Reyn Ouwehand (who rocks) just released this video of him jammin out to Green Beret. OMFG...that was incredible! Simply incredible!!
I was a die-hard C64 owner as a teenager. My buddy across the street had an Apple IIe and he was _always_ over at my house wanting to play my games. I went from carts to tapes to disks to double disks. Hell, I ended up with a C128 and then an Amiga 500 after that. My favourites were Ultima III, Bruce Lee, Karateka, and (oddly enough) the Wizard's Construction Set.
Around here, we make SAAD a general IS Department event...everyone geeks out and generally enjoys themselves.
For all of the people who are so adamantly opposed to _any_ sort of "day" for technology professionals...meh. People have birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals, etc, and they are all commemorated in some fashion. I think of SAAD as a good occasion to relax for a day and enjoy things. For the rest of the work year, we will all be trudging about dealing with problems, what is the big objection with having ONE day out of the year where we recognize our achievements even if no-one else does. It is a way of building esprit du corps and good feelings across departments.
(as an aside) So many frackin' people (I find this especially true in the US) are so hell-bent on being unhappy these days. They want to piss in everyone's Cheerios because they can't be happy...why should anyone ELSE be happy? The last I heard, we all have a time-limit on our existence on this planet, why would you want to spend it being frackin' unhappy? Relax a little people! Loosen that knot around your neck and enjoy just being alive for a moment.
The rest of us acknowledge the existence of Thief: Deadly Shadows. I have T:DS. I thought it was relatively mediocre until I got to the Shalebridge Cradle. That level singlehandedly pulled it out of the no-repeat bin. Hands-down it was the scariest thing I'd ever experienced in a video game. My daughter, who was watching me play at the time, screamed and ran out of the room. I had the dignity to stop short of that by simply falling backwards in my chair and landing unceremoniously on the floor.
I think that TIE Fighter and Thief share a common thread: a game that was produced and had a compelling story with solid gameplay that pulled you in personally. The hours I spent chasing down Rebel starfighters with my Saitek's blazing and my headphones on listening to the almost-revolutionary sound of game-based stereo. With Thief, it was much the same...just years later. No lights on, headphones amped up, sneaking around listening so intently that the rest of the world did not even exist. It was truly immersing.
My biggest complaint about the whole game is that, once again, I find myself really wanting a next generation version of Tie Fighter. I can't say just _how_ many times I've thought this. Isn't there some game designer out there that could DO this? I wore out two Saitek stick/throttles playing TIE Fighter. It was, to date, my absolute favourite flight/space sim.
I wish that the Thief series would get picked up and modernized, as well, but that seems to be quite a pipe dream too.
I'd say that it's more like switching from QWERTY to DVORAK I have tried the new version of Office 2007 and I can say that the above characterization is pretty accurate. In addition, the new Outlook is bigger, better, and much slower than any of its predecessors. Opening Outlook and getting it properly sending and receiving mail took several minutes on my workstation here...using a good, fresh, XP Professional install with no cruft. I also had great difficulty with the internal search functions in Outlook, which now seem to be tied into the Microsoft Search service. I was never able to successfully get it to work before I felt compelled to downgrade back to Office 2003.
Office 2000 was a nice breath of fresh air from Office 97. Office 2003 was a significant improvement over them both. Office 2007 is a dramatic departure from them all. The new wide-tabbed menu system took ME quite awhile to get used to and while the same functionality seems to be there, it can be very hard to find.
I do not think my end-users are going to be happy or accepting of the change so I have no plans of deploying this new version anytime soon. Just my experience, folks...YMMV.
To expand on this, slightly......full-spectrum fluorescent lamps have been available for a number of years and in a variety of shapes. I believe that you can get them in a CFL form-factor now, as well.
I'd like to know which companies still use solutions from Symantec or McAfee
We do.
While I will agree with you wholeheartedly on the retail or "personal" versions of some of these products, the corporate editions of Symantec Antivirus and Client Security are actually pretty good. We have had only had one or two problems with interoperability using them. I setup the console and server portions and apply the settings that *I* want then I just join those clients to them and things just work.
It can be a pain in the a$$ to upgrade their products from one revision to the next but, on the whole, I am pleased with their performance. It would disappoint me greatly to see the Netscapification of Symantec. Trusting the embedded "security" that Microsoft deems appropriate would be a poor substitute.
