system one time cost for enterprise license, putting you on a platform with 5 yrs official support
or
0-60$/system one time cost for community license, putting you on a platform with 1 yr official support
--
After you make that decision, you can either download the official updates manually yourself, or pay for greater convenience:
60$/yr per system for basic up2date service
240$/yr per system for enterprise up2date service
My experience with the Meyers-Briggs literature is that one of their core tennants is that none of their 16 major personality types is 'better' than another.
I don't believe this test was intended to be used for job discrimination. The seminars I attended focused on using the test as a tool to understand people's work strategies better, and better enable managers to play off of individual's strengths.
Using this kind of test for black-and-white discrimination would seem to be a perversion of its purpose. It seems tantamount to attending a "gender awareness" seminar and taking away the idea that it's too much trouble to hire women.
"Our help desk is pretty much a joke. Most people don't bother calling them, they go straight to the developers or whomever they think can actually help them. I am trying to work with the manager of the Help Desk group and give him some ideas of how to improve in some key areas. I would like some opinions on my approach, as well as any comments you feel pertinent to the situation."
Well, that sounds like most internal helpdesks that I've run across. The fundamental problem is that the frontline tier of people are often thick as bricks. Calling them up is just as bad as any other so-called tech support operation. You spend 20 minutes providing tracking information to someone who reads to you off some idiotic diagram that you should reboot. Lets face it, some helpdesk people, while eager and pleasant, are totally ignorant of the underlying mechanisms of the products they support and possess neither the faculties nor the ambition to diagnose a problem. Worse, if you attract too much attention from them they might disk-blast your system and ruin hours of customizations you might have set up.
Well, obviously my advice should never be applied in a formal business setting, because it is entirely coming from the point of the admin or developer who gets stuck taking up the slack of a bad helpdesk.
But, if you want to hear it anyway, here's what you do:
1. Don't hire helpdesk staff. Hire admins and junior admins that share helpdesk duties as part of their "apprenticeship".
2. (pipe dream) Put a computer in a room, loaded up with your company standard software. When you interview potential new hires, give them a simple task to do on the system. It should be something unfamiliar to them, but easy enough that they could figure out with 5 minutes of minimal effort. If the person does not at least make an attempt to solve the problem themselves, do not hire them.
3. Train your helpdesk staff to show users how to solve their own problems. Do not solve the problem for them while they are at lunch. If they call a helpdesk member over to do something, that person should stay at their desk and watch the entire time. They shouldn't go get coffee or talk with their neighbor. If you diagnose something over the phone, insist on an accurate description of symptoms. Don't settle for "It doesn't work" or "It's acting up". Let people know that you're there to help them, but that they have to be willing to help themselves. This is hard to do at first, but once you get going no one thinks anything of it, and users solve their own problems a lot more often.
4. Set up an intranet site/phone number where you can put status updates. Train people to visit it instead of each employee individually calling the helpdesk every 5 minutes when something goes wrong.
5. Have semi-annual fun training classes, where the helpdesk staff teach people to filter spam, use google, use tabs in mozilla, and generally introduce new pieces of consumer-level technology. Use these sessions to re-educate everyone about electronic security issues.
6. If you get users that intentionally break their computers hoping to get new systems, give them even older systems as replacements to set an example.
7. Have a published, fair system for replacing systems as they become obsolete. Don't play favourites.
8. Don't institute draconian anti-privacy policies that can be used to spy on users's desktops and/or read their email.
If you do even some of these things, your helpdesk will be efficient and respected vehicle for streamlining your entire business. If you go the traditional route you'll end up with a cost center full of what amounts to cheery office assistants.
I like Chimera a lot. It's near perfect for my usage, and I prefer it over Safari. My only suggustion is to add "close tab" buttons on each of the tabs, like galeon does under Linux. I miss these immensely for the easy, one-step ability to close tabs that *aren't* currently active.
:)
Thanks for the all the open source browser beasts
-OT
As strange as it may seem to a simple market interpretation, craptapular and trivial apps do sell under some OS's. One of the reasons may be that the cost of the development tools to make a better app on that OS are much more expensive than shelling out 10-20$ for a poor, but workable solution. There's an effective barrier to entry that acts to keep quality down at the lowest end of the software rung.
Does Cocoa Gestures and keyboard shortcuts let you close tabs other than the one that is currently open? If not, it isn't as convenient for me in most situations.
Tabs are a killer feature for me. Once I started using tabs in Galeon, all other browsers suddenly seemed awkward and frustrating to use over a long period of time. Right now I have 7 tabs open in Galeon, and I can easily read enough of the titles to know what page is what.
Many of the tabs have become a semi-permanent fixture in my browser, in that I use them for quick access to site multiple times a day. Some of the pages the tabs point at auto-refresh, so all I have to do is hit the tab to get a quick update for that set of information.
Another great way to use tabs is to index a string of links as you pursue it. It's like sticking your fingers in a choose-your-own-adventure book at each junction, for those who can remember ever doing that. Tabs make this very easy to do, much easier than bookmarks.
Tabs manage pop-ups more elegantly than full-pages. The pop ups do not obscure the previous pages, so you can read them only when you are ready.
