I hope he makes SCO pay for every freaking penny of the court's and IBM's time. At least until they dry up and blow away. That would suck for SCO stockholders, but anyone left holding SCO is (IMO) nuts, anyway. SCO deserves to die a public, humiliating death at this point. The principle need to spend a long time in public stocks, maybe on a flatbed trailer that travels around the country (as) as punishment and (b) as a warning to similar scumbags.
Waste of resources? Can you even buy a disk smaller than 80GB for a server these days? The GUI RPMs take up less than 1GB of space. Sometimes there are annoying dependencies, so we just do the full install. We do find, from time to time, that running a GUI tool on a server (core or compute) has its uses. And our workstations have to run X. So we just install everything (well, inside the firewall 8^), set to runlevel 3, and that's that. Which wastes no resources other than a bit of disk space that's in the noise range from my vantage point.
Our company uses a lot of EDA tools. The tool vendors only support their tools on certain OSes. RHEL is one of the few, and everyone supports it.
At home I used the Scientific Linux rebuild of RHEL since we use that at work and I knew it, plus that way I became more intimate with all of its parts. Now, I still have one system at home running that but all the others are (or soon will be) Fedora Core 6. They could as easily be anything else; I just figured FC6 would upgrade easily from older RH and it did (even an RH8 system, which is supposedly not a good idea).
We have a couple of dozen Linux systems for infrastructure, in a variety of roles. We run them all level 3. If we really need to, we can start X on them by typing "startx" at a console. Same thing for our compute servers. Even most desktops run this way. But especially on the non-desktops there are many reasons not to run in level 5, and none to run there.
At home, sure, level 5. There's no reason for X NOT to be up unless I'm doing certain types of maintenance, and my wife doesn't want to know any more about computers than she has to.
At work, run level 3 unless a user wants to change that on his or her desktop.
We tried RHEL support. Paid good money for several advanced server licenses. Turnaround time on problems was abysmal, and they weren't that much help. (This was about a year ago.) We use Scientific Linux on everything now. Support is somewhat minimal, but it's better than RedHat's and free.
We need to upgrade soon. We'll re-evaluate with SL, CentOS and RHEL (and perhaps "Unbreakable" Linux). But even with allegedly lower pricing (I haven't looked into what their new model would charge for 100 desktop workstations, 200 compute servers and a couple dozen infrastructure servers) RH will have a hard time getting our vote after the poor support we received before. We paid, IIRC, $700 - $800 per license, and it took them between two and three weeks to be sure that they were "fairly sure" a specific chipset probably wasn't supported on a motherboard. The SL response was "check the source and kernel logs", but at least it was fast (and free!) We pay for tool licenses. If we get good support we'll pay reasonable fees for OS licenses. Absent said support, we won't pay a penny if we don't have to.
We run EDA tools. To get support from tool vendors, we have to run certain versions of certain enterprise class Linuxes. So we really need to know that the box will run with (for example) RHEL4. This is just as true of the workstations as the rackmount servers. If Dell (for example) sells systems with RHEL4, I have reason to believe the system will actually *work* with RHEL4. If they don't, I have a reasonable expectation that it *won't* work, based on past experience. PC mfrs are always putting new hardware out, and that isn't always going to work with the OS that's been out a while as a stable version.
There are plenty of exmaples of this besides those involving EDA tools.
There are several classes of users, not just one. At home, I'm fine with buying a box and trying thing til it works, to a point. At work, when we need a new batch of servers or desktops right now, I can't afford the time to mess around with it. It needs to work out of the box.
I got to their page. It was annoyingly slow, but not horrible. OK, so it's/.ed. I can live with that.
BUT... they advertise an "enterprise grade" product. Too bad they don't have an "enterprise grade" web page.
I cannot stand to go to a website's main page, and find nothing useful on it.
At a bare minimum, there should be a paragraph or two telling me what the thing really is, with an obvious link for an overview, technical specs, etc. Instead, I'm left guessing. Maybe I can go to "documentation" and find this. (Then again, at least half the time I follow such a link from an open source project, I still have to hunt around.) And even that link, nebulous as it is, isn't on the main menu!
