To me it's typically fine if someone is talking on their cell phone in a public place at a reasonable volume level. What gets annoying is when people don't turn off their annoying ring tones when they are in public places. Or when they talk on the phone in a normal or louder volume in certain public places where people talk in much quieter voices like libraries, quiet trains or planes, and many other places. Another thing that gets very irritating is people that try to do multiple things at once, when one of the things includes talking on their cell phone in a public place. This includes talking on the phone while in store checkouts, or any other places where they are holding up a bunch of people because they can't get off their damn phone for 5 minutes to get done with what they are in line to do.
For the screws I'd say get good quality ones. I've never actually looked for sources for good quality screws, but it always irritates me when the head of a cheap screw breaks off of the threads, rendering the screw hole useless.
Most screws that come with stuff seem to be good enough quality, but occasionally a computer case or something else will come with the really lousy screws that break pretty easily.
Another thing that I find works great for this is to have your screwdriver slightly magnetized. To do this, just run a decently strong magnet along the length of the metal screwdriver, only going in one direction though. Do this until it has enough magnetism to hold a typical computer screw. It works great and it can even reach places the little grabby thing can't.
I now have coworkers that handle most of these simple (in a relative term) tasks that I once used to do. I guess I forgot how much simple stuff there is to do in the IT world that companies still need to have done.
Just because someone has a few years of programming experience doesn't mean they know how to fix PCs and setup servers. Having a few years experience in programming doesn't automatically mean that somebody knows how to setup Windows and Linux servers. They are completely different. Most everybody can make their way through the initial setup of either OS, but solving wierd problems often requires experience with the OS. "Fixing" PCs also requires experience with both the software and hardware of PCs, both which require experience to be good at troubleshooting. I don't care how many classes you've taken and how many certifications you've received, but troubleshooting PC problems simply require a lot of experience so that you've had a chance to deal with a large amount of hardware and software in different environments. It's incredible the kind of bizarre problems that you encounter when troubleshooting PCs. Things you'd expect to never make any difference could be the differnce between working perfectly or not working at all.
I've done both IT work and programming for various operating systems, and I can tell you that it helps a great deal to do both of these. Mainly, programming for a certain OS can help you troubleshoot problems with that OS because you will likely have a greater understanding of how that OS performs certain tasks at a programming level. Going the other way I would think would also help, though not quite as much. With IT work you usually have to figure out the problem from trial and error, whereas with programming there are API references you can look at to gain the knowledge and then apply that to IT work.
In any case, I do not believe that having a few years of programming experience will necessarily allow you to successfully do IT consulting work. Though if you are very good with OS installation and configuration, you should be able to do well as an IT consultant. In fact, if you have both the skills of a programmer and an IT worker, then I'm pretty sure you will be very successful at IT consulting. For many companies with more than about 5 or so PCs, being able to script tasks is where your talent will show. Creating complex login scripts and computer startup scripts is essential to solving certain problems without having to perform tasks locally on every single computer, and this is where the programming knowledge comes into play. If you can fix a problem that would normally need to be done by logging into every single computer by simply modifying a single script in a short amount of time, I couldn't see how a client could not be impressed. Most computer consultants would need to log into each computer to solve the problem, but if you can script it, then you're way ahead.
If all intellectual property became property of the company, then you could post illegal stuff on the Internet, and do all sorts of other illegal things that would fall under the "intellectual property" category, and according to the NDA, you wouldn't be responsible for these because they are the property of the company you work for.
Of course I wouldn't recommend this because I doubt it would hold up in court.
I've read that also, but web data storage to me would seem to be a bit different from normal data storage. I think they already update the web cache and search data every 30 days, so I'm sure that repopulating a single one of the thousands of storage nodes they have wouldn't be too big of a deal. Basically what I'm saying is that the web data that Google stores isn't absolutely critical that it never be lost. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have any tape backup of the web cache data either, but they do (from what I've read) mirror the IDE drives for some redundancy. I would imagine that the statistical data about the websites and other more important data that is not easily obtained is backed up though.
