The reviewer says: "I still have to recommend The Unix System Administration Handbook first, however."
I disagree. I have the "purple" book, otherwise known as the third edition, and I bought it after reading on/. about how great this book is.
It's not. It's about as informative as reading any number of equally expensive, weighty, yet shitty books put out by SAMS or QUE. Honestly, it was the biggest dissapointment, and I would never recommend it to anyone. In the three years since I purchased it, I have consulted it maybe ten times.
The coverage of Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris is shallow and nothing is ever explored in any real depth. Mostly, it is full of anecdotal stories that leave you feeling like you just stepped into an introductory unix seminar hosted by hoary old geeks.
IMO, The Unix System Administration Handbook is highly overrated.
Instead, I would suggest that anyone interested in reading an excellent, informative and useful UNIX book pick up a copy of this book. I've been using linux for about 5 years now, and this book is part of my coursework at college, and i've learned more about unix from this one book than all the crappy SAMS and QUE tomes combined.
most of the jobs out there right now are for windows houses. most of the admin positions advertised are for mcses. and no matter how 'difficult' linux may be to some, microsoft and it's server platforms are fucking *voodoo*.
unexplained registry hacks, endless patches and hotfixes, undocumented cli commands and execution switches...all without ryhme or reason.
sure, setting up a windows server is easy. securing it, or even being able to say "yeah, i know what this box is doing" is practically impossible. active directory is a nightmare of consoles and accounts strewn all over the damn place, blech.
big corps use what makes sense. everyone else uses windows, whether it makes sense or not. the economy is built upon small businesses and they can't afford permanent IT staffs. so they throw up a win2k server in the corner with some network shares and voila, instant network. web page and email service is handled by the isp, linksys 'router' in the closet doing NAT, and they can focus on business. and they can count on those expensive third party apps they invested in (accounting, contact db, CAD) to work reliably with the rest of the network.
if you start to tell some boiler-room style investment broker that he needs staroffice and kde on redhat to do his job, he'll just blink and wonder why he can't just use outlook. he'll put up with a virus once or twice a year if it means he can avoid re-learning how to use his email. besides, his $75 licensed proprietary stock ticker app that he and all his colleagues use only runs on windows (and requires IE 5.5 or higher)
windows is cheaper because linux cuts into the brain time of the people that use the boxes to sell insurance and real estate. linux gets in the way of their jobs.
IT staff are no longer neccesary to most organizations. they will contract someone to set up a small office network, and then they just ride the free isp tech support when shit breaks. why have an admin at all, when you can farm out the responsibility to the service providers? IT is becoming a non-profession, and turning into fastfood.
in other news, brash young entrepeneurs talk shit, and blow smoke up people's asses while stodgy old men try to discredit their competitors by pointing out their poor business models.
03-Oct-82 21:47 Wilson Harvey at CMU-IUS For anyone interested... I have a picture of ET holding a chainsaw in.press file format. The file exists in/usr/wah/public/etchainsaw.press on the IUS. =
03-Oct-82 23:43 Guy Jacobson at CMU-780G Holding a chainsaw??:-) Does anyone have a picture of R2D2 holding a seed auger in TeX format? Or how about a rendering of Yoda with a lathe for use with nroff? Any pointers to digitized images of short, cute aliens holding power tools would be greatly appreciated. =
IMO, the best reason for allowing downloadable music is this: the preservation of our musical heritage, and indirectly, our cultural heritage.
Janis says it best here, when envisioning the online catalogue:
"Spread a lot of great old music around - and music, like all art, stands on the bones of those who've gone before. One of the big problems with so much catalogue out of print is that whole generations are growing up never having heard the "originals", but only the clones."
1) lose the penguin. there is absolutley nothing sexy about a penguin. penguins don't bring images of profits or 3d games or a "satisfying computer experience" (whatever the hell that is). penguins bring to mind...nothing. lose the mascot. mascots are for high-school athletics.
2) lose the spotty geek image. show grandma and her dog in one of those cliche overhead-shot-with-a-fish-eye-lens photos you see on every ultra-hip, ultra-cool, consumer-friendly ISP website. have grandma quoted as saying, "buster and i can surf the interweb with ease, and i don't have to worry about viruses!" Who cares if it's a lie or not, that never stopped a marketing exec.
3) quit bashing MS. it's tiresome. MS is not out to snuff linux. MS is out ot snuff *everything*, not just you/us/them. some of the users out there think MS is great. some people hate MS and still think linux is a crock of shit. the constant MS feud (with only the linux zealots playing, and the 800 lb bully snickering in the corner), is old. very few potential users want to be embroiled in a this vs. that computing holy war, or even see it. they already have mac vs. pc, and for some, that's enough.
4) market, don't advocate. advocacy is for long-hairs and socialists, and socialists are commies, and commies are unamerican. that's why despite MS being cut-throat bastards, they prosper. it's the american way. market, don't preach. marketing involves convincing a bunch of fools to be hungry when they are not, thirsty when they are satiated, and wanting when they already have. *tell* them they want linux, don't try to explain it to them. have you ever seen a coke commercial describe the benefits of drinking coca-cola? nope, just tits.
