I made a very simple page called 'cli.php' (as in 'command line interface'.) It's good for quick-n-easy (and non-intereactive) things when you can't ssh in. Not quite Webmin, but it's handy. Good for checking uptime, disk usage, etc. Sample commands:
whoami, pwd, uptime, df -h, du -sh/home/<yourname>/public_html/
CL rules. I just got an old SGI O2 for $50. I had to drive a half-hour to get it but I didn't have to pay shipping and I got to see it before handing over my money. And very much unlike ebay, it's free to list things. I (heart) U Craig!
I'm buying a minimac for just this reason. comes with (optionally?) a dongle with S-video & composite video out. I know from experience that OS X will play my ripped DVDs just fine with MPlayer. sold.
"Vendor Lock in: When you switch to Apple for an IT strategy you will be stuck with it."
How is this different from *anyone* else? You think my company can easily migrate away from our combination of AD, Notes, Outlook, and EMC? At least Apple's products are, for the most part, based on open-source products, so you could go from OS X to any other *nix pretty easily. Apple may be no better than anyone else, but they're certainly no worse. To claim otherwise is absurd.
"In each case, various servers and external storage enclosures are needed on the cheap that will be pushed to their limits."
Would you buy the cheapest car you could and push it to its theoretical limits? The only way to be good, cheap, is to go cheap and redundant. 3 Linux boxes chock full o' drives will be better than one "high-performance" 1U box you built on the cheap. An XServe will be better than either.
If your Ars-recommended gaming rig goes out for a couple of days, who cares? On the other hand, if a small company's one-and-only file/print/web/mail/ server goes out...
I'm one of many here, I'm sure, going through hell with a custom-made server. A guy in our group recommended building one--most power for the least money, right? Yeah, except that we can't get the motherboard's crappy 3rd-rate SATA working under Linux. Oops. Spending a grand more on an XServe would have had us up and running two months ago. But, of course, now that the money has been spent, the only option is to make it work. *sigh.*
Don't worry about cranking every last erg out of a certain box. Like on ours--who gives a shit if SATA can serve up X% more pages per hour than plain ATA? Right now it's serving zero pages per hour. The Deskpro PIII I have in my closet on DSL is currently kicking the crap out of this piece-of-shit box that is still in pieces at some dude's house. It's not like we're ever gonna come close to that theoretical limit, anyway. If you're never gonna do more than 100 MPH, what does it matter if a Ferrari will go 205 MPH and and a Lamborghini will only do 202? You'll save money in the long run if you just get something good that works. Put down the Tiger Direct catalog and call a real vendor.
Remember: Cheap clients get desktops with Linux and lots of hard drives. (Last week CompUSA had 160 GB 7200 RPM Maxtors for $70, no rebates or nuthin'.) Rich clients get real servers. There is no in-between. If some loser douchebag wants an 'enterprise-level SAN' for his 3-man telemarketing firm, tell him to go screw.
How is the average user going to know where to find the few *good* free AV, firewall, spyware scanners, etc. among the thousands of malicious products that claim to do the same? Explain me that, genious-boy.
Skipping 4 might not be enough--Windows went from 3 to 95, just to be extra-extra safe, and look where it got them. They didn't make any real progress until they skipped 99 through 1999.
After that, the numbers got so high they jumped to a base-36 system (0-9,A-Z) with XP. (Ha ha, just kidding. 'XP' is only 1,213 in base-36. I don't really know where XP came from. But they obviously need to get back up above 2000 if they want to get anywhere.)
After looking at IMDB to see who she is, I now need to submit a fix to them. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0517820/ Eviden tly she was born in 1986 (!!!!!) but was somehow in "Another World" (TV Series) in 1964.
...I've mostly given up trying to catch a stream. I just go to whichever Mac site can handle a million reloads and watch it unfold in text. Not as fun but I can actually get more work done with a browser windows open reloading every few minutes (thanks to practice with/. on the other 364 days of the year) than I can when I just sit and watch the keynote. That said, he's a good presenter, and I hope they post it after the fact. OTOH, they could have Steve Ballmer present for them, I don't care--just gimme my $500 headless Mac.:-)
Don't know about everyone else, but every time I get a new computer at work, I don't have time to clean everything up before moving, so I just copy the whole old HD onto the new one. Done this 3 or 4 times now, so yeah, my next move will prolly need a half a T.:-)
One of the few things I remember from those Econ classes oh-so-many years ago: "Pure capitalism tends towards monopolies." IE, it's competition. Unregulated, there will be one winner. Period. Will that one entity stay on top forever? Not necessarily. But when you have competition, you will wind up with one winner, every time. Until someone new comes along, and the cycle starts over.
