Businesses don't run based on ideals, they run based on productivity. If applications like Open Office fail to open an Office document even 1% of the time then they're useless if that document is really something you need to open. Gimp still isn't a satisfactory replacement for Photoshop. Sound in flash still doesn't work correctly out of the box on Ubuntu systems, there's no mp3 support by default, nor does Quicktime really work. There's still not a decent movie player.
This doesn't even begin to take into account that most businesses I've come across use some kind of custom industry application. CAD applications, specialized accounting applications, lending an loan applications, guess what they're all written for? Windows. Linux still doesn't work for those customers.
If the Linux community wants to advance they're going to have to give up on some of their ideals and actually provide what people are looking for, which is a stable operating systems that run applications people actually want to use with a consistent look and feel everywhere. I ran Ubuntu for over a year and reverted to XP because I couldn't deal with the slowdowns for no reason, application crashes, incompatibilities, mystery feature additions and removals based on the whims of the developers (what's pigeon going to include or disable this week!), and decisions that were made purely for philosophical reasons (no mp3 support by default? please.)
Most of my machines still run some kind of Unix (mostly FreeBSD and OSX) but when I need Windows, I really need Windows and nothing else will do.
Besides, Outlook is still the best email/productivity/calendaring application out there. Nothing I've seen on UNIX even comes close, especially when I need to share data with others.
And just because XP will be end of lifed, the security updates for it will continue for a few years, which is all anyone really needs. If 75% of the market is still on XP, developers aren't going to move to being Vista only any time soon because it'd kill their sales.
I've given in and just follow the conventions of the intended audience. For technical people I follow all the old rules of netiquette, bottom posting, 4 line signature, etc. When I'm writing to business people I top reply and have the full 63 line company signature complete with the attached jpeg and vcard.
There are quite a few things that I can argue against and try to go against the grain on, but this would be a losing battle. Business email has its own conventions and When in Rome...
Heh, one of the larger newspapers around here still does their billing on a VAX. Some part of it actually did catch on fire about 2 years ago. They put it out with a fire extinguisher and the thing just kept running.
If you're majoring in CS, the major isn't really about programming. Math and logic help for some programs you'll end up writing, but they're a lot more helpful overall for studying algorithms and the rest of CS.
Programming is the same to CS as learning how to use lab equipment is to chemistry. Helpful in studying fundamentals, but far from the point.
Vahid was the best prof I ever had at UCR. He was genuinely interested in the students doing well, but not at the expense of academics. If students failed the first midterm, he was one of the few who didn't:
a)just keep going and flunk 80% of the class or b)make the rest of the class a cakewalk so everyone passed.
He changed the class around so that you actually learned the material and liked doing it.He was the first professor that I had who actually got me interested in the subject matter beyond a "I'm here for 4 years and just want my degree" level after I was beaten down by my first year physics and calc classes.
For any UCR CS undergrads:
If you want to get involved with research Vahid is the one you should talk to. He's completely approachable without any of the usual academic elitest bullshit surrounding him. He takes a genuine interest in his students.
Also, you need to take a class from Eamonn Keogh. He's a funny guy who is an excellent teacher and an absolute genius. Another excellent prof who doesn't get high and mighty because he can put Dr. in front of his name.
Someone at the company where I work got his car broken into. This was caught on the security camera. The guy pulls up in a red Toyota pickup, throws a rock through the window and steals everything inside. The license plate on the pickup truck was clearly visible on the security tape. After the tape was turned over to the police they went to the truck owner to investigate. His response: "I loaned it to my daughter's boyfriend." The police didn't even bother to follow up on what should have been an open and shut case. Never investigated the boyfriend, nothing.
Fine, the police don't have a lot of resources, they're underpaid, they have a tough job, they're understaffed, they work long hours. At the same time, they should be counted on to solve the easy crimes even with limited funding and they just won't do it.
From now on, their complaints are falling on deaf ears for me. They can't be counted on to do their jobs even when a case is handed to them. If they won't even make an effort to protect the citizens they're supposed to, why should I make an effort to care whether or not they have decent benefits.
Meanwhile, my dad got a ticket for wearing his seatbelt improperly from the local police(wearing it under his arm instead of over). I feel so much safer now that nasty lawbreakers like my dad have to pay fines for things that don't hurt anyone but himself.
If it is, this is going to do more to hurt Java than anything else. I had to install Sun's a while ago when MS pulled theirs from Windows Update. It's the most obscenely slow piece of software I've ever run. I mean, like, quicktime video flicker on a 486 slow. It was like this on every single machine I ran it on, so I don't think it was just a fluke.
