You overestimate how many people work in "big" IT shops.
There are many places where there is a single person with all the keys, or a small group of people - because there aren't enough of them to specialize. I suspect you might be able to start doing that at 6-7 or so IT staff, but even then, someone, somewhere has to have the root keys to the castle.
Many educational institutions lag behind because they're an ever-evolving door. Even when they've got dedicated and experienced IT staff, most of it's just in a managerial role for the student work studies (it saves money, of course).
Believe it or not, maintaining a mail host for a larger, geographically diverse
If it were easy, there'd be no push to outsource it to "the Cloud" (or anywhere else), and countless organizations wouldn't be moving from the "burden" of administering something like Exchange (ie, a trivial amount of knowledge is required compared to any other MTA) to Office 365 or Google.
It's not just as simple as setting the mx to point to a 'working host', especially not in academia (though many try). Do you have to deal with this kind of thing?
As someone who has to deal with this stuff on a daily basis - I had dealings regarding CalMail last week on a similar mail related problem of their's - and with academic mail systems in general, let me clue you in:
* This is not your business mail system, where everyone has a uniformly specified mailbox. * It is not dictated from the top down how mail is run. In a corporation, there is standardization. CalMail is the exception in academia, as far as I can tell, in that it's run somewhat like the business model. However, there is still somewhat of the "Greek" (vs. "Roman") model of management involved, and this does tend to lead to problems. (This is much more true with other academic mail systems, from what I can tell.) * Unlike in the work place, there is very little systems experience where it is needed (ie in the actual administration). Even with dedicated IT, very few people are actually good with the mail system due to how broad and complicated mail management can be. * Running a mail server effectively is now quite difficult. Not only do you have to "just make it work" - ie, dealing with all the misbehaving mail systems out there from other academic institutions and verifying the VIP email makes it through (regardless of how much spam that means letting through - but never let any spam through!) - but it's got to run like a top. * Often, you're dealing with decades of systemic dependencies. Mail was the first connected application, after all, and nobody's had it as long as Berkeley. Based on my own experience with networks which grew around their mail system, small changes can compound any sort of change or update. Suddenly, there's something everywhere that needs a specific mail system functionality which can't simply be copied over during a move to replicate it. * An organizational system like this is big, it's not garden variety email. Hell, i guarantee you they don't have as many IT people maintaining accounts as they have admissions people, probably not even a 10th. Yet the IT people have to actually make sure those records get to the right places all while assuring the admissions people that the information transits securely. * There is undoubtedly a faculty member with his pet requirements for email. He probably has things which will not migrate properly. * There will undoubtedly be the people using their mail account for file storage. * Believe it or not, it's actually fairly difficult to migrate mail from, say, Cyrus IMAP to anything else. It takes time (and anything at all with Cyrus, which I'd not be surprised if they were using, takes a lot of time). Sieve scripts, procmail, IMAP states, et al. It's a pain in the ass, and takes a loooong time to do seamlessly. Doing it under duress of hardware failure is something else entirely.
From my reading of the events (and seeing some other things not mentioned in OP or linked article) there were a number of things which caused this prolonged outage. First and foremost, the system was not designed to be resilient so much as it was designed to scale up (or proper failure condition testing was not performed beforehand). Second, they either don't have the necessary (knowledgeable) human resources, or enough time allocated to those resources, to effectively manage this system. (You would not believe how difficult it is to find a "mail administrator". Everyone's done it, but nobody seems to like it or is all that good at it. If they are, they want a LOT in compensation.) Third, they may
One could make that argument about solid-state electronics, the move away from punch-cards, the move from paper-based filing, the move to journaled filesystems, etc.
Except in this case, syslog format has been thoroughly vetted. It's gone up against some heavy hitters and still proves itself to be superior for what it does. Event Log is the biggest functional competitor, and you've got Eventlog to Syslog mechanisms, but not the other way around. Syslog is trivial to adhere to, so it's easy to log effectively.
I don't see you describing anything which isn't possible (and common) with the syslog format. Most environments have remote syslog servers, you can filter events by event type, etc. and you can get a "clean, current last record" in a number of ways quite trivially (tac or last -f, pick your poison).
Changing from syslog format will cause all sorts of problems. There are literally thousands of syslog analyzers in use, custom scripts, and people who use common utilities (such as the above, plus grep/sed/awk/etc.) to monitor and manipulate the files into something else. I personally use half a dozen different tools for this, such as Fail2Ban and loganalyzer. Many of these ship on the default install on systems because they're useful (targetting specific functionality on top of the very specific and minimal functional role of syslog).
Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".
Sorry, but no thanks. I can see the need for something else, in a limited/special purpose role, but these assholes are aggregately destroying the very basis of what makes Linux a good, robust server choice:
* you can use traditional unix tools from ssh to manipulate and analyze the system * there are literally thousands of tools for analyzing, manipulating, and storing syslog data * init is purely linear, whereas upstart is threaded, increasing the possible ways in which it can fail as well as increasing the difficulty of troubleshooting * KISS means broken things are more obvious. * KISS means there's less that can go wrong. * Most Windows guys don't even read the logs, from what I've seen. This could quite possibly be related to the complexity and lack of utility of Event Viewer itself, granted, but even Event Logs can be exported to syslog...
While we're at it, why don't we start using XML or sqlite as a replacement for/etc.
It's not the "sorta Celeron" it's the "Celeron of their server CPUs", the little brother to the Xeon. people were (are) buying desktop boards and putting them in cheap, low-end servers. This fills that gap, but still lets you use a full-featured server board.
There's no evidence that both intelligent design and evolution is involved, in the biological case. After all, Debian, which is designed and maintained by intelligent beings, demonstrates a very strong similarity to evolutionary process. It's not a proof in and of itself, but it's suggestive, IMO.
On the contrary. In a smaller car, I am simply too large to get a good view of what's beside me. I don't want you to misunderstand me to say I'm fat (I'm 6' and 160lb); I mean to say the smaller cars are awkwardly tight and have poor visibility due to having to put things like A pillars in places that obscure vision to improve driver safety (on account of vehicle size).
I drive a full-size windowed van. I can see everything on both sides of me by turning my head (or using the mirrors).
My wife drives a Ford Focus. It has less 4 and 6 o'clock visibility than my van (though better 5 o'clock visibility due to its short profile). The 4 and 6 o'clock is important, because that's where it's goign to cause an accident if there's someone there when you need to move.
I don't know where you're driving, but the people I see violating traffic laws, speeding, and generally driving recklessly aren't the ones in the Suburbans, pickup trucks, etc. - it's the compact cars that do all the law breaking and dangerous behavior (out here in San Francisco).
Back in the Midwest, that's not the case - you'll see idiots in trucks barreling along snowy roads at 75mph much more often than any other 'reckless' driving. But out here? Let's just say I've yet to have an SUV or truck edge up on me in the turn lane when I'm trying to get over, preventing me from getting off, be cut off by one, or notice more than a single (ie, I've seen one) SUV traveling recklessly. It is ALWAYS the BMWs, Priuses, and other smaller trendy commuter vehicles that are waiting until the exit until quickly merging into the flow of traffic. Always.
(Also, don't honk your damn horn at me because I'm going 'slow', 'leaving space', or 'letting people get ahead'. That's to avoid idiots like you cutting me off and giving me no braking room.)
My experience with witnessing about one vehicle accident a week on my way to or from work is that the accidents appear to be, almost invariably, caused by the smaller vehicle. I saw an accident occur the other day where someone in a small sedan (Honda, I think) zipped in front of a larger vehicle (work pickup) that was going faster than it was, at the speed of traffic.
Legally? Sure, the truck driver was responsible. But it was still the car driver's fault.
I deal with this on a daily basis, as a driver of a larger vehicle. People in smaller cars, often hybrids (Prius), will zip in and out of traffic lanes jockying for a single vehicle advantage. They'll slip in, hit the brakes, slip back, and so on. They try to do what the people on the motorcycles do (which is dangerous as well), but are too large to split lanes.
The biggest safety problem with EVs are either the drivers, or the vehicle ergonomic design. (Of particular note is the Prius.)
Why do I say this?
* Prius drivers don't yield or stop at signs. "Oh, there's a Prius" is almost synonymous with "Careful, here comes an idiot. Stand back/slow down." * Prius drivers don't know how to merge or change lanes, or the blinkers are broken. It's also possible the A-pillar and seat/etc. prevent the driver from actually turning their body/head to see what's beside them, so they just scream "roulette!" and switch lanes anyway. * The dashboard is too high, or there's an odd tinting on the windshield, or something like that, because pedestrians are ignored on crosswalks. (They're like landsharks - you can't hear them coming and you least expect them.)
The alternative to the design being defective is that the Prius appeals to a certain breed of self-absorbed, oblivious driver. This is a bit more tangible.
It seems like only yesterday, still, that floppy drives stopped shipping with desktops. Time flies - that was what, 5-8 years ago?