It goes both ways. I code quite a bit during the day and yeah, most days when I get home, the last thing I want to do is start working on one of my many pet projects. OTOH, the projects I have at work are mostly fun, and I wouldn't be doing or be exposed to as many different neat and interesting things if I weren't here. (*ahem* I mean, there. No, I'm not reading/. at work. Nope, nosiree.)
I read this essay when it first came out and loved it. I don't remember him saying Windows *didn't* have a command line, just that it was not very good. No cron. No autocompletion. No remote access. No history between sessions. The included editor--EDIT--pales in comparison even to pico. And so on and so on.
Keynote can make a dent in PowerPoint because presentation files are traded relatively rarely. For spreadsheets and (for want of a better term) Word documents, interchange is essential. Perception is reality, and if someone can't read a Word doc because you made it with something other than MS Word, it is your fault. If it's because of screwups between Office XP, 2004, 2001, 2000, or '97, both parties can safely blame MS. Otherwise, the 'nonconformist' takes the blame. Everyone here should know by now that no one wants to hear how they shouldn't be using Word documentns. Users want it simple and to just work. 100% Word compatibility is impossible--at best, you're spending all your resources chasing a moving target. At worst, you're doing a bad job and no one will use your product.
And remember kids, for every mom and dad you get to start using Open Office, there are a thousand companies with a thousand employees each who will continue to buy MS Office. Overthrowing the market leader is possible but it gets more and more difficult every year. There are orders of magnitude more Excel users today than there were Lotus 1-2-3 users.
Personally, I think Adobe really missed the boat. They should have made a word processor based on PDF. The full version of Acrobat can edit text, so they should have made something--even as simple as MS WordPad--where PDF was the native format. Since everyone and their brother can read PDFs (and they hold their formatting even better than Word docs) they could have distributed a $50-$100 PDF editor--nothing more than Acrobat Reader and Wordpad--that would have ate MS's lunch. Think about it--anyone with a free tool that they already have can read your documents on any platform, and anyone with an inexpensive editor can make and save changes in the native format. Could've been great.
One to add to your list--owning proper jackstands and wheel chocks. You're not supposed to do all this underneath the included wheel jack, y'know. I agree with the point the grandparent was trying to make but he picked a reeeeally bad example.
Slashdot Mirror
I just RTFA (I know, I know)--why is this the first I'm hearing about AskJeeve's desktop search?!?!? :-)
C'mon, it's gzipped text, what could be easier?
:-)
Maybe the guys who did the filter for "StarOffice Write for Windows and UNIX Version 5.2 (text only)" never heard of OOo?
CL rules. I just got an old SGI O2 for $50. I had to drive a half-hour to get it but I didn't have to pay shipping and I got to see it before handing over my money. And very much unlike ebay, it's free to list things. I (heart) U Craig!
I'm buying a minimac for just this reason. comes with (optionally?) a dongle with S-video & composite video out. I know from experience that OS X will play my ripped DVDs just fine with MPlayer. sold.
"Vendor Lock in: When you switch to Apple for an IT strategy you will be stuck with it."
How is this different from *anyone* else? You think my company can easily migrate away from our combination of AD, Notes, Outlook, and EMC? At least Apple's products are, for the most part, based on open-source products, so you could go from OS X to any other *nix pretty easily. Apple may be no better than anyone else, but they're certainly no worse. To claim otherwise is absurd.
"In each case, various servers and external storage enclosures are needed on the cheap that will be pushed to their limits."
Would you buy the cheapest car you could and push it to its theoretical limits? The only way to be good, cheap, is to go cheap and redundant. 3 Linux boxes chock full o' drives will be better than one "high-performance" 1U box you built on the cheap. An XServe will be better than either.
If your Ars-recommended gaming rig goes out for a couple of days, who cares? On the other hand, if a small company's one-and-only file/print/web/mail/ server goes out...
I'm one of many here, I'm sure, going through hell with a custom-made server. A guy in our group recommended building one--most power for the least money, right? Yeah, except that we can't get the motherboard's crappy 3rd-rate SATA working under Linux. Oops. Spending a grand more on an XServe would have had us up and running two months ago. But, of course, now that the money has been spent, the only option is to make it work. *sigh.*
Don't worry about cranking every last erg out of a certain box. Like on ours--who gives a shit if SATA can serve up X% more pages per hour than plain ATA? Right now it's serving zero pages per hour. The Deskpro PIII I have in my closet on DSL is currently kicking the crap out of this piece-of-shit box that is still in pieces at some dude's house. It's not like we're ever gonna come close to that theoretical limit, anyway. If you're never gonna do more than 100 MPH, what does it matter if a Ferrari will go 205 MPH and and a Lamborghini will only do 202? You'll save money in the long run if you just get something good that works. Put down the Tiger Direct catalog and call a real vendor.
