Heck, an old boss of mine (one Neil Peiman, former owner of the now-bought-out Internet Access Group, Inc. (iag.net)) was reading employees' and who knows who ELSE's email. Everytime I see someone with that ThinkGeek shirt on, I ask them if they are related to Neil...
In my opinion, Neil was the most morally bankrupt, self-serving, and egotistical bastards alive. he didn't even have the balls to fire me on his own - he tried to get another co-worker to do it for him. You see, he was scared of me. I knew his dirty little secret; I knew he was fscking his sexy little secretary Sarah LaRosa. I also knew he was regularly rummaging through employee emails (looking to see if anyone "knew", I would imagine). I knew he was giving his customers the runaround and using his techs to cover his a$$.
Sorry...was I ranting?? Anyways, so if Neil is running an ISP somewhere else now, he can read everyone's email legally....great, I feel _so_ much better.
Cobble some spare parts together and give DROPLINE a try. I think you will be surprised just _how_ feature- and app-rich the X(Free|.org) has become oer the years.
Personally I like the fact that when I run "apt-get install mysql", it will install the package *and* ensure it is run at boot time, rather than me having to screw around hand-editing conf files.
The "screw around hand-editing conf files" part is probably why most of us Slack users are _still_using the distro. I have used both SysV and BSD style init's on both free (as in beer) OS's and the pay-to-play variety and I much prefer the hands-on functionality within the BSD flavour.
Taken as a group, most Slackware devotees have been doing things _much_ longer because we have been around the Linux block longer. That may be something of a glaring generality but, for the most part, it is accurate. We are happiest when we are able to "see" the guts of what is going on and we only trust what we have "made" to happen. I have been doing so since making disksets off images I was downloading through my SLIP account. As far as Linux itself is concerned, Slack users have been perfectly content with doing things this way for _quite_ some time.
Storied past aside, I _like_ Patrick and I _like_ his distro. While I have tried (and been forced to use) others, I always come back to Slackware. That's the great thing about Open Source: use what YOU like, not what someone ELSE likes.
The zombies eerie moaning wafting out from a cavernous hall used to freak me (and my daughter) out when playing Thief1. Heck, I can _still_ hear it in my head as I write this.
While I enjoyed playing Thief 2, I missed some of the elements of the first...but you just can't escape the fun of hearing Karras taunt you when his "eye" spots you in the shadows!!
I, for one, welcome our new non-vapourware Thief title. Looking Glass is dead, long LIVE Looking Glass!!
But, there is a very real and substantial difference between these methods of "photography" and what we use today with film cameras - reproducibility.
Once you have fixed the image upon any of these mediums, you are finished. You cannot mass-produce the image you have captured as it is permanently and irrevocably imprinted upon the receiver, glass or silver plate.
Where the advent of the tintype processes brought photography to the masses, modern negative exposure for paper processing made it cheap, simple, and reproducible. Even so, there were still people using ferrotype process up through the 1940's.
If it weren't for the mind-bogglingly lethal chemicals required to develop tintype images, we might still find people using them...if only for the artistic value they impart.
I do not, personally, find digital cameras superior in any way to film ones in any aspect save convenience. That convenience will likely be the killer of film once and for all but not for a very long time. My Nikon body will work without batteries and 35mm film cans are plentiful.
My biggest (to date) mistake was enabling NT (4.0) software mirroring on our SQL server. This server housed our proprietary internal application's database....irreplaceable data.
When the server crashed from a (then) unknown issue with Compaq storage drivers and the MP kernel, I spent about five hours trying to resuscitate the volumes...unsuccessfuly....and it sounded like _such_ a good idea at the time.
FM2's should be relatively easy to find second-hand...esp. for the budget you have set for the camera body. Old Nikkor glass would be your stumbling block there. Fortunately, you can blow your wad on just about ANY recent Nikkor glass and it'll mate to the FM2 body just fine...sans the CPU features.
I personally own an FM3a with 20-120mm zoom and 50mm D-type lenses. Manual everything just like the old FM2 but with the convenience of aperture-priority and TTL metering for your Speedlight.
My wife has an N75, which gives her point-and-shoot and she can steal my lenses.
This strays a bit from the topic at-hand but I felt compelled to weigh in on this subject.
In the past, I had much the same attitude as the majority of/. : screw other people's computer problems, if I'm off the clock I don't want to be bothered. I thought that way until my mother wanted to buy a computer. She bought her first computer from me when I was a young(er) lad at Radio Shack...it was the right thing for her to do.
