A proxy server that does NT authentication, and doesn't let you log into it through your web browser.
The company I work at was running that setup for months, but only because the staff at the time didn't have a better alternative.
As such, I was stuck in Windows for the first few months of my time there. But, since MS proxy is such a miserable piece of shit, they got sick of trying to keep it functional, and switched to a proxyless network. 30 minutes later, I was in X.:)
as a programmer i have to say - that HAS got to be the worst and most draconian policy ever.
Did you actually read the post you're now slamming? His comments were, imho, quite reasonable. If you consider them Draconian, I wish you luck finding an employer that meets your requirements of an IT department.
its the people who USE those workstations that make money for your company - not you or that IT department.
This narrow minded view is about enough to invalidate your entire post. Does the concept of a team effort mean anything to you? The presence of programmers, marketers, customer service reps, etc. wouldn't be worth five cents without a solid IT department keeping it all running. Don't think for a moment a qualified group of network admins doesn't help a company make money.
Indeed, one of the biggest concerns when a company is being considered for a contract is the quality of their network. Speaking as a programmer for a company that's been scrutinized and approved by more than a few large corporations, I assure you that one of the key factors of our getting contracts is the quality of our network and the reliability of the systems.
by definition people who use workstations should be allowed to do whatever they like assuming that they dont interfere with the network in any way.
By definiton? Oh, please. The definition of a workstation is not "You can do whatever you want with it, as long as it doesn't hurt the network". Your workstation is not your responsibility when it breaks, or when it acquires a virus. It's IT's responsiblity. They're the people who will be held accountable for your workstation's functionality, not you. Therefore, it is most certainly not yours to do with as you please.
'd be really horrified to work at a company which didnt let me install the OS i liked on the machine i have for my exclusive use.
Again, I wish you luck finding an employer that meets your somewhat skewed outlook on reality. I'll also assume you didn't read his entire post, because he explicitly stated that if somebody presented a good reason to install an alternate OS, it would be considered, tested, and approved or disapproved. It's not Draconian as you'd like to scream and wail, it's the protection of their time and their responsibilities.
Another point. It's not your box, it's not yours for exclusive use, and it's certainly not your property. If you're home sick one day, the company has every right to let somebody other than you use the system, or log into it to look up something in your mail. It's a reality check: The computer isn't yours.
if i want to be my own admin what rights does the IT department have to fiddle with my personal workstation or fire me ?
This should be obvious by now, from what I've covered above, but I'll say it again. It's not yours. You didn't pay for it, you didn't install it, you don't maintain it. The computer belongs to the company, and the company can do with it whatever it wants. How is it you don't understand this?
you must be at some really brain dead firm to be considering policies like that.
Well, the rest of your post isn't worth responding to, so I'll just leave it at that.
Damn straight. If a couple employees have switched to Linux, and the IT people haven't noticed, then obviously it didn't cause any problems. Samba isn't overriding the PDC's authority like it could be, they're probably still in e-mail contact with the company, and it's a safe bet they're still being as productive as before (If not more), because if they weren't, IT would've gotten a call to come down and re-install Windows.
I just so happen to be in this position, as the only Linux-running employee in an otherwise comletely NT/Win98 shop. The company does ColdFusion development, uses Exchange Server (I use the webmail interface) and uses SMB file/print sharing copiously. I work on a project that's being done in PHP, so I don't have to deal with the ColdFusion server regularly crashing NT, and by being in Linux, I can very easilly run my own development environment.
It's a completely ideal environment, in my opinion. I can use a superior development environment, I've proven that I can actually be more productive (God, what a pain in the ass it was having to develop with only one 1280x1024 area available) and I'm one less person IT has to worry about supporting, because I can take care of myself.
Like, oh, say,.k12..us, which is already in place, and already being used by the vast majority of Internet-using schools and school districts in the US.
They'll say that it's unproven and/or untested, too new or too young to demonstrate that it's actually a reliable filesystem. Assuming it does prove itself, of course. If there are problems with it, they'll either point out and exaggurate those problems, or simply ignore Tux2 altogether.
The notion of a complete range of content belonging to one company is something that I recall being discussed over six years ago. People worried that a sole company could manage to control, essentially, all points of an average person's day on the web. Well, it's completely plausible now.