Nope, nothing useful there. Maybe the community portal? Nope, nothing there at all!
What about the comparison with other products? Oog. It may be useful if you speak OpenView (I don't).
Please (and this applies to all project maintainers, not just these guys), don't waste one *&^$% minute apologizing for your web pages. Instead, spend just an hour or two putting up useful data with decent organization. If you haven't got a clue how to do that, find a college student in marketing who needs to design a web site for credit and get them to do it. Get your sister to do it. Anyone.
We have some specific network management needs. We can't afford Tivoli or OpenView. Based on experience with Tivoli a decade ago, I've avoided it anyway (it could have improved, but since I've never worked anywhere willing to pay for it, I haven't checked). I've been looking for an open source solution, or even a reasonably priced commercial solution. I should be able to go to any product's web site and within a minute or two at least have an idea whether it might be a good fit. I can't tell anything useful from this one.
If you can find a Matrox 450 or 550 with dual DVIs, you're all set. They concentrate on 2D, not 3D. You might want to look for used cards, because they're typically $100 or more new. But they work great (excellent Linux support as well as Windows, etc) and last forever.
The Amercican bees are just too lazy. They're all heading off to beehives where they aren't expected to work. But soon we'll have bees sneaking in from Mexico, and everything will be fine again!
But almost everything he said could have as easily been done in XP- better fonts, faster startup, improved search... all this could have just as easily been in SP2, or at least SP3, if MS hadn't been expending all that money and energy on Vista.
Here's my favorite quote: ``Some programs still have problems with Vista but the blame for this really falls on the vendor and not Microsoft.''
I wonder how he arrives at that? If the program already existed, and Vista didn't, and MS wrote Vista with backward compatibility in mind (did they?) it's hardly the app vendor's fault. But even if MS didn't care about backward compatibility, that's not the app vendor's fault. They can't write programs to an OS that hasn't been written! So this was just a goofy statement.
On the flip side, an employee here just bought a laptop with Vista on it. Another admin has spent at least a day working on the stupid thing over the past week or so, just trying to get it to work properly on a network that has been supporting several versions of Windows as well as OSX, Linux and Solaris for years. Granted, he hasn't used Vista before, but he knows Microsoft OSes prior to Vista just fine. (One of the things that pisses me off about MS is that with every release you have to learn where things are all over again.)
And there is NO excuse for scrolling something like a start menu using standard sized fonts. None. Ever. Morons.
I also don't see the need for much tech in K. Paste, scissors, crayons, paper, blocks, Legos, Lincoln Logs. Tinkertoys would be good, but I'm not even sure you can get those any more.
I really think kids need to learn to work in the real world before we drop them into virtual worlds. And at that age, interacting with people is far more crucial than interacting with machines.
Unless, of course, one thinks SkyNet is taking over tomorrow. In that case, make sure you start teaching them how to make bombs, tracking systems and time machines.
We should set up a web site, so people can sign up for times to visit him. Spam him with pissed off internet users for however much of that 101 years he serves!
Society and the government have handed parents an impossible job.
1) You may not invade your child's privacy, discipline them, or in any other way treat them as if they were not an adult in charge of their own life. If we even *think* you are out of line here, Child Protective Services will be on you like flies on stink. 2) Until they reach the age of accountability, you are completely responsible and liable for everything your child does. If we even *think* you are out of line here, Child Protective Services will be on you like flies on stink.
Can you say, "Catch 22"?
[This is not a generic indictment of CPS, which has many fine people working for them (I know some). It's an indictment on US society and its government, which is a part of said society.
There are several, and they aren't what you think.
One is that more and more peoplel don't give a damn about anything but themselves, *and* they don't expect to have to work for anything. It should all be handed to them. I work with teenagers, and this attitude pervades the high schools. Not all of them have this attitude, but a huge, scary percentage do.
