I've seen so many negative comments on this I wanted to chirp in something positive, sorry for being mr optimistic:P
Anyways, first off I think at 23mph with the exhaust about 3-4 feet under your nose (Unless your a midget) you wouldn't have to worry about breathing in fumes. Site did say it has a centrifugal clutch which only activates the motor at a certain speed.
Also I've been reading a lot of comments about pollution too. Do 2 strokes really produce that much air pollution? I've heard that the opposite is true because since it is a gas/oil mixture the remaining exhaust resembles diesel more than 4 stroke exhaust, which just settles to the ground (Yay it gets into our streams and rivers though, which is why MTBE gas is banned in CA waterways)
I just wanted to play devils advocate, it looks like a really neat peice of engineering compared to those things I used to see in popular science.
A few days ago slashdot announced a new version with the Subscriber site preview plum. My response compared this to extortion, I.E. pay Malda if you want to see this site before we DDOS it. It's been almost a week since then, and most of the stories I really didn't care for, this one did, I clicked it, and it wasn't there. Only 58 replies by the time I saw the story and it was gone, poof! Inundated by a torrent of http requests.
My only response to this story is this, to the author's, editors, coders, whatever of slashdot. This story is a perfect example of publicly released images to the public, with no banner ad requirements, why in gods name haven't you implemented some sort of cache system yet? There is nothing wrong with caching something the US gov is making publicly available.
You need to get in touch with Adrian of the squid project, he's offered his help, take him up on it, before you get accused of being a terrorist or something.
Compared to full frontal open chest heart surgery. The article mentions using a heart cathador, which if memory serves correctly is nothing more than a small, maybe 1/4" diameter tube which is inserted into the artery.
Compare a small 1/4" long 3 inch deep incision to a 4-5" cut + chest spreader that most operations require and compare which method causes more trauma to the body, I think this stem cell/cathador technique wins hands down.
Potentially though, this is going to save a lot of people. I wonder if the application is just limited to the heart, or if it can be used for any organ (for instance, my mucas filled lungs and ulcer pocked stomach)
The procedure seems simple enough even where it could be an outpatient therapy depending on what needs to be treated. Sorta neat how the body just lets those stems cells stick right to it.
Human cloning has been outright abolished, so until the people that consider it a "moral dilema" I won't be getting a new pair of lungs from my spare parts body anytime soon.
But this has the potential of generating a lot of money for cloning and stem cell research. Already there is a lot of pet cloning going on (although at the 6 figure price tag I won't be cloning my kitty anytime soon) Hopefully this will create a demand for cloned pet parts which will have the direct effect of funding research in these areas.
Hmm, Chia Kidney, just add water and watch it grow.
Feel free to call this troll. He's lives with his mom, and that's her voice in the answering machine message. Every time Mr. McDaniel decides to troll, another copy of his personal info will be posted immediately afterward.
Dear Bowie J. Poag
WTF do you think you are accomplishing by posting this guys personal info? Sure you may not like him, disagree with him or what not, but taking the time to track down his personal info, and posting it shows a level of compulsiveness that I think requires some professional help.
If you don't like the guy.. Fine, deal with it in the real world. Don't waste my time, and all the other productive slashdot posters time with this crap. You're showing the maturity of a 12 year old, no I take that back, I know 12 year olds that can behave more maturely than you.
Hate to say it, but I saw it here first and as old school of a pc gamer that I am, isn't doom passe?
Counterstrike is just merely approaching it's end of life while we await the arrival of counter zero:D If you disagree with me do it with your words and not your mod points.
Lack of innovation, thats right, a serious lack of innovation, and too many "me too" games.
Waaaayy back in the day, the atari 2600 was the #1 console. It died a horrible death mainly because of all the crap "me too" clones of astroids, combat, and pac man clones (actually the 2600 pacman stunk like turds)
Later we got the nintendo 8-bit. OOh wow, easter eggs in mario, now every game has easter eggs and secret codes. Now everyone wants to program platform games because "If mario is such a popular platform game, mine should be too!"
Later we saw the puzzle game "me too" phase where everyone and their brother was doing some sort of "tetris" clone. Nintendo had Dr. Mario, Sega had columns, Atari came out with some shit game called "klax". For a while there it seemed everyone and their brother was trying to do some spin on tetris.