Picture, if you will. A user starts on AOL, and, without ever leaving the AOL revenue stream (Ad banners and affiliates) they get news from a dozen diffrent sources. Entertainment and TV/Movie info, running web searches, buying products, etc. And if they really wanted to, AOL could make life really interesting by mandating that no AOL-owned website may link to a non-AOL-owned website. Think it could never happen? Don't kid yourself, folks, it's easier than you may think.
Bland is one way to put it, but what sprung to my mind while reviewing the Q&A was that he was largely as brief as possible, generally dismissing the question as being silly or ignorant.
Now, I've tried for the last couple years to maintain optimism about Corel. I've been a fan of WordPerfect since I was a kid using WordPerfect 4.x in dos, and I was more or less pleased with WP7 and 8 when they came to Linux. Functional, faster than StarOffice. Did the job.
But Corel has only been going downhill in my book. My question is, is Corel actually up to the task of porting.NET to Linux? I mean, sure they have a Linux distro, but they didn't write any of it. At most, they wrote an installer, a KDE file manager.. Few utils here and there, but the rest of it is Debian. WordPerfect had a motif port long before Corel got their hands on it, so I assume that was the starting point for WP7/Linux and WP8/Linux. And then there's CorelOffice, which isn't ported to Linux persay (No native toolkit), it's ported to Wine, which is a completely different endeavor. So, I say again. Is Corel equipped to port.NET?
Now, a business perspective. Corel has been losing money, and demonstrating just how low your stock can go for the last year or two. This MS investment seems to be in line with MS's extremely well-established history of investing, partnering, embracing, and extending other companies (Not just their products). I wonder what the future of Corel will be.
In such a system, I'd probably track my bandwidth usage and maintain my own logs. If a given ISP comes up with significantly different usage stats for you at the end of the month, you can argue with them and try to get your bill reduced (Not unlike arguing with your telco over a phone bill). When that fails, you can always pack up and switch to an ISP that has a potential to be more honest.
No Linux programmer has even thought of creating a GUI network browser.
After several people pointed out that many graphical SMB clients do indeed exist, you then said:
yeah, but in the 0.0000000000001 pre-pre-pre-alpha stage.
So which is it? Or are you just spouting arguments in the hopes of seeming like you have a valid point?
And just in case people thought you might have a clue about how Unix works, you clear up that misconception with:
In my opinion, only daemons and tty clients should be in textmode.
So, let's get rid of the GNU tools, we don't need grep, tar, cat, man, and the like, because they're all confusing and should be replaced by graphical programs that can't be used in scripts or relied upon to exist on all platforms.
Alrighty. We're even then. Granted, my response was probably somewhat reactionary.:)
People are touting Linux as a competitor to Windows NOW, not in the future.
You're right, we do agree this is a bad idea.
Right now, WP Office 2K is the only (usable) one on Linux and its better in Windows.
Talk about a sad state of affairs if the best we can do is WP Office. I did the beta for that, and.. yuck. IMHO, doing it with wine was a half-assed way to go. I have to give StarOffice some credit for at least being functional, and using a native toolkit. Sure, it's monolithic bloatware like nobody has ever seen (Hell, MS hasn't even written an app like SOffice). But it does work.
Lot's of people know how to registry hack and edit.ini files. You fail to remember that the majority of the work-force grew up in DOS.
This may have been true 5-10 years ago, but certainly not today, where people take a few community college classes on how to use MS Word and head for any job that sits them in front of a computer. I work as a PHP developer in what is otherwise a ColdFusion shop, for example, and out of the 15 developers we have, perhaps 2 of them (Not counting myself) know anything about the registery,.ini files, etc. They're just end users that know ColdFusion.
Lots of people may know how to hack the registry, but I assure you that number pales in comparison to the millions of users who don't.
Only a few applications "get it" in Linux. Helix GNOME is one such application. However, if one app does something well, you can't just point to it and say "oh, we're easy too!"
In most cases this is true. Tounge firmly in cheek, I'll also point to RedHat's kudzo utility and say "We're easy too!", but realistically I find kudzo a distateful utility that I remove as a matter of course whenever I install a RedHat system. It's a step in the right direction, but it's still fundamentally incapable of being the solution, because the only things it can provide answers for are the things already contained in the kernel.