If it is known that having a cellphone infuriates others, and your's goes off, I think that the actions are comparable. I can't tell you how many times I've been in classes and theaters where people's phones go off *repeatedly*. I bet that if there were some threat of physical violence, classes and movies would be a whole lot more enjoyable to go to. Swat a kid on the ass a couple of times for incorrect behavior and they will learn not to do it again a whole lot faster than a kid sent to a "time out." The same is true for adults. There are two damned many SUV driving, cell-phone talking, red-zone parking me-monkeys out there that really should just grow up and learn that we are living in a society.
Yes, violence is wrong, but I think that the comfort of others is worth the cost of physical violence to the one jerkoff that thinks it's ok to piss off everyone else for their own comfort. When the solution is as simple as turning off a phone so as to not annoy other people, selfishness is a crime. You deserve to get beaten down for the good of society.
In my department, two HP 4100 series printers died within a week of purchase.. "fuser error". One 1100 series decided to just up and die for no reason. A third 4100 has developed random roller noises, that are likely a sign of things to come.
Our main 8550 printer has never worked right, random print speed issues, resolved by using older/incorrect drivers that don't actually use any of the features you would buy an 8550 for. And no matter what driver you happen to pick, if there is paper in the manual feed tray, it will claim paper jam until you pull the paper out, and put it back in....for every single sheet. It will then print from the manual feed tray, regardless of what you choose in the print driver. Turning off manual feed entirely allows it to print from the correct try by default, but anyone wanting to use manual feed then has to turn it back on themselves. This operation, naturally is buried as the last option in the paper handling menu. In other departments, their two year old (4550 series?) printers jam when anything tries to pull from tray three. This is a problem with 6 of the 6 printers that they ordered.
Is it really that hard to make hardware that actually works correctly any more? Seriously, these printers aren't cheap, and if we have to send back EVERY printer that comes into us for repair at least once, it really can't be saving them all that money. They could at least make them so they break 1 month out of warranty, like everything else. At least then we get something that works for a solid year, rather than random downtime while things get sent back and forth. Spare laser printers aren't exactly one of those things you keep laying around.
And their driver support just keeps getting worse. HP 3100 combo fax/printer/copier thingy? no XP drivers downloadable from their website, you have to order the CD containing them. All we use is the print functionality, they could at least toss a 3 meg printer driver up, even if they are contractually bound from posting the software that lets you use full functionality. Same for their webcams. I have Photoshop, just give me a small twain compliant driver, and I'll be happy, I don't need Hippy Dippy Bed Bath and Fun Image Manipulation Program to come with it.
Meanwhile, our printers bought prior to 1997 all are still working, without a peep, and with no service whatsoever, other than toner changes and paper refills. Screw you HP, and screw anyone who looks like you.
Why do we keep buying their crap? I work for an edu that apparently has a contract with them. Spectacular.
More bandwidth typically isn't an option, especially in school districts where the top people are siphoning money into their own pockets (which really happens more often than you would think). When people start complaining that the network is slow, and, fair or not, it is your responsibility to make it faster, what else are you supposed to do?
More money just isn't an option. I wouldn't care what people do with the network, but as soon as a slowdown becomes noticeable to people passing legitimate traffic, then you have to do something about it. It isn't a power trip, it is a basic job responsibility.
For a lot of businesses who have a 30 day net account or whatever, buying machines from a Mom and Pop isn't a problem, but having worked for places where it takes 30 days for accounting to pay a vendor, I've had places refuse to give us quotes as they couldn't handle the quantity that we wanted to order. A lot of smaller places can't sit on 50 grand worth of hardware for the 30 days it takes to get paid. We ran into problems with this while trying to order 20 machines for a beowulf cluster. When we finally did get a vendor that would sell to us, they had to ship the parts for 5 machines at a time since there was no way they could afford it otherwise.
I know this isn't a problem for most businesses (I work for an edu that for whatever reason doesn't have such an account), it can become an issue.
All patched well in advance of exploits making it into such general use. Yeah, the product is shoddy, but the typical admin is worse. Don't blame the software for the admin's screwups.
Old hole in IIS, blame Microsoft, hole in an old version of Sendmail or Bind, blame the admin, funny how these things work.
Although it isn't publicised as much as some of the other people making donations, the Gates foundation tends to invest a lot of energy in producing vaccinations and providing other medical care to underdeveloped countries. I remember an article from about a year and a half ago or so, where there were a lot of big people in technology talking about donating computers and whatever at a conference. If I remember correctly, Gates was the only person to really stand up and make the point that if they were going to do anything, they should keep people alive before giving them equipment and turning them into just another market to sell things to. I could be lying, since I read this a while ago. The news.com archives should have some relevent infomation, I'm really too lazy to search.