One feature galeon has that complements tab-browsing is that it remembering your tabs and across sessions, so even if you have to reboot or accidently kill the webbrowser you can instantly get back a rich session that might otherwise take 10 minutes to set up.
I like Chimera a lot, but I still prefer galeon because Galeon puts close "X" buttons on each tab. If Chimera did that it would be perfect for me.
I can't even contemplate a tabless browser for anything more than rudimentary local HTML file viewing. People multitask, and tabs help you do this without wasting screen space or cluttering the task bar, which has enough applications to deal with as it is.
Better get coding then, or start nagging ID. Let us know how it works out for you.
Thankfully, your expert opinion of Free Software will not prevent me from using Mozilla and OpenOffice on Linux, along with the thousands of other open source tools and applications many companies and individuals depend on.
Since the vast majority Linux development tools are Free and installed by default by many distributions, there's less justification for someone to hack out a craptapular trivial app, closed source, and charge money for it. Most shareware apps are not advanced enough to compete with open source equivalents. If the shareware app is a simple accomplishment, which many are, someone will eventually scratch an itch, make an open source work-alike, and ever-after that open source app will gain the benefit of a wider pool of developers.
It would make more sense for someone seeking light income to either create a closed source app that is truly above-and-beyond anything currently open source, or to make their app open source and charge money for it under an honor/donation system, or for support, or for automatic updates, or in exchange for additional customization/integration work, or one of the other various schemes others have come up with.
It's the example MS and other closed-source OS vendors set with the exclusive and expensive licensing of developer tools and developer documentation, that encourages closed-source shareware. Thankfully, Linux is not hampered by these barriers to development.
The Quantum Guardian NAS servers sound like exactly what you want. It's turnkey hardware fileserver solution that uses Linux behind the scenes. I posted some detailed information about one of these devices here. It's a pretty polished system and you might want to take a look at it.
I've seen this phenomena before, and everyone has probably been exposed to it whether they understood it or not.
:)
After putting enough time into something that turns out to be unsatisfying, sometimes your mind becomes it's own worst enemy. You don't want to stop, because doing that would be an admission that you've been wasting countless money and time for far too long. Facing that fact is often difficult for people to deal with, and so they will rationalize a reason for continuing their unsatisfying behavior, and display hostility to others who quit, because quitters disrupt the illusion that the activity still has merit.
Examples:
- Everquest and some other mud-like games.
- A company that continues to use an inferior product simply because they were conned into spending an excessive amount of money on it originally.
- People that linger too long in obviously bad relationships
- Javier, of Les Miserables fame
Err, the answer is painfully obvious.
Write down the cost of a 200GB IDE hard drive (the western digital ones are quite speedy and have 8MB cache). Then add the cost of IDE/SCSI converter.
Now, compare that figure with the cost of a 200GB SCSI drive- *IF* you can even find such a beast.
For bonus points, figure out how much an 8-drive IDE RAID enclosure that presents a SCSI interface to a host computer, or an 8-drive 3ware internal RAID controller will save you when populated with 200GB IDE drives over a pure SCSI solution.
Many usage patterns need high capacity, but not require the benefits that high end SCSI drives provide over IDE. Why pay 5X as much for them if you don't need to?
With a 5-fold savings, you can buy more drives and use a RAID, increasing both your reliability and your performance over a single scsi drive solution.
Sounds like a perfect case for small claims court. You can submit a claim yourself and do not need a lawyer. You may have to wait a while to get a hearing scheduled but once that starts the whole thing is usually over in minutes. You should be able to get them to settle with you, because it will cost them more than 22$ in time just to show up and defend themselves.
Even if they do show up, having the printed tickets as evidence should give you an easy win.
Check out your local laws!
Unfortunately, it's NOT good enough to allow you to properly debug applications that use that driver, or debug the driver itself.
It's about as open source as Cheney's list of energy policy contributors.
I just looked at a Quantum Guardian 4400 NAS device recently.
It's a 1U rackmount system with four IDE drives, a custom motherboard that sports a 1Ghz PIII and two onboard gigabit ethernet controllers, usb, a serial port, and two onboard promise IDE controllers.
The NAS boots linux (a 2.4.18 variant) off of some kind of flash chip and then uses linux's software raid and LVM to manage the drives. The drives are formatted using the XFS filesystem
You use a small self-contained java application to initially set the IP address, and thereafter you can use a web browser to administer it. It has features up the ying-yang, including various backup options, automated updates, failover, load balancing, and synchronizing with peer NAS devices. It supports a full suite of filesharing protocols and has quota support, access control, etc.
You can even enable an SSHD server and log in, although I haven't been able to find the root password yet. I don't know if quantum will provide it willingly or if you will have to aquire it yourself.
I benchmarked it's NFS performance against similar configurations we've built in house and it is well optimized for latency and bandwidth in the ranges allowed by gigabit ethernet. In particular there were no lengthy pauses that we sometimes see on ext3-based systems.
I was impressed with how well they were able to polish the box and make it appear that so many different, complex filesharing subsystems and features were seemlessly integrated.
Excellent interview! He's brutally open, tempermental, and more often than not correct. This man is a true dwarf in the Crytonomicon sense.
Cheers!