Except, he's not actually admitting that, despite the words he used. What he's basically saying is, "Back off, already - we're tired of hearing about your bloody standards! We'll do it!"
They'll just go off and do what they were planning to do before, now that they may have gotten a little respite from the (as they see it) "attacks". MS's response will make any further follow-up questions before the release of the mentioned product will make ODF advocates seem like shrill, unsatisfiable, unintelligent, and trite. This is, of course, their intent.
So what's the big offset component do, then? Don't tell me that's the chipset? I'd think such a large chipset would inhibit efficient power use beyond a certain point...
From what I understand, the i900 and later chipsets have much better support. But then, they're also quite a bit newer and faster. Though, the fact remains that much of the i8x0 support has been supplanted with support for the 900 series stuff, "which also works for i8x0" - but doesn't, really.
And if you think Google is the answer to staying current, I seriously question yours.
No, google isn't the answer to staying current, but it is a pretty good staging point for questions.
My mention of google (ie, search in general) was not even until later in the post; the reference to vitality was with regard to knowing how to learn - to find new information in your field so as to become a more effective worker.
I am keenly aware of the importance of coworkers and field experts in obtaining new knowledge - as well as the paramount significance of paying attention to the people who rely upon your skills for their own daily work.
The original poster mentioned that he was in a small, 50 person office, as the "IT guy". It's not likely that he's got much in terms of interpersonal reference - in fact, he mentioned he didn't. So, he's going to have to look elsewhere and pull everything out of his own hat. It is an entirely different situation than working in a development environment where there are multiple people with similar skills, working with mostly the same tools, and on the same - or similar - projects. In such an "IT guy" role, he is the answer man: he's going to have to come up with not only solutions to problems with the current environment, but forge ahead into unexplored areas.
Maybe I'm simply not grasping what you're saying and I'm completely off in left field. But, if you choose to respond, you hopefully will take into consideration the fact that I've been successful in the maintenance and production of small-medium office environments for a number of years now across the industries of health care, engineering, and publishing - all in what would be considered small to very small localities.
"Picking up a new hat" has been required with each change, and google (as well as other reference sources) has enabled me to pick up those new hats quickly and effectively. When your primary role is making old stuff work, figuring out the cutting edge is a secondary concern.
As an example, let's say we've got a small office with 50 or so PCs of various vintage - W98 through XP, say - and we need to plan what course to take so as to mitigate cost - and, since you're only one man, reduce maintenance.
Finding several options can be quickly determined with only a little topical knowledge of what you're looking for and an understanding of operational needs and your own abilities. One turn will lead to another, and options will present themselves, allowing you to figure out a workable course of action to replace said aging machines. Upgrade the OS on the older PCs? Install new hardware in some of the older PCs to make them workable? Standardize the system image on the OSes? Graphic terminals, and with Linux or Windows? Much of this information is only a half dozen or so searches away, and what you need to learn to take the next step. Often, unless you're in an extremely niche market, you're going to learn much of what you need to learn - what you were looking for, and more - long before an "expert opinion" book on the topic arrives at your door from Amazon.
No, you're not going to become a field expert this way - not without actually doing some of it and experimenting, at any rate. But then, you're not going to become a field expert by listening to another field expert, either - and much of single-person-support IT involves being a jack-of-all-trades, anyway.
Also, without the inclusion of actual people, resources such as IRC can also come in handy. When you are literally the only person with any background or education in IT within 40 miles, considering an honest-to-God human being as a resource doesn't often come to mind.
If there's something to the usefulness of "human connection" I'm missing, please do let me know. I'm not saying you're wrong (you've likely got a number of years experience on me, at the least), but I suspect that the development/support environments are quite a bit different. I just don't see how actual research can be fully supplanted by such interpersonal contact for small-scale IT: someone, somewhere, has to do the brain work, and who better than you, as that's your job?
When most people will be running a legacy OS on these such as Windows XP, which does not fully and properly support USB input devices properly, the lack of a keyboard can be problematic for actually using the board.
Yes, it's an exception when a USB keyboard doesn't work, but I've seen it often enough to realize how much of a problem it'd be for a product targeted at picking up at least -some- of the people wanting to install Windows.
Probably because the start-up capital needed for a software company is pretty high. Your employees are going to need to be fairly highly paid compared to something like manual labor if you want half-decent ones. And with the increase in cost comes a higher need for the projects to succeed.
And even then, it's got to be planned perfectly so that the first product is successful, or your boat will be sunk.
So why risk hiring people for more, when you can get away with hiring them for less?
That's nice in theory and all, but it really doesn't work that way, unfortunately - and I'm speaking from experience.
Christmas 2004: I got an IBM Thinkpad X30. I picked the X30 over the X31 for two primary reasons: 1) cost difference of $250 or so, and 2) better Linux support - from Intel - from the i830 onboard video on the X30 than the ATI Radeon Mobility (something like that) in the X31.