I provided little or no tech support for her and, indeed, felt a little indignant when she would call for help. It took several years to figure out that helping one of the two people responsible for bringing me into this world (then clothing, feeding, educating, and disciplining me) was just the right thing to do. The way I see it, I want MY own children to grow up, become successful, and help ME out as I grow old. What makes me so incredibly special that I am too fucking GOOD to do the same for my parents?
So, I help my mother out and occasionally field some support when I am at my fathers or my aunt's house. Hell, I even troubleshot my brother's son's computer during the holidays. Why? I would _never_ consider myself a good samaratin or, even, a terribly pleasant person. Nor do I particularly enjoy doing family computer support after-hours. But, I do it because it is the right thing to do.
What good is the hard-fought knowledge and experience we have gained over technology if we cannot help to improve the lives of our family?
While the article itself is something of an advertisement, I _do_ have the Media Tools package and it _does_ work pretty well...horible documentation, though.
Now...staying relatively on-topic...lemme tell you just how bad OnTrack stinks. I needed a notebook PC's data recovered after a system crash. Instead of dinking around with it myself and possibly losing the data forever, I forked over some dinero to have OnTrack perform a recovery.
After two days of phone calls and emails, I finally get the info for shipping the HD. After it arrived at OnTrack's facility, I never heard word ONE from them...I had to call and badger them every time I needed a status update. After two weeks of waiting, I called only for them to tell me "Oh, I'm sorry we can't do anything with the disk." More than a month later, I finally got my HD back from them and that was only after I called a final time, talked with no less than three different people, and got a stammering apology. UPS delivered a NFG HD to me the next day.
If you plan on using OnTrack - don't. If you need data recovery - don't use OnTrack, try the recovery yourself or use a different vendor. I have crossed OnTrack off our corporate list of approved vendors and have promised to tell any of my peers who are looking for data recovery service to steer clear of OnTrack and their (very) dismal customer service.
OK, maybe I am missing something here...which is entirely possible.
XYZ Corp. makes widgets that everyone LOVES. They have an economically (and ecologically) sound business that employees thousands of people around the world. XYZ widgets are in high demand and are affordably priced.
(fast-forward 20 years)
XYZ Corp. lays off 95% of their workforce for even MORE productive robots. These robots make widgets, faster, better, and with less ecological impact. The formerly-employed people have no money to buy widgets and are forced to subsist at (or below) the povertly level. Thousands of people who once bought widgets are no longer prospective consumers.
If we magnify this scenario, many businesses lay off large numbers of human workers in preference for robotics. Idle, unproductive, and poor people now cannot afford to purchase products from the now-more-productive businesses.
If there is no market, how can there continue to be a product?
This is a good point, actually. I watched an article about the iBot on 60 Minutes this past weekend and it looks pretty impressive.
Once I got over the "gee-whiz" factor of it all, I started wondering about ADA requirements and how the iBot might circumvent some of them. I mean, no ramps are needed for this wheelchair. No special accommodations (other than some extra patience to navigate with it) are honestly necessary in order to get around and live a very functional life.
Once it has proliferated into the masses, I think that technology like this will take quite a bit of bite out current legislation for the disabled. A shop owner could justify his lack of ramps and guardrails by saying, "why don't people just get those iBot thingies?".
Actually, a nice EMP blast...judiciously placed and proportioned would be 10x better. (Probably) no loss of life and no spam for awhile. The affected spammer would, then, have to face the prospect of replacing hardware and software and all that muckety-muck. It has been shown that if you provide an economic deterrent, only a very _few_ spammers will survive...the remainder would be easily corralled and poked indiscriminately with cattle-prods.
I cannot imagine doing without my CorelDRAW! program...if not for it (and my preternatural addition to Photoshop) I could do without Windows entirely and forEVER.
If Microsoft ever gets serious about patch management, they'll have a common tool that sysadmins can use to patch any and all of their MS software with a common interface and no unnecessary transmission of system-specific data to MS. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
A tool I am rolling out to our end-users right now is Software Update Services. I, too, have relied heavily on HFNETCHK in the past but with many, many remote locations and many, many end-users, I would much rather have a single, internal, and NOT Internet-accessible, location wherein all remote systems can pick up their patches. I can even test them out before deployment. In this regard, MS has started down the long road to responsible patch management.
Honestly, though, all of MS's hotfixes and service packs ARE available for individual download...just keep a dedicated folder to download them and apply as necessary. If you have a large Org. to support, look at the SuS package MS has available. It is (*GASP*) free!!!
The whole Hyperion cycle paints a picture like few other future-set books I have read. It has computers and religion and civilization working in fascinating ways. While the Dune series was a very definite influence on me, Hyperion was a much deeper one.