Now it's the same old crap, and game companies STILL haven't learned their lessons. Yay we have procedural textured mapped polygons on a box that can do 3gabillion vertices per second. Who cares about the game! Just look at those fill rates! Wow look it's tetris, but it's better because it's IN 3D WOW! Yeah i'm just lining up at best buy before they open so I CAN GET MY COPY TOO!
I suppose when they release the next generation of consoles, we're going to see the same old crap, but with more wizzbang graphics than you can shake a stick at.
In the words of Roddy Piper, "It's like putting perfume on a pig."
I don't have the companies information anymore, but they said they got my resume from craigslist. They said come down for an interview, when I got there there was about 100 people there.
They gave a slick dog and pony, and wanted us to pony up 2k for a "sales kit" and explained how if we brought in others we would get a part of their commisions, and so on.
I got spam, I got telemarketers, I got people trying to get me into pyramid schemes.
Craigslist, Monster, svjobs, hotjobs, all of them I suspect of either a)selling my personal informations or b) maintained weak security in both their systems or their policies which resulted in the afformentioned "annoyances"
And i'm really sorry to the afformentioned websites either, I don't mean to accuse you but hot damn my inbox / home POTS line gets filled with crap everytime i've used your service.
Re:unfortunately..
on
Half Mast
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I mean, if I wanted to hork data off of a system I had full physical access to, I'd just grab the drive, stick it in my pocket, and walk out whistling "Jimmy Crack Corn and I Don't Care."
Binary packages never have support out of the box for the stuff I run, a good example of this is when I set up certain PHP apps that require --enable-track-vars to be there at compile time. PHP binary packages never have this option enabled.
As far as securing IIS, you d/l a patch, big deal. Apache you patch the source, recompile, and then you're done. Quite a few LONGER steps.
I thought anyone that used purely binary packages was a clueless n00b. Since you're having such an easy time slinging mud at me.
How closely have you worked with the windows registry? Believe me there's a ton of documented stuff you can do. Why wouldn't you patch IIS for code red before you put it in your networks DMZ? That's just plain foolhearty. As foolhearty as not doing cvsupit on your BSD ports collection before installing anything.
Do I think IIS is better in terms of performance and reliability for web services? NO! Look at my sig sucka! I rely on apache/php/mysql to run my site everyday (from a he.net account) I just don't find it usefull as a desktop at the moment. I use putty to ssh in, I use vi a lot to edit files (*note* I use the "iodqs!" keys alot)I use wget to grab stuff remotely, it's great.
Can it replace the everyday needs I have as a desktop user? No, sorry, doesn't even come close to cutting it at the moment. I get an itch to try it every few months or so as a desktop, grab a spare machine, wipe it with linux and then proceed to learning the asswipe apps that were written for it.
Nearly every app i've seen in a gnome, kde, desktop has a user interface from hell. Enlightenment has lots of neat effects, but is dog slow compared to XP, even under accellerated X servers.
It's not just XP that rocks linux on the desktop, I recently had the chance to play around with macosx on a cherry red imac. From apple standards, I found everything I needed on the control panel from the apple menu, the application interfaces were well designed, and I was able to quickly get into my XP equivelents and do some work.
It's just too bad the only thing "intuative" about linux is the shell, which is great for certain tasks, but not everything.
Can these be hacked?
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
For any cool experiments? Is the transmitter range long enough to track my pet to within lets say 400 feet? Could they be hacked into some sort of packet network backbone or radio station?
I'm going to brush paranoia aside for now because I wonder what sort of cool things I can do with these little wonders. Millions upon millions of them all availiable whenever I purchase a product.
Could I read these RDIF tags myself? Could I drive past my neighbors and find out what brand lubricant they use by scanning their trashcans? Oh what fun! I can see it now, you heard it from me first, "War RDIF anarchy dildo driving!" As soon as these things are introduced, I'm going to drive around the bay area every garbage night and scan for people who have empty anarchy dildo packages in their trash, and mark it with some chalk (And on a map I will post on the net)
Man, this takes shaming peoples insecurities to a whole new level.