I recently bought a pair of the DLink DGE-500T gigabit ethernet cards. I knew not to expect anywhere near the full gigabit speeds, but the performance I actually got was horrible. I'm not sure what the cause was, but connecting a Linux box to a Windows 2000 box directly with a 3 foot cable, all I got was right around 12MB/sec from Samba. I was quite disappointed with this because that isn't even twice the performance I get with 100mbps cards. It's not even giving me another 50% performance.
I tried tweaking all sorts of stuff, with no luck whatsoever. Samba performance settings, MTU sizes, but nothing helped at all. I couldn't seem to pinpoint any bottlenecks in the systems either.
One of the main reasons that these cards are so cheap is that they have a very small cache on them. The more expensive cards come with much more, but at much more cost also.
If anyone has any suggestions as to how to get any reasonable performance out of these cards, please let me know, but from my experience with these cards, I'd not recommend them at all.
If you can't decide on a naming scheme that has all the info in the name that you want, perhaps implementing a web based database wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Give each server some name, but then make a database containing each server. Each entry would contain the server's name, IP(s), function, owner, physical location (datacenter and rack location), operating system, administrator (if necessary), who worked on it, what number it is on the console switch, and anything else you can think of.
The advantage of this is that you can have an endless supply of info about the server at your fingertips to ease in troubleshooting and finding the server. The database would also be accessible from anywhere with a web browser and network connectivity. You could even equip a PDA with a wireless ethernet card and get info from there. The database could even keep track of what work has been done on a server and who did it. If a network card gets replaced, you'd know who did it, to what server, and when. If something got changed, you'd know who did it (as long as they entered it in the database). Also, the database could keep track of what hardware is in each server. Data in a database is much easier to change than the name of the servers too, which is nice.
The disadvantage is mainly the added maintenance of the system. The software would have to be written, but really the software wouldn't need to be terribly complex: just a simple database with a simple frontend to enter, view, edit, and search data. The existing servers would need to be added to get it up and running which would take a bit of work, but then adding servers wouldn't be too bad. As long as the database was kept up to date the maintenance on it wouldn't be too bad. Also, the more stuff you keep track of in the database, the more difficult and time consuming it becomes to maintain the database.
Just curious, but what operating system were you running? I ask because Windows 95/98 (and probably 98SE and ME) will use up 100% of the cpu all the time, even when you aren't doing anything and it is sitting idle at the desktop. The heat from the laptop will be very noticeable and the fan will turn on very frequently to keep it cool. My guess is that if Win95/98 came preinstalled by Dell, they installed a utility that would have Win95/98 actually halt the cpu for times where it is idle instead of just executing an infinite loop. This way when idle, the CPU wouldn't actually be using 100%. I can't think of the names of these apps, but many exist that fix Win95/98 in this way. So, basically, if your laptop came preinstalled with Win95/98 and you just popped in a standard Win95/98 CD to reinstall it, then you just killed your battery life. Install one of these apps and your battery life will drastically improve.
On the other hand, if the operating system that you were using was Windows NT/2000 or Linux, FreeBSD, etc. then you would not have to worry about this because these OSs all properly halt the CPU during idle loops.
No, I'm sure he's talking about a standard MPEG-2 DVD. I notice the artifacts of compression as well. Once you're engulfed in an interesting movie you don't really notice them too much, hence why he would notice them in Titanic. I've done video editing from my digital camera, and I can tell you that pure uncompressed digital video looks infinitely better than any version of MPEG compression. MPEG-1,2,4 all have clearly visible artifacts, you just have to know what to look for. And unfortunately, once you know what to look for, you will always notice them.
I was in an introductory C programming class in college and a couple students got caught cheating. It turned out their source code was identical, even down to the name appearing in the doc box at the top of source.
There are two things that prevent Windows from migrating to other hardware platforms. One, Windows needs to be ported to other cpu architectures. Two, tons of software needs to be either ported or compiled for alternate CPU architectures.