For example, what is the difference between/usr/bin and/usr/local/bin on a single-user machine? I'm not suggesting that all UNIXes change. I'm just saying that the "UNIX way" isn't going to cut it for the average desktop.
As per the FHS,/usr/bin is system-installed and maintained software, and/usr/local/bin is stuff installed by the user that should never be overwritten or removed by the system. Which is to say if I manually install Netscape in/usr/local, even though RedHat already has a netscape rpm installed, upgrading the rpm should have no effect on the/usr/local copy. Put another way,/usr/local is packages installed from a source other than the RedHat distro.
(I'll never run Debian since they aren't cutting edge)
As a Debian loyalist I can't pass this one up:) Yes, the stable release always gets stale fairly quickly. And unstable is usually unsuitable for most people, but it's also usually perfectly fine for users that are fine with lagging a few weeks behind cutting age and be mindful about when they do apt updates. To make that a bit easier, Debian's been musing over adding a middle phase in development between the bleeding-edge unstable and the near-release frozen. Called test, probably, it'd essentially be a few weeks older than unstable, and it would only update when unstable had been noted to be relatively free of major bugs. Should be promising if they do roll it out..
Why do people think the distros are so damn different? Do they all only run the software that comes with their distro? All the Linuxes work more or less the same way.
I make the distinction of saying distros should be used for comparison because that's where the battles, for lack of a better word, will be fought. It's not Linux that's going to be held up by the media and reviewed side by side with Windows ME, it's RedHat, Caldera, Suse, Corel, etc. individually. We've seen this happen for years now. Nobody in the media compares Linux to Windows, because that would be too ambiguous. It's much easier (And more consistent with the mindsets of the mass market) to take RedHat or CorelLinux out of the shrink wrap, and compare it to Windows. Sure they work more or less the same at the core. We both know they even use 99% of the same software. But it's that 1% that distinguishes them.
All too often C-Net or ZD-Net will focus an unusual amount of attention on the installation process. This is unique for each distro. The next thing they'll look at is what the system has installed, and what the default environment(s) is/are. They'll say "Well, RedHat installed and provided us a desktop with a file manager, some links to a few websites, the Gnome panel, and some apps." Or they'll say "We installed Caldera's distro, and when it finished we were presented with a fine KDE2 desktop and a copy of StarOffice.", etc, etc. The mass market is very superficial that way, and that's why the task of becoming a viable desktop lies in the hands of the distro makers (And, in retrospect, the folks behind KDE & Gnome, which I should've thought to mention earlier)
< The next several paragraphs are all good, I plead no contest to your points.:) >
If the distro makers can't get such a disparate group of coders to unify, then maybe Linux wasn't meant to be a mass market, desktop OS.
Well, I think we're seeing some efforts in this area. Certainly distro makers are backing the developers of projects that aim to make things better, either financially or with additional resources. It's progress, but I don't feel ready to predict if it will ever reach that level of consistency and unity that one may attribute to BeOS or Windows. I'm also not sure it should even be a goal.
Since this article has long since fallen off Slashdot's front page, I suppose this is it for our thread. It's been fun.:) See you around.
I agree completely. If all the computers in a library are in plain view of the world, you'll either prevent people from viewing porn in the library through shame, or when somebody who has no shame tries it, they get tossed out on the street quite rapidly.
Of course, the downside is that when somebody comes along who has no shame, he'll be exposing everybody with a line of sight to the stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
But it isn't now, in the Year Of Our Lord Two-thousand AD. Did I say it never was?
Surely you have better things to do with your time than seek out excuses to nitpick Slashdot posts.
Well, there's this flag, but it isn't the Irish flag.
The window borders are from BlueSteel, the Enlightenment theme.
Is it just me, or is that stupid ad rotated way, way too frequently? I'm extremely sick of seeing that guy's wide open mouth screaming at me.
Well, IMHO, categorizing should go something like
1. Hardware (Apple, Intel, etc)
2. OS (MacOS, Linux, Amiga, etc)
3. Software (X, Gnome, KDE, etc)
Actually, he said "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos". And then Kodos whipped him. :)
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F02.html
That was an excellent sketch, and it's been constantly reminding me of this election.