An unusual practice? Where? Most places I know have their users running as admin, because there is still software around that won't function properly if it's not run that way.
The network I manage has +/-500 PC's. Not a large number compared to other enterprises but all of these PC's are geographically dispersed across the US in small batches of 4 or 5 or 6, which makes for an administrative headache. None of our non-administrative employees have privileged access to their systems. Even most of our administrative staff does not have privileged access. This setup has equated to a relatively low occurrence of security issues. Our roaming users, however, do have elevated privileges on their notebook PC's and THOSE are (with no surprise) the systems we have incessant trouble with.
I think we are a testament to the virtue of giving end-users, right from the start, no expectation of elevated privilege on their systems. Going the other way must surely be an almost impossible task.
I second that emotion. I've played Thief, Thief II, and Thief III. Not only were the games great fun and engaging the first time around but the tremendous fan support made it even better. The original missions in Thief were, for most, more entertaining and engaging but the improved Dark enging in Thief II took the play to the next leve, I thought. Thief III, released after the untimely demise of EIDOS, is a different game entirely...it lacks the original spark of the first two...but it will scare the weak-of-heart into cardiac arrest if you aren't careful.
For both The original Thief and the improved engine in Thief II, hundreds of fantastic fan missions are available. My aging CD's from Thief are going on six years old, they are _both_ loaded on my current systm, and are fully playable.
Back when our company was running ATM on the backbone and in our HQ offices, all of the FORE HE155 NIC's were "smart". That was also due, in part, to the particular nature of ATM. The NIC's handled their own routing in addition participating in LANE and PNNI services. Very little of the network load was actually handled by the server themselves. It was really very nice and the NIC's themselves were more than $600 a pop.
Load on our servers from network processing increased easily by 20% when we moved to an all Ethernet/IP setup. $500 for a "smart" NIC, hell yeah! As much as my boss may chide me about it, I sill lament the loss of ATM in our network.
-PONA-
Re:Good news for Model M lovers
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
I agree. For around $100US, I got two of their Customizer (WHITE) buckling-spring keyboards and they really ARE model-M clones. Keytronics also makes several good models, some with weighted "zones" for the keys but none of them seen as durable as my unicomp ones.
I don't think it is necessarily about being "uber-geek" but more about keyboarding style. If you used old-school BS keyboards from a galaxy far, far away, you are likely to enjoy going back to one after the mess of crappy membrane keyboards the industry cranks out today. If you learned on a quiet membrane keyboard, you are likely to continue using the same.
I thought the idea of a "laptop" or "notebook PC" was so that it was portable.
Isn't this sort of thing the reason docking stations were invented? portability for on-the-go and a way to simulate a regular desktop when you are in the office?? I mean, reallly!!
I agree about Cacti...it was stoopid simple to install and setup. The same can be said about Cricket.
If you are looking at Big Brother, I would probably recommend you look at Hobbit Monitor instead. Hobbit is Open Source and unconstrained as is BB. They are developing a client-side piece to replace BBNT, as well. Hobbit extends the good things we like about BB and adds some other things we would have really liked to have SEEN in BB.
It seems to me, also, that BB hasn't enjoyed much development activity for awhile now. Every tool has its place...we use BB/Hobbit and Cacti both, each for their own advantages and good points.
A number of years ago, when I was an employee of Tandy Corporation and worked in your local Radio Shack store, We sold a simple Victorinox Swiss Army knife at Christmastime. It sold for $10US and was pretty basic:
1 straight blade 1 electricians blade 1 phillips bit riding snugged on the outside 1 plastic toothpick 1 metal tweezers...I bought one and started using it for the normal things that an innovative Radio Shack employee _used_ to do: strip wires, screw/unscrew things, pry stuff apart, and cut things in half. I bought another one because I would forget the knife at home...again for $10US. The electrician's blade alone made it the single best tool I've ever used. I could cut and strip wire and slice open boxes like nobody's business with that thing. We stopped carrying it after the holidays so I bought a few more and have managed to lose all but one of them.
It was perfect for me...it fit INside my pocket, it was light, it was simple, and it always worked. I abused the hell out of it and I never had a moment's problem with it. That said, I received a gift of the original Leatherman PST one holiday afterwards and used it until the pliers would flip out like a balisong...that's the ONE thing that old Swiss Army knife never had: pliers.