So, if the CLR stuff takes off, a lot of software would be available for a variety of platforms because Windows would be able to 'compile' it into native code for whatever CPU to run under Windows for that architecture. Then, MS could charge outrageous fees to manufacturers of CPU architectures that wanted to be able to run Windows. Something to the effect of.. "How much would you pay us to port Windows to your platform so you could market a product that was compatible with all software compiled as CLR?"
Another variation would be MS manufacturing a computer or CPU that could run CLR natively or would have the most optimized instruction set for CLR. Then, MS could easily market this CPU as being the fastest for executing CLR compiled programs. Of course no other manufacturer would be able to duplicate this easily without paying large licensing fees to MS.
I've had very good success with my DV camcorder under Linux. I'm using Linux 2.4.6 with a program called dvgrab to actually capture the video. It couldn't work better. And best of all, dvgrab will split up the videos on the computer based on where you hit the record button on the tape. That way you don't have to manually split them up.
To start off, I'd first recommend installing Mandrake. Play around with this for a while with it's nice graphical interface and start to get a feel for Linux. Begin to find applications under Linux that replace the common apps that you used under Windows. Oddly, I found this to be the hardest part of switching to Linux.. through the years you build up a group of programs for Windows that will fit all of your needs, but once you switch to Linux, you need to start all over again.
Once you become somewhat familiar with Linux from playing with the Mandrake distro, it's time for some serious learning to begin. Backup any necessary data, reformat and install Slackware. Download the source for all the programs that you liked that came with Mandrake but weren't included with Slackware. Compile and install all of these from the source code (no RPMs). As you go along, write a bash script to do this for you so that next time you reinstall you wont have to go through all the motions of recompiling all of the programs you need, but can rather just type in a single command to do it all.
Since you most likely have some other Windows boxes at home, get the Windows box to be able to connect to the Linux box via Samba. Work out a usable backup scheme (even if you dont have much data on the box) to become familiar with the differences from Windows backup software. If you dont have a spare tape drive laying around, have it back the data up to another server or to a spare hard drive. Hook your printer up to the Linux box and connect to it from your Windows box. Recompile the kernel over and over. Try out differnet settings, read the Help for every item. Think of other little (or big) things you could setup on your Linux box and test them out.
The above will allow you to learn the basics of a Linux setup. Once you get the hang of those, then it's time to dig a little deeper... Check out the Linux From Scratch guide on building your own Linux distro, and then make one for yourself. Granted this takes a very long time, so even if you never quite get it to a usable state, you will have learned a great deal about the bootup process for Linux. On a smaller scale, you could try to make a mini recovery/utility distro and put it on a floppy, zip disk, or cdrom. Also, teach yourself a couple programming languages for writing both scripts and utilities. Also, become familiar with piping ( | ) and redirecting ( ) input and output to and from console programs.
Granted this is still far from a complete list of stuff to teach yourself about Linux, but it's a start.
I've done this also and it works very well. The monitor is definately the most difficult part of a system to lug around. I had 2 spare monitors and my house and then I'd just have a few people over and 2 of them got to use one of the extra monitors. Then the other gamers just have to bring over a backpacks worth of stuff (keyboard, mouse, cds, etc) and their actual computer.
Well unfortunately this name is going to stick. I dont know if they came up with this name or not, but Microsoft calls their product Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, and they refer to it as Terminal Services in Windows 2000. Even though this name isn't the best, Microsoft is using it so it will stick.
I agree. Being an IT tech, I try to take pride in my work because for the most part I enjoy what I do except the management makes for a very unpleasent work environment. One of the things that I find to be most irritating is being told to do something to just 'get it working'. As we all know, fixing something to the point of 'getting it working' equates to a horribly done job that you will never be able to go back and do the proper way. Typically if you solve or fix a problem you get a somewhat good feeling that you've actually accomplished something worthwhile, but when you are forced to do a poor job at something, it has the opposite affect.
What is even worse is when you are told to do something in this way to just get it working but you know that you will have to return to this problem shortly in the future to correct it again and do it the proper way. Never a good thought to think that you are doing something in a stupid way and wasting all your time when you could simply do it right the first time and save many hours of work later on.