5) offer absurdly easy certifications. the more monkeys with papers that say, "i graduated from compu-college with a certificate in linux", the more places will hear about linux, the more monkeys will use it, the more monkeys will go out and pay for a cert. "i'm an LCE, Linux Certified Enduser". Hooray.
6) Dont bitch about United Linux, or Lindows, or any coporate form of linux. you want linux on the desktop, it takes a corporation to do it. and then prepare for the most popular version of linux to be an utter peice of shit, wiht utter fuckheads for users. if you want to masses , be prepared to cater to the lowest common denominator. Movies, music, food, clothes, computers. godzilla, btitney (oops, i mean britney), McDonalds, GAP, Windows.
Wires still rule. For long-distance hauls, relatively error-free transmission and high-speed links, fiber and wire will be the only way to go for a long time.
Wireless is susceptible to weather, depends on line of sight, and the requirements for a quality link are very strict. Wireless is also limited by spectrum licensing, data rates, and nasty things like roof-rights and buildings cropping up 5 years later in front of your installation.
Wireless is fine and dandy for 11Mbps LANs and 45Mbps WANs. But we're not talking about offices and campuses here. We're talking about highspeed datalinks spanning cities, states and continents.
Even if wireless could approach the level of reliability of fiber and copper, you have that little "curvature of the earth" problem for long haul networks. And bouncing signals off sattelites is not a solution.
I'm no biologist, but aren't our 5 senses "analog to digital" converters? (timpanic membrane/tongue/retina/olfactory/skin => Na, K electrolyte pump => neural stimulus....you get the idea)
Get bent MPAA. There will be no watermarking near me anytime soon.
cat5 UTP : T568A = green striped, green solid, orange striped, blue solid, blue striped, orange solid, brown striped, brown solid. Min. 1 twist per half inch, max 100 metres end to end between terminal equipment. Rated for 10-1000Mbps ethernet. T568B just switch the orange and green.
Cat3 UTP same thing, gauge is less, only rated for 10Mbps ethernet. Min 1 twist per inch.
win95 and 98 and ME and 2K and XP and OS8 and OS 9 and OSX, and linux and FreeBSD and Apache and IIS and CGI and PHP and qmail and sendmail and SSH and FTP and POP and SMTP and DNS and HTTP and TCP and UDP and HTML and ASP and ICMP and mail readers and IE and Netscape and Opera and routing, subnetting, addressing and OSPF and BGP and Cisco and Juniper and CAT5 and Cat3 and domain names and contact handles and domain tranfers and *SQL and Coldfusion and Javascript and right-click and left-click and open a new window m'aam and drivers and Modems and routers and DSL and Wireless and ISDN and PPP and PPPoE and NAT devices and nslookup and traceroute and ping and dig and whois and.htaccess and how to upload, and how to design a website, and how to keep the kids away form your porn and why alt.kiddieprn is not on our news server and turn off fuckin zonealarm and no you're being hax0red and we are currently having an outage and I'm sorry your DSL speed sucks why dont you get your fucking cats away from the phone cords, and why do you have 3 hardware firewalls on your 1.5Mbps ADSL sir and please stop spamming on our network no I wont instruct you how to harvest mail addresses and I'm sorry but your domain name has expired no we didn't know because you never listed us a technical contact and desperately trying to remain friendly while helping people that think turning off the monitor is rebooting their PC and I see that you don't have your OS CD and I'm sorry but if you formatted your drive you won't get that email back and 5.1.1 relaying denied and you can't send 10MB files through our mail server and it appears that we are not your ISP please call them not me and let me get this straight you want an additional subnet that is physically separate from your internal LAN that is also logically separate that begins before the demarc point but you don't want to purchase extra IP's and you're the network admin at your company HAHAHAHA and the reason you're mail is not working is because your domain host is not pointing your MX to your Exchange server on your DSL line and you think the problem is our DNS cache and you're the network admin at your company HAHAHAHAHA and you're an MSCE then why the fcuk are you calling me to config your 2k dialup settings HAHAHAHA and I can see that you haven't even bothered to run a fucking trace to the destination IP because it is clearly a problem that originates with you because your 192.168 address can't even touch the LinkSys gateway you have in your office and again I see that you are the netadmin so you keep telling me and who in the flaming blue christ set up your network well why the fsck are you caling me instead of them oh I see it;s because our support for your unsupported fuckup is free whereas you would have to pay the assholes you hired to setup your lousy NT box $40 and hour minimum to fix your shit and on and on and all the other shit that I have to deal with in any given day?
Apparently the net value of tech support is zero because it comes free with your internet connection.
The basic problem with your viewpoint here is that you've allowed yourself to be sucked into the American Media Machine regarding Bin Laden.
Bin Laden is a small time hoodlum that fathered the psychosis and reactionary leanings of a few zealots, like any good cult leader would. Then they commandeered some planes and caused some serious destruction and loss of life. At least that is what you have been fed. It remains to be seen how much of this is truth, and how much is manufactured for convenience. GW can't very well address the American Constituency and say "We didn't even see this coming, and we have no idea who did this".