I took a a performance hit in battery life, heat, and CPU (all of which due to the P3M vs. P-M CPU); a decreased maximum RAM (512 vs. 1024M), and likely a couple other things that aren't coming to mind right now, so that X would actually work properly in Linux.
Today, I have to monkeyfuck around with X just to prevent the machine from hanging. I've tried all of the available drivers available to me in X, as well as fiddling around with different driver options and disabling various X extensions and functionality, yet actual reliability is worse now than it was two-three years ago. I can't use a screensaver, suspend, or any number of other things I was able to do not too long ago because Xorg will irreparably freeze, sometimes hanging the whole laptop's input and output. If I leave the laptop sitting overnight (or for any period of time) with the screen on X (as opposed to on a tty) the machine will be hung, requiring a hard reboot, when I come back in the morning.
Sure, compiz works (slowly/unusably, but that's probably not the driver's fault), but that's little consolidation for everything else not working.
Now, maybe this is partially at fault of Xorg (I wouldn't be surprised!), it's just as likely the drivers. From my perspective, once a video hardware driver becomes open source and isn't cutting-edge anymore, it basically stops receiving any sort of useful support, and more likely than not starts to work less reliably within a couple versions of Xorg.
On the flip side of things, Nvidia's binary-only drivers for old TNT2 era cards work just fine with recent versions of X. (I have no experience with ATI drivers, as I've stuck far away from their cards due their previous poor reputation for lack of support).
Let's hope that ATI's image-laden support of Linux drivers actually pans out for the open sourced drivers, but the track record isn't good for medium to long term support.
You are living in an age of free, universally available information. There is almost literally no limit to how much useful, free information is out there, and the most prevalent type of information is typically on computing - software and hardware.
If you've gotten this far in your career without realizing this little fact, I'd be a bit concerned about your intellectual vitality if I were your employer. Being able to shoot ideas off fellow employees is one thing; having to rely on them to keep your knowledge up-to-par is another.
Granted, it depends on the type of information you're after, and to what depth you want, but there is not going to be a golden spoon for getting Manager-approved sound bite knowledge - and that appears to be what you're after.
Just as programmers will have to spend hours of their day pouring over interface documentation, so will you have to do as an IT administrator. You will have to demonstrate a curiosity in how things work, and when you come upon something which is foreign, look it up. There are dozens of Internet-published tech rags with information, if you're looking for something only roughly instructive, and Wikipedia is an awesome resource if you're trying to get a high-level understanding of what something is and how it works. Then, you'll have enough information to dig deeper.
You'd be surprised how many hours you'll save simply by googling something relatively simple - like installing Windows 2003 on an HP low-end Opteron server. It'll point out shortcomings and problems which would take you, the tech guy, hours to figure out on your own on aggregate. Time spent reading documentation more than makes up for time lost trying to figure out esoteric problems.
Hell, then there's just the simple google search. No, they won't all yield results you'll want to use; you might spend an hour or two just digging for a snippet of information, but you'll learn a lot about the extenuating circumstances in the process. A quick google search is often one of the best ways to quickly determine whether a certain course of action is a bad idea - not a good idea, but a bad idea, as people are likely to bitch if something doesn't work properly or if something is inherently shitty. Though, sometimes, something is so bad that nobody uses it.
And, of course, this is Slashdot... spend an hour or so on here every week reading comments on pertinent threads, and you'll pick up on a lot of "peer knowledge". Of course, it won't all be correct - but then, you'll run into that with coworkers, too.
I'd have thought anyone in IT would've figured this shit out by their freshman year of high school, or at least, by the end of the freshman university year.
Maybe sysadmin duties are a lot more divergent than programming duties and knowledge than I'd thought, but either way, you've got quite a bit of reading ahead of you!
But MS -could- have that model. They'd just have to roll out their security and bug fixes individually, instead of a roll-up, as they currently do. Likewise, they could continue to ship incomplete product and provide those promised features as 'updates'.
Seriously, I'd say this is the best bet of a success. Not only would it humiliate the competitor, but it might get a chuckle out of some potential clients - and they'd remember you, not the competitor.
I've gotten one or two like this before. It's kind of humorous, and I don't personally consider it spam provided it's not written in marketese.
Granted, it's massively more difficult to reverse engineer a product - or re-implement its functionality to create a work-alike - than it is to design and implement something without those pre-existing requirements. But it at least gives some perspective into what kind of environment the Windows developers have to exist, what with the obscene number of applications which have to work - and not break - in Windows.
Vista's SKU's are only competing against one predecessor: XP. New system buyers have a different choice than a few years ago: Proven XP, or Unproven Vista.
You're mistaken about that. With Dell and HP (and Gateway?) selling both laptops and desktops with Linux pre-installed, and Apple's OS X gaining popularity and fanfare by the day (in no small part due to their wild success with the iPod/iPhone product lines which have pulled many a person into the Apple fold), there are quite a few options jumping out at people right now - especially with the crazy proportion of new laptop sales being Macs, and people lugging them around.