I've run through two PST's and am on a new WAVE now. It is really slick with the blades OUTside the case now...and they LOCK. Just about everything on the new WAVE is an improvement on the original PST...but it IS bigger.
What I wouldn't give for another BOX of those little Swiss Army knives!!!
The play on the DS is much like the GBA, with modestly improved graphics and functionality. It has the new second screen on the bottom-side that is touch sensitive. The DS games are approximately the same size as a SD card.
The PSP is smaller and definitely sexier. The graphics are on par with the console system...MUCH better than the DS. While there is only so much Japanese I know, the gameplay is smooth and crisp, with a flat eraser mouse/joystick on the left side of the screen. The PSP games are the same approximate size as a micro CD (2in. diameter at best) and are fitted into a sealed caddy.
If Sony adds IM and WiFi to the lineup and drops some serious effort into getting games out for it, the PSP will absolutely KILL the DS. The screen and graphics on the PSP are so good that I couldn't put the thing down, unlike the DS where the awkwardness of the second touchscreen below made me quit after a few minutes of play.
Seriously...Slackware is the most BSD-like Linux there is. I _highly_ recommend it. Otherwise, give OpenBSD a try. For all the stick-in-the-mud that people say it is (no bleeding edge like Linux), it is very stable and very secure.
If you think that the US is the worst polluter on the planet, you haven't visited China lately.
In the US, we have a relatively high level of visibility. Corporations that make messes get caught and censured...or, at least, caught in some fashion. There are news articles and freedom of movement here. We are considered the world's biggest polluter because people see MORE of the US on the Internet, on the radio, and on the TV.
China, however, has no level of visibility. If they have governmental regulation of pollutants, we have no idea if they enforce them. If they have (mostly government-run) companies that are polluting, we don't know about it. Heck, I bet CHINA doesn't even know how bad their pollution problem is.
Maybe they will realize there's a problem when the Gobi desert swallows the rest of the country.
I wonder how much productivity you lock-'em-down admins are costing the economy as a whole. You wanna know something? LAN administration isn't the most important part of a company, you aren't making the company any money. Your job is to help us users be more productive in doing our job, it isn't to cause you the least hassle.
In the microcosm of my network, it is people who evidence the same ranting as the above-quoted post that inevitably cause the greatest amount of damage to the network.
Our users have Domain User privileges. That's it. They run the typical bevy of Office apps and run our own in-house app to conduct their business. Un fortunately, they use IE. Fortunately, our HTTP proxy only allows them to pre-approved sites required for their daily duties. No muss, no fuss. Honestly - end-user or no - your workstation at the office is for you to make the company more money...a glorifed typewriter, post office, and calculator.
Most ranting end-users fail to realize that sysadmins have to balance EVERYone's need with the needs of the network itself. Exactly how much productivity are you going to have when your precious new app you just _had_ to have causes a massive virus infection or malicious intrusion?
Don't scream at the sysadmin. Don't pelt him with epithets for not agreeing with you. Speak calmly and make your case. Our network, as it stands now, suffers from neither malicious intrusion nor adware/spyware infection due primarily to the level of attention paid to security. Our uptime is high and our users are productive. We, like other IS departments, are a cost center but we also add a great deal of value to the company by providing stability and order to the people that _do_ make the money for the company.
I have a similar experience while using Slackware as my distro of choice. We have a Compaq shop and were/are leveraged heavily with MS products.
I gave our IS Director a no-nonsense example of how easy Slackware boots, installs, and runs by simply _doing_ a boot, install, and run on one of our rackmounted CPQ boxes. It worked flawlessly as I had advertised it would. Given the fact that it took all of about 10 minutes to lock it down once install, he was sold..."official support" or not. What exactly are you planning on getting out of "official support" from IBM regarding Debian? What exactly is IBM not going to do if you install it versus one of their "officially supported" distros? I mean there are loads of _very_ talented people out the who have written drivers and daemons to support IBM/SUN/CPQ/whatever hardware.
I could care less if Compaq (part of the new SUCKY HP!) "officially supports" Slackware on their boxes. You certainly aren't going to catch me calling them up asking why my Apache server won't start or why my custom-built app won't work right. Those are all questions I have to answer myself vis a vis Open Source computing. Freedom from cost and onerous licensing also means freedom from crappy software tech support.