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To me it's typically fine if someone is talking on their cell phone in a public place at a reasonable volume level. What gets annoying is when people don't turn off their annoying ring tones when they are in public places. Or when they talk on the phone in a normal or louder volume in certain public places where people talk in much quieter voices like libraries, quiet trains or planes, and many other places. Another thing that gets very irritating is people that try to do multiple things at once, when one of the things includes talking on their cell phone in a public place. This includes talking on the phone while in store checkouts, or any other places where they are holding up a bunch of people because they can't get off their damn phone for 5 minutes to get done with what they are in line to do.
I'm not sure what version of Windows it was with, but I once saw the error message that was something like...
Error deleting file: No more disk space.
For the screws I'd say get good quality ones. I've never actually looked for sources for good quality screws, but it always irritates me when the head of a cheap screw breaks off of the threads, rendering the screw hole useless.
Most screws that come with stuff seem to be good enough quality, but occasionally a computer case or something else will come with the really lousy screws that break pretty easily.
Another thing that I find works great for this is to have your screwdriver slightly magnetized. To do this, just run a decently strong magnet along the length of the metal screwdriver, only going in one direction though. Do this until it has enough magnetism to hold a typical computer screw. It works great and it can even reach places the little grabby thing can't.
I now have coworkers that handle most of these simple (in a relative term) tasks that I once used to do. I guess I forgot how much simple stuff there is to do in the IT world that companies still need to have done.
Just because someone has a few years of programming experience doesn't mean they know how to fix PCs and setup servers. Having a few years experience in programming doesn't automatically mean that somebody knows how to setup Windows and Linux servers. They are completely different. Most everybody can make their way through the initial setup of either OS, but solving wierd problems often requires experience with the OS. "Fixing" PCs also requires experience with both the software and hardware of PCs, both which require experience to be good at troubleshooting. I don't care how many classes you've taken and how many certifications you've received, but troubleshooting PC problems simply require a lot of experience so that you've had a chance to deal with a large amount of hardware and software in different environments. It's incredible the kind of bizarre problems that you encounter when troubleshooting PCs. Things you'd expect to never make any difference could be the differnce between working perfectly or not working at all.
I've done both IT work and programming for various operating systems, and I can tell you that it helps a great deal to do both of these. Mainly, programming for a certain OS can help you troubleshoot problems with that OS because you will likely have a greater understanding of how that OS performs certain tasks at a programming level. Going the other way I would think would also help, though not quite as much. With IT work you usually have to figure out the problem from trial and error, whereas with programming there are API references you can look at to gain the knowledge and then apply that to IT work.
In any case, I do not believe that having a few years of programming experience will necessarily allow you to successfully do IT consulting work. Though if you are very good with OS installation and configuration, you should be able to do well as an IT consultant. In fact, if you have both the skills of a programmer and an IT worker, then I'm pretty sure you will be very successful at IT consulting. For many companies with more than about 5 or so PCs, being able to script tasks is where your talent will show. Creating complex login scripts and computer startup scripts is essential to solving certain problems without having to perform tasks locally on every single computer, and this is where the programming knowledge comes into play. If you can fix a problem that would normally need to be done by logging into every single computer by simply modifying a single script in a short amount of time, I couldn't see how a client could not be impressed. Most computer consultants would need to log into each computer to solve the problem, but if you can script it, then you're way ahead.
This could actually be quite fun...
If all intellectual property became property of the company, then you could post illegal stuff on the Internet, and do all sorts of other illegal things that would fall under the "intellectual property" category, and according to the NDA, you wouldn't be responsible for these because they are the property of the company you work for.
Of course I wouldn't recommend this because I doubt it would hold up in court.
I've read that also, but web data storage to me would seem to be a bit different from normal data storage. I think they already update the web cache and search data every 30 days, so I'm sure that repopulating a single one of the thousands of storage nodes they have wouldn't be too big of a deal. Basically what I'm saying is that the web data that Google stores isn't absolutely critical that it never be lost. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have any tape backup of the web cache data either, but they do (from what I've read) mirror the IDE drives for some redundancy. I would imagine that the statistical data about the websites and other more important data that is not easily obtained is backed up though.