Atari had a HUGE following, Antic, Analog, to name a few always had basic programs you could type in. Of course I did more than just type in games, I understood what alot of it meant, and used to do my own "programming art" on the atari mode 11, ahh 16 shades of grey how beutiful:D
Apple's I toyed with a bit, forgot the name of the book, but it was skinny and spiral bound. It showed a method for making psuedo vector graphics on the apple. I took that too making gravity simulations that looked like space war, but were nothing more than just sit back and watch em simulations.
Unfortunatly at that point, I had heck in my life that prevented me from going further for a while. After I went through it I got back into computers in the form of desktop, networking, and IT and stuck with it.
Started reading slashdot 4 years ago, when an admin named "ed" from another office was building mail servers in BSD, I watched him do it, it was neato. I learned about FreeBSD, linux, and slashdot through him, and never looked back.
Oh and going back to my parent post, BSD's/stand/sysinstall rules over anything, even apt-get, rpm, you name it. It's like an add remove programs on steroids. GnoRPM? Give me a break man. Linux is really really lacking an easy install system like windows and FreeBSD has(at least from an admin view).
Come to think of it, I know 6 admins, 2 of which are into open source (i being one of them) the other four are just all into windows, you're right, they are pretty much satisfied with just windows. I've honestly tried to talk them into eating green eggs and ham in the form of open source but they wont bite.
Don't cast me down with those dudes please!!! LoL! you're 2/3rd's correct:D
Sure I charge for research. I don't charge research fees for things that I should know before stepping foot on my clients' premises. But I suppose that this is one of the fundamental differences between Unix and Windows admins.
So lets say you're on site, and that openssh exploit that was reported a few weeks ago is used to install a backdoor that you have never seen before.
So you're not going to charge the customer for going to securityfocus.com to read up the solution to cleaning out the backdoor? Why not? Your entire response sounded kind of knee jerk.
It's not an IT persons job to know every solution to every problem in the world. It's their job to asess a problem, research the solution(either through documentation or personal experience), and then apply it. Or are you one of those superhuman 7inuX d00dz l33t cr4ck3rs that can crack a password in under 60 seconds while some hot chick gives you a blowjob?
The thing all these other fanatics don't understand (btw I enjoyed your post too) is for most business, having a easy to use IT system is essential to not having to maintain more experienced admins.
I've used linux for NT work too. Ever grep out someones e-mail list from a corrupted NTFS drive before this http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ ca me out? Or used DD under redhat to copy a bunch of win2k advanced servers and their newfangled NTFS partitions before ghost was able to?
Ya, linux IS powerful, no doubt about it. It's saved my ass hella times. I use it as a server everyday. Trying it as a desktop though has been a complete nightmare. I get a whole lot more done on windows, gimps UI looks like it's been designed by dyslexic monkeys, open office is bleh, fonts look cruddy, and any task requires you to go reading through a mountain of documentation the quality of which, looks likes a first years tech writers work. Not to mention, sometimes you click a link for an O/S project and get a 404.
I tried using RH8 when it first came out for 3 months last year, god what a dog. For stuff that matters on the home user desktop, like 3D performance, it just wasn't there. Even if my favorite windows apps were written for X (truespace comes to mind) GL's performance blows in linux when compared to XP.
Yeah, those are my reasons for not using a linux desktop at the moment. Great for something I wanna set and forget, no fun for something I have to sit in front of everyday.
BTW, anyone questioning my tastes, i've been an avid computer user for 26 of my 30 years, started off with timex sinclairs and went through the whole 8-bit phase on up unto the current generation of PC's, Macs, and Unix hardware. My hands have touched everything out there and I am of the opinion that a system that is intuative to use is more quickly learned than one that isn't.
"One Linux operator can manage 45 computers while
on
Linux in High School Labs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"One Linux operator can manage 45 computers while a Windows operator can manage only 10 because it's harder," Mello said.
FUD ALERT! That's just plain malarky.
I started off managing windows systems, and later moved on to linux. Mello is just plain wrong here.
Now as far as flexability is concerned, yes you can do all sorts of neat tricks with linux, but for day to day admin operations, MS has very polished tools that save a MS admin tons of time in implementation.
Let's compare services...