Paint me a picture where computers become our masters, albeit hidden ones....hmmmm, I'm sitting in front of one of those infernal machines right NOW!
This topic, like few others, really polarizes the/. audience. There's the "Sharing" crowd and theres the "Buy-it" crowd.
This stand from a large media conglomerate isn't particularly aimed at music-sharing over the Internet, it is aimed at retaining ultimate control over the music. Music- and file-sharing is just a scapegoat. It would look bad to complain that their artists can cut them out of the deal but it looks good to say they are clamping down on piracy!
Recording artists, with some relatively inexpensive equipment at home and a permanent connection to the 'Net, can effectively replace a media conglomerate. They can spread the word about their music, provide downloadables (music, images, screensavers, music videos), and bypass the virtual RAPE they experience at the hands of a modern recording contract. It is THIS that "the corporation" is trying to cut off.
Watch and see...this new "Red Book" product will be touted as some new, improved media. They will market it as the "in" thing to have. The unquestioning consumer will agree and keep consuming. Regardless, the more you try to protect your media, the more we will subvert their protection.
Windows 2000 has added many automated tasks in Active Directory, but when I last worked with it (without service packs), those things tended to be a bit flaky at times. I suspect you probably need the same three guys at 50 machines, but you can probably scale them to 150-200. This is purely theoretical, and is based on a six-month contract learning and setting up a brand-new Windows 2000 network, back pre-SP1. I'd be interested to hear from any experienced 2K admins whether or not my wild-assed guess is accurate.
I have 37 W2K servers and approximately 200 (W2K/NT4) desktops and 20(W2K) laptop users. There's just me, no-one else. I keep pretty busy and can get bogged down quickly when several problems arise at once but, overall, I do pretty well.
I can troll for news and babes occasionally and everything is patched with plenty of attention to virus scanning and general system maintenance.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, an old boss of mine (one Neil Peiman, former owner of the now-bought-out Internet Access Group, Inc. (iag.net)) was reading employees' and who knows who ELSE's email. Everytime I see someone with that ThinkGeek shirt on, I ask them if they are related to Neil...
In my opinion, Neil was the most morally bankrupt, self-serving, and egotistical bastards alive. he didn't even have the balls to fire me on his own - he tried to get another co-worker to do it for him. You see, he was scared of me. I knew his dirty little secret; I knew he was fscking his sexy little secretary Sarah LaRosa. I also knew he was regularly rummaging through employee emails (looking to see if anyone "knew", I would imagine). I knew he was giving his customers the runaround and using his techs to cover his a$$.
Sorry...was I ranting?? Anyways, so if Neil is running an ISP somewhere else now, he can read everyone's email legally....great, I feel _so_ much better.
I was wunnering who _else_ read that mag? Talk about "back in the day"...
...everything else is read online.
I subscribe (and occasionally read):
1 - linux journal
2 - network computing
3 - national geographic
4 - outside
-PONA-
Cobble some spare parts together and give DROPLINE a try. I think you will be surprised just _how_ feature- and app-rich the X(Free|.org) has become oer the years.
-PONA-
The "screw around hand-editing conf files" part is probably why most of us Slack users are _still_using the distro. I have used both SysV and BSD style init's on both free (as in beer) OS's and the pay-to-play variety and I much prefer the hands-on functionality within the BSD flavour.
Taken as a group, most Slackware devotees have been doing things _much_ longer because we have been around the Linux block longer. That may be something of a glaring generality but, for the most part, it is accurate. We are happiest when we are able to "see" the guts of what is going on and we only trust what we have "made" to happen. I have been doing so since making disksets off images I was downloading through my SLIP account. As far as Linux itself is concerned, Slack users have been perfectly content with doing things this way for _quite_ some time.
Storied past aside, I _like_ Patrick and I _like_ his distro. While I have tried (and been forced to use) others, I always come back to Slackware. That's the great thing about Open Source: use what YOU like, not what someone ELSE likes.
-PONA-
The zombies eerie moaning wafting out from a cavernous hall used to freak me (and my daughter) out when playing Thief1. Heck, I can _still_ hear it in my head as I write this.
While I enjoyed playing Thief 2, I missed some of the elements of the first...but you just can't escape the fun of hearing Karras taunt you when his "eye" spots you in the shadows!!
I, for one, welcome our new non-vapourware Thief title. Looking Glass is dead, long LIVE Looking Glass!!
-PONA-
Point taken.
But, there is a very real and substantial difference between these methods of "photography" and what we use today with film cameras - reproducibility.
Once you have fixed the image upon any of these mediums, you are finished. You cannot mass-produce the image you have captured as it is permanently and irrevocably imprinted upon the receiver, glass or silver plate.