I recently bought a pair of the DLink DGE-500T gigabit ethernet cards. I knew not to expect anywhere near the full gigabit speeds, but the performance I actually got was horrible. I'm not sure what the cause was, but connecting a Linux box to a Windows 2000 box directly with a 3 foot cable, all I got was right around 12MB/sec from Samba. I was quite disappointed with this because that isn't even twice the performance I get with 100mbps cards. It's not even giving me another 50% performance.
I tried tweaking all sorts of stuff, with no luck whatsoever. Samba performance settings, MTU sizes, but nothing helped at all. I couldn't seem to pinpoint any bottlenecks in the systems either.
One of the main reasons that these cards are so cheap is that they have a very small cache on them. The more expensive cards come with much more, but at much more cost also.
If anyone has any suggestions as to how to get any reasonable performance out of these cards, please let me know, but from my experience with these cards, I'd not recommend them at all.
If you can't decide on a naming scheme that has all the info in the name that you want, perhaps implementing a web based database wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Give each server some name, but then make a database containing each server. Each entry would contain the server's name, IP(s), function, owner, physical location (datacenter and rack location), operating system, administrator (if necessary), who worked on it, what number it is on the console switch, and anything else you can think of.
The advantage of this is that you can have an endless supply of info about the server at your fingertips to ease in troubleshooting and finding the server. The database would also be accessible from anywhere with a web browser and network connectivity. You could even equip a PDA with a wireless ethernet card and get info from there. The database could even keep track of what work has been done on a server and who did it. If a network card gets replaced, you'd know who did it, to what server, and when. If something got changed, you'd know who did it (as long as they entered it in the database). Also, the database could keep track of what hardware is in each server. Data in a database is much easier to change than the name of the servers too, which is nice.
The disadvantage is mainly the added maintenance of the system. The software would have to be written, but really the software wouldn't need to be terribly complex: just a simple database with a simple frontend to enter, view, edit, and search data. The existing servers would need to be added to get it up and running which would take a bit of work, but then adding servers wouldn't be too bad. As long as the database was kept up to date the maintenance on it wouldn't be too bad. Also, the more stuff you keep track of in the database, the more difficult and time consuming it becomes to maintain the database.
Just curious, but what operating system were you running? I ask because Windows 95/98 (and probably 98SE and ME) will use up 100% of the cpu all the time, even when you aren't doing anything and it is sitting idle at the desktop. The heat from the laptop will be very noticeable and the fan will turn on very frequently to keep it cool. My guess is that if Win95/98 came preinstalled by Dell, they installed a utility that would have Win95/98 actually halt the cpu for times where it is idle instead of just executing an infinite loop. This way when idle, the CPU wouldn't actually be using 100%. I can't think of the names of these apps, but many exist that fix Win95/98 in this way. So, basically, if your laptop came preinstalled with Win95/98 and you just popped in a standard Win95/98 CD to reinstall it, then you just killed your battery life. Install one of these apps and your battery life will drastically improve.
On the other hand, if the operating system that you were using was Windows NT/2000 or Linux, FreeBSD, etc. then you would not have to worry about this because these OSs all properly halt the CPU during idle loops.
No, I'm sure he's talking about a standard MPEG-2 DVD. I notice the artifacts of compression as well. Once you're engulfed in an interesting movie you don't really notice them too much, hence why he would notice them in Titanic. I've done video editing from my digital camera, and I can tell you that pure uncompressed digital video looks infinitely better than any version of MPEG compression. MPEG-1,2,4 all have clearly visible artifacts, you just have to know what to look for. And unfortunately, once you know what to look for, you will always notice them.
Don't forget XP too.
I was in an introductory C programming class in college and a couple students got caught cheating. It turned out their source code was identical, even down to the name appearing in the doc box at the top of source.
There are two things that prevent Windows from migrating to other hardware platforms. One, Windows needs to be ported to other cpu architectures. Two, tons of software needs to be either ported or compiled for alternate CPU architectures.
