Good luck to you! If the "representative" shows up next week he is going to give you 2 choices: 1. Commit to switch over to an MS only shop 2. Get sued
So unless you can get legal/install Linux before then, you're gonna be MS's bitch one way or the other.
The Linux version is said to be pre-alpha quality at this stage. Here is screenshots of the spreadsheet and word processor. Although it looks quite a bit nicer than StarOffice, it also seems to be using custom widgets, which I think is a pity. Unless it is some weird gtk theme.
DMCA is the proof that the organization that we call Democratic Government and the Representative System is not representing the people, but interests to big corporations.
I don't understand how you can say this. In the end the American individuals are still the ones who vote people into office or not. If they vote for assholes because they're impressed by their heavily sponsored, glitzy campaigns who's fault is that?
King TJ, I think I understand what you are trying to say, but I don't believe pop culture is what ties us as human beings. People had lots in common way before the days of advertising or pop culture. We are, after all, part of the same species, and as such share the vast majority of our genes, feeling, emotions and intellect with other human beings. Of course the brand monkeys want us all to think that they provide some new age bond that holds us together, that's why they sell it that way. And you know why? They can't take diversity. It much easier and cheaper for them to have 1 product and sell it in a "diversified" way (multi cultural/racial/sexual etc) than to try and market cultural specific items with cultural specific ads. They want to starve off any form of uniqueness. Although this couple of sentences does not explain it very well please read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein. You seem intelligent, so I think you might find it interesting.
This is something i have extensive experience with. We have a bunch of servers all over the world, some of them on slow and unreliable links.
The short answer is that rsync out of cron works wonderfully. We sync up all the servers every day with rsync over ssh, so it's all very secure, and rsync only syncs the deltas of the file that actually changed. So if 100 bytes of a 100MB file changed it won't retrieve the whole 100MB file again, only the parts that changed (in reality it will sync a little more than that, but you get the idea). I someomes even use rsync for local copies and over fast links. The speedup due to only syncing the deltas are well worth it. Based on my experience make one server the "master" server. Let the master server log into easch machine periodically and sync the deltas. Then each machine should log into the master and get all the changes from all the other machines.
Damn, and to think I hex edited the saved games in PCTools to get extra funds. If only slashdot was around 15 years ago I could've saved a lot of time! Well, maybe not.
I've kind of done both. I started out with university. In my final year I got a good job offer from a company I respected and decided I will split my last year in 2 and start working for them. The first year went ok. I completed the math and theoretical parts which was fairly easy to do in my spare time. I suffered with the second part of last year though. We had practical classes during the day which I could not attend and I lost some exam entrance points there. To cut the longer story short, in the end I never completed my degree. I still need about three subject, but by them I've already had 2 promotions and got fairly interested and busy with my job. I never really made a conscious decision to not finish my degree, practicalities just forced it that way before I fully realized it. Now I'm an IT manager which I wouldn't have been right now if I originally turned down the job offer. However, a degree gives you something very important - the ability to study further. I can't do a MSc or MBA in future before I finish my degree. There's kind of a ceiling now to what I can do to really better/differentiate me, which really sucks. In the end my advice would be to get a degree first. The job market will always be there, but it will be very hard to start studying after a few years of work. And believe me, you *will* get frustrated down the line if you don't have a decent background in math and stats. After all, I know you might not think so now, but chances are fairly good that you'll want to be something other than a system admin when you're 30 or 40. Think about it this way, you will still be able to be a sys admin after you finished your degree, but you'll have opened up so many other doors along the way, which will give you more freedom to choose. Hope this helps.
What new area could they expand into? There aren't many.
I've thought about this too. Well, in all honesty I've been forced to think about this after audit requests and reading MS licences. Some of the things that MS does to keep the money flowing in is to: 1.) Go after current customers and squeezing every last drop out of them with audits. And I'm not talking about outright pirates, I'm talking about companies that are really trying hard to be legal with their licensing, but have the odd programs that they've lost the paperwork for etc. 2.) Binding the software to the hardware. For instance, when a friend's laptop was stolen he had to re-buy Office and WinXP. He had the licenses, but they were tied to the hardware. So, with an average PC/laptop life expectancy of 3 years they've got a constant stream of cash comming their way if they can maintain a monopoly.