If I'm wrong, feel free to slap me upside the head.
Every reference to vi I've ever seen has used:wq to write and quit. People eventually learn this, probably because it is more descriptive e.g. x, meaning....whatever, wq having an actual meaning in write+quit. At a certain point, even when you learn:x, you are so used to typing wq, often with the !, which is just one key and a shift away from the w and q, rather than the considerable leap for x, that it simply rolls out. Given the !, it likely takes less time to type than making the jump from the x all the way up to the top of the keyboard, those thousands of seconds add up over the course of a sysadmin's life.
Man, I really need to finish studying for that final. Posting this reply is the definition of procrastination.
I average several dozen connections from those idiots every week. If I had some spare bandwidth, I'd actually do what a friend of mine did and set up an anonymous ftp server that would only allow uploads. He got some neat goodies.
legitimate use of a DDoS attack. I know it is wrong on so many levels and immoral and all that, but doesn't it just make sense on a primitive level that if they are unwilling to shut down their open relays, someone else should shut them down for them? 24 hours notice, then hit them until they promise to shut it off. Make there be direct consequences for them not playing nice on the net.
Like I said, I know this is inherently flawed, but it is nice to dream. Mmmmmm, vigelante justice on the net...
I've seen some of their old servers and they were great pieces of engineering. Looking at the tinfoil that they put their PCs together out of, it is hard to imagine that it is the same company.
There are a hell of a lot of old laserjets pounding out page after page after 10 years, why can't the new ones last more than 3 months.
I always hated Compaq's home stuff, but at least their business stuff was tolerable. That's been going downhill too.
Small question for the PC builders. If the margins are so low on consumer PCs that 3 dollars worth of cds cuts drastically into your margins, why are you even bothering to sell them? Find a worthwhile market to sell a product to. If you can't make money selling PCs, just don't sell them, Toshiba and IBM have already cleared out of the desktop PC market, it is time for the other makers to do so too, rather than screwing over customers.
This just ups my already pathological hatred of HP.
I borrowed my parent's digital camera last week to take a few pictures, I didn't have the driver CD and I'm using windows xp, so required drivers aren't on that cd anyway. I go to HP's site and it proceeds to give me instructions on ordering a CD from them for replacement drivers. As near as I can figure, digital camera drivers are analogous to scanner drivers and should be about 2 megs at most, TWAIN crap and all. As long as I have photoshop I have no need for whatever crap they shovel onto the CD. I would have been a happy camper if I could have just taken the 30 seconds to download the drivers. Instead I am supposed to jump through hoops and shell out for a CD for software for a piece of hardware I already own.
Earlier in the week, I was at work, dealing with one of their combination printer/fax/copier machines, the laserjet 3100. I couldn't find the driver cd initially, and didn't care to try to install standard postscript drivers since they usually don't work on lower end printers anyway. I try to download the drivers off of their website, once again, I'm instructed to order a CD. For something as simple as printer drivers. 30 seconds of my time turned into 30 minutes as I had to hunt down the driver CD in the woman's office and get the drivers installed.
As a result I sent a nastygram to HP asking why drivers for some of their more obscure products (anything not supported by built in windows drivers anyway) aren't available on their site. The response I got basically amounted to "you need to order a CD because we don't have the drivers up, so you need to order a CD and you can find the instructions for ordering a CD on our site."
Last week we also had a 2 month old laserjet 4100N fail with a "fuser error", a 1200 die with a "printer tray mispick" error, the 8100s seem to have a massive issue where the third tray jams constantly. and our 8500C(or 8550, forget which) was slower than all hell. HPs tech support gave us a song and dance about how the engine speed only related to multiple copies of the same page... blah blah blah. They finally got a marketroid in there to say that it wasn't right, he called tech support and we spent half a day working on this crap, only to use older drivers that let it work at a reasonable speed.
Last week I had to set up another printer in another department, using one of their external JetDirect print servers. Apparently the things do not like it if you dont have a DHCP server. When setting them up manually, for some stupid reason they will only take one change to their network settings at a time. Change ip address, ok, go back in, change subnet mask, ok, go back in, change gateway, ok...
Don't even get me started about the inkjets.
So, yeah, long story short I'm sick of HP and will do anything to avoid buying/touching them in the future. Their tech support is lousy and flat out lies, they won't give proper driver support for their lousy products, and their products are shoddy to begin with.