Think of the fanfare which accompanied the release of Windows XP - or, more drastically, Windows 95. Everyone started jumping around with glee - and then they started screaming. Apple and, as near as I can tell, the various Linux-powered ultramobile laptops, are not facing those problems. People are seemingly quite pleased with these developments, and almost everyone wants to get their hands on such goodies.
People hear geeks (and TV ads) extolling the virtues of OS X and/or Linux, and then they see the clean, bright, functional desktops on others' new Linux or Mac computer, and they think: I'm really not all that interested in buying a Dell, dude.
Nevermind that ghosting/sysprep'ing the system isn't likely to work reliably with more than just a handful of different hardware revisions. And then, for whatever reason, sysprep'd systems seem to have some weird network problems on occasion where their SSIDs get "confused".
Are you kidding me? Have you tried installing Windows lately? Like, in the last 5 years?
It's more of a pain to install Windows now (and, more specifically, as soon as SATA became common) than it was to install RedHat 5.2 or Windows 95. The complete lack of proper drivers built into the system supporting basic SATA disks/controllers is ridiculous - and it's not just XP, but also Windows 2003.
Want to include drivers to assist the install? Great, you've got to roll it into the install image in a fairly lengthy and poorly documented process, first. Why? Oh, because the install media doesn't support removable media, like USB floppy drives or USB memory keys. Windows 2003 actually wants a goddamn floppy disk for drivers.
It is actually easier to install to a second, "install" IDE hard drive, get the OS set up, and then image it to the SATA hard drive using something like Acronis than it is to install Windows on its own (not including all the extra steps of driver installation once getting into Windows).
And that doesn't even get into the immense pain that is sysprep and friends and large deployments; that's just a single workstation/server install.
And then you'll be shoved onto the tracks of Vista - or whatever joke MS is selling as the latest, greatest operating system, likely to be tormented by a myriad of very disruptive changes and poor performance.
Frankly, I'd not be surprised to see MS go to a annual license/support contract, like what antivirus companies do, with their next version of Windows. They simply can't keep doing the non-profitable "sell one product every 10 years" nonsense that they pulled with XP - their stockholders won't allow it.
The reason MS is supporting XP for 12 years is because it has, and will be, their flagship product the whole damn time. No, it probably won't be by 2012 or so, but XP is still outselling Vista (iirc, if you include corporate sales). It'd be kind of stupid to not support the one major product keeping you in a market that everyone wants.
All I can say is that I feel sorry for people who are paying Open Licensing costs for XP, especially due to the anemic and generally crappy support that's been provided since Vista came out.
What this article is really about is a female who managed to get ahead in a male-dominated field, and has likely encountered sexism a number of times. Maybe she's bitter about a lack of relational interest from coworkers, or too much interest - whatever. The end result is that she's sexually biased against males: ie, she's a sexist. This is, of course, culturally acceptable in today's world for a woman.
I've only met a handful of female tech folks. I dated one for a while. I've got a generally low opinion of most of their work because I've ended up having to fix it (that's actually my current job description, and oooh boy this mess is a doozie: no documentation whatsoever, and a lot of stuff left broken/half finished/etc.). The girl I dated in tech was incredibly smart - arguably smarter than I am in most respects - but her coding and general tech abilities were "folksy" (for lack of a better term). Her code was pretty mediocre, and her understanding of things was surface level and highly subjective to opinion.
On the other hand, the female coders/tech people I've met who I can pull their own weight and not need hand-holding have been very good. They've not got caught up in the "I'm just as good as a man" head-trip self-disillusion and concentrate on their strengths - and they're not going to fuck around and let others do their owrk. This is really useful in common group project environments. In college, I'd try to get as many of these women into group projects past the 300 or so level as a result.
This usually meant more coding requirements for everyone else, but the overall project would (usually) turn out better - just hope you don't get a couple slack-jawed guys...
So would it be progressive if I wanted to round up all the people who are anti-war and gas them in concentration camps? Or maybe all the Muslims?
No, the point is that saying you're progressive doesn't mean a damn thing. You're for "change". Change, like progressivism, isn't inherently anything. Change can be negative as well as positive.
No, saying you're progressive is a politically derisive word. It's kind of humorous, really, as many of the people who say they're progressives claim they're open-minded and just want to work together for change, but in actuality, they want nothing of the sort. They want their own vision of the new world, and if you have a different vision, you're backwards, primitive, unintelligent - or some other demeaning label.
Progressive means nothing at all, really, because it can mean anything at all. It means whatever the hive mind wants it to mean.
Thank you, you said what I've been feeling for the last couple of weeks fairly succinctly. As someone who's been using Linux and Windows maybe 75/25 for the past decade, having touched every useable window manager available for Linux (including many I've built myself), I don't think I've ever been so significantly frustrated with user interface characteristics as I have been in the last couple weeks of "first significant time" Mac use.