A proxy server that does NT authentication, and doesn't let you log into it through your web browser.
:)
The company I work at was running that setup for months, but only because the staff at the time didn't have a better alternative.
As such, I was stuck in Windows for the first few months of my time there. But, since MS proxy is such a miserable piece of shit, they got sick of trying to keep it functional, and switched to a proxyless network. 30 minutes later, I was in X.
All that's required is to spend a few minutes reading the docs on how to make Samba peacefully coexist with an NT domain. Really, it's quite simple.
:)
as a programmer i have to say - that HAS got to be the worst and most draconian policy ever.
Did you actually read the post you're now slamming? His comments were, imho, quite reasonable. If you consider them Draconian, I wish you luck finding an employer that meets your requirements of an IT department.
its the people who USE those workstations that make money for your company - not you or that IT department.
This narrow minded view is about enough to invalidate your entire post. Does the concept of a team effort mean anything to you? The presence of programmers, marketers, customer service reps, etc. wouldn't be worth five cents without a solid IT department keeping it all running. Don't think for a moment a qualified group of network admins doesn't help a company make money.
Indeed, one of the biggest concerns when a company is being considered for a contract is the quality of their network. Speaking as a programmer for a company that's been scrutinized and approved by more than a few large corporations, I assure you that one of the key factors of our getting contracts is the quality of our network and the reliability of the systems.
by definition people who use workstations should be allowed to do whatever they like assuming that they dont interfere with the network in any way.
By definiton? Oh, please. The definition of a workstation is not "You can do whatever you want with it, as long as it doesn't hurt the network". Your workstation is not your responsibility when it breaks, or when it acquires a virus. It's IT's responsiblity. They're the people who will be held accountable for your workstation's functionality, not you. Therefore, it is most certainly not yours to do with as you please.
'd be really horrified to work at a company which didnt let me install the OS i liked on the machine i have for my exclusive use.
Again, I wish you luck finding an employer that meets your somewhat skewed outlook on reality. I'll also assume you didn't read his entire post, because he explicitly stated that if somebody presented a good reason to install an alternate OS, it would be considered, tested, and approved or disapproved. It's not Draconian as you'd like to scream and wail, it's the protection of their time and their responsibilities.
Another point. It's not your box, it's not yours for exclusive use, and it's certainly not your property. If you're home sick one day, the company has every right to let somebody other than you use the system, or log into it to look up something in your mail. It's a reality check: The computer isn't yours.
if i want to be my own admin what rights does the IT department have to fiddle with my personal workstation or fire me ?
This should be obvious by now, from what I've covered above, but I'll say it again. It's not yours. You didn't pay for it, you didn't install it, you don't maintain it. The computer belongs to the company, and the company can do with it whatever it wants. How is it you don't understand this?
you must be at some really brain dead firm to be considering policies like that.
Well, the rest of your post isn't worth responding to, so I'll just leave it at that.
Damn straight. If a couple employees have switched to Linux, and the IT people haven't noticed, then obviously it didn't cause any problems. Samba isn't overriding the PDC's authority like it could be, they're probably still in e-mail contact with the company, and it's a safe bet they're still being as productive as before (If not more), because if they weren't, IT would've gotten a call to come down and re-install Windows.
I just so happen to be in this position, as the only Linux-running employee in an otherwise comletely NT/Win98 shop. The company does ColdFusion development, uses Exchange Server (I use the webmail interface) and uses SMB file/print sharing copiously. I work on a project that's being done in PHP, so I don't have to deal with the ColdFusion server regularly crashing NT, and by being in Linux, I can very easilly run my own development environment.
It's a completely ideal environment, in my opinion. I can use a superior development environment, I've proven that I can actually be more productive (God, what a pain in the ass it was having to develop with only one 1280x1024 area available) and I'm one less person IT has to worry about supporting, because I can take care of myself.
...Or if 'Plain Old Text' actually meant Plain Old Text, that post would've said
.k12.<state code>.us
Like, oh, say, .k12..us, which is already in place, and already being used by the vast majority of Internet-using schools and school districts in the US.
Well, how many base ten systems do you see starting at 0?
1... 10, 11... 20, 1901... 2000, 20001...
It's not difficult.