They are truly an evil company who is going to take Compaq down with them, not that compaq was that spectacular to begin with.
right click start button, properties, classic start menu. your desktop goes back to the way it was in previous versions of windows. sick of msn messenger getting in the way asking you to sign up for passport? uninstall it.
edit c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf
remove the word "hide" from the line containing msmsgs. you can now uninstall it from the add/remove programs, windows components.
yeah, microsoft gets pretty evil about burying stuff where it doesnt want you to find it, but you can usually customize it fairly easily. once you poke around a bit.
Duron 850 processor,
256 megs of ram,
20 gig hard drive,
56k modem(yes, it was a software modem, outside of the driver issues, software modems have started to get decent, I'm impressed by the intel chipset)
decent inwin case,
52x cdrom,
8 meg ati xpert 98 video card(they dont game)
audio and 10/100 nic integrated on the mobo (8139 chipset, generic, but not bad, and the audio comes standard with the via amd chipsets.)
It isn't that hard to pull off, the computer shows here are really good, since I live in southern california. At pricewatch.com, you can find similar prices to the computer shows, you just pay a bit more on shipping, order as much as you can from the same dealer and you should be ok since you save on shipping, even if the cost of the ram is two dollars more than somewhere else.
Ditch the modem, and the entire thing will run fine with Linux or $OS_OF_CHOICE. You have to build it yourself, but you end up with a better deal, since you get a machine without any real compromises, you get to pick every part that is in it, not have a cut rate manufacturer stick a bargain motherboard in it, or crappy ram.
One more hint, if you are in the market for an AMD and want to save some cash, ECS is doing some great things right now, the board I got for my parents was 70 bucks and has been rock solid. The integrated 10/100 nic is fine for home use, but if you dont want to use it, blow the 30 bucks on an intel or 3com. Plus this thing also has a promise ata100 controller My fileserver has been running without any issues since I put it together, a duron 600 on an ECS board.
Nightmare nightmare nightmare.
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I realise that these features you want could presumably be turned off. BUT, why would I want the overhead of a web browser if all I'm doing is running ICQ (yes, I know recent builds of ICQ actually take up more memory than most web browsers).
The integration that quicktime does with the browser prompted me to swear off EVER installing it on any of my machines. Sorenson may be great, but I'll pass, thank you.
What's wrong with clicking on an mp3 and using a default program to open it. Presuming I want to listen to an mp3 repeatedly, I'll typically actually save it. A web browser should browse the web, that is it. It doesn't introduce a whole lot of hardship to open a dedicated to the task at hand. The user interface issues alone make it a tough task. Would the instant messaging client be docked inside the browser somewhere, or outside, what kind of controls would it have, would it be sleek, like you can force ICQ to be with some twiddling, or would it have the bulk of a web browser (typically what happens when you try to do things like this). On a fast enough machine (most of them now), IE opens instantly, mozilla nearly so (I'm not turning on the cache feature), ICQ usually sits there since I want it around all the time, as does AIM. Winamp opens instantly, and is usually docked somewhere anyway out of convenience. PERHAPS, including a link on audio files with a right click that says "stream from this location" would be a good idea, it would take the.05 seconds to open winamp and start streaming the media when it came in, which winamp will do anyway. It is just a manner of pointing winamp to the file where you are saving the data.
There was an instant messaging client that did what you are talking about, Odigo (is it still around?), I tried it for a day, the first time I went to a website and it showed everyone else with an Odigo client browsing the website, it freaked me the hell out. I dont need the entire internet knowing I'm browsing goat porn, thanks.
The more I try to talk to people online, the more I find out that I really don't have a whole lot in common with most of them. My ICQ list is reserved for friends that I've met in real life, and people in the few channels I hang out in on IRC. I dont want Joe in Utah messaging me because I happen to be looking at google.
I realise I'm saying this as a geek, but I also come from a background of a couple of years of ISP tech support. In addition to currently being a sysadmin, I do desktop support for decidedly non tech savvy users in my department, and such features wouldn't be useful or wanted by them, either. Right now, if icq or aim, or winamp screws up (We dont care what is installed on their machines as long as they get their work done and don't completely hose the os, most users have admin on their machines, until they prove themselves incompetant), it gets deleted and reinstalled. I dont want to have to completely uninstall a web browser simply because the AIM component screws up.
This wasn't intended as a flame but I think the way things work now is the best way. I'm not scared of change, I just dont like integrating everything, only to have a mess that isn't even remotely as useful as the individual parts.
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Businesses don't run based on ideals, they run based on productivity. If applications like Open Office fail to open an Office document even 1% of the time then they're useless if that document is really something you need to open. Gimp still isn't a satisfactory replacement for Photoshop. Sound in flash still doesn't work correctly out of the box on Ubuntu systems, there's no mp3 support by default, nor does Quicktime really work. There's still not a decent movie player.