Finder is a complete mess. It appears to be a ported application from an OS from 1978, or something equally antiquated and quaint: being certain of what you're doing (copying? moving?), and in which directory you're doing it (damn it, why did it put it at the filesystem root, AGAIN) are just the start of what makes finder frustrating. Why does the 'maximize'/+ button not do as it does in most other applications? Why is there no "cut" option? Why do I not have an "address" bar, particularly now that we've got full and proper UNIX file paths? Why do Finder windows not stack/organize themselves in such a fashion as to make having more than (say) 3 open at any one time frustrating and confusing?
Honest to god, I've resorted to just using iTerm with multiple tabs for all file management (short of multiple selections). It's quicker, easier, and less confusing, as I never have to wonder "where am I?" I don't want to be forced to feel that way, and I don't intend to feel that way at all until I'm well past my 50s.
The task management - application switching instead of app switching, and no way to change it - is equally irritating. This includes the parent-child window lock-out situation. It results in all kinds of irritating context problems, where you're trying to perform work, but are unable to do so without repeatedly closing and opening a specific context window, as you're unable to switch and/or remember the content of said window between switches in completion (I end up printing shit out and referencing it that way, sadly, more often than I'd like). That isn't reasonable, at all, and it's like no other operating system or windowing system I've used.
Finally, combining those two problems seems to result in an inefficient use of screen real estate. There's a good reason mac workstations have large displays: they need them to be effective at multitasking. I don't imagine that was much of a case when the Mac was just a graphic workstation or something like that (when macOS multitasking sucked/didn't really exist, and there weren't many apps/users), but now, it's kind of ridiculous. I don't want to have to buy a larger screen just to get basic work done because fancy widgets are taking up too much space; I want a bigger screen because I need more space. Compared to pretty much other UI, OS X definitely seems to need more space by default. (Sorry, I can't quantify it better than that.)
It wouldn't be such an issue if focus context switched properly when going from "Space" to "Space", but doesn't, so that potential way of managing things is kinda of another irritant that's got to be worked around...
People will often say they're not paying for security, stability, performance and the like, but they do, and usually will do so willingly.
Case(s) in point:
Windows 98 -> 2000. People jumped on that ship pretty quickly, even though 2000 offered diminished graphical performance. The only people who stayed with 98 were people with low-end hardware, people who'd been bit by upgrading MS software too soon in the past, and by those who were hardcore gamers and didn't mind the stability for an extra 5fps.
Enlightenment window manager (.16 or.17). Not stable or fast, but damn did it/does it have a lot of features! It had most of those features before anything else available for linux, but plunkers like KDE and GNOME stuck with their development and provided features slowly, while trying to work on the other things (ie, balance) and providing a usable product in the process.
I'm curious: what new features do people actually want in OS X which are obtainable? I'm aware of the stupid things like "transparent Windows emulation" or "run Windows without any performance hit". Those are kind of stupid. In my mind, 95%+ of the features which can and be delivered in an OS and are significant to the vast majority's user experience are present already. The only things significantly lacking are not the wiz-bang user features, but the nitty-gritty which is important to the more technically inclined - the kind of things that linux users bicker about ("2.4 had better performance than 2.6 for aquatic parallel computing!", "the new i8x0 Xorg drivers are borked!" or what have you). That's important, because a lot of nitty-gritty stuff is missing...
However... If there was one feature I'd ask for in the "presentation" parts of OS X, it'd be the ability to do window vs. task/app based window management. Not something hardwired, just a damn option. Unfortunately, features like this will never come about, because they break the Apple UI Use Guidelines, or some such nonsense...
And yet, Apple's desktop market share percentage increases every year, and nobody is buying Vista, if they have the choice/know a thing about it. And Linux is making not-insignificant inroads on the desktop as well.
OS X does not need more desktop features. It needs more infrastructure features which appeal to IT administrator/manager types. That is the primary reason Apple has remained fringe - because Windows has remained dominant through infrastructural technologies due to their initial corporate focus.
My take is that they don't really "need" the hype anymore. For a couple years after Steve Jobs took over, their existence was riding solely on their Macs (desktop and laptop) and their OS - as they'd always done prior.
Now, they've got a fairly substantial "additional" product line - ipodTV, airport, etc. which all need support. And...
Now they've got other considerations for OS X: they're running all their products (aside from the ipod touch) on the OS X core technologies. That requires reduction in size, additional efficiency, and so on and so forth. Fixing, and making OS X better overall (sans additional features) pays dividends, because it spans all of their products. Doing tihs will make future feature additions to the platform more tenable, as well as make the platform a tenable long-term project.
There's really very little "small" stuff they can do to OS X, I think. I've only used it a little, and I'm no fan boy, but there are substantial benefits in almost every area for normal desktop use. In order to make OS X viable (and superior) in the other arenas, they've got to fix what ails - in this case, some of the underlying infrastructure.
As a system and database administrator on their over-priced platform, these changes excite me a lot more than 10.5 did, because they open up more fully the possibility of actually having a system which has a full suite of integrated sysadmin tools that can be leveraged for efficient db driving.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, he's not actually admitting that, despite the words he used. What he's basically saying is, "Back off, already - we're tired of hearing about your bloody standards! We'll do it!"