To compare Bin Laden with the likes of Hitler is to insult the lives of the *millions* of people who lost their lives during WWII. The American military brass are so busy trying to forestall the next Vietnam, WWII, or Korea, that they cannot see the forest for the trees. In the Eighties it was the Ayatollah in Iran and Mohammar Qadafi in Libya, in the Nineties it was Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and in the 2000's it's Osama Bin Laden. Step back and have a look a what your democratic and free nation has accomplished. In five years Bin Laden will be gone and you'll be turning another tin-pot reactionary into a celebrity. Maybe this time he will be a cyber-terrorist. Ooh, just imagine the headlines. Meanwhile in a bombed-out faraway place that was a media/military magnet 10 years ago...a young mother begs for food in the streets...a boy died after stepping on a landmine today...
Very little of the military actions taken by America in the last 30 years have been based on moral or ethical quandaries facing the free-world, such as those faced by humanity in the 30s and 40s. Rather, the majority of American actions have involved leveraging your superior military might against foreign nations who threaten your economic position, usually in the petroleum based industries.
Please step back from the fear and hatred for a moment. Step back from the pablum that is your news media. And take a good hard look at the benefits and priveleges you have because of all those people all over the world who cannot participate in democracy, or don't enjoy the same level of economic power because the US government won't "liberate" them, as their is no oil to be found there.
Nobody gave a shit about Afghani women in burkhas until Bin Laden stepped on your lawn. But now the US has 'moral' obligation to restore order and democracy to the West, and rid the world of the evil Al-Qaeda. It reads like a drug-store novel. People have been twiddling their thumbs and farting around for years over the crap that goes/went on in South Africa (apartheid) and starving Africans, and hummed-and hawed about Croatia, Serbia, and Chechnya. But the US never took much of a moral interest in any of it other than an obligatory peace-keeping role or diplomatic stance. Mainly because their was no economic benefit to any of it, seeing as how there was fuck-all in the way of resources in any of those countries. But oh, watchout for those dirty towel-heads and camel-jockeys, they want to kill all Americans. Right. I think they just want you to stay the hell away. But you don't because you need that oil.
Israel has one of the most lethal and sophisticated military establishments in the world, heavily subsidized by the US. If anyone has been treading the fine line of morality (can you say systematic state-sactioned racism toward palestinians), it is Israel. And you're in bed with them, and we all know it.
The world is watching you Rome, and we can see corruption and decadence. Not a good model of democracy and freedom, just a good game of command and conquer.
we are not your target demographic
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Oh boo fucking hoo, Jon can't sell his shitty book. Who the hell allowed this guy to use valuable/. frontpage space to flog his shitty book? Leave it Katz to shoehorn the plight of a warehouse full of dusty printed toilet paper into a provacative look at the exciting world of online book publishing. You're no better than those UFO cranks that sell books on their free personal webspace.
Maybe you should try marketing to people that would actually read your book, Jon. Nobody here cares that about the fact you haven't whipped up a storm in the literary world. Because you are the Online World's Shittiest Writer, bar none.
Next time try hitting on the website for Egomaniacal and Uninformed Blowhards.
>it causes the worth of Microsoft Sys Admins everywhere to be cheapened.
Actually, the worth of all sysadmins is being cheapened. More often than not, small to medium enterprises will find the most 'tech-literate' person on staff and they become the defacto IT person. So the poor sod muddles his/her way through the setup, often with the help of a temp contractor who will setup and install the systems and the network. The contractor leaves, and then said poor sod is left to maintain a system without documentation and a thorough lack of knowledge about what the hell they are using or doing.
The marketplace is trying to replace costly human labour (sysadmins) with plug n' play firewalls, routers and fileservers. When shit breaks, they call the ISP *first* because they get free support and can bitch and whine their way to have someone try and fix it. They will only call the contracting company as a last resort, because then they have to pay for the time. So little Johnny-mail-room calls up and says 'my internet is down' when what they really need is someone familiar with the setup and knows what the hell is what.
Raise your hand ( techsupport phone-monkeys) how many times you've had to deal with some idiot who says he is the IT/sysadmin/netadmin and doesn't know anything beyond tracert and ping? These people aren't even certified in *anything*. Hell sometimes it's even a real sysadmin calling up, and you quickly realize that the clown on the other end is milking the shit out of the smallbiz owner, using your knowledge to troubleshoot *his* problem.
This industry is going to shit. Tech support is being outsourced by enormous franchise-style support agencies, full of mindless CDI/DeVry grads, admins are being cut in favour of standalone systems, and no one seems to appreciate the value of a knowledgable person anymore.
I've read the MSCE material, and I can honestly say that it's nothing more than a preliminary intro to computers followed by numerous pages of point-and-click tutorials. Vey little of the material focuses on the underlying tech, why it works, what can break, and how to fix it. It's utter crap. An MSCE will not learn about DNS, DHCP, ethernet, routing or anything else in any meaningful way using that garbage as a teaching tool. Yes, yes there are shit unix admins just as there are great MS admins. The point is that this is a situation that demands qualified people, and no one wants to pay for it.
If you have a network, you need an admin. If you have a server, you need an admin. If you have more than one end-station with net access 56k or higher, you need an admin. They can be on-call, or on-staff, but you need an admin. Because the simple fact is that the time and money saved by not having one at your disposal is wasted when Sally-secretary has to call and spend 45 minutes fucking around with tech support.
If you don't have someone on staff who understands what the fuck it is they're doing, get out your damn wallet already and enlist the help of a real sysadmin.