This doesn't even begin to take into account that most businesses I've come across use some kind of custom industry application. CAD applications, specialized accounting applications, lending an loan applications, guess what they're all written for? Windows. Linux still doesn't work for those customers.
If the Linux community wants to advance they're going to have to give up on some of their ideals and actually provide what people are looking for, which is a stable operating systems that run applications people actually want to use with a consistent look and feel everywhere. I ran Ubuntu for over a year and reverted to XP because I couldn't deal with the slowdowns for no reason, application crashes, incompatibilities, mystery feature additions and removals based on the whims of the developers (what's pigeon going to include or disable this week!), and decisions that were made purely for philosophical reasons (no mp3 support by default? please.)
Most of my machines still run some kind of Unix (mostly FreeBSD and OSX) but when I need Windows, I really need Windows and nothing else will do.
Besides, Outlook is still the best email/productivity/calendaring application out there. Nothing I've seen on UNIX even comes close, especially when I need to share data with others.
And just because XP will be end of lifed, the security updates for it will continue for a few years, which is all anyone really needs. If 75% of the market is still on XP, developers aren't going to move to being Vista only any time soon because it'd kill their sales.
Can't someone just edit the Wikipedia article to say that they have enough donations to last until the human/robot apocalypse?
We'll be reading it in Wikipedia so we know it must be a fact.
Would you want Unix to run on a filesystem that was 'chmod -R 777'd? Why would you expect Microsoft to support it?
There aren't enough ads on that page, I can still see some content.
I've given in and just follow the conventions of the intended audience. For technical people I follow all the old rules of netiquette, bottom posting, 4 line signature, etc. When I'm writing to business people I top reply and have the full 63 line company signature complete with the attached jpeg and vcard.
There are quite a few things that I can argue against and try to go against the grain on, but this would be a losing battle. Business email has its own conventions and When in Rome...
Heh, one of the larger newspapers around here still does their billing on a VAX. Some part of it actually did catch on fire about 2 years ago. They put it out with a fire extinguisher and the thing just kept running.
If you're majoring in CS, the major isn't really about programming. Math and logic help for some programs you'll end up writing, but they're a lot more helpful overall for studying algorithms and the rest of CS.
Programming is the same to CS as learning how to use lab equipment is to chemistry. Helpful in studying fundamentals, but far from the point.
Which one?
Hear Hear.
Vahid was the best prof I ever had at UCR. He was genuinely interested in the students doing well, but not at the expense of academics. If students failed the first midterm, he was one of the few who didn't:
a)just keep going and flunk 80% of the class or
b)make the rest of the class a cakewalk so everyone passed.
He changed the class around so that you actually learned the material and liked doing it.He was the first professor that I had who actually got me interested in the subject matter beyond a "I'm here for 4 years and just want my degree" level after I was beaten down by my first year physics and calc classes.
For any UCR CS undergrads:
If you want to get involved with research Vahid is the one you should talk to. He's completely approachable without any of the usual academic elitest bullshit surrounding him. He takes a genuine interest in his students.
Also, you need to take a class from Eamonn Keogh. He's a funny guy who is an excellent teacher and an absolute genius. Another excellent prof who doesn't get high and mighty because he can put Dr. in front of his name.
Seriously.
Someone at the company where I work got his car broken into. This was caught on the security camera. The guy pulls up in a red Toyota pickup, throws a rock through the window and steals everything inside. The license plate on the pickup truck was clearly visible on the security tape. After the tape was turned over to the police they went to the truck owner to investigate. His response: "I loaned it to my daughter's boyfriend." The police didn't even bother to follow up on what should have been an open and shut case. Never investigated the boyfriend, nothing.
Fine, the police don't have a lot of resources, they're underpaid, they have a tough job, they're understaffed, they work long hours. At the same time, they should be counted on to solve the easy crimes even with limited funding and they just won't do it.
From now on, their complaints are falling on deaf ears for me. They can't be counted on to do their jobs even when a case is handed to them. If they won't even make an effort to protect the citizens they're supposed to, why should I make an effort to care whether or not they have decent benefits.
Meanwhile, my dad got a ticket for wearing his seatbelt improperly from the local police(wearing it under his arm instead of over). I feel so much safer now that nasty lawbreakers like my dad have to pay fines for things that don't hurt anyone but himself.