Web Server. Windows, go to add/remove software, add IIS. Run the microsoft management console, and tweak it to your delight, if you get stuck the help file is right there, or burn a call on the credit card to MS support.
Linux, go to apache.org, download the source, make install, go out and have a cig, come back and see if the compile is finished, go out to lunch, come back. Ok now you have to edit your rc.d scripts to run apache on start, do a little configuring in/usr/local/etc/apache, get stuck? Dig through millions of irrelevant howto's and newsgroups posts to find the answer. Live support? Go into IRC and get called n00b by every facist l33tist in there. Try a suggestion, and it breaks something else, rinse and repeat.
It took me a good 4 years of tinkering with linux before I became proficient enough to run a server, compile my kernel (which is m00t these days because of modules) and basically make it do the same things my windows boxes do. Most of this time was spent wading through useless irrelevent documention, trial and error, ect.
I charge for my research time, don't know about you other IT guys out there, but everytime I read a howto, or browse support.microsoft.com i'm earning.
As far as desktop management is concerned, group policies, netlogon scripts, and active directory makes it easy enough for a child to manage a MS domain.
I'm not trying to bag on linux here, it's awesome to have a system that never crashes even on shitty hardware. If linux had gui based management tools that were on par with their MS counterparts, I would agree with the above quote. I've tried everything from linuxconf, to webmin and all tcl/tk tools in between, and yes they are quite good, but not nearly as good as what i've seen come out of redmond. None of these tools have anything even closeley resembling the functionality of creating a software group policy object that will install across 1000's of computers in an organization.
From a personal standpoint though, I would pick any *nix or BSD for running my mission critical applications any day of the week over a MS box. For managing a buttload of user desktops and apps, MS wins hands down.
Slashdot Mirror
Higher res images
(o) <----put that karma right here :P
I've seen so many negative comments on this I wanted to chirp in something positive, sorry for being mr optimistic :P
Anyways, first off I think at 23mph with the exhaust about 3-4 feet under your nose (Unless your a midget) you wouldn't have to worry about breathing in fumes. Site did say it has a centrifugal clutch which only activates the motor at a certain speed.
Also I've been reading a lot of comments about pollution too. Do 2 strokes really produce that much air pollution? I've heard that the opposite is true because since it is a gas/oil mixture the remaining exhaust resembles diesel more than 4 stroke exhaust, which just settles to the ground (Yay it gets into our streams and rivers though, which is why MTBE gas is banned in CA waterways)
I just wanted to play devils advocate, it looks like a really neat peice of engineering compared to those things I used to see in popular science.
announced a
new version with the Subscriber site preview plum. My
response
compared this to extortion, I.E. pay Malda if you want to see this site before
we DDOS it. It's been almost a week since then, and most of the stories I really
didn't care for, this one did, I clicked it, and it wasn't there. Only 58
replies by the time I saw the story and it was gone, poof! Inundated by a
torrent of http requests.
My only response to this story is this, to the author's, editors, coders,
whatever of slashdot. This story is a perfect example of publicly released
images to the public, with no banner ad requirements, why in gods name haven't
you implemented some sort of cache system yet? There is nothing wrong with
caching something the US gov is making publicly available.
You need to get in touch with Adrian of the squid project, he's
offered his
help, take him up on it, before you get accused of being a terrorist or
something.
Compared to full frontal open chest heart surgery. The article mentions using a heart cathador, which if memory serves correctly is nothing more than a small, maybe 1/4" diameter tube which is inserted into the artery.
Compare a small 1/4" long 3 inch deep incision to a 4-5" cut + chest spreader that most operations require and compare which method causes more trauma to the body, I think this stem cell/cathador technique wins hands down.
Potentially though, this is going to save a lot of people. I wonder if the application is just limited to the heart, or if it can be used for any organ (for instance, my mucas filled lungs and ulcer pocked stomach)
The procedure seems simple enough even where it could be an outpatient therapy depending on what needs to be treated. Sorta neat how the body just lets those stems cells stick right to it.
Slashdot people - I'm willing to lend you a hand implementing a set of proxy caches for a trial.
:P
Not that it makes a difference, but how come you're posting as AC adrian? Definetly got some points comin your way if you do.