When I call Compaq for help, it is because someone was sleeping on QC duty while they let a faulty p/s fan through the assembly line.
-PONA- no snappy sig. no spellcheck. viva la revolution!
Slashdot Mirror
My goodness...I needed a good laugh this morning. This was great. I only lament my lack of mod points this week.
I was a die-hard C64 owner as a teenager. My buddy across the street had an Apple IIe and he was _always_ over at my house wanting to play my games. I went from carts to tapes to disks to double disks. Hell, I ended up with a C128 and then an Amiga 500 after that. My favourites were Ultima III, Bruce Lee, Karateka, and (oddly enough) the Wizard's Construction Set.
Around here, we make SAAD a general IS Department event...everyone geeks out and generally enjoys themselves.
For all of the people who are so adamantly opposed to _any_ sort of "day" for technology professionals...meh. People have birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals, etc, and they are all commemorated in some fashion. I think of SAAD as a good occasion to relax for a day and enjoy things. For the rest of the work year, we will all be trudging about dealing with problems, what is the big objection with having ONE day out of the year where we recognize our achievements even if no-one else does. It is a way of building esprit du corps and good feelings across departments.
(as an aside)
So many frackin' people (I find this especially true in the US) are so hell-bent on being unhappy these days. They want to piss in everyone's Cheerios because they can't be happy...why should anyone ELSE be happy? The last I heard, we all have a time-limit on our existence on this planet, why would you want to spend it being frackin' unhappy? Relax a little people! Loosen that knot around your neck and enjoy just being alive for a moment.
*sheesh*
PONA
I think that TIE Fighter and Thief share a common thread: a game that was produced and had a compelling story with solid gameplay that pulled you in personally. The hours I spent chasing down Rebel starfighters with my Saitek's blazing and my headphones on listening to the almost-revolutionary sound of game-based stereo. With Thief, it was much the same...just years later. No lights on, headphones amped up, sneaking around listening so intently that the rest of the world did not even exist. It was truly immersing.
I wish that the Thief series would get picked up and modernized, as well, but that seems to be quite a pipe dream too.
Office 2000 was a nice breath of fresh air from Office 97. Office 2003 was a significant improvement over them both. Office 2007 is a dramatic departure from them all. The new wide-tabbed menu system took ME quite awhile to get used to and while the same functionality seems to be there, it can be very hard to find.
I do not think my end-users are going to be happy or accepting of the change so I have no plans of deploying this new version anytime soon. Just my experience, folks...YMMV.
-PONA-
To expand on this, slightly... ...full-spectrum fluorescent lamps have been available for a number of years and in a variety of shapes. I believe that you can get them in a CFL form-factor now, as well.
-PONA-
We do.
While I will agree with you wholeheartedly on the retail or "personal" versions of some of these products, the corporate editions of Symantec Antivirus and Client Security are actually pretty good. We have had only had one or two problems with interoperability using them. I setup the console and server portions and apply the settings that *I* want then I just join those clients to them and things just work.
It can be a pain in the a$$ to upgrade their products from one revision to the next but, on the whole, I am pleased with their performance. It would disappoint me greatly to see the Netscapification of Symantec. Trusting the embedded "security" that Microsoft deems appropriate would be a poor substitute.
-PONA-
An unusual practice? Where? Most places I know have their users running as admin, because there is still software around that won't function properly if it's not run that way.
The network I manage has +/-500 PC's. Not a large number compared to other enterprises but all of these PC's are geographically dispersed across the US in small batches of 4 or 5 or 6, which makes for an administrative headache. None of our non-administrative employees have privileged access to their systems. Even most of our administrative staff does not have privileged access. This setup has equated to a relatively low occurrence of security issues. Our roaming users, however, do have elevated privileges on their notebook PC's and THOSE are (with no surprise) the systems we have incessant trouble with.
I think we are a testament to the virtue of giving end-users, right from the start, no expectation of elevated privilege on their systems. Going the other way must surely be an almost impossible task.
Hear, Hear!!