Who is this mister Knuth to say that computer science is not yet mature? If CS brought us UNIX, and even a CS student can program something as wonderful as Linux, then I say Computer Science is as mature as I want it to be, thank you very much. And to this Mr. Knuth I ask, do you even know anything about Computer Science?
And an even more irrelevant side note... I once addressed Noam Chomsky as "Mr Chomsky", and when I realized my mistake and apologized he said "That's not a problem. Only my enemies call me "Professor Chomsky".
I'm an IT Manager, and also opted not to take the Software Insurance offer. For one it meant that we'd have upgrade (or at least buy the licenses) all our MS products to latest version. All the NT + Exchange + SQL CALs, and then Windows + Office + Project... It adds up quickly.
But my main point that I wanted to make is that it's just plain unfair. Microsoft want you to pay them even when you *don't* want the latest and greatest. (And 95% can life without it... If some people think StarOffice 5.2 is good enough...:-) But if you don't take software assurance then you can't just upgrade down the line. You have to pay the full purchase price. Which is all fine and dandy, except that they didn't write the product from scratch, they built it on top of older versions. And you already paid them for the intellectual property in the previous versions, so why do it again? Upgrade in the older, normal sense is much more fair, since you only pay them for the added value... when you need it.
yup. from now on we buy whatever we use to avoid nice surprises like this. we only use the mcp for the marketing value and msdn subsciption. every year they change it to the detrement of their "partners".
You're right. About 4 years ago our company was about 50 people small, and we got an opportunity to become a MCP (Microsoft Cerified Partner), because an MCSE joined our company. At that stage it sounded great, the marketing people really liked the idea of being a "Microsoft Partner" and on top of it we got a buch of software licenses with the deal. It included (but was not limited to) an exchange server with 50 CALs, SQL server with 50 CALs etc etc. So ofcourse when later that year we started investigating a new mail server exchange was the obvious choice. It had everything we need, plus a buch of other "cool stuff". Up till then we were a Novell / Linux shop on the server side. So we basicially start using exchange 'cause we can do it for free and exveryone's happy (it's actually quite stable any everything). The next year, however, we want to renew our MCP program. Only this year we only get 1 Server (instead of 5) and 10 CALs. Which means for us and our branch office we have to buy 2 licenses of WinNT + Exchange + 40 CALs. Quite expensive for a small company. Forward back about 3.5 years and we are 250 people and MS sends us 'scare letter' and we have to buy about 200 NT + exchange CALs. Also a lot of money. In any case, there's no way getting rid of exchange now. Worst decision I ever made.
Here's what I do on server systems (workstations I handle differently). I only install the minimum amout of packages during system install time. From that point onwards I only install under/usr/local/package_name. All my source goes into/usr/local/package_name/src. I always compile from source where possible./opt is symlinked to/usr/local as well.
$ cd/usr/local
$ ls
apache djbdns firewall info mysql redhat share
bin doc freeswan kernel openldap rsync squid
cvs e2fsprogs games lib openssh samba src
cyrus etc imp man openssl saprouter wget
dhcp exim include mathopd portfwd sbin wu-imap
$
I use ksh, so in/etc/profile I have:
LOCALPATH=""
for DIR in $( ls -d/usr/local/*/*bin )
do
if [[ -z $LOCALPATH ]]
then
LOCALPATH=$DIR
else
LOCALPATH=$LOCALPATH:$DIR
fi
done
PATH=/root/bin:$PATH:$LOCALPATH
MANPATH=/usr/man
for DIR in $( ls -d/usr/local/*/man/usr/local/man/* )
do
MANPATH=$MANPATH:$DIR
done
Yes, how it works: You connect to your ISP's proxy and they forward the request to "The One Big" firewall. Many of the ISP's proxy's I've seen there do indeed use squid. It makes finding a problem a real bitch though. "Is the problem on our proxy, the ISP's proxy or the government's proxy?".