They'll just go off and do what they were planning to do before, now that they may have gotten a little respite from the (as they see it) "attacks". MS's response will make any further follow-up questions before the release of the mentioned product will make ODF advocates seem like shrill, unsatisfiable, unintelligent, and trite. This is, of course, their intent.
So what's the big offset component do, then? Don't tell me that's the chipset? I'd think such a large chipset would inhibit efficient power use beyond a certain point...
From what I understand, the i900 and later chipsets have much better support. But then, they're also quite a bit newer and faster. Though, the fact remains that much of the i8x0 support has been supplanted with support for the 900 series stuff, "which also works for i8x0" - but doesn't, really.
And if you think Google is the answer to staying current, I seriously question yours.
No, google isn't the answer to staying current, but it is a pretty good staging point for questions.
My mention of google (ie, search in general) was not even until later in the post; the reference to vitality was with regard to knowing how to learn - to find new information in your field so as to become a more effective worker.
I am keenly aware of the importance of coworkers and field experts in obtaining new knowledge - as well as the paramount significance of paying attention to the people who rely upon your skills for their own daily work.
The original poster mentioned that he was in a small, 50 person office, as the "IT guy". It's not likely that he's got much in terms of interpersonal reference - in fact, he mentioned he didn't. So, he's going to have to look elsewhere and pull everything out of his own hat. It is an entirely different situation than working in a development environment where there are multiple people with similar skills, working with mostly the same tools, and on the same - or similar - projects. In such an "IT guy" role, he is the answer man: he's going to have to come up with not only solutions to problems with the current environment, but forge ahead into unexplored areas.
Maybe I'm simply not grasping what you're saying and I'm completely off in left field. But, if you choose to respond, you hopefully will take into consideration the fact that I've been successful in the maintenance and production of small-medium office environments for a number of years now across the industries of health care, engineering, and publishing - all in what would be considered small to very small localities.
"Picking up a new hat" has been required with each change, and google (as well as other reference sources) has enabled me to pick up those new hats quickly and effectively. When your primary role is making old stuff work, figuring out the cutting edge is a secondary concern.
As an example, let's say we've got a small office with 50 or so PCs of various vintage - W98 through XP, say - and we need to plan what course to take so as to mitigate cost - and, since you're only one man, reduce maintenance.
Finding several options can be quickly determined with only a little topical knowledge of what you're looking for and an understanding of operational needs and your own abilities. One turn will lead to another, and options will present themselves, allowing you to figure out a workable course of action to replace said aging machines. Upgrade the OS on the older PCs? Install new hardware in some of the older PCs to make them workable? Standardize the system image on the OSes? Graphic terminals, and with Linux or Windows? Much of this information is only a half dozen or so searches away, and what you need to learn to take the next step. Often, unless you're in an extremely niche market, you're going to learn much of what you need to learn - what you were looking for, and more - long before an "expert opinion" book on the topic arrives at your door from Amazon.
No, you're not going to become a field expert this way - not without actually doing some of it and experimenting, at any rate. But then, you're not going to become a field expert by listening to another field expert, either - and much of single-person-support IT involves being a jack-of-all-trades, anyway.
Also, without the inclusion of actual people, resources such as IRC can also come in handy. When you are literally the only person with any background or education in IT within 40 miles, considering an honest-to-God human being as a resource doesn't often come to mind.
If there's something to the usefulness of "human connection" I'm missing, please do let me know. I'm not saying you're wrong (you've likely got a number of years experience on me, at the least), but I suspect that the development/support environments are quite a bit different. I just don't see how actual research can be fully supplanted by such interpersonal contact for small-scale IT: someone, somewhere, has to do the brain work, and who better than you, as that's your job?
I'm always eager to learn.
When most people will be running a legacy OS on these such as Windows XP, which does not fully and properly support USB input devices properly, the lack of a keyboard can be problematic for actually using the board.
Yes, it's an exception when a USB keyboard doesn't work, but I've seen it often enough to realize how much of a problem it'd be for a product targeted at picking up at least -some- of the people wanting to install Windows.
Probably because the start-up capital needed for a software company is pretty high. Your employees are going to need to be fairly highly paid compared to something like manual labor if you want half-decent ones. And with the increase in cost comes a higher need for the projects to succeed.
And even then, it's got to be planned perfectly so that the first product is successful, or your boat will be sunk.
So why risk hiring people for more, when you can get away with hiring them for less?
That's nice in theory and all, but it really doesn't work that way, unfortunately - and I'm speaking from experience.
Christmas 2004: I got an IBM Thinkpad X30. I picked the X30 over the X31 for two primary reasons: 1) cost difference of $250 or so, and 2) better Linux support - from Intel - from the i830 onboard video on the X30 than the ATI Radeon Mobility (something like that) in the X31.
I took a a performance hit in battery life, heat, and CPU (all of which due to the P3M vs. P-M CPU); a decreased maximum RAM (512 vs. 1024M), and likely a couple other things that aren't coming to mind right now, so that X would actually work properly in Linux.