1. Work is Work. You can chat with your buddies on your own time. Would you yak on the phone to your significant other all day? I hope not, otherwise I'm gonna slap you.
2.If I have downtime, I like to browse/., or Salon, or hardware prices, or rfc's or wireless stuff. But we don't have admin priv on our boxes, so no icq, kazaa, or any silly crap that is distracting. Personally, if you're chatting, or dl'ing mp3s you're wasting time. OTOH, if you're engaging in something at least related to your job in some way, fine.
3. Mail and web access/files should be filtered, if only because people *still* open attachements. If you act like an ass, expect to be treated like one. I do like having ssh access to my home box, it allows me to test our network from an external site, in cases of dns, ftp, smtp, etc.
4. Shopping online at work is silly, that's wasting company time (who the hell does that?). At least try to utilise their bandwidth and time by doing something that is somewhat job-related.
copy protection is easy because...
on
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the easier it is to crack it, the less likely people will go back to the store and demand a refund. If you make it troublesome but easily bypassed, people won't complain, just like our man in the salon article. After awhile, crappy copy protection will become the norm, we'll all be used to bypassing their weak protection schemes and never complaining, and all discs/media will have it.Then the industry will bring out the big guns and really copy protect their wares.
At which point you'll have a helluva time demanding your refund and starting a backlash against a technology that is a decade old.
"Without causation, there's nothing to remedy," Warden said. Moving ahead with further litigation to determine a remedy--that is, penalties against Microsoft--would not have gotten the government anything more, he said. "One doesn't get two bites of the apple." [emphasis mine]
Oooooh. That one is a stinker. Two bites at the Apple. Har har. Try three or four. Microsoft is taking bites out of everything in their path. Wedging into the server room and coming to a family room near you!
The pendulum sure is swinging faaaaarrrr to the right these days. Next the gov't will agree to pay MS legal fees as compensation for disturbing their business</joke>. Even though they have still been found guilty, the gov't feels they don't have enough of a case to seek penalties?
I committed criminal acts, in order to secure my well-being. I am guilty. But thou shalt not punish me. Where is the accountability???
Ads don't bother me too much. They bother some people alot. Some of the most vocal users here are almost militant in there views on spam and ads. And now/. is doing the very thing that most people come here to deride./. is becoming the very thing that it's own userbase depises.
/. is nice to kill time with, interesting and funny at times. But linking to other site's stories submitted by your own users, then editorially embellishing the headline to get the anti-microsofties frothing at the mouth is not worth a subscription.
If I pay, I never want to see a goatse link again. I dont want to be modded down, in fact a subscription should negate karma altogether. Mod me up, let the thread see the results, but I never wanna have to deal with karma again. Stupid system, I feel like Pavlov's dog.
I want real stories, real editors, real grammar, and real spell-checking. Stories should be spell-checked, and so too should comments. There is nothing worse than having to read thrug sumonz awfull post to figguere out wy thye were modded intrsting.
Threatening to berate me with ads wont make me pay. If TV, print, and radio can get by without click-through, so can the web. A multi-million (maybe billion nowadays?) dollar industry is built up around creating brand recognition. If/. isn't the place to build brand recognition within the IT/OSS community across all continents, I don't know what is. You can be sure that when I can scrape enough together every month to afford the $US to buy a rack at rackpace, I will. And guess where the name recognition for rackspace came from? Guess what site I "clicked-through" to investigate rackspace. SLASHDOT.
I put up with (read: ignore) commercials in all media, not just the web. I don't see the advert industry taking a nodedive anytime soon. Radio station *give* money away fer craps sake! I don't drop the mag/newspaper/run out the door everytime an ad for Smirnoff invades one of my five senses, so why should I buy a t-shirt that says "WTF" everytime I decide to see what's on/.'s front page? Being in a non-US country I get the pleasure of paying duty and tariffs despite our wonderful NAFTA agreement. I dont want to pay $50-60 CDN for a bloody t-shirt from thinkgeek. But if I ever want to splurge, I know where to go. Brand recognition.
Do whatever you feel guys, I dont need an ad blocker, my mind does that just fine. I promise not to block the ads, but I won't promise to buy crap I can't afford or don't need. Load it up with banners and javascript to make me click (ala porno) before reading a story. Your users will hate it. And they will go elsewhere. Napster is proof of that.
BTW, did you guys even *try* a tip-jar? ( I realise that maybe this isn't your decision, maybe it's coming from on high, and they want revenue, not tips.) But still...
You've obviously never felt the satisfaction of making something of value and giving it away, only to be slammed by an $800 bill by your ISP. What's going to happen next month? Will it rise to $1200?
That'll take the satisfaction out of your sails. You've created something wonderful, but you can't share it because you're in the red.
Creating something of value for the public that costs time and effort is easy. Creating something of value for the public that costs money is hard. Eventually, you go broke. Then nobody has any fun.
Slashdot Mirror
dishwasher/computer tech
The reviewer says: "I still have to recommend The Unix System Administration Handbook first, however."
/. about how great this book is.
I disagree. I have the "purple" book, otherwise known as the third edition, and I bought it after reading on
It's not. It's about as informative as reading any number of equally expensive, weighty, yet shitty books put out by SAMS or QUE. Honestly, it was the biggest dissapointment, and I would never recommend it to anyone. In the three years since I purchased it, I have consulted it maybe ten times.