I second that emotion. I've played Thief, Thief II, and Thief III. Not only were the games great fun and engaging the first time around but the tremendous fan support made it even better. The original missions in Thief were, for most, more entertaining and engaging but the improved Dark enging in Thief II took the play to the next leve, I thought. Thief III, released after the untimely demise of EIDOS, is a different game entirely...it lacks the original spark of the first two...but it will scare the weak-of-heart into cardiac arrest if you aren't careful.
For both The original Thief and the improved engine in Thief II, hundreds of fantastic fan missions are available. My aging CD's from Thief are going on six years old, they are _both_ loaded on my current systm, and are fully playable.
http://www.ttlg.com/
http://www.thief-thecircle.com/
jellybaby anyone? I've got plenty.
OK, where's _my_ five finger discount?
Back when our company was running ATM on the backbone and in our HQ offices, all of the FORE HE155 NIC's were "smart". That was also due, in part, to the particular nature of ATM. The NIC's handled their own routing in addition participating in LANE and PNNI services. Very little of the network load was actually handled by the server themselves. It was really very nice and the NIC's themselves were more than $600 a pop.
Load on our servers from network processing increased easily by 20% when we moved to an all Ethernet/IP setup. $500 for a "smart" NIC, hell yeah! As much as my boss may chide me about it, I sill lament the loss of ATM in our network.
-PONA-
I agree. For around $100US, I got two of their Customizer (WHITE) buckling-spring keyboards and they really ARE model-M clones. Keytronics also makes several good models, some with weighted "zones" for the keys but none of them seen as durable as my unicomp ones.
I don't think it is necessarily about being "uber-geek" but more about keyboarding style. If you used old-school BS keyboards from a galaxy far, far away, you are likely to enjoy going back to one after the mess of crappy membrane keyboards the industry cranks out today. If you learned on a quiet membrane keyboard, you are likely to continue using the same.
-PONA-
oh, that's just Laslo...
I thought the idea of a "laptop" or "notebook PC" was so that it was portable.
Isn't this sort of thing the reason docking stations were invented? portability for on-the-go and a way to simulate a regular desktop when you are in the office?? I mean, reallly!!
-PONA-
Well fuck ME, folks! Ain't that trailer sumthin' else? I likes me some serous action so's it looks like Joss is gonna serve some up!
yeee-HAAW!
-PONA-
I agree about Cacti...it was stoopid simple to install and setup. The same can be said about Cricket.
If you are looking at Big Brother, I would probably recommend you look at Hobbit Monitor instead. Hobbit is Open Source and unconstrained as is BB. They are developing a client-side piece to replace BBNT, as well. Hobbit extends the good things we like about BB and adds some other things we would have really liked to have SEEN in BB.
It seems to me, also, that BB hasn't enjoyed much development activity for awhile now. Every tool has its place...we use BB/Hobbit and Cacti both, each for their own advantages and good points.
-PONA-
A number of years ago, when I was an employee of Tandy Corporation and worked in your local Radio Shack store, We sold a simple Victorinox Swiss Army knife at Christmastime. It sold for $10US and was pretty basic:
...I bought one and started using it for the normal things that an innovative Radio Shack employee _used_ to do: strip wires, screw/unscrew things, pry stuff apart, and cut things in half. I bought another one because I would forget the knife at home...again for $10US. The electrician's blade alone made it the single best tool I've ever used. I could cut and strip wire and slice open boxes like nobody's business with that thing. We stopped carrying it after the holidays so I bought a few more and have managed to lose all but one of them.
1 straight blade
1 electricians blade
1 phillips bit riding snugged on the outside
1 plastic toothpick
1 metal tweezers
It was perfect for me...it fit INside my pocket, it was light, it was simple, and it always worked. I abused the hell out of it and I never had a moment's problem with it. That said, I received a gift of the original Leatherman PST one holiday afterwards and used it until the pliers would flip out like a balisong...that's the ONE thing that old Swiss Army knife never had: pliers.
I've run through two PST's and am on a new WAVE now. It is really slick with the blades OUTside the case now...and they LOCK. Just about everything on the new WAVE is an improvement on the original PST...but it IS bigger.
What I wouldn't give for another BOX of those little Swiss Army knives!!!
-PONA-
I have both the DS and the PSP.
The play on the DS is much like the GBA, with modestly improved graphics and functionality. It has the new second screen on the bottom-side that is touch sensitive. The DS games are approximately the same size as a SD card.