Remember that we're talking about the Internet access for a whole country here. To push all that traffic through a single intel based box would be impossible. You might be able to use free proxy software on a Sun running Solaris, but I guess only real world test will tell.
Yep I can confirm this, and we have problems with the laptops too. The servers are ok, but none the less. Compaq is now banned from out company. Maybe something to do with those heavty support prices?
Microsoft is developing a literal track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities
So does every one else. Go to securityfocus.com and you'll see that every Linux distro, SUN, HPUX, *BSD etc has a bad track record when it comes to security. This is not just a MS thing.
Also note that apple has slashed its hardware prices a lot to get rid of about 11.5 weeks of stock sitting around. Apparently they overestimated the average mac user's upgrade cycle. Plus the G4 cube wasn't nearly as popular as they hoped it would be. I'm seriously thinking of buying a mac and just run linux on it till OS X comes out. Hell, you can now buy a Power Mac G4 for $1299!
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck to you! If the "representative" shows up next week he is going to give you 2 choices:
1. Commit to switch over to an MS only shop
2. Get sued
So unless you can get legal/install Linux before then, you're gonna be MS's bitch one way or the other.
Unless you live in South Africa, where even one person surfing can cause notable bandwidth degradation. :-)
The Linux version is said to be pre-alpha quality at this stage. Here is screenshots of the spreadsheet and word processor. Although it looks quite a bit nicer than StarOffice, it also seems to be using custom widgets, which I think is a pity. Unless it is some weird gtk theme.
DMCA is the proof that the organization that we call Democratic Government and the Representative System is not representing the people, but interests to big corporations.
I don't understand how you can say this. In the end the American individuals are still the ones who vote people into office or not. If they vote for assholes because they're impressed by their heavily sponsored, glitzy campaigns who's fault is that?
King TJ, I think I understand what you are trying to say, but I don't believe pop culture is what ties us as human beings. People had lots in common way before the days of advertising or pop culture. We are, after all, part of the same species, and as such share the vast majority of our genes, feeling, emotions and intellect with other human beings. Of course the brand monkeys want us all to think that they provide some new age bond that holds us together, that's why they sell it that way. And you know why? They can't take diversity. It much easier and cheaper for them to have 1 product and sell it in a "diversified" way (multi cultural/racial/sexual etc) than to try and market cultural specific items with cultural specific ads. They want to starve off any form of uniqueness. Although this couple of sentences does not explain it very well please read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein. You seem intelligent, so I think you might find it interesting.
This is something i have extensive experience with. We have a bunch of servers all over the world, some of them on slow and unreliable links.
The short answer is that rsync out of cron works wonderfully. We sync up all the servers every day with rsync over ssh, so it's all very secure, and rsync only syncs the deltas of the file that actually changed. So if 100 bytes of a 100MB file changed it won't retrieve the whole 100MB file again, only the parts that changed (in reality it will sync a little more than that, but you get the idea). I someomes even use rsync for local copies and over fast links. The speedup due to only syncing the deltas are well worth it. Based on my experience make one server the "master" server. Let the master server log into easch machine periodically and sync the deltas. Then each machine should log into the master and get all the changes from all the other machines.
Damn, and to think I hex edited the saved games in PCTools to get extra funds. If only slashdot was around 15 years ago I could've saved a lot of time! Well, maybe not.
I've kind of done both. I started out with university. In my final year I got a good job offer from a company I respected and decided I will split my last year in 2 and start working for them. The first year went ok. I completed the math and theoretical parts which was fairly easy to do in my spare time. I suffered with the second part of last year though. We had practical classes during the day which I could not attend and I lost some exam entrance points there. To cut the longer story short, in the end I never completed my degree. I still need about three subject, but by them I've already had 2 promotions and got fairly interested and busy with my job. I never really made a conscious decision to not finish my degree, practicalities just forced it that way before I fully realized it. Now I'm an IT manager which I wouldn't have been right now if I originally turned down the job offer. However, a degree gives you something very important - the ability to study further. I can't do a MSc or MBA in future before I finish my degree. There's kind of a ceiling now to what I can do to really better/differentiate me, which really sucks. In the end my advice would be to get a degree first. The job market will always be there, but it will be very hard to start studying after a few years of work. And believe me, you *will* get frustrated down the line if you don't have a decent background in math and stats. After all, I know you might not think so now, but chances are fairly good that you'll want to be something other than a system admin when you're 30 or 40. Think about it this way, you will still be able to be a sys admin after you finished your degree, but you'll have opened up so many other doors along the way, which will give you more freedom to choose. Hope this helps.