If it is, this is going to do more to hurt Java than anything else. I had to install Sun's a while ago when MS pulled theirs from Windows Update. It's the most obscenely slow piece of software I've ever run. I mean, like, quicktime video flicker on a 486 slow. It was like this on every single machine I ran it on, so I don't think it was just a fluke.
It's really simple: Don't Be A Jerkoff.
If it is known that having a cellphone infuriates others, and your's goes off, I think that the actions are comparable. I can't tell you how many times I've been in classes and theaters where people's phones go off *repeatedly*. I bet that if there were some threat of physical violence, classes and movies would be a whole lot more enjoyable to go to. Swat a kid on the ass a couple of times for incorrect behavior and they will learn not to do it again a whole lot faster than a kid sent to a "time out." The same is true for adults. There are two damned many SUV driving, cell-phone talking, red-zone parking me-monkeys out there that really should just grow up and learn that we are living in a society.
Yes, violence is wrong, but I think that the comfort of others is worth the cost of physical violence to the one jerkoff that thinks it's ok to piss off everyone else for their own comfort. When the solution is as simple as turning off a phone so as to not annoy other people, selfishness is a crime. You deserve to get beaten down for the good of society.
In my department, two HP 4100 series printers died within a week of purchase.. "fuser error". One 1100 series decided to just up and die for no reason. A third 4100 has developed random roller noises, that are likely a sign of things to come.
Our main 8550 printer has never worked right, random print speed issues, resolved by using older/incorrect drivers that don't actually use any of the features you would buy an 8550 for. And no matter what driver you happen to pick, if there is paper in the manual feed tray, it will claim paper jam until you pull the paper out, and put it back in....for every single sheet. It will then print from the manual feed tray, regardless of what you choose in the print driver. Turning off manual feed entirely allows it to print from the correct try by default, but anyone wanting to use manual feed then has to turn it back on themselves. This operation, naturally is buried as the last option in the paper handling menu. In other departments, their two year old (4550 series?) printers jam when anything tries to pull from tray three. This is a problem with 6 of the 6 printers that they ordered.
Is it really that hard to make hardware that actually works correctly any more? Seriously, these printers aren't cheap, and if we have to send back EVERY printer that comes into us for repair at least once, it really can't be saving them all that money. They could at least make them so they break 1 month out of warranty, like everything else. At least then we get something that works for a solid year, rather than random downtime while things get sent back and forth. Spare laser printers aren't exactly one of those things you keep laying around.
And their driver support just keeps getting worse. HP 3100 combo fax/printer/copier thingy? no XP drivers downloadable from their website, you have to order the CD containing them. All we use is the print functionality, they could at least toss a 3 meg printer driver up, even if they are contractually bound from posting the software that lets you use full functionality. Same for their webcams. I have Photoshop, just give me a small twain compliant driver, and I'll be happy, I don't need Hippy Dippy Bed Bath and Fun Image Manipulation Program to come with it.
Meanwhile, our printers bought prior to 1997 all are still working, without a peep, and with no service whatsoever, other than toner changes and paper refills. Screw you HP, and screw anyone who looks like you.
Why do we keep buying their crap? I work for an edu that apparently has a contract with them. Spectacular.
More bandwidth typically isn't an option, especially in school districts where the top people are siphoning money into their own pockets (which really happens more often than you would think). When people start complaining that the network is slow, and, fair or not, it is your responsibility to make it faster, what else are you supposed to do?
More money just isn't an option. I wouldn't care what people do with the network, but as soon as a slowdown becomes noticeable to people passing legitimate traffic, then you have to do something about it. It isn't a power trip, it is a basic job responsibility.
For a lot of businesses who have a 30 day net account or whatever, buying machines from a Mom and Pop isn't a problem, but having worked for places where it takes 30 days for accounting to pay a vendor, I've had places refuse to give us quotes as they couldn't handle the quantity that we wanted to order. A lot of smaller places can't sit on 50 grand worth of hardware for the 30 days it takes to get paid. We ran into problems with this while trying to order 20 machines for a beowulf cluster. When we finally did get a vendor that would sell to us, they had to ship the parts for 5 machines at a time since there was no way they could afford it otherwise.
I know this isn't a problem for most businesses (I work for an edu that for whatever reason doesn't have such an account), it can become an issue.
All patched well in advance of exploits making it into such general use. Yeah, the product is shoddy, but the typical admin is worse. Don't blame the software for the admin's screwups.
Old hole in IIS, blame Microsoft, hole in an old version of Sendmail or Bind, blame the admin, funny how these things work.