Remember: Cheap clients get desktops with Linux and lots of hard drives. (Last week CompUSA had 160 GB 7200 RPM Maxtors for $70, no rebates or nuthin'.) Rich clients get real servers. There is no in-between. If some loser douchebag wants an 'enterprise-level SAN' for his 3-man telemarketing firm, tell him to go screw.
Huh?
How is the average user going to know where to find the few *good* free AV, firewall, spyware scanners, etc. among the thousands of malicious products that claim to do the same? Explain me that, genious-boy.
Nerds? On slashdot? Since when?
And Wired got that joke from Apple itself (themselves?) at last summer's WWDC.
Skipping 4 might not be enough--Windows went from 3 to 95, just to be extra-extra safe, and look where it got them. They didn't make any real progress until they skipped 99 through 1999.
After that, the numbers got so high they jumped to a base-36 system (0-9,A-Z) with XP. (Ha ha, just kidding. 'XP' is only 1,213 in base-36. I don't really know where XP came from. But they obviously need to get back up above 2000 if they want to get anywhere.)
So many words on that page... what, I'm supposed to read *all* of 'em? :-)
After looking at IMDB to see who she is, I now need to submit a fix to them.n tly she was born in 1986 (!!!!!) but was somehow in "Another World" (TV Series) in 1964.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0517820/
Evide
...I've mostly given up trying to catch a stream. I just go to whichever Mac site can handle a million reloads and watch it unfold in text. Not as fun but I can actually get more work done with a browser windows open reloading every few minutes (thanks to practice with /. on the other 364 days of the year) than I can when I just sit and watch the keynote. That said, he's a good presenter, and I hope they post it after the fact. OTOH, they could have Steve Ballmer present for them, I don't care--just gimme my $500 headless Mac. :-)
Don't know about everyone else, but every time I get a new computer at work, I don't have time to clean everything up before moving, so I just copy the whole old HD onto the new one. Done this 3 or 4 times now, so yeah, my next move will prolly need a half a T. :-)
One of the few things I remember from those Econ classes oh-so-many years ago: "Pure capitalism tends towards monopolies." IE, it's competition. Unregulated, there will be one winner. Period. Will that one entity stay on top forever? Not necessarily. But when you have competition, you will wind up with one winner, every time. Until someone new comes along, and the cycle starts over.
It goes both ways. I code quite a bit during the day and yeah, most days when I get home, the last thing I want to do is start working on one of my many pet projects. OTOH, the projects I have at work are mostly fun, and I wouldn't be doing or be exposed to as many different neat and interesting things if I weren't here. (*ahem* I mean, there. No, I'm not reading /. at work. Nope, nosiree.)
I read this essay when it first came out and loved it. I don't remember him saying Windows *didn't* have a command line, just that it was not very good. No cron. No autocompletion. No remote access. No history between sessions. The included editor--EDIT--pales in comparison even to pico. And so on and so on.
I've had this all in my head for quite a while. Finally decided to put all my thoughts down in one place.
Can any longtime followers tell us how accurate TS has been in the past (say, four years) with their predictions?
Keynote can make a dent in PowerPoint because presentation files are traded relatively rarely. For spreadsheets and (for want of a better term) Word documents, interchange is essential. Perception is reality, and if someone can't read a Word doc because you made it with something other than MS Word, it is your fault. If it's because of screwups between Office XP, 2004, 2001, 2000, or '97, both parties can safely blame MS. Otherwise, the 'nonconformist' takes the blame. Everyone here should know by now that no one wants to hear how they shouldn't be using Word documentns. Users want it simple and to just work. 100% Word compatibility is impossible--at best, you're spending all your resources chasing a moving target. At worst, you're doing a bad job and no one will use your product.
And remember kids, for every mom and dad you get to start using Open Office, there are a thousand companies with a thousand employees each who will continue to buy MS Office. Overthrowing the market leader is possible but it gets more and more difficult every year. There are orders of magnitude more Excel users today than there were Lotus 1-2-3 users.
Personally, I think Adobe really missed the boat. They should have made a word processor based on PDF. The full version of Acrobat can edit text, so they should have made something--even as simple as MS WordPad--where PDF was the native format. Since everyone and their brother can read PDFs (and they hold their formatting even better than Word docs) they could have distributed a $50-$100 PDF editor--nothing more than Acrobat Reader and Wordpad--that would have ate MS's lunch. Think about it--anyone with a free tool that they already have can read your documents on any platform, and anyone with an inexpensive editor can make and save changes in the native format. Could've been great.
George Bush got Time's 'Person of the Year', so obviously the bar for this kind of thing is pretty low. :-)
Hell, I just don't trust them to keep the damn domain active. :-) (Original slashdot coverage here.)
One to add to your list--owning proper jackstands and wheel chocks. You're not supposed to do all this underneath the included wheel jack, y'know. I agree with the point the grandparent was trying to make but he picked a reeeeally bad example.