Today, I have to monkeyfuck around with X just to prevent the machine from hanging. I've tried all of the available drivers available to me in X, as well as fiddling around with different driver options and disabling various X extensions and functionality, yet actual reliability is worse now than it was two-three years ago. I can't use a screensaver, suspend, or any number of other things I was able to do not too long ago because Xorg will irreparably freeze, sometimes hanging the whole laptop's input and output. If I leave the laptop sitting overnight (or for any period of time) with the screen on X (as opposed to on a tty) the machine will be hung, requiring a hard reboot, when I come back in the morning.
Sure, compiz works (slowly/unusably, but that's probably not the driver's fault), but that's little consolidation for everything else not working.
Now, maybe this is partially at fault of Xorg (I wouldn't be surprised!), it's just as likely the drivers. From my perspective, once a video hardware driver becomes open source and isn't cutting-edge anymore, it basically stops receiving any sort of useful support, and more likely than not starts to work less reliably within a couple versions of Xorg.
On the flip side of things, Nvidia's binary-only drivers for old TNT2 era cards work just fine with recent versions of X. (I have no experience with ATI drivers, as I've stuck far away from their cards due their previous poor reputation for lack of support).
Let's hope that ATI's image-laden support of Linux drivers actually pans out for the open sourced drivers, but the track record isn't good for medium to long term support.
You are living in an age of free, universally available information. There is almost literally no limit to how much useful, free information is out there, and the most prevalent type of information is typically on computing - software and hardware.
If you've gotten this far in your career without realizing this little fact, I'd be a bit concerned about your intellectual vitality if I were your employer. Being able to shoot ideas off fellow employees is one thing; having to rely on them to keep your knowledge up-to-par is another.
Granted, it depends on the type of information you're after, and to what depth you want, but there is not going to be a golden spoon for getting Manager-approved sound bite knowledge - and that appears to be what you're after.
Just as programmers will have to spend hours of their day pouring over interface documentation, so will you have to do as an IT administrator. You will have to demonstrate a curiosity in how things work, and when you come upon something which is foreign, look it up. There are dozens of Internet-published tech rags with information, if you're looking for something only roughly instructive, and Wikipedia is an awesome resource if you're trying to get a high-level understanding of what something is and how it works. Then, you'll have enough information to dig deeper.
You'd be surprised how many hours you'll save simply by googling something relatively simple - like installing Windows 2003 on an HP low-end Opteron server. It'll point out shortcomings and problems which would take you, the tech guy, hours to figure out on your own on aggregate. Time spent reading documentation more than makes up for time lost trying to figure out esoteric problems.
Hell, then there's just the simple google search. No, they won't all yield results you'll want to use; you might spend an hour or two just digging for a snippet of information, but you'll learn a lot about the extenuating circumstances in the process. A quick google search is often one of the best ways to quickly determine whether a certain course of action is a bad idea - not a good idea, but a bad idea, as people are likely to bitch if something doesn't work properly or if something is inherently shitty. Though, sometimes, something is so bad that nobody uses it.
And, of course, this is Slashdot... spend an hour or so on here every week reading comments on pertinent threads, and you'll pick up on a lot of "peer knowledge". Of course, it won't all be correct - but then, you'll run into that with coworkers, too.
I'd have thought anyone in IT would've figured this shit out by their freshman year of high school, or at least, by the end of the freshman university year.
Maybe sysadmin duties are a lot more divergent than programming duties and knowledge than I'd thought, but either way, you've got quite a bit of reading ahead of you!
But MS -could- have that model. They'd just have to roll out their security and bug fixes individually, instead of a roll-up, as they currently do. Likewise, they could continue to ship incomplete product and provide those promised features as 'updates'.
And yet, there are plenty of motivated, capable people out there who do not have jobs, let alone jobs which pay well.
Motivation is not the sole determinant.
Seriously, I'd say this is the best bet of a success. Not only would it humiliate the competitor, but it might get a chuckle out of some potential clients - and they'd remember you, not the competitor.
I've gotten one or two like this before. It's kind of humorous, and I don't personally consider it spam provided it's not written in marketese.
What's that say for Windows, then?
Granted, it's massively more difficult to reverse engineer a product - or re-implement its functionality to create a work-alike - than it is to design and implement something without those pre-existing requirements. But it at least gives some perspective into what kind of environment the Windows developers have to exist, what with the obscene number of applications which have to work - and not break - in Windows.
Vista's SKU's are only competing against one predecessor: XP. New system buyers have a different choice than a few years ago: Proven XP, or Unproven Vista.
You're mistaken about that. With Dell and HP (and Gateway?) selling both laptops and desktops with Linux pre-installed, and Apple's OS X gaining popularity and fanfare by the day (in no small part due to their wild success with the iPod/iPhone product lines which have pulled many a person into the Apple fold), there are quite a few options jumping out at people right now - especially with the crazy proportion of new laptop sales being Macs, and people lugging them around.