Then, there's the "us vs them" mentality of the poster I'm responding to. Evolution requires at least as big a leap of faith as intelligent design. You can rag on people all day long, or you can find ways to have meaningful dialogue. Far too many people today follow the "rag on" hlosophy. (Yes, I know. But I have an "us *and* them" philosophy, as much as possible. It's OK to disagree, now let's move on and solve this other problem, OK?)
Throw in the fact that an insane portion of today's youth are diagnosed with disorders purely for the convenience of the schools and parents, and given drugs when they need some mix of love and discipline, and you have a hugely demotivated, downright dysfunctional bomb waiting to explode.
First thing I really remember building was a crystal radio. Pretty basic, but it sucked me into the world of electronics.
In high school I wound my own electric guitar pickup, and even made my own shielded cable. They sucked, but they were free (spare parts). OTOH, they taught me to play to my strengths, and learn when to just buy something... a valuable lesson.
Years later, I was part o a small team who build ground vehicle traffic control systems, from accident detection and rerouting systems to the system than let the city of Los Angeles monitor and control traffic during the 1984 Olympics. Some seriously cool stuff, and really rewarding.
More recently, I got back into vacuum tubes. I have designed and built several guitar amps. Even better, I helped a teenager at church learn this stuff. Together we desinged his amp, then he rebuilt an old, messed up amp of little value into something he loves.
But the coolest thing will be if I build a company to make and sell these amps, and eventually emply teenagers here and people who want to better themselves here or in a couple of other countries.
``Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?''
No, the industry was created pretty much ex niholo by its customers. Said customers were the military. Nobody else was thinking ahead far enough to anticipate this at this time. So blame whomever you like, but include yourself in there for not being any smarter than everyone else in the governments who didn't forsee it and start planning for it before we knew when it would be viable.
Slashdot Mirror
...usenet the last 15 years...
Those and a one-button way to stop *all* animations (Flash, whatever), and I'll be happier than a clam.
In fact, there should be a control that says, "no A/V". That and get the memory sucker under control. That's all I ask.
I hope he makes SCO pay for every freaking penny of the court's and IBM's time. At least until they dry up and blow away. That would suck for SCO stockholders, but anyone left holding SCO is (IMO) nuts, anyway. SCO deserves to die a public, humiliating death at this point. The principle need to spend a long time in public stocks, maybe on a flatbed trailer that travels around the country (as) as punishment and (b) as a warning to similar scumbags.
Waste of resources? Can you even buy a disk smaller than 80GB for a server these days? The GUI RPMs take up less than 1GB of space. Sometimes there are annoying dependencies, so we just do the full install. We do find, from time to time, that running a GUI tool on a server (core or compute) has its uses. And our workstations have to run X. So we just install everything (well, inside the firewall 8^), set to runlevel 3, and that's that. Which wastes no resources other than a bit of disk space that's in the noise range from my vantage point.
Our company uses a lot of EDA tools. The tool vendors only support their tools on certain OSes. RHEL is one of the few, and everyone supports it.
At home I used the Scientific Linux rebuild of RHEL since we use that at work and I knew it, plus that way I became more intimate with all of its parts. Now, I still have one system at home running that but all the others are (or soon will be) Fedora Core 6. They could as easily be anything else; I just figured FC6 would upgrade easily from older RH and it did (even an RH8 system, which is supposedly not a good idea).
We have a couple of dozen Linux systems for infrastructure, in a variety of roles. We run them all level 3. If we really need to, we can start X on them by typing "startx" at a console. Same thing for our compute servers. Even most desktops run this way. But especially on the non-desktops there are many reasons not to run in level 5, and none to run there.
At home, sure, level 5. There's no reason for X NOT to be up unless I'm doing certain types of maintenance, and my wife doesn't want to know any more about computers than she has to.
At work, run level 3 unless a user wants to change that on his or her desktop.
We tried RHEL support. Paid good money for several advanced server licenses. Turnaround time on problems was abysmal, and they weren't that much help. (This was about a year ago.) We use Scientific Linux on everything now. Support is somewhat minimal, but it's better than RedHat's and free.