So, if the CLR stuff takes off, a lot of software would be available for a variety of platforms because Windows would be able to 'compile' it into native code for whatever CPU to run under Windows for that architecture. Then, MS could charge outrageous fees to manufacturers of CPU architectures that wanted to be able to run Windows. Something to the effect of.. "How much would you pay us to port Windows to your platform so you could market a product that was compatible with all software compiled as CLR?"
Another variation would be MS manufacturing a computer or CPU that could run CLR natively or would have the most optimized instruction set for CLR. Then, MS could easily market this CPU as being the fastest for executing CLR compiled programs. Of course no other manufacturer would be able to duplicate this easily without paying large licensing fees to MS.
I've had very good success with my DV camcorder under Linux. I'm using Linux 2.4.6 with a program called dvgrab to actually capture the video. It couldn't work better. And best of all, dvgrab will split up the videos on the computer based on where you hit the record button on the tape. That way you don't have to manually split them up.
To start off, I'd first recommend installing Mandrake. Play around with this for a while with it's nice graphical interface and start to get a feel for Linux. Begin to find applications under Linux that replace the common apps that you used under Windows. Oddly, I found this to be the hardest part of switching to Linux.. through the years you build up a group of programs for Windows that will fit all of your needs, but once you switch to Linux, you need to start all over again.
Once you become somewhat familiar with Linux from playing with the Mandrake distro, it's time for some serious learning to begin. Backup any necessary data, reformat and install Slackware. Download the source for all the programs that you liked that came with Mandrake but weren't included with Slackware. Compile and install all of these from the source code (no RPMs). As you go along, write a bash script to do this for you so that next time you reinstall you wont have to go through all the motions of recompiling all of the programs you need, but can rather just type in a single command to do it all.
Since you most likely have some other Windows boxes at home, get the Windows box to be able to connect to the Linux box via Samba. Work out a usable backup scheme (even if you dont have much data on the box) to become familiar with the differences from Windows backup software. If you dont have a spare tape drive laying around, have it back the data up to another server or to a spare hard drive. Hook your printer up to the Linux box and connect to it from your Windows box. Recompile the kernel over and over. Try out differnet settings, read the Help for every item. Think of other little (or big) things you could setup on your Linux box and test them out.
The above will allow you to learn the basics of a Linux setup. Once you get the hang of those, then it's time to dig a little deeper... Check out the Linux From Scratch guide on building your own Linux distro, and then make one for yourself. Granted this takes a very long time, so even if you never quite get it to a usable state, you will have learned a great deal about the bootup process for Linux. On a smaller scale, you could try to make a mini recovery/utility distro and put it on a floppy, zip disk, or cdrom. Also, teach yourself a couple programming languages for writing both scripts and utilities. Also, become familiar with piping ( | ) and redirecting ( ) input and output to and from console programs.
Granted this is still far from a complete list of stuff to teach yourself about Linux, but it's a start.
I've done this also and it works very well. The monitor is definately the most difficult part of a system to lug around. I had 2 spare monitors and my house and then I'd just have a few people over and 2 of them got to use one of the extra monitors. Then the other gamers just have to bring over a backpacks worth of stuff (keyboard, mouse, cds, etc) and their actual computer.
Well unfortunately this name is going to stick. I dont know if they came up with this name or not, but Microsoft calls their product Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, and they refer to it as Terminal Services in Windows 2000. Even though this name isn't the best, Microsoft is using it so it will stick.
I agree. Being an IT tech, I try to take pride in my work because for the most part I enjoy what I do except the management makes for a very unpleasent work environment. One of the things that I find to be most irritating is being told to do something to just 'get it working'. As we all know, fixing something to the point of 'getting it working' equates to a horribly done job that you will never be able to go back and do the proper way. Typically if you solve or fix a problem you get a somewhat good feeling that you've actually accomplished something worthwhile, but when you are forced to do a poor job at something, it has the opposite affect.
What is even worse is when you are told to do something in this way to just get it working but you know that you will have to return to this problem shortly in the future to correct it again and do it the proper way. Never a good thought to think that you are doing something in a stupid way and wasting all your time when you could simply do it right the first time and save many hours of work later on.