Truth be told, I've not build a machine for myself with either a floppy drive or CD/DVD drive in some time, aside from my main workstation. There are really only a handful of times I've needed one, and I suspect I'm somewhat the exception in how frequently it's needed (as I work in IT, and have done entirely too much "home PC repair").
* burning OS install media * copying the rare movie I purchase * playing rented DVDs * reading some vendor's supplied media (due to the nature of where I work, many distributions still come on manually burned, Sharpie-labeled media).
And, that's it. If I didn't work in IT, I suspect I'd not even have a working optical drive in the house. (The last time I had to use an optical drive, both the one in my system didn't work, and the spare I had - which was IDE - didn't work. So I took about 5 minutes to set up the environment and booted off the network like I do with everything else, instead.)
My wife's laptop has a DVD drive, which we use regularly to watch movies (both for us and the kids). This is very useful, because Netflix doesn't ship USB flash drives.:D
These days, DVD burner drives are a dime a dozen. I suspect most of the cost is due to material cost alone. They're cheaper than a commodity, really, and probably aren't long for this world as a common or easily acquirable device, what with the cost of USB flash drives continually dropping. With the ubiquitous network, I suspect we'll likely see "install media" go away outright, at some point relatively soon.
Maybe 5, 10 years ago. Certainly not a year ago. For the cost of a single 150Gb tape you could buy a 1Tb drive. Then you need to sink over $1,000 (4k? 10k?) into your tape drive and deal with proprietary/esoteric applications. No thanks.
Granted, this may have a reversal with the hard drive manufacturing disasters, but "pain in the ass" is still higher with tape.
If the press really wanted to understand the Occupy movement, it wouldn't just stand back and complain that the movement is not producing a manifesto.
What? It's been published for a verylong time. Calling the Occupy movement "leaderless" or rudderless is a fairly bold-faced lie given this, and when their playbook is widely disseminated .
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 1
Occupy Occupy? I've been doing that for the past week. What you do is this: you show up at the Occupy* movement encampment and occupy it. But only between the hours of 2AM to 8AM. Wear good running shoes and/or kevlar, because these types are somewhat violent, particularly at night. Bull horns and an audio event van is a good idea, too.
It's freedom of speech, right? It must be expressed or it will be lost.
Look at the power numbers. You're not gaining much, if anything, by going mini-ITX. If you need more than 2 drives, you're going to need a larger chassis anyway - in which case the a mini-itx will barely fill much of the tower/chassis.
1) Foxconn branded equipment is some of the worst out there. I find this incredibly odd, since they make so much shit for other companies, you'd thinkt hey'd be able to steal something decent every now and then. 2) I bought this board, as well as the Asus and Asrock variants. I've had nothing but problems with them in ways I've never seen before in Linux (crashing storage drivers, odd VT bugs). They have some of the absolute worst performance I've ever seen in Windows. 3) The power budget on these isn't all that great unless you're going to be using it for its video capabilities, and even then it's really not that much better than, say, a first-generation Atom Ion board. (Hell, for video playback, the Intel chipset on the firstgen Atom wasn't a slouch, either.) 4) For $150, I can get an i3 system with a better board that will blow the ever loving shit out of an E350 board. 5) For $50 I can get an atom-based Logitech Revue (and put custom Android roms on it) which is a cheap COTS solution. 6) For $60 I can get a plain-jane Foxconn board + psu + case (with a dualcore Atom) which will do the same thing.
All in all, #1 and #4 irritate me the most. I like my E-350s (they make pretty decent cheap storage servers), and I've bought a hell of a lot of AMD products in the past decade, but this latest run (post-Phenom II) has been a huge disappointment. Intel is eating their lunch.
As a long-time user of sid (I used it exclusively for my workstations for about 6 years, so I've seen the whole cycle at least twice), forgive me a comment.The problemsI have with sid are:
* There is no such thing as stable. (Ironically, it's state is very close, albeit somewhat better than, FreeBSD's so-called 'stable' branch). You can expect at least one significant thing to break if you do an apt-get upgrade. * The previous has bit me twice where hardware in my system has stopped working with an upgrade. * It's sometimes difficult to regress to a previous version of a file, because it's no longer there. dpkg dependency resolution is also somewhat less stable or finessed, negating half the reason to use a debian distro in the first place.