The coverage of Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris is shallow and nothing is ever explored in any real depth. Mostly, it is full of anecdotal stories that leave you feeling like you just stepped into an introductory unix seminar hosted by hoary old geeks.
IMO, The Unix System Administration Handbook is highly overrated.
Instead, I would suggest that anyone interested in reading an excellent, informative and useful UNIX book pick up a copy of this book. I've been using linux for about 5 years now, and this book is part of my coursework at college, and i've learned more about unix from this one book than all the crappy SAMS and QUE tomes combined.
Well worth the money.
porn1
porn2
New Folder
New Folder(1)
unsorted_porn
mp3s
or maybe some entity with vested interests in online chat/messaging/file transfer.
the kind that comes bundled with the OS, or assists with brand name recognition
time for another round of mcse jokes. ha ha.
most of the jobs out there right now are for windows houses. most of the admin positions advertised are for mcses. and no matter how 'difficult' linux may be to some, microsoft and it's server platforms are fucking *voodoo*.
unexplained registry hacks, endless patches and hotfixes, undocumented cli commands and execution switches...all without ryhme or reason.
sure, setting up a windows server is easy. securing it, or even being able to say "yeah, i know what this box is doing" is practically impossible. active directory is a nightmare of consoles and accounts strewn all over the damn place, blech.
big corps use what makes sense. everyone else uses windows, whether it makes sense or not. the economy is built upon small businesses and they can't afford permanent IT staffs. so they throw up a win2k server in the corner with some network shares and voila, instant network. web page and email service is handled by the isp, linksys 'router' in the closet doing NAT, and they can focus on business. and they can count on those expensive third party apps they invested in (accounting, contact db, CAD) to work reliably with the rest of the network.
if you start to tell some boiler-room style investment broker that he needs staroffice and kde on redhat to do his job, he'll just blink and wonder why he can't just use outlook. he'll put up with a virus once or twice a year if it means he can avoid re-learning how to use his email. besides, his $75 licensed proprietary stock ticker app that he and all his colleagues use only runs on windows (and requires IE 5.5 or higher)
windows is cheaper because linux cuts into the brain time of the people that use the boxes to sell insurance and real estate. linux gets in the way of their jobs.
IT staff are no longer neccesary to most organizations. they will contract someone to set up a small office network, and then they just ride the free isp tech support when shit breaks.
why have an admin at all, when you can farm out the responsibility to the service providers? IT is becoming a non-profession, and turning into fastfood.
MS is just waiting for all the open source .net clones to make it to stable.
then they will come out with their own version.
"ooh", the suits will say. "ms has come out with an enterprise grade solution."
in other news, brash young entrepeneurs
talk shit, and blow smoke up people's asses
while stodgy old men try to discredit their
competitors by pointing out their poor
business models.
pull my finger
this stuff is gold!
==========snip==========
03-Oct-82 21:47 Wilson Harvey at CMU-IUS For anyone interested
I have a picture of ET holding a chainsaw in
exists in
=
03-Oct-82 23:43 Guy Jacobson at CMU-780G Holding a chainsaw??
Does anyone have a picture of R2D2 holding a seed auger in TeX format?
Or how about a rendering of Yoda with a lathe for use with nroff?
Any pointers to digitized images of short, cute aliens holding power
tools would be greatly appreciated.
=
IMO, the best reason for allowing downloadable music is this: the preservation of our musical heritage, and indirectly, our cultural heritage.
Janis says it best here, when envisioning the online catalogue:
"Spread a lot of great old music around - and music, like all art, stands on the bones of those who've gone before. One of the big problems with so much catalogue out of print is that whole generations are growing up never having heard the "originals", but only the clones."
i'm lost in the throng. oh well.
here are my suggestions:
1) lose the penguin. there is absolutley nothing sexy about a penguin. penguins don't bring images of profits or 3d games or a "satisfying computer experience" (whatever the hell that is). penguins bring to mind...nothing. lose the mascot. mascots are for high-school athletics.
2) lose the spotty geek image. show grandma and her dog in one of those cliche overhead-shot-with-a-fish-eye-lens photos you see on every ultra-hip, ultra-cool, consumer-friendly ISP website. have grandma quoted as saying, "buster and i can surf the interweb with ease, and i don't have to worry about viruses!" Who cares if it's a lie or not, that never stopped a marketing exec.
3) quit bashing MS. it's tiresome. MS is not out to snuff linux. MS is out ot snuff *everything*, not just you/us/them. some of the users out there think MS is great. some people hate MS and still think linux is a crock of shit. the constant MS feud (with only the linux zealots playing, and the 800 lb bully snickering in the corner), is old. very few potential users want to be embroiled in a this vs. that computing holy war, or even see it. they already have mac vs. pc, and for some, that's enough.
4) market, don't advocate. advocacy is for long-hairs and socialists, and socialists are commies, and commies are unamerican. that's why despite MS being cut-throat bastards, they prosper. it's the american way. market, don't preach. marketing involves convincing a bunch of fools to be hungry when they are not, thirsty when they are satiated, and wanting when they already have. *tell* them they want linux, don't try to explain it to them. have you ever seen a coke commercial describe the benefits of drinking coca-cola? nope, just tits.