Where the advent of the tintype processes brought photography to the masses, modern negative exposure for paper processing made it cheap, simple, and reproducible. Even so, there were still people using ferrotype process up through the 1940's.
If it weren't for the mind-bogglingly lethal chemicals required to develop tintype images, we might still find people using them...if only for the artistic value they impart.
I do not, personally, find digital cameras superior in any way to film ones in any aspect save convenience. That convenience will likely be the killer of film once and for all but not for a very long time. My Nikon body will work without batteries and 35mm film cans are plentiful.
-PONA-
A good deal of Civil War-era photography was not photography in the sense that we understand it today. Typically, you will find:
ambrotypes
daguerreotypes
ferrotypes or tintypes
None of these methods have exposure or development methods such as what we use today with print film.
-PONA-
My biggest (to date) mistake was enabling NT (4.0) software mirroring on our SQL server. This server housed our proprietary internal application's database....irreplaceable data.
...and it sounded like _such_ a good idea at the time.
When the server crashed from a (then) unknown issue with Compaq storage drivers and the MP kernel, I spent about five hours trying to resuscitate the volumes...unsuccessfuly.
-PONA-
I would second that emotion!
FM2's should be relatively easy to find second-hand...esp. for the budget you have set for the camera body. Old Nikkor glass would be your stumbling block there. Fortunately, you can blow your wad on just about ANY recent Nikkor glass and it'll mate to the FM2 body just fine...sans the CPU features.
I personally own an FM3a with 20-120mm zoom and 50mm D-type lenses. Manual everything just like the old FM2 but with the convenience of aperture-priority and TTL metering for your Speedlight.
My wife has an N75, which gives her point-and-shoot and she can steal my lenses.
This strays a bit from the topic at-hand but I felt compelled to weigh in on this subject.
/. : screw other people's computer problems, if I'm off the clock I don't want to be bothered. I thought that way until my mother wanted to buy a computer. She bought her first computer from me when I was a young(er) lad at Radio Shack...it was the right thing for her to do.
In the past, I had much the same attitude as the majority of
I provided little or no tech support for her and, indeed, felt a little indignant when she would call for help. It took several years to figure out that helping one of the two people responsible for bringing me into this world (then clothing, feeding, educating, and disciplining me) was just the right thing to do. The way I see it, I want MY own children to grow up, become successful, and help ME out as I grow old. What makes me so incredibly special that I am too fucking GOOD to do the same for my parents?
So, I help my mother out and occasionally field some support when I am at my fathers or my aunt's house. Hell, I even troubleshot my brother's son's computer during the holidays. Why? I would _never_ consider myself a good samaratin or, even, a terribly pleasant person. Nor do I particularly enjoy doing family computer support after-hours. But, I do it because it is the right thing to do.
What good is the hard-fought knowledge and experience we have gained over technology if we cannot help to improve the lives of our family?
-PONA-
While the article itself is something of an advertisement, I _do_ have the Media Tools package and it _does_ work pretty well...horible documentation, though.
Now...staying relatively on-topic...lemme tell you just how bad OnTrack stinks. I needed a notebook PC's data recovered after a system crash. Instead of dinking around with it myself and possibly losing the data forever, I forked over some dinero to have OnTrack perform a recovery.
After two days of phone calls and emails, I finally get the info for shipping the HD. After it arrived at OnTrack's facility, I never heard word ONE from them...I had to call and badger them every time I needed a status update. After two weeks of waiting, I called only for them to tell me "Oh, I'm sorry we can't do anything with the disk." More than a month later, I finally got my HD back from them and that was only after I called a final time, talked with no less than three different people, and got a stammering apology. UPS delivered a NFG HD to me the next day.
If you plan on using OnTrack - don't. If you need data recovery - don't use OnTrack, try the recovery yourself or use a different vendor. I have crossed OnTrack off our corporate list of approved vendors and have promised to tell any of my peers who are looking for data recovery service to steer clear of OnTrack and their (very) dismal customer service.
-PONA-
...because he dodges bullets, Avi.
OK, maybe I am missing something here...which is entirely possible.
XYZ Corp. makes widgets that everyone LOVES. They have an economically (and ecologically) sound business that employees thousands of people around the world. XYZ widgets are in high demand and are affordably priced.
(fast-forward 20 years)
XYZ Corp. lays off 95% of their workforce for even MORE productive robots. These robots make widgets, faster, better, and with less ecological impact. The formerly-employed people have no money to buy widgets and are forced to subsist at (or below) the povertly level. Thousands of people who once bought widgets are no longer prospective consumers.