Although it isn't publicised as much as some of the other people making donations, the Gates foundation tends to invest a lot of energy in producing vaccinations and providing other medical care to underdeveloped countries. I remember an article from about a year and a half ago or so, where there were a lot of big people in technology talking about donating computers and whatever at a conference. If I remember correctly, Gates was the only person to really stand up and make the point that if they were going to do anything, they should keep people alive before giving them equipment and turning them into just another market to sell things to. I could be lying, since I read this a while ago. The news.com archives should have some relevent infomation, I'm really too lazy to search.
If I'm wrong, feel free to slap me upside the head.
Muscle memory.
:wq to write and quit. People eventually learn this, probably because it is more descriptive e.g. x, meaning....whatever, wq having an actual meaning in write+quit. At a certain point, even when you learn :x, you are so used to typing wq, often with the !, which is just one key and a shift away from the w and q, rather than the considerable leap for x, that it simply rolls out. Given the !, it likely takes less time to type than making the jump from the x all the way up to the top of the keyboard, those thousands of seconds add up over the course of a sysadmin's life.
Every reference to vi I've ever seen has used
Man, I really need to finish studying for that final. Posting this reply is the definition of procrastination.
I average several dozen connections from those idiots every week. If I had some spare bandwidth, I'd actually do what a friend of mine did and set up an anonymous ftp server that would only allow uploads. He got some neat goodies.
legitimate use of a DDoS attack. I know it is wrong on so many levels and immoral and all that, but doesn't it just make sense on a primitive level that if they are unwilling to shut down their open relays, someone else should shut them down for them? 24 hours notice, then hit them until they promise to shut it off. Make there be direct consequences for them not playing nice on the net.
Like I said, I know this is inherently flawed, but it is nice to dream. Mmmmmm, vigelante justice on the net...
I've seen some of their old servers and they were great pieces of engineering. Looking at the tinfoil that they put their PCs together out of, it is hard to imagine that it is the same company.
There are a hell of a lot of old laserjets pounding out page after page after 10 years, why can't the new ones last more than 3 months.
I always hated Compaq's home stuff, but at least their business stuff was tolerable. That's been going downhill too.
Small question for the PC builders. If the margins are so low on consumer PCs that 3 dollars worth of cds cuts drastically into your margins, why are you even bothering to sell them? Find a worthwhile market to sell a product to. If you can't make money selling PCs, just don't sell them, Toshiba and IBM have already cleared out of the desktop PC market, it is time for the other makers to do so too, rather than screwing over customers.
This just ups my already pathological hatred of HP.
I borrowed my parent's digital camera last week to take a few pictures, I didn't have the driver CD and I'm using windows xp, so required drivers aren't on that cd anyway. I go to HP's site and it proceeds to give me instructions on ordering a CD from them for replacement drivers. As near as I can figure, digital camera drivers are analogous to scanner drivers and should be about 2 megs at most, TWAIN crap and all. As long as I have photoshop I have no need for whatever crap they shovel onto the CD. I would have been a happy camper if I could have just taken the 30 seconds to download the drivers. Instead I am supposed to jump through hoops and shell out for a CD for software for a piece of hardware I already own.
Earlier in the week, I was at work, dealing with one of their combination printer/fax/copier machines, the laserjet 3100. I couldn't find the driver cd initially, and didn't care to try to install standard postscript drivers since they usually don't work on lower end printers anyway. I try to download the drivers off of their website, once again, I'm instructed to order a CD. For something as simple as printer drivers. 30 seconds of my time turned into 30 minutes as I had to hunt down the driver CD in the woman's office and get the drivers installed.
As a result I sent a nastygram to HP asking why drivers for some of their more obscure products (anything not supported by built in windows drivers anyway) aren't available on their site. The response I got basically amounted to "you need to order a CD because we don't have the drivers up, so you need to order a CD and you can find the instructions for ordering a CD on our site."
Last week we also had a 2 month old laserjet 4100N fail with a "fuser error", a 1200 die with a "printer tray mispick" error, the 8100s seem to have a massive issue where the third tray jams constantly. and our 8500C(or 8550, forget which) was slower than all hell. HPs tech support gave us a song and dance about how the engine speed only related to multiple copies of the same page... blah blah blah. They finally got a marketroid in there to say that it wasn't right, he called tech support and we spent half a day working on this crap, only to use older drivers that let it work at a reasonable speed.
Last week I had to set up another printer in another department, using one of their external JetDirect print servers. Apparently the things do not like it if you dont have a DHCP server. When setting them up manually, for some stupid reason they will only take one change to their network settings at a time. Change ip address, ok, go back in, change subnet mask, ok, go back in, change gateway, ok...
Don't even get me started about the inkjets.