The PSP is smaller and definitely sexier. The graphics are on par with the console system...MUCH better than the DS. While there is only so much Japanese I know, the gameplay is smooth and crisp, with a flat eraser mouse/joystick on the left side of the screen. The PSP games are the same approximate size as a micro CD (2in. diameter at best) and are fitted into a sealed caddy.
If Sony adds IM and WiFi to the lineup and drops some serious effort into getting games out for it, the PSP will absolutely KILL the DS. The screen and graphics on the PSP are so good that I couldn't put the thing down, unlike the DS where the awkwardness of the second touchscreen below made me quit after a few minutes of play.
Oh, I recommend DriftRacer...it is very good.
-PONA-
Seriously...Slackware is the most BSD-like Linux there is. I _highly_ recommend it. Otherwise, give OpenBSD a try. For all the stick-in-the-mud that people say it is (no bleeding edge like Linux), it is very stable and very secure.
-PONA-
If you think that the US is the worst polluter on the planet, you haven't visited China lately.
In the US, we have a relatively high level of visibility. Corporations that make messes get caught and censured...or, at least, caught in some fashion. There are news articles and freedom of movement here. We are considered the world's biggest polluter because people see MORE of the US on the Internet, on the radio, and on the TV.
China, however, has no level of visibility. If they have governmental regulation of pollutants, we have no idea if they enforce them. If they have (mostly government-run) companies that are polluting, we don't know about it. Heck, I bet CHINA doesn't even know how bad their pollution problem is.
Maybe they will realize there's a problem when the Gobi desert swallows the rest of the country.
-PONA-
sync, sync, reboot
I wonder how much productivity you lock-'em-down admins are costing the economy as a whole. You wanna know something? LAN administration isn't the most important part of a company, you aren't making the company any money. Your job is to help us users be more productive in doing our job, it isn't to cause you the least hassle.
In the microcosm of my network, it is people who evidence the same ranting as the above-quoted post that inevitably cause the greatest amount of damage to the network.
Our users have Domain User privileges. That's it. They run the typical bevy of Office apps and run our own in-house app to conduct their business. Un fortunately, they use IE. Fortunately, our HTTP proxy only allows them to pre-approved sites required for their daily duties. No muss, no fuss. Honestly - end-user or no - your workstation at the office is for you to make the company more money...a glorifed typewriter, post office, and calculator.
Most ranting end-users fail to realize that sysadmins have to balance EVERYone's need with the needs of the network itself. Exactly how much productivity are you going to have when your precious new app you just _had_ to have causes a massive virus infection or malicious intrusion?
Don't scream at the sysadmin. Don't pelt him with epithets for not agreeing with you. Speak calmly and make your case. Our network, as it stands now, suffers from neither malicious intrusion nor adware/spyware infection due primarily to the level of attention paid to security. Our uptime is high and our users are productive. We, like other IS departments, are a cost center but we also add a great deal of value to the company by providing stability and order to the people that _do_ make the money for the company.
I have a similar experience while using Slackware as my distro of choice. We have a Compaq shop and were/are leveraged heavily with MS products.
I gave our IS Director a no-nonsense example of how easy Slackware boots, installs, and runs by simply _doing_ a boot, install, and run on one of our rackmounted CPQ boxes. It worked flawlessly as I had advertised it would. Given the fact that it took all of about 10 minutes to lock it down once install, he was sold..."official support" or not. What exactly are you planning on getting out of "official support" from IBM regarding Debian? What exactly is IBM not going to do if you install it versus one of their "officially supported" distros? I mean there are loads of _very_ talented people out the who have written drivers and daemons to support IBM/SUN/CPQ/whatever hardware.
I could care less if Compaq (part of the new SUCKY HP!) "officially supports" Slackware on their boxes. You certainly aren't going to catch me calling them up asking why my Apache server won't start or why my custom-built app won't work right. Those are all questions I have to answer myself vis a vis Open Source computing. Freedom from cost and onerous licensing also means freedom from crappy software tech support.
When I call Compaq for help, it is because someone was sleeping on QC duty while they let a faulty p/s fan through the assembly line.
-PONA-
no snappy sig. no spellcheck. viva la revolution!
I like the Madeline Kahn version better.
I'm Tired
-PONA-