Add me as a freind
can read it is basically what this plum means. I think it sucks personally. Why didn't you implement a cache system?
Visable light, that means point my telescope with a photodiode on it to sniff. Right?
Human cloning has been outright abolished, so until the people that consider it a "moral dilema" I won't be getting a new pair of lungs from my spare parts body anytime soon.
But this has the potential of generating a lot of money for cloning and stem cell research. Already there is a lot of pet cloning going on (although at the 6 figure price tag I won't be cloning my kitty anytime soon) Hopefully this will create a demand for cloned pet parts which will have the direct effect of funding research in these areas.
Hmm, Chia Kidney, just add water and watch it grow.
Feel free to call this troll. He's lives with his mom, and that's her voice in the answering machine message. Every time Mr. McDaniel decides to troll, another copy of his personal info will be posted immediately afterward.
Dear Bowie J. Poag
WTF do you think you are accomplishing by posting this guys personal info? Sure you may not like him, disagree with him or what not, but taking the time to track down his personal info, and posting it shows a level of compulsiveness that I think requires some professional help.
If you don't like the guy.. Fine, deal with it in the real world. Don't waste my time, and all the other productive slashdot posters time with this crap. You're showing the maturity of a 12 year old, no I take that back, I know 12 year olds that can behave more maturely than you.
Jan 9, 2003
Hate to say it, but I saw it here first and as old school of a pc gamer that
I am, isn't doom passe?
Counterstrike is just merely approaching it's end of life while we await the arrival of counter zero :D If you disagree
with me do it with your words and not your mod points.
Lack of innovation, thats right, a serious lack of innovation, and too many "me too" games.
Waaaayy back in the day, the atari 2600 was the #1 console. It died a horrible death mainly because of all the crap "me too" clones of astroids, combat, and pac man clones (actually the 2600 pacman stunk like turds)
Later we got the nintendo 8-bit. OOh wow, easter eggs in mario, now every game has easter eggs and secret codes. Now everyone wants to program platform games because "If mario is such a popular platform game, mine should be too!"
Later we saw the puzzle game "me too" phase where everyone and their brother was doing some sort of "tetris" clone. Nintendo had Dr. Mario, Sega had columns, Atari came out with some shit game called "klax". For a while there it seemed everyone and their brother was trying to do some spin on tetris.
Now it's the same old crap, and game companies STILL haven't learned their lessons. Yay we have procedural textured mapped polygons on a box that can do 3gabillion vertices per second. Who cares about the game! Just look at those fill rates! Wow look it's tetris, but it's better because it's IN 3D WOW! Yeah i'm just lining up at best buy before they open so I CAN GET MY COPY TOO!
I suppose when they release the next generation of consoles, we're going to see the same old crap, but with more wizzbang graphics than you can shake a stick at.
In the words of Roddy Piper, "It's like putting perfume on a pig."
Wow a personal response, cool.
I don't have the companies information anymore, but they said they got my resume from craigslist. They said come down for an interview, when I got there there was about 100 people there.
They gave a slick dog and pony, and wanted us to pony up 2k for a "sales kit" and explained how if we brought in others we would get a part of their commisions, and so on.
I'll report it next time. Thanks man,
I got spam, I got telemarketers, I got people trying to get me into pyramid schemes.
Craigslist, Monster, svjobs, hotjobs, all of them I suspect of either a)selling my personal informations or b) maintained weak security in both their systems or their policies which resulted in the afformentioned "annoyances"
And i'm really sorry to the afformentioned websites either, I don't mean to accuse you but hot damn my inbox / home POTS line gets filled with crap everytime i've used your service.
what's a mullet?
http://ratemymullet.com/
I mean, if I wanted to hork data off of a system I had full physical access to, I'd just grab the drive, stick it in my pocket, and walk out whistling "Jimmy Crack Corn and I Don't Care."
Now I can't get that song out of my head!
The graphics cards benchmark YOU!
BS
Binary packages never have support out of the box for the stuff I run, a good example of this is when I set up certain PHP apps that require --enable-track-vars to be there at compile time. PHP binary packages never have this option enabled.
As far as securing IIS, you d/l a patch, big deal. Apache you patch the source, recompile, and then you're done. Quite a few LONGER steps.