What new area could they expand into? There aren't many.
I've thought about this too. Well, in all honesty I've been forced to think about this after audit requests and reading MS licences. Some of the things that MS does to keep the money flowing in is to: 1.) Go after current customers and squeezing every last drop out of them with audits. And I'm not talking about outright pirates, I'm talking about companies that are really trying hard to be legal with their licensing, but have the odd programs that they've lost the paperwork for etc. 2.) Binding the software to the hardware. For instance, when a friend's laptop was stolen he had to re-buy Office and WinXP. He had the licenses, but they were tied to the hardware. So, with an average PC/laptop life expectancy of 3 years they've got a constant stream of cash comming their way if they can maintain a monopoly.
Who is this mister Knuth to say that computer science is not yet mature? If CS brought us UNIX, and even a CS student can program something as wonderful as Linux, then I say Computer Science is as mature as I want it to be, thank you very much. And to this Mr. Knuth I ask, do you even know anything about Computer Science?
And an even more irrelevant side note... I once addressed Noam Chomsky as "Mr Chomsky", and when I realized my mistake and apologized he said "That's not a problem. Only my enemies call me "Professor Chomsky".
Hmm, I think i found a bug in your comment.
> "This looks like Windows, can I run $favorite_application?"
Should be:
"This looks like Windows, can I run ${favorite_application}?"
;-) Sorry, couldn't help myself. I agree with your comment in general.
I am not sure where these comparisons are going.
Each major operating system has its advantages and disadvantages depending on how it is implemented.
I think the point of these comparisons are exactly to teach you what OS will be best for a certain task.
I'm an IT Manager, and also opted not to take the Software Insurance offer. For one it meant that we'd have upgrade (or at least buy the licenses) all our MS products to latest version. All the NT + Exchange + SQL CALs, and then Windows + Office + Project... It adds up quickly.
... :-) But if you don't take software assurance then you can't just upgrade down the line. You have to pay the full purchase price. Which is all fine and dandy, except that they didn't write the product from scratch, they built it on top of older versions. And you already paid them for the intellectual property in the previous versions, so why do it again? Upgrade in the older, normal sense is much more fair, since you only pay them for the added value... when you need it.
But my main point that I wanted to make is that it's just plain unfair. Microsoft want you to pay them even when you *don't* want the latest and greatest. (And 95% can life without it... If some people think StarOffice 5.2 is good enough
Pardon the rant.
yup. from now on we buy whatever we use to avoid nice surprises like this. we only use the mcp for the marketing value and msdn subsciption. every year they change it to the detrement of their "partners".
You're right. About 4 years ago our company was about 50 people small, and we got an opportunity to become a MCP (Microsoft Cerified Partner), because an MCSE joined our company. At that stage it sounded great, the marketing people really liked the idea of being a "Microsoft Partner" and on top of it we got a buch of software licenses with the deal. It included (but was not limited to) an exchange server with 50 CALs, SQL server with 50 CALs etc etc. So ofcourse when later that year we started investigating a new mail server exchange was the obvious choice. It had everything we need, plus a buch of other "cool stuff". Up till then we were a Novell / Linux shop on the server side. So we basicially start using exchange 'cause we can do it for free and exveryone's happy (it's actually quite stable any everything). The next year, however, we want to renew our MCP program. Only this year we only get 1 Server (instead of 5) and 10 CALs. Which means for us and our branch office we have to buy 2 licenses of WinNT + Exchange + 40 CALs. Quite expensive for a small company. Forward back about 3.5 years and we are 250 people and MS sends us 'scare letter' and we have to buy about 200 NT + exchange CALs. Also a lot of money. In any case, there's no way getting rid of exchange now. Worst decision I ever made.