Think of the fanfare which accompanied the release of Windows XP - or, more drastically, Windows 95. Everyone started jumping around with glee - and then they started screaming. Apple and, as near as I can tell, the various Linux-powered ultramobile laptops, are not facing those problems. People are seemingly quite pleased with these developments, and almost everyone wants to get their hands on such goodies.
People hear geeks (and TV ads) extolling the virtues of OS X and/or Linux, and then they see the clean, bright, functional desktops on others' new Linux or Mac computer, and they think: I'm really not all that interested in buying a Dell, dude.
Nevermind that ghosting/sysprep'ing the system isn't likely to work reliably with more than just a handful of different hardware revisions. And then, for whatever reason, sysprep'd systems seem to have some weird network problems on occasion where their SSIDs get "confused".
Are you kidding me? Have you tried installing Windows lately? Like, in the last 5 years?
It's more of a pain to install Windows now (and, more specifically, as soon as SATA became common) than it was to install RedHat 5.2 or Windows 95. The complete lack of proper drivers built into the system supporting basic SATA disks/controllers is ridiculous - and it's not just XP, but also Windows 2003.
Want to include drivers to assist the install? Great, you've got to roll it into the install image in a fairly lengthy and poorly documented process, first. Why? Oh, because the install media doesn't support removable media, like USB floppy drives or USB memory keys. Windows 2003 actually wants a goddamn floppy disk for drivers.
It is actually easier to install to a second, "install" IDE hard drive, get the OS set up, and then image it to the SATA hard drive using something like Acronis than it is to install Windows on its own (not including all the extra steps of driver installation once getting into Windows).
And that doesn't even get into the immense pain that is sysprep and friends and large deployments; that's just a single workstation/server install.
So is it Apple's fault that I can't install (say) Half-Life 2 on OS X?
Is it Microsoft's fault that I can't use Safari in Windows or Vista?
And then you'll be shoved onto the tracks of Vista - or whatever joke MS is selling as the latest, greatest operating system, likely to be tormented by a myriad of very disruptive changes and poor performance.
Frankly, I'd not be surprised to see MS go to a annual license/support contract, like what antivirus companies do, with their next version of Windows. They simply can't keep doing the non-profitable "sell one product every 10 years" nonsense that they pulled with XP - their stockholders won't allow it.
The reason MS is supporting XP for 12 years is because it has, and will be, their flagship product the whole damn time. No, it probably won't be by 2012 or so, but XP is still outselling Vista (iirc, if you include corporate sales). It'd be kind of stupid to not support the one major product keeping you in a market that everyone wants.
All I can say is that I feel sorry for people who are paying Open Licensing costs for XP, especially due to the anemic and generally crappy support that's been provided since Vista came out.
You're not talking about FileMaker, are you?
Exactly.
What this article is really about is a female who managed to get ahead in a male-dominated field, and has likely encountered sexism a number of times. Maybe she's bitter about a lack of relational interest from coworkers, or too much interest - whatever. The end result is that she's sexually biased against males: ie, she's a sexist. This is, of course, culturally acceptable in today's world for a woman.
I've only met a handful of female tech folks. I dated one for a while. I've got a generally low opinion of most of their work because I've ended up having to fix it (that's actually my current job description, and oooh boy this mess is a doozie: no documentation whatsoever, and a lot of stuff left broken/half finished/etc.). The girl I dated in tech was incredibly smart - arguably smarter than I am in most respects - but her coding and general tech abilities were "folksy" (for lack of a better term). Her code was pretty mediocre, and her understanding of things was surface level and highly subjective to opinion.
On the other hand, the female coders/tech people I've met who I can pull their own weight and not need hand-holding have been very good. They've not got caught up in the "I'm just as good as a man" head-trip self-disillusion and concentrate on their strengths - and they're not going to fuck around and let others do their owrk. This is really useful in common group project environments. In college, I'd try to get as many of these women into group projects past the 300 or so level as a result.
This usually meant more coding requirements for everyone else, but the overall project would (usually) turn out better - just hope you don't get a couple slack-jawed guys...
So would it be progressive if I wanted to round up all the people who are anti-war and gas them in concentration camps? Or maybe all the Muslims?
No, the point is that saying you're progressive doesn't mean a damn thing. You're for "change". Change, like progressivism, isn't inherently anything. Change can be negative as well as positive.
No, saying you're progressive is a politically derisive word. It's kind of humorous, really, as many of the people who say they're progressives claim they're open-minded and just want to work together for change, but in actuality, they want nothing of the sort. They want their own vision of the new world, and if you have a different vision, you're backwards, primitive, unintelligent - or some other demeaning label.
Progressive means nothing at all, really, because it can mean anything at all. It means whatever the hive mind wants it to mean.
Thank you, you said what I've been feeling for the last couple of weeks fairly succinctly. As someone who's been using Linux and Windows maybe 75/25 for the past decade, having touched every useable window manager available for Linux (including many I've built myself), I don't think I've ever been so significantly frustrated with user interface characteristics as I have been in the last couple weeks of "first significant time" Mac use.