We need to upgrade soon. We'll re-evaluate with SL, CentOS and RHEL (and perhaps "Unbreakable" Linux). But even with allegedly lower pricing (I haven't looked into what their new model would charge for 100 desktop workstations, 200 compute servers and a couple dozen infrastructure servers) RH will have a hard time getting our vote after the poor support we received before. We paid, IIRC, $700 - $800 per license, and it took them between two and three weeks to be sure that they were "fairly sure" a specific chipset probably wasn't supported on a motherboard. The SL response was "check the source and kernel logs", but at least it was fast (and free!) We pay for tool licenses. If we get good support we'll pay reasonable fees for OS licenses. Absent said support, we won't pay a penny if we don't have to.
We run EDA tools. To get support from tool vendors, we have to run certain versions of certain enterprise class Linuxes. So we really need to know that the box will run with (for example) RHEL4. This is just as true of the workstations as the rackmount servers. If Dell (for example) sells systems with RHEL4, I have reason to believe the system will actually *work* with RHEL4. If they don't, I have a reasonable expectation that it *won't* work, based on past experience. PC mfrs are always putting new hardware out, and that isn't always going to work with the OS that's been out a while as a stable version.
There are plenty of exmaples of this besides those involving EDA tools.
There are several classes of users, not just one. At home, I'm fine with buying a box and trying thing til it works, to a point. At work, when we need a new batch of servers or desktops right now, I can't afford the time to mess around with it. It needs to work out of the box.
I got to their page. It was annoyingly slow, but not horrible. OK, so it's /.ed. I can live with that.
BUT... they advertise an "enterprise grade" product. Too bad they don't have an "enterprise grade" web page.
I cannot stand to go to a website's main page, and find nothing useful on it.
At a bare minimum, there should be a paragraph or two telling me what the thing really is, with an obvious link for an overview, technical specs, etc. Instead, I'm left guessing. Maybe I can go to "documentation" and find this. (Then again, at least half the time I follow such a link from an open source project, I still have to hunt around.) And even that link, nebulous as it is, isn't on the main menu!
Nope, nothing useful there. Maybe the community portal? Nope, nothing there at all!
What about the comparison with other products? Oog. It may be useful if you speak OpenView (I don't).
Please (and this applies to all project maintainers, not just these guys), don't waste one *&^$% minute apologizing for your web pages. Instead, spend just an hour or two putting up useful data with decent organization. If you haven't got a clue how to do that, find a college student in marketing who needs to design a web site for credit and get them to do it. Get your sister to do it. Anyone.
We have some specific network management needs. We can't afford Tivoli or OpenView. Based on experience with Tivoli a decade ago, I've avoided it anyway (it could have improved, but since I've never worked anywhere willing to pay for it, I haven't checked). I've been looking for an open source solution, or even a reasonably priced commercial solution. I should be able to go to any product's web site and within a minute or two at least have an idea whether it might be a good fit. I can't tell anything useful from this one.
No more ftape? Say it ain't so?
If you can find a Matrox 450 or 550 with dual DVIs, you're all set. They concentrate on 2D, not 3D. You might want to look for used cards, because they're typically $100 or more new. But they work great (excellent Linux support as well as Windows, etc) and last forever.
The Amercican bees are just too lazy. They're all heading off to beehives where they aren't expected to work. But soon we'll have bees sneaking in from Mexico, and everything will be fine again!
You left out nicer fonts!
But almost everything he said could have as easily been done in XP- better fonts, faster startup, improved search... all this could have just as easily been in SP2, or at least SP3, if MS hadn't been expending all that money and energy on Vista.
Here's my favorite quote: ``Some programs still have problems with Vista but the blame for this really falls on the vendor and not Microsoft.''
I wonder how he arrives at that? If the program already existed, and Vista didn't, and MS wrote Vista with backward compatibility in mind (did they?) it's hardly the app vendor's fault. But even if MS didn't care about backward compatibility, that's not the app vendor's fault. They can't write programs to an OS that hasn't been written! So this was just a goofy statement.