The richest 1% controls 80% I don't know about you, but to me that's pretty messed up.
They'll say that it's unproven and/or untested, too new or too young to demonstrate that it's actually a reliable filesystem. Assuming it does prove itself, of course. If there are problems with it, they'll either point out and exaggurate those problems, or simply ignore Tux2 altogether.
The notion of a complete range of content belonging to one company is something that I recall being discussed over six years ago. People worried that a sole company could manage to control, essentially, all points of an average person's day on the web. Well, it's completely plausible now.
Picture, if you will. A user starts on AOL, and, without ever leaving the AOL revenue stream (Ad banners and affiliates) they get news from a dozen diffrent sources. Entertainment and TV/Movie info, running web searches, buying products, etc. And if they really wanted to, AOL could make life really interesting by mandating that no AOL-owned website may link to a non-AOL-owned website. Think it could never happen? Don't kid yourself, folks, it's easier than you may think.
Bland is one way to put it, but what sprung to my mind while reviewing the Q&A was that he was largely as brief as possible, generally dismissing the question as being silly or ignorant.
Now, I've tried for the last couple years to maintain optimism about Corel. I've been a fan of WordPerfect since I was a kid using WordPerfect 4.x in dos, and I was more or less pleased with WP7 and 8 when they came to Linux. Functional, faster than StarOffice. Did the job.
.NET to Linux? I mean, sure they have a Linux distro, but they didn't write any of it. At most, they wrote an installer, a KDE file manager.. Few utils here and there, but the rest of it is Debian. WordPerfect had a motif port long before Corel got their hands on it, so I assume that was the starting point for WP7/Linux and WP8/Linux. And then there's CorelOffice, which isn't ported to Linux persay (No native toolkit), it's ported to Wine, which is a completely different endeavor. So, I say again. Is Corel equipped to port .NET?
But Corel has only been going downhill in my book. My question is, is Corel actually up to the task of porting
Now, a business perspective. Corel has been losing money, and demonstrating just how low your stock can go for the last year or two. This MS investment seems to be in line with MS's extremely well-established history of investing, partnering, embracing, and extending other companies (Not just their products). I wonder what the future of Corel will be.
Don't want a distro run by a corporate agenda?
Hello, Debian.
In such a system, I'd probably track my bandwidth usage and maintain my own logs. If a given ISP comes up with significantly different usage stats for you at the end of the month, you can argue with them and try to get your bill reduced (Not unlike arguing with your telco over a phone bill). When that fails, you can always pack up and switch to an ISP that has a potential to be more honest.
In your post that started this thread:
No Linux programmer has even thought of creating a GUI network browser.
After several people pointed out that many graphical SMB clients do indeed exist, you then said:
yeah, but in the 0.0000000000001 pre-pre-pre-alpha stage.
So which is it? Or are you just spouting arguments in the hopes of seeming like you have a valid point?
And just in case people thought you might have a clue about how Unix works, you clear up that misconception with:
In my opinion, only daemons and tty clients should be in textmode.
So, let's get rid of the GNU tools, we don't need grep, tar, cat, man, and the like, because they're all confusing and should be replaced by graphical programs that can't be used in scripts or relied upon to exist on all platforms.
Sheesh.
Fair enough. I think you're a fool too ;)
:)
.ini files. You fail to remember that the majority of the work-force grew up in DOS.
.ini files, etc. They're just end users that know ColdFusion.
/usr/bin and /usr/local/bin on a single-user machine? I'm not suggesting that all UNIXes change. I'm just saying that the "UNIX way" isn't going to cut it for the average desktop.
/usr/bin is system-installed and maintained software, and /usr/local/bin is stuff installed by the user that should never be overwritten or removed by the system. Which is to say if I manually install Netscape in /usr/local, even though RedHat already has a netscape rpm installed, upgrading the rpm should have no effect on the /usr/local copy. Put another way, /usr/local is packages installed from a source other than the RedHat distro.
:) Yes, the stable release always gets stale fairly quickly. And unstable is usually unsuitable for most people, but it's also usually perfectly fine for users that are fine with lagging a few weeks behind cutting age and be mindful about when they do apt updates. To make that a bit easier, Debian's been musing over adding a middle phase in development between the bleeding-edge unstable and the near-release frozen. Called test, probably, it'd essentially be a few weeks older than unstable, and it would only update when unstable had been noted to be relatively free of major bugs. Should be promising if they do roll it out..