5) offer absurdly easy certifications. the more monkeys with papers that say, "i graduated from compu-college with a certificate in linux", the more places will hear about linux, the more monkeys will use it, the more monkeys will go out and pay for a cert. "i'm an LCE, Linux Certified Enduser". Hooray.
6) Dont bitch about United Linux, or Lindows, or any coporate form of linux. you want linux on the desktop, it takes a corporation to do it. and then prepare for the most popular version of linux to be an utter peice of shit, wiht utter fuckheads for users. if you want to masses , be prepared to cater to the lowest common denominator. Movies, music, food, clothes, computers. godzilla, btitney (oops, i mean britney), McDonalds, GAP, Windows.
Wires still rule. For long-distance hauls, relatively error-free transmission and high-speed links, fiber and wire will be the only way to go for a long time.
Wireless is susceptible to weather, depends on line of sight, and the requirements for a quality link are very strict. Wireless is also limited by spectrum licensing, data rates, and nasty things like roof-rights and buildings cropping up 5 years later in front of your installation.
Wireless is fine and dandy for 11Mbps LANs and 45Mbps WANs. But we're not talking about offices and campuses here. We're talking about highspeed datalinks spanning cities, states and continents.
Even if wireless could approach the level of reliability of fiber and copper, you have that little "curvature of the earth" problem for long haul networks. And bouncing signals off sattelites is not a solution.
I'm no biologist, but aren't our 5 senses "analog to digital" converters? (timpanic membrane/tongue/retina/olfactory/skin => Na, K electrolyte pump => neural stimulus....you get the idea)
Get bent MPAA. There will be no watermarking near me anytime soon.
cat5 UTP : T568A = green striped, green solid, orange striped, blue solid, blue striped, orange solid, brown striped, brown solid. Min. 1 twist per half inch, max 100 metres end to end between terminal equipment. Rated for 10-1000Mbps ethernet. T568B just switch the orange and green.
Cat3 UTP same thing, gauge is less, only rated for 10Mbps ethernet. Min 1 twist per inch.
How much value do you place on knowledge of:
.htaccess and how to upload, and how to design a website, and how to keep the kids away form your porn and why alt.kiddieprn is not on our news server and turn off fuckin zonealarm and no you're being hax0red and we are currently having an outage and I'm sorry your DSL speed sucks why dont you get your fucking cats away from the phone cords, and why do you have 3 hardware firewalls on your 1.5Mbps ADSL sir and please stop spamming on our network no I wont instruct you how to harvest mail addresses and I'm sorry but your domain name has expired no we didn't know because you never listed us a technical contact and desperately trying to remain friendly while helping people that think turning off the monitor is rebooting their PC and I see that you don't have your OS CD and I'm sorry but if you formatted your drive you won't get that email back and 5.1.1 relaying denied and you can't send 10MB files through our mail server and it appears that we are not your ISP please call them not me and let me get this straight you want an additional subnet that is physically separate from your internal LAN that is also logically separate that begins before the demarc point but you don't want to purchase extra IP's and you're the network admin at your company HAHAHAHA and the reason you're mail is not working is because your domain host is not pointing your MX to your Exchange server on your DSL line and you think the problem is our DNS cache and you're the network admin at your company HAHAHAHAHA and you're an MSCE then why the fcuk are you calling me to config your 2k dialup settings HAHAHAHA and I can see that you haven't even bothered to run a fucking trace to the destination IP because it is clearly a problem that originates with you because your 192.168 address can't even touch the LinkSys gateway you have in your office and again I see that you are the netadmin so you keep telling me and who in the flaming blue christ set up your network well why the fsck are you caling me instead of them oh I see it;s because our support for your unsupported fuckup is free whereas you would have to pay the assholes you hired to setup your lousy NT box $40 and hour minimum to fix your shit and on and on and all the other shit that I have to deal with in any given day?
win95 and 98 and ME and 2K and XP and OS8 and OS 9 and OSX, and linux and FreeBSD and Apache and IIS and CGI and PHP and qmail and sendmail and SSH and FTP and POP and SMTP and DNS and HTTP and TCP and UDP and HTML and ASP and ICMP and mail readers and IE and Netscape and Opera and routing, subnetting, addressing and OSPF and BGP and Cisco and Juniper and CAT5 and Cat3 and domain names and contact handles and domain tranfers and *SQL and Coldfusion and Javascript and right-click and left-click and open a new window m'aam and drivers and Modems and routers and DSL and Wireless and ISDN and PPP and PPPoE and NAT devices and nslookup and traceroute and ping and dig and whois and
Apparently the net value of tech support is zero because it comes free with your internet connection.
The basic problem with your viewpoint here is that you've allowed yourself to be sucked into the American Media Machine regarding Bin Laden.
Bin Laden is a small time hoodlum that fathered the psychosis and reactionary leanings of a few zealots, like any good cult leader would. Then they commandeered some planes and caused some serious destruction and loss of life. At least that is what you have been fed. It remains to be seen how much of this is truth, and how much is manufactured for convenience. GW can't very well address the American Constituency and say "We didn't even see this coming, and we have no idea who did this".