"the fact that I work in computers"
Man, you work *in* computers? Isn't it a bit small dark and cold in there? Can you hear me if I kick my box like this (thud)? Or like this (THUDTHUD)?
Here's what I do on server systems (workstations I handle differently). I only install the minimum amout of packages during system install time. From that point onwards I only install under /usr/local/package_name. All my source goes into /usr/local/package_name/src. I always compile from source where possible. /opt is symlinked to /usr/local as well.
/usr/local
/etc/profile I have:
/usr/local/*/*bin )
/usr/local/*/man /usr/local/man/* )
h /b in:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/apache/bin:/usr/local /apache/cgi-bin:/usr/local/cvs/bin:/usr/local/cyru s/bin:/usr/local/cyrus/sbin:/usr/local/dhcp/sbin:/ usr/local/djbdns/bin:/usr/local/e2fsprogs/INSTALL. dllbin:/usr/local/e2fsprogs/INSTALL.elfbin:/usr/lo cal/exim/bin:/usr/local/firewall/bin:/usr/local/fr eeswan/bin:/usr/local/mathopd/bin:/usr/local/mysql /bin:/usr/local/openldap/bin:/usr/local/openldap/s bin:/usr/local/openssh/bin:/usr/local/openssh/sbin :/usr/local/openssl/bin:/usr/local/rsync/bin:/usr/ local/samba/bin:/usr/local/samba/sbin:/usr/local/s aprouter/bin:/usr/local/squid/bin:/usr/local/wget/ bin
$ cd
$ ls
apache djbdns firewall info mysql redhat share
bin doc freeswan kernel openldap rsync squid
cvs e2fsprogs games lib openssh samba src
cyrus etc imp man openssl saprouter wget
dhcp exim include mathopd portfwd sbin wu-imap
$
I use ksh, so in
LOCALPATH=""
for DIR in $( ls -d
do
if [[ -z $LOCALPATH ]]
then
LOCALPATH=$DIR
else
LOCALPATH=$LOCALPATH:$DIR
fi
done
PATH=/root/bin:$PATH:$LOCALPATH
MANPATH=/usr/man
for DIR in $( ls -d
do
MANPATH=$MANPATH:$DIR
done
And my PATH looks like:
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/openss
Which may look ugly, but I never actually look at it, and it works just fine. I've never noticed a speed decrease because of the long PATH... YMMV
Yes, how it works: You connect to your ISP's proxy and they forward the request to "The One Big" firewall. Many of the ISP's proxy's I've seen there do indeed use squid. It makes finding a problem a real bitch though. "Is the problem on our proxy, the ISP's proxy or the government's proxy?".
Remember that we're talking about the Internet access for a whole country here. To push all that traffic through a single intel based box would be impossible. You might be able to use free proxy software on a Sun running Solaris, but I guess only real world test will tell.
and in fact it is over here in south africa!
A kernel developer gets C#ursed and goes into a slumber for 100 years. What's the first thing he posts to the kernel ML when he wakes up?
"Has the VM been fixed yet?"
Yep I can confirm this, and we have problems with the laptops too. The servers are ok, but none the less. Compaq is now banned from out company. Maybe something to do with those heavty support prices?
Microsoft is developing a literal track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities
So does every one else. Go to securityfocus.com and you'll see that every Linux distro, SUN, HPUX, *BSD etc has a bad track record when it comes to security. This is not just a MS thing.
"I like Theo".
Also note that apple has slashed its hardware prices a lot to get rid of about 11.5 weeks of stock sitting around. Apparently they overestimated the average mac user's upgrade cycle. Plus the G4 cube wasn't nearly as popular as they hoped it would be. I'm seriously thinking of buying a mac and just run linux on it till OS X comes out. Hell, you can now buy a Power Mac G4 for $1299!