:) >
:) See you around.
Alrighty. We're even then. Granted, my response was probably somewhat reactionary.
People are touting Linux as a competitor to Windows NOW, not in the future.
You're right, we do agree this is a bad idea.
Right now, WP Office 2K is the only (usable) one on Linux and its better in Windows.
Talk about a sad state of affairs if the best we can do is WP Office. I did the beta for that, and.. yuck. IMHO, doing it with wine was a half-assed way to go. I have to give StarOffice some credit for at least being functional, and using a native toolkit. Sure, it's monolithic bloatware like nobody has ever seen (Hell, MS hasn't even written an app like SOffice). But it does work.
Lot's of people know how to registry hack and edit
This may have been true 5-10 years ago, but certainly not today, where people take a few community college classes on how to use MS Word and head for any job that sits them in front of a computer. I work as a PHP developer in what is otherwise a ColdFusion shop, for example, and out of the 15 developers we have, perhaps 2 of them (Not counting myself) know anything about the registery,
Lots of people may know how to hack the registry, but I assure you that number pales in comparison to the millions of users who don't.
Only a few applications "get it" in Linux. Helix GNOME is one such application. However, if one app does something well, you can't just point to it and say "oh, we're easy too!"
In most cases this is true. Tounge firmly in cheek, I'll also point to RedHat's kudzo utility and say "We're easy too!", but realistically I find kudzo a distateful utility that I remove as a matter of course whenever I install a RedHat system. It's a step in the right direction, but it's still fundamentally incapable of being the solution, because the only things it can provide answers for are the things already contained in the kernel.
For example, what is the difference between
As per the FHS,
(I'll never run Debian since they aren't cutting edge)
As a Debian loyalist I can't pass this one up
Why do people think the distros are so damn different? Do they all only run the software that comes with their distro? All the Linuxes work more or less the same way.
I make the distinction of saying distros should be used for comparison because that's where the battles, for lack of a better word, will be fought. It's not Linux that's going to be held up by the media and reviewed side by side with Windows ME, it's RedHat, Caldera, Suse, Corel, etc. individually. We've seen this happen for years now. Nobody in the media compares Linux to Windows, because that would be too ambiguous. It's much easier (And more consistent with the mindsets of the mass market) to take RedHat or CorelLinux out of the shrink wrap, and compare it to Windows. Sure they work more or less the same at the core. We both know they even use 99% of the same software. But it's that 1% that distinguishes them.
All too often C-Net or ZD-Net will focus an unusual amount of attention on the installation process. This is unique for each distro. The next thing they'll look at is what the system has installed, and what the default environment(s) is/are. They'll say "Well, RedHat installed and provided us a desktop with a file manager, some links to a few websites, the Gnome panel, and some apps." Or they'll say "We installed Caldera's distro, and when it finished we were presented with a fine KDE2 desktop and a copy of StarOffice.", etc, etc. The mass market is very superficial that way, and that's why the task of becoming a viable desktop lies in the hands of the distro makers (And, in retrospect, the folks behind KDE & Gnome, which I should've thought to mention earlier)
< The next several paragraphs are all good, I plead no contest to your points.
If the distro makers can't get such a disparate group of coders to unify, then maybe Linux wasn't meant to be a mass market, desktop OS.
Well, I think we're seeing some efforts in this area. Certainly distro makers are backing the developers of projects that aim to make things better, either financially or with additional resources. It's progress, but I don't feel ready to predict if it will ever reach that level of consistency and unity that one may attribute to BeOS or Windows. I'm also not sure it should even be a goal.
Since this article has long since fallen off Slashdot's front page, I suppose this is it for our thread. It's been fun.
I agree completely. If all the computers in a library are in plain view of the world, you'll either prevent people from viewing porn in the library through shame, or when somebody who has no shame tries it, they get tossed out on the street quite rapidly.
Of course, the downside is that when somebody comes along who has no shame, he'll be exposing everybody with a line of sight to the stuff.
You left out a link.
Does anyone else know more about this, or is this just an individual council going overboard?