To compare Bin Laden with the likes of Hitler is to insult the lives of the *millions* of people who lost their lives during WWII. The American military brass are so busy trying to forestall the next Vietnam, WWII, or Korea, that they cannot see the forest for the trees. In the Eighties it was the Ayatollah in Iran and Mohammar Qadafi in Libya, in the Nineties it was Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and in the 2000's it's Osama Bin Laden. Step back and have a look a what your democratic and free nation has accomplished.
In five years Bin Laden will be gone and you'll be turning another tin-pot reactionary into a celebrity. Maybe this time he will be a cyber-terrorist. Ooh, just imagine the headlines. Meanwhile in a bombed-out faraway place that was a media/military magnet 10 years ago...a young mother begs for food in the streets...a boy died after stepping on a landmine today...
Very little of the military actions taken by America in the last 30 years have been based on moral or ethical quandaries facing the free-world, such as those faced by humanity in the 30s and 40s. Rather, the majority of American actions have involved leveraging your superior military might against foreign nations who threaten your economic position, usually in the petroleum based industries.
Please step back from the fear and hatred for a moment. Step back from the pablum that is your news media. And take a good hard look at the benefits and priveleges you have because of all those people all over the world who cannot participate in democracy, or don't enjoy the same level of economic power because the US government won't "liberate" them, as their is no oil to be found there.
Nobody gave a shit about Afghani women in burkhas until Bin Laden stepped on your lawn. But now the US has 'moral' obligation to restore order and democracy to the West, and rid the world of the evil Al-Qaeda. It reads like a drug-store novel. People have been twiddling their thumbs and farting around for years over the crap that goes/went on in South Africa (apartheid) and starving Africans, and hummed-and hawed about Croatia, Serbia, and Chechnya. But the US never took much of a moral interest in any of it other than an obligatory peace-keeping role or diplomatic stance. Mainly because their was no economic benefit to any of it, seeing as how there was fuck-all in the way of resources in any of those countries. But oh, watchout for those dirty towel-heads and camel-jockeys, they want to kill all Americans. Right. I think they just want you to stay the hell away. But you don't because you need that oil.
Israel has one of the most lethal and sophisticated military establishments in the world, heavily subsidized by the US. If anyone has been treading the fine line of morality (can you say systematic state-sactioned racism toward palestinians), it is Israel. And you're in bed with them, and we all know it.
The world is watching you Rome, and we can see corruption and decadence. Not a good model of democracy and freedom, just a good game of command and conquer.
Oh boo fucking hoo, Jon can't sell his shitty book. Who the hell allowed this guy to use valuable /. frontpage space to flog his shitty book? Leave it Katz to shoehorn the plight of a warehouse full of dusty printed toilet paper into a provacative look at the exciting world of online book publishing. You're no better than those UFO cranks that sell books on their free personal webspace.
/. my bad ;)
Maybe you should try marketing to people that would actually read your book, Jon. Nobody here cares that about the fact you haven't whipped up a storm in the literary world. Because you are the Online World's Shittiest Writer, bar none.
Next time try hitting on the website for Egomaniacal and Uninformed Blowhards.
oh wait.. that is
>it causes the worth of Microsoft Sys Admins everywhere to be cheapened.
Actually, the worth of all sysadmins is being cheapened. More often than not, small to medium enterprises will find the most 'tech-literate' person on staff and they become the defacto IT person. So the poor sod muddles his/her way through the setup, often with the help of a temp contractor who will setup and install the systems and the network. The contractor leaves, and then said poor sod is left to maintain a system without documentation and a thorough lack of knowledge about what the hell they are using or doing.
The marketplace is trying to replace costly human labour (sysadmins) with plug n' play firewalls, routers and fileservers. When shit breaks, they call the ISP *first* because they get free support and can bitch and whine their way to have someone try and fix it. They will only call the contracting company as a last resort, because then they have to pay for the time. So little Johnny-mail-room calls up and says 'my internet is down' when what they really need is someone familiar with the setup and knows what the hell is what.
Raise your hand ( techsupport phone-monkeys) how many times you've had to deal with some idiot who says he is the IT/sysadmin/netadmin and doesn't know anything beyond tracert and ping? These people aren't even certified in *anything*. Hell sometimes it's even a real sysadmin calling up, and you quickly realize that the clown on the other end is milking the shit out of the smallbiz owner, using your knowledge to troubleshoot *his* problem.
This industry is going to shit. Tech support is being outsourced by enormous franchise-style support agencies, full of mindless CDI/DeVry grads, admins are being cut in favour of standalone systems, and no one seems to appreciate the value of a knowledgable person anymore.
I've read the MSCE material, and I can honestly say that it's nothing more than a preliminary intro to computers followed by numerous pages of point-and-click tutorials. Vey little of the material focuses on the underlying tech, why it works, what can break, and how to fix it. It's utter crap. An MSCE will not learn about DNS, DHCP, ethernet, routing or anything else in any meaningful way using that garbage as a teaching tool. Yes, yes there are shit unix admins just as there are great MS admins. The point is that this is a situation that demands qualified people, and no one wants to pay for it.
If you have a network, you need an admin. If you have a server, you need an admin. If you have more than one end-station with net access 56k or higher, you need an admin. They can be on-call, or on-staff, but you need an admin. Because the simple fact is that the time and money saved by not having one at your disposal is wasted when Sally-secretary has to call and spend 45 minutes fucking around with tech support.