If we magnify this scenario, many businesses lay off large numbers of human workers in preference for robotics. Idle, unproductive, and poor people now cannot afford to purchase products from the now-more-productive businesses.
If there is no market, how can there continue to be a product?
This is a good point, actually. I watched an article about the iBot on 60 Minutes this past weekend and it looks pretty impressive.
Once I got over the "gee-whiz" factor of it all, I started wondering about ADA requirements and how the iBot might circumvent some of them. I mean, no ramps are needed for this wheelchair. No special accommodations (other than some extra patience to navigate with it) are honestly necessary in order to get around and live a very functional life.
Once it has proliferated into the masses, I think that technology like this will take quite a bit of bite out current legislation for the disabled. A shop owner could justify his lack of ramps and guardrails by saying, "why don't people just get those iBot thingies?".
-PONA-
Actually, a nice EMP blast...judiciously placed and proportioned would be 10x better. (Probably) no loss of life and no spam for awhile. The affected spammer would, then, have to face the prospect of replacing hardware and software and all that muckety-muck. It has been shown that if you provide an economic deterrent, only a very _few_ spammers will survive...the remainder would be easily corralled and poked indiscriminately with cattle-prods.
-PONA-
OSU!!!
I cannot imagine doing without my CorelDRAW! program...if not for it (and my preternatural addition to Photoshop) I could do without Windows entirely and forEVER.
Hear, Hear!!! I second that emotion...
although, I _still_ tend to compile from source and install by hand.
make mine SLACKWARE!!!
-PONA-
There are machines on IX...many new machines.
Most astute...my point eggsactly.
make mine SLACKWARE!
-PONA-
*ahem*
SLACKWARE distros have NO package management tools!!!
*ahem*
Oh really? I never HEARD of that before!!
-PONA-
If Microsoft ever gets serious about patch management, they'll have a common tool that sysadmins can use to patch any and all of their MS software with a common interface and no unnecessary transmission of system-specific data to MS. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
A tool I am rolling out to our end-users right now is Software Update Services . I, too, have relied heavily on HFNETCHK in the past but with many, many remote locations and many, many end-users, I would much rather have a single, internal, and NOT Internet-accessible, location wherein all remote systems can pick up their patches. I can even test them out before deployment. In this regard, MS has started down the long road to responsible patch management.
Honestly, though, all of MS's hotfixes and service packs ARE available for individual download...just keep a dedicated folder to download them and apply as necessary. If you have a large Org. to support, look at the SuS package MS has available. It is (*GASP*) free!!!
oh...Patrick J. Volkerding ROCKS!!!
The whole Hyperion cycle paints a picture like few other future-set books I have read. It has computers and religion and civilization working in fascinating ways. While the Dune series was a very definite influence on me, Hyperion was a much deeper one.
Paint me a picture where computers become our masters, albeit hidden ones....hmmmm, I'm sitting in front of one of those infernal machines right NOW!
This topic, like few others, really polarizes the /. audience. There's the "Sharing" crowd and theres the "Buy-it" crowd.
This stand from a large media conglomerate isn't particularly aimed at music-sharing over the Internet, it is aimed at retaining ultimate control over the music. Music- and file-sharing is just a scapegoat. It would look bad to complain that their artists can cut them out of the deal but it looks good to say they are clamping down on piracy!
Recording artists, with some relatively inexpensive equipment at home and a permanent connection to the 'Net, can effectively replace a media conglomerate. They can spread the word about their music, provide downloadables (music, images, screensavers, music videos), and bypass the virtual RAPE they experience at the hands of a modern recording contract. It is THIS that "the corporation" is trying to cut off.
Watch and see...this new "Red Book" product will be touted as some new, improved media. They will market it as the "in" thing to have. The unquestioning consumer will agree and keep consuming. Regardless, the more you try to protect your media, the more we will subvert their protection.
Oy!
'Twould be more delectable with Ram's Bladder Cup!
-PONA-
Windows 2000 has added many automated tasks in Active Directory, but when I last worked with it (without service packs), those things tended to be a bit flaky at times. I suspect you probably need the same three guys at 50 machines, but you can probably scale them to 150-200. This is purely theoretical, and is based on a six-month contract learning and setting up a brand-new Windows 2000 network, back pre-SP1. I'd be interested to hear from any experienced 2K admins whether or not my wild-assed guess is accurate.
I have 37 W2K servers and approximately 200 (W2K/NT4) desktops and 20(W2K) laptop users. There's just me, no-one else. I keep pretty busy and can get bogged down quickly when several problems arise at once but, overall, I do pretty well.
I can troll for news and babes occasionally and everything is patched with plenty of attention to virus scanning and general system maintenance.
-PONA-