Finder is a complete mess. It appears to be a ported application from an OS from 1978, or something equally antiquated and quaint: being certain of what you're doing (copying? moving?), and in which directory you're doing it (damn it, why did it put it at the filesystem root, AGAIN) are just the start of what makes finder frustrating. Why does the 'maximize'/+ button not do as it does in most other applications? Why is there no "cut" option? Why do I not have an "address" bar, particularly now that we've got full and proper UNIX file paths? Why do Finder windows not stack/organize themselves in such a fashion as to make having more than (say) 3 open at any one time frustrating and confusing?
Honest to god, I've resorted to just using iTerm with multiple tabs for all file management (short of multiple selections). It's quicker, easier, and less confusing, as I never have to wonder "where am I?" I don't want to be forced to feel that way, and I don't intend to feel that way at all until I'm well past my 50s.
The task management - application switching instead of app switching, and no way to change it - is equally irritating. This includes the parent-child window lock-out situation. It results in all kinds of irritating context problems, where you're trying to perform work, but are unable to do so without repeatedly closing and opening a specific context window, as you're unable to switch and/or remember the content of said window between switches in completion (I end up printing shit out and referencing it that way, sadly, more often than I'd like). That isn't reasonable, at all, and it's like no other operating system or windowing system I've used.
Finally, combining those two problems seems to result in an inefficient use of screen real estate. There's a good reason mac workstations have large displays: they need them to be effective at multitasking. I don't imagine that was much of a case when the Mac was just a graphic workstation or something like that (when macOS multitasking sucked/didn't really exist, and there weren't many apps/users), but now, it's kind of ridiculous. I don't want to have to buy a larger screen just to get basic work done because fancy widgets are taking up too much space; I want a bigger screen because I need more space. Compared to pretty much other UI, OS X definitely seems to need more space by default. (Sorry, I can't quantify it better than that.)
It wouldn't be such an issue if focus context switched properly when going from "Space" to "Space", but doesn't, so that potential way of managing things is kinda of another irritant that's got to be worked around...
People will often say they're not paying for security, stability, performance and the like, but they do, and usually will do so willingly.
.17). Not stable or fast, but damn did it/does it have a lot of features! It had most of those features before anything else available for linux, but plunkers like KDE and GNOME stuck with their development and provided features slowly, while trying to work on the other things (ie, balance) and providing a usable product in the process.
Case(s) in point:
Windows 98 -> 2000. People jumped on that ship pretty quickly, even though 2000 offered diminished graphical performance. The only people who stayed with 98 were people with low-end hardware, people who'd been bit by upgrading MS software too soon in the past, and by those who were hardcore gamers and didn't mind the stability for an extra 5fps.
Enlightenment window manager (.16 or
I'm curious: what new features do people actually want in OS X which are obtainable? I'm aware of the stupid things like "transparent Windows emulation" or "run Windows without any performance hit". Those are kind of stupid. In my mind, 95%+ of the features which can and be delivered in an OS and are significant to the vast majority's user experience are present already. The only things significantly lacking are not the wiz-bang user features, but the nitty-gritty which is important to the more technically inclined - the kind of things that linux users bicker about ("2.4 had better performance than 2.6 for aquatic parallel computing!", "the new i8x0 Xorg drivers are borked!" or what have you). That's important, because a lot of nitty-gritty stuff is missing...
However... If there was one feature I'd ask for in the "presentation" parts of OS X, it'd be the ability to do window vs. task/app based window management. Not something hardwired, just a damn option. Unfortunately, features like this will never come about, because they break the Apple UI Use Guidelines, or some such nonsense...
And yet, Apple's desktop market share percentage increases every year, and nobody is buying Vista, if they have the choice/know a thing about it. And Linux is making not-insignificant inroads on the desktop as well.
OS X does not need more desktop features. It needs more infrastructure features which appeal to IT administrator/manager types. That is the primary reason Apple has remained fringe - because Windows has remained dominant through infrastructural technologies due to their initial corporate focus.
My take is that they don't really "need" the hype anymore. For a couple years after Steve Jobs took over, their existence was riding solely on their Macs (desktop and laptop) and their OS - as they'd always done prior.
Now, they've got a fairly substantial "additional" product line - ipodTV, airport, etc. which all need support. And...
Now they've got other considerations for OS X: they're running all their products (aside from the ipod touch) on the OS X core technologies. That requires reduction in size, additional efficiency, and so on and so forth. Fixing, and making OS X better overall (sans additional features) pays dividends, because it spans all of their products. Doing tihs will make future feature additions to the platform more tenable, as well as make the platform a tenable long-term project.
There's really very little "small" stuff they can do to OS X, I think. I've only used it a little, and I'm no fan boy, but there are substantial benefits in almost every area for normal desktop use. In order to make OS X viable (and superior) in the other arenas, they've got to fix what ails - in this case, some of the underlying infrastructure.
As a system and database administrator on their over-priced platform, these changes excite me a lot more than 10.5 did, because they open up more fully the possibility of actually having a system which has a full suite of integrated sysadmin tools that can be leveraged for efficient db driving.