I thought anyone that used purely binary packages was a clueless n00b. Since you're having such an easy time slinging mud at me.
Counter strike, if I remember right that mod made the dev's no money until it got popular.
Now those mod dev's are laughing all the way to the bank.
How closely have you worked with the windows registry? Believe me there's a ton of documented stuff you can do. Why wouldn't you patch IIS for code red before you put it in your networks DMZ? That's just plain foolhearty. As foolhearty as not doing cvsupit on your BSD ports collection before installing anything.
Do I think IIS is better in terms of performance and reliability for web services? NO! Look at my sig sucka! I rely on apache/php/mysql to run my site everyday (from a he.net account) I just don't find it usefull as a desktop at the moment. I use putty to ssh in, I use vi a lot to edit files (*note* I use the "iodqs!" keys alot)I use wget to grab stuff remotely, it's great.
Can it replace the everyday needs I have as a desktop user? No, sorry, doesn't even come close to cutting it at the moment. I get an itch to try it every few months or so as a desktop, grab a spare machine, wipe it with linux and then proceed to learning the asswipe apps that were written for it.
Nearly every app i've seen in a gnome, kde, desktop has a user interface from hell. Enlightenment has lots of neat effects, but is dog slow compared to XP, even under accellerated X servers.
It's not just XP that rocks linux on the desktop, I recently had the chance to play around with macosx on a cherry red imac. From apple standards, I found everything I needed on the control panel from the apple menu, the application interfaces were well designed, and I was able to quickly get into my XP equivelents and do some work.
It's just too bad the only thing "intuative" about linux is the shell, which is great for certain tasks, but not everything.
For any cool experiments? Is the transmitter range long enough to track my pet to within lets say 400 feet? Could they be hacked into some sort of packet network backbone or radio station?
I'm going to brush paranoia aside for now because I wonder what sort of cool things I can do with these little wonders. Millions upon millions of them all availiable whenever I purchase a product.
Could I read these RDIF tags myself? Could I drive past my neighbors and find out what brand lubricant they use by scanning their trashcans? Oh what fun! I can see it now, you heard it from me first, "War RDIF anarchy dildo driving!" As soon as these things are introduced, I'm going to drive around the bay area every garbage night and scan for people who have empty anarchy dildo packages in their trash, and mark it with some chalk (And on a map I will post on the net)
Man, this takes shaming peoples insecurities to a whole new level.
Atari had a HUGE following, Antic, Analog, to name a few always had basic programs you could type in. Of course I did more than just type in games, I understood what alot of it meant, and used to do my own "programming art" on the atari mode 11, ahh 16 shades of grey how beutiful :D
/stand/sysinstall rules over anything, even apt-get, rpm, you name it. It's like an add remove programs on steroids. GnoRPM? Give me a break man. Linux is really really lacking an easy install system like windows and FreeBSD has(at least from an admin view).
:D
Apple's I toyed with a bit, forgot the name of the book, but it was skinny and spiral bound. It showed a method for making psuedo vector graphics on the apple. I took that too making gravity simulations that looked like space war, but were nothing more than just sit back and watch em simulations.
Unfortunatly at that point, I had heck in my life that prevented me from going further for a while. After I went through it I got back into computers in the form of desktop, networking, and IT and stuck with it.
Started reading slashdot 4 years ago, when an admin named "ed" from another office was building mail servers in BSD, I watched him do it, it was neato. I learned about FreeBSD, linux, and slashdot through him, and never looked back.
Oh and going back to my parent post, BSD's
Come to think of it, I know 6 admins, 2 of which are into open source (i being one of them) the other four are just all into windows, you're right, they are pretty much satisfied with just windows. I've honestly tried to talk them into eating green eggs and ham in the form of open source but they wont bite.
Don't cast me down with those dudes please!!! LoL! you're 2/3rd's correct
No I still disagree, there are tons of competant windows admins that learn linux in their spare time, what you are saying is too much stereotyping.
Sure I charge for research. I don't charge research fees for things that I should know before stepping foot on my clients' premises. But I suppose that this is one of the fundamental differences between Unix and Windows admins.
So lets say you're on site, and that openssh exploit that was reported a few weeks ago is used to install a backdoor that you have never seen before.