On the flip side, an employee here just bought a laptop with Vista on it. Another admin has spent at least a day working on the stupid thing over the past week or so, just trying to get it to work properly on a network that has been supporting several versions of Windows as well as OSX, Linux and Solaris for years. Granted, he hasn't used Vista before, but he knows Microsoft OSes prior to Vista just fine. (One of the things that pisses me off about MS is that with every release you have to learn where things are all over again.)
And there is NO excuse for scrolling something like a start menu using standard sized fonts. None. Ever. Morons.
``Still, it provides an interesting look into the world of data after death.''
Death before data!!!
The feds banned pitchforks.
... a caffeinated black 4D donut?
I also don't see the need for much tech in K. Paste, scissors, crayons, paper, blocks, Legos, Lincoln Logs. Tinkertoys would be good, but I'm not even sure you can get those any more.
I really think kids need to learn to work in the real world before we drop them into virtual worlds. And at that age, interacting with people is far more crucial than interacting with machines.
Unless, of course, one thinks SkyNet is taking over tomorrow. In that case, make sure you start teaching them how to make bombs, tracking systems and time machines.
If you read the article, the technique prevents this approach as well.
Only mail that FIRST tries the primary, fails, and THEN tries the secondary gets through.
Period.
Yes, I'm yelling because you clearly aren't paying attention!
We should set up a web site, so people can sign up for
times to visit him. Spam him with pissed off internet
users for however much of that 101 years he serves!
Society and the government have handed parents an impossible job.
1) You may not invade your child's privacy, discipline them, or in any other way treat them as if they were not an adult in charge of their own life. If we even *think* you are out of line here, Child Protective Services will be on you like flies on stink.
2) Until they reach the age of accountability, you are completely responsible and liable for everything your child does. If we even *think* you are out of line here, Child Protective Services will be on you like flies on stink.
Can you say, "Catch 22"?
[This is not a generic indictment of CPS, which has many fine people working for them (I know some). It's an indictment on US society and its government, which is a part of said society.
...my system panic'd with a SIGFPE...
There are several, and they aren't what you think.
One is that more and more peoplel don't give a damn about anything but themselves, *and* they don't expect to have to work for anything. It should all be handed to them. I work with teenagers, and this attitude pervades the high schools. Not all of them have this attitude, but a huge, scary percentage do.
Then, there's the "us vs them" mentality of the poster I'm responding to. Evolution requires at least as big a leap of faith as intelligent design. You can rag on people all day long, or you can find ways to have meaningful dialogue. Far too many people today follow the "rag on" hlosophy. (Yes, I know. But I have an "us *and* them" philosophy, as much as possible. It's OK to disagree, now let's move on and solve this other problem, OK?)
Throw in the fact that an insane portion of today's youth are diagnosed with disorders purely for the convenience of the schools and parents, and given drugs when they need some mix of love and discipline, and you have a hugely demotivated, downright dysfunctional bomb waiting to explode.
First thing I really remember building was a crystal radio. Pretty basic, but it sucked me into the world of electronics.
In high school I wound my own electric guitar pickup, and even made my own shielded cable. They sucked, but they were free (spare parts). OTOH, they taught me to play to my strengths, and learn when to just buy something... a valuable lesson.
Years later, I was part o a small team who build ground vehicle traffic control systems, from accident detection and rerouting systems to the system than let the city of Los Angeles monitor and control traffic during the 1984 Olympics. Some seriously cool stuff, and really rewarding.
More recently, I got back into vacuum tubes. I have designed and built several guitar amps. Even better, I helped a teenager at church learn this stuff. Together we desinged his amp, then he rebuilt an old, messed up amp of little value into something he loves.
But the coolest thing will be if I build a company to make and sell these amps, and eventually emply teenagers here and people who want to better themselves here or in a couple of other countries.
I can hear it now.
``Bloody hydrogen!''
``Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?''
No, the industry was created pretty much ex niholo by its customers. Said customers were the military. Nobody else was thinking ahead far enough to anticipate this at this time. So blame whomever you like, but include yourself in there for not being any smarter than everyone else in the governments who didn't forsee it and start planning for it before we knew when it would be viable.