If you don't have someone on staff who understands what the fuck it is they're doing, get out your damn wallet already and enlist the help of a real sysadmin.
1. Work is Work. You can chat with your buddies on your own time. Would you yak on the phone to your significant other all day? I hope not, otherwise I'm gonna slap you.
/., or Salon, or hardware prices, or rfc's or wireless stuff. But we don't have admin priv on our boxes, so no icq, kazaa, or any silly crap that is distracting. Personally, if you're chatting, or dl'ing mp3s you're wasting time. OTOH, if you're engaging in something at least related to your job in some way, fine.
2.If I have downtime, I like to browse
3. Mail and web access/files should be filtered, if only because people *still* open attachements. If you act like an ass, expect to be treated like one. I do like having ssh access to my home box, it allows me to test our network from an external site, in cases of dns, ftp, smtp, etc.
4. Shopping online at work is silly, that's wasting company time (who the hell does that?). At least try to utilise their bandwidth and time by doing something that is somewhat job-related.
the easier it is to crack it, the less likely people will go back to the store and demand a refund. If you make it troublesome but easily bypassed, people won't complain, just like our man in the salon article. After awhile, crappy copy protection will become the norm, we'll all be used to bypassing their weak protection schemes and never complaining, and all discs/media will have it.Then the industry will bring out the big guns and really copy protect their wares.
At which point you'll have a helluva time demanding your refund and starting a backlash against a technology that is a decade old.
"Without causation, there's nothing to remedy," Warden said. Moving ahead with further litigation to determine a remedy--that is, penalties against Microsoft--would not have gotten the government anything more, he said. "One doesn't get two bites of the apple." [emphasis mine]
Oooooh. That one is a stinker. Two bites at the Apple. Har har. Try three or four. Microsoft is taking bites out of everything in their path. Wedging into the server room and coming to a family room near you!
The pendulum sure is swinging faaaaarrrr to the right these days. Next the gov't will agree to pay MS legal fees as compensation for disturbing their business</joke>. Even though they have still been found guilty, the gov't feels they don't have enough of a case to seek penalties?
I committed criminal acts, in order to secure my well-being. I am guilty. But thou shalt not punish me. Where is the accountability???
Ads don't bother me too much. They bother some people alot. Some of the most vocal users here are almost militant in there views on spam and ads. And now /. is doing the very thing that most people come here to deride. /. is becoming the very thing that it's own userbase depises.
/. isn't the place to build brand recognition within the IT/OSS community across all continents, I don't know what is.
/.'s front page? Being in a non-US country I get the pleasure of paying duty and tariffs despite our wonderful NAFTA agreement. I dont want to pay $50-60 CDN for a bloody t-shirt from thinkgeek. But if I ever want to splurge, I know where to go. Brand recognition.
/. is nice to kill time with, interesting and funny at times. But linking to other site's stories submitted by your own users, then editorially embellishing the headline to get the anti-microsofties frothing at the mouth is not worth a subscription.
If I pay, I never want to see a goatse link again. I dont want to be modded down, in fact a subscription should negate karma altogether. Mod me up, let the thread see the results, but I never wanna have to deal with karma again. Stupid system, I feel like Pavlov's dog.
I want real stories, real editors, real grammar, and real spell-checking. Stories should be spell-checked, and so too should comments. There is nothing worse than having to read thrug sumonz awfull post to figguere out wy thye were modded intrsting.
Threatening to berate me with ads wont make me pay. If TV, print, and radio can get by without click-through, so can the web. A multi-million (maybe billion nowadays?) dollar industry is built up around creating brand recognition. If
You can be sure that when I can scrape enough together every month to afford the $US to buy a rack at rackpace, I will. And guess where the name recognition for rackspace came from? Guess what site I "clicked-through" to investigate rackspace. SLASHDOT.
I put up with (read: ignore) commercials in all media, not just the web. I don't see the advert industry taking a nodedive anytime soon. Radio station *give* money away fer craps sake! I don't drop the mag/newspaper/run out the door everytime an ad for Smirnoff invades one of my five senses, so why should I buy a t-shirt that says "WTF" everytime I decide to see what's on
Do whatever you feel guys, I dont need an ad blocker, my mind does that just fine. I promise not to block the ads, but I won't promise to buy crap I can't afford or don't need. Load it up with banners and javascript to make me click (ala porno) before reading a story. Your users will hate it. And they will go elsewhere. Napster is proof of that.
BTW, did you guys even *try* a tip-jar? ( I realise that maybe this isn't your decision, maybe it's coming from on high, and they want revenue, not tips.) But still...
a thousand students at a thousand typewriters for a thousand....
Seriously, if the site keeps a copy of every submission, is it not inevitable that a significant portion of text will be nearly identical to another?
some of the posters below mention that Flash *can* retrieve info from SQL, and variables can be passed from the query)string.
Anybody have any good links to code snippets or tutorials for this?
You've obviously never felt the satisfaction of making something of value and giving it away, only to be slammed by an $800 bill by your ISP. What's going to happen next month? Will it rise to $1200?
That'll take the satisfaction out of your sails. You've created something wonderful, but you can't share it because you're in the red.
Creating something of value for the public that costs time and effort is easy. Creating something of value for the public that costs money is hard. Eventually, you go broke. Then nobody has any fun.