So, yeah, long story short I'm sick of HP and will do anything to avoid buying/touching them in the future. Their tech support is lousy and flat out lies, they won't give proper driver support for their lousy products, and their products are shoddy to begin with.
They are truly an evil company who is going to take Compaq down with them, not that compaq was that spectacular to begin with.
right click start button, properties, classic start menu. your desktop goes back to the way it was in previous versions of windows. sick of msn messenger getting in the way asking you to sign up for passport? uninstall it.
edit c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf
remove the word "hide" from the line containing msmsgs. you can now uninstall it from the add/remove programs, windows components.
yeah, microsoft gets pretty evil about burying stuff where it doesnt want you to find it, but you can usually customize it fairly easily. once you poke around a bit.
Duron 850 processor,
256 megs of ram,
20 gig hard drive,
56k modem(yes, it was a software modem, outside of the driver issues, software modems have started to get decent, I'm impressed by the intel chipset)
decent inwin case,
52x cdrom,
8 meg ati xpert 98 video card(they dont game)
audio and 10/100 nic integrated on the mobo (8139 chipset, generic, but not bad, and the audio comes standard with the via amd chipsets.)
It isn't that hard to pull off, the computer shows here are really good, since I live in southern california. At pricewatch.com, you can find similar prices to the computer shows, you just pay a bit more on shipping, order as much as you can from the same dealer and you should be ok since you save on shipping, even if the cost of the ram is two dollars more than somewhere else.
Ditch the modem, and the entire thing will run fine with Linux or $OS_OF_CHOICE. You have to build it yourself, but you end up with a better deal, since you get a machine without any real compromises, you get to pick every part that is in it, not have a cut rate manufacturer stick a bargain motherboard in it, or crappy ram.
One more hint, if you are in the market for an AMD and want to save some cash, ECS is doing some great things right now, the board I got for my parents was 70 bucks and has been rock solid. The integrated 10/100 nic is fine for home use, but if you dont want to use it, blow the 30 bucks on an intel or 3com. Plus this thing also has a promise ata100 controller My fileserver has been running without any issues since I put it together, a duron 600 on an ECS board.
I realise that these features you want could presumably be turned off. BUT, why would I want the overhead of a web browser if all I'm doing is running ICQ (yes, I know recent builds of ICQ actually take up more memory than most web browsers).
.05 seconds to open winamp and start streaming the media when it came in, which winamp will do anyway. It is just a manner of pointing winamp to the file where you are saving the data.
The integration that quicktime does with the browser prompted me to swear off EVER installing it on any of my machines. Sorenson may be great, but I'll pass, thank you.
What's wrong with clicking on an mp3 and using a default program to open it. Presuming I want to listen to an mp3 repeatedly, I'll typically actually save it. A web browser should browse the web, that is it. It doesn't introduce a whole lot of hardship to open a dedicated to the task at hand. The user interface issues alone make it a tough task. Would the instant messaging client be docked inside the browser somewhere, or outside, what kind of controls would it have, would it be sleek, like you can force ICQ to be with some twiddling, or would it have the bulk of a web browser (typically what happens when you try to do things like this). On a fast enough machine (most of them now), IE opens instantly, mozilla nearly so (I'm not turning on the cache feature), ICQ usually sits there since I want it around all the time, as does AIM. Winamp opens instantly, and is usually docked somewhere anyway out of convenience. PERHAPS, including a link on audio files with a right click that says "stream from this location" would be a good idea, it would take the
There was an instant messaging client that did what you are talking about, Odigo (is it still around?), I tried it for a day, the first time I went to a website and it showed everyone else with an Odigo client browsing the website, it freaked me the hell out. I dont need the entire internet knowing I'm browsing goat porn, thanks.
The more I try to talk to people online, the more I find out that I really don't have a whole lot in common with most of them. My ICQ list is reserved for friends that I've met in real life, and people in the few channels I hang out in on IRC. I dont want Joe in Utah messaging me because I happen to be looking at google.
I realise I'm saying this as a geek, but I also come from a background of a couple of years of ISP tech support. In addition to currently being a sysadmin, I do desktop support for decidedly non tech savvy users in my department, and such features wouldn't be useful or wanted by them, either. Right now, if icq or aim, or winamp screws up (We dont care what is installed on their machines as long as they get their work done and don't completely hose the os, most users have admin on their machines, until they prove themselves incompetant), it gets deleted and reinstalled. I dont want to have to completely uninstall a web browser simply because the AIM component screws up.
This wasn't intended as a flame but I think the way things work now is the best way. I'm not scared of change, I just dont like integrating everything, only to have a mess that isn't even remotely as useful as the individual parts.