So you're not going to charge the customer for going to securityfocus.com to read up the solution to cleaning out the backdoor? Why not? Your entire response sounded kind of knee jerk.
It's not an IT persons job to know every solution to every problem in the world. It's their job to asess a problem, research the solution(either through documentation or personal experience), and then apply it. Or are you one of those superhuman 7inuX d00dz l33t cr4ck3rs that can crack a password in under 60 seconds while some hot chick gives you a blowjob?
Nah, that's only in the movies kid.
The thing all these other fanatics don't understand (btw I enjoyed your post too) is for most business, having a easy to use IT system is essential to not having to maintain more experienced admins.
a me out? Or used DD under redhat to copy a bunch of win2k advanced servers and their newfangled NTFS partitions before ghost was able to?
I've used linux for NT work too. Ever grep out someones e-mail list from a corrupted NTFS drive before this
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
c
Ya, linux IS powerful, no doubt about it. It's saved my ass hella times. I use it as a server everyday. Trying it as a desktop though has been a complete nightmare. I get a whole lot more done on windows, gimps UI looks like it's been designed by dyslexic monkeys, open office is bleh, fonts look cruddy, and any task requires you to go reading through a mountain of documentation the quality of which, looks likes a first years tech writers work. Not to mention, sometimes you click a link for an O/S project and get a 404.
I tried using RH8 when it first came out for 3 months last year, god what a dog. For stuff that matters on the home user desktop, like 3D performance, it just wasn't there. Even if my favorite windows apps were written for X (truespace comes to mind) GL's performance blows in linux when compared to XP.
Yeah, those are my reasons for not using a linux desktop at the moment. Great for something I wanna set and forget, no fun for something I have to sit in front of everyday.
BTW, anyone questioning my tastes, i've been an avid computer user for 26 of my 30 years, started off with timex sinclairs and went through the whole 8-bit phase on up unto the current generation of PC's, Macs, and Unix hardware. My hands have touched everything out there and I am of the opinion that a system that is intuative to use is more quickly learned than one that isn't.
"One Linux operator can manage 45 computers while a Windows operator can manage only 10 because it's harder," Mello said.
/usr/local/etc/apache, get stuck? Dig through millions of irrelevant howto's and newsgroups posts to find the answer. Live support? Go into IRC and get called n00b by every facist l33tist in there. Try a suggestion, and it breaks something else, rinse and repeat.
FUD ALERT! That's just plain malarky.
I started off managing windows systems, and later moved on to linux. Mello is just plain wrong here.
Now as far as flexability is concerned, yes you can do all sorts of neat tricks with linux, but for day to day admin operations, MS has very polished tools that save a MS admin tons of time in implementation.
Let's compare services...
Web Server.
Windows, go to add/remove software, add IIS. Run the microsoft management console, and tweak it to your delight, if you get stuck the help file is right there, or burn a call on the credit card to MS support.
Linux, go to apache.org, download the source, make install, go out and have a cig, come back and see if the compile is finished, go out to lunch, come back. Ok now you have to edit your rc.d scripts to run apache on start, do a little configuring in
It took me a good 4 years of tinkering with linux before I became proficient enough to run a server, compile my kernel (which is m00t these days because of modules) and basically make it do the same things my windows boxes do. Most of this time was spent wading through useless irrelevent documention, trial and error, ect.
I charge for my research time, don't know about you other IT guys out there, but everytime I read a howto, or browse support.microsoft.com i'm earning.
As far as desktop management is concerned, group policies, netlogon scripts, and active directory makes it easy enough for a child to manage a MS domain.
I'm not trying to bag on linux here, it's awesome to have a system that never crashes even on shitty hardware. If linux had gui based management tools that were on par with their MS counterparts, I would agree with the above quote. I've tried everything from linuxconf, to webmin and all tcl/tk tools in between, and yes they are quite good, but not nearly as good as what i've seen come out of redmond. None of these tools have anything even closeley resembling the functionality of creating a software group policy object that will install across 1000's of computers in an organization.
From a personal standpoint though, I would pick any *nix or BSD for running my mission critical applications any day of the week over a MS box. For managing a buttload of user desktops and apps, MS wins hands down.