Honestly, I don't like either of the "line in the sand" or "rolling update" approaches. The best way to do things, IMO, would be to have a combination of both so you get the advantages of both, without many of the shortcomings:
* Have a Hardware Support Release cycle, on which end-user applications sit. This would include libraries, kernel, and general platform support. Change this roughly every 24 months. * Have a rolling end-user application release. Everything from your version of emacs to KDE to mousepad. * have the ability to update them independently of each other. (Naturally, this would require the entire application release to be rebuilt for each of multiple library versions, but I don't think this should be a significant problem.)
IMO, this approach would also likely help isolate the origin of certain bugs, helping them get triaged to the right people.
I've been thinking of going back to Debian myself, lately. The only problem, of course, is that Debian lacks a lot of the newer packages and hardware hardware support that Ubuntu has, making putting it on a new machine and keeping 'cutting edge' on various things somewhat frustrating at times.
That, and there are usually Ubuntu.debs where there aren't any Debian.debs.
Though, honestly, it's not worth putting up with Ubuntu stupidity, most of the time. For the time being, I'll stick with 10.04 LTS, but from the looks of things, this will be the last release I'll use on teh desktop.
Unity has caused an uproar in the Linux community — especially amongst the power users who decry its lack of customizability and inability to scale on big- and multi-monitor setups
No, it's because it's slow, buggy, and makes it almost impossible to get to the programs and files you need to get work done by increasing the number of steps to do so. I don't know about multi-monitor support, but I'm guessing it's more to do with the UI's general functionality not support.
What is this guy smoking? Maybe the numbers don't work out, but from what I can tell, the Revue is the best thing to come to TV since the personal DVR (even at $100). At $50-60 it's a steal - almost literally, the thing has more hardware than that (and could tentatively be used as a workstation or any number of other roles).
Maybe it just didn't sell well. The idea works well, and even with the initial release (3.1 is much better) it's a great addition to a TV.
Having to support Windows Vista almost got me out of IT permanently. Fortunately, I hopped into a larger organization which was still using XP before it became too late, and hastily started helping make plans to jump straight to W7.
Hopefully I'll be entrenched enough in Linux and misc. Unix administration before Windows 8 comes down the pipe for it to matter for me.
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You overestimate how many people work in "big" IT shops.
There are many places where there is a single person with all the keys, or a small group of people - because there aren't enough of them to specialize. I suspect you might be able to start doing that at 6-7 or so IT staff, but even then, someone, somewhere has to have the root keys to the castle.
Many educational institutions lag behind because they're an ever-evolving door. Even when they've got dedicated and experienced IT staff, most of it's just in a managerial role for the student work studies (it saves money, of course).
Believe it or not, maintaining a mail host for a larger, geographically diverse
If it were easy, there'd be no push to outsource it to "the Cloud" (or anywhere else), and countless organizations wouldn't be moving from the "burden" of administering something like Exchange (ie, a trivial amount of knowledge is required compared to any other MTA) to Office 365 or Google.
It's not just as simple as setting the mx to point to a 'working host', especially not in academia (though many try). Do you have to deal with this kind of thing?
As someone who has to deal with this stuff on a daily basis - I had dealings regarding CalMail last week on a similar mail related problem of their's - and with academic mail systems in general, let me clue you in:
* This is not your business mail system, where everyone has a uniformly specified mailbox.
* It is not dictated from the top down how mail is run. In a corporation, there is standardization. CalMail is the exception in academia, as far as I can tell, in that it's run somewhat like the business model. However, there is still somewhat of the "Greek" (vs. "Roman") model of management involved, and this does tend to lead to problems. (This is much more true with other academic mail systems, from what I can tell.)
* Unlike in the work place, there is very little systems experience where it is needed (ie in the actual administration). Even with dedicated IT, very few people are actually good with the mail system due to how broad and complicated mail management can be.
* Running a mail server effectively is now quite difficult. Not only do you have to "just make it work" - ie, dealing with all the misbehaving mail systems out there from other academic institutions and verifying the VIP email makes it through (regardless of how much spam that means letting through - but never let any spam through!) - but it's got to run like a top.
* Often, you're dealing with decades of systemic dependencies. Mail was the first connected application, after all, and nobody's had it as long as Berkeley. Based on my own experience with networks which grew around their mail system, small changes can compound any sort of change or update. Suddenly, there's something everywhere that needs a specific mail system functionality which can't simply be copied over during a move to replicate it.
* An organizational system like this is big, it's not garden variety email. Hell, i guarantee you they don't have as many IT people maintaining accounts as they have admissions people, probably not even a 10th. Yet the IT people have to actually make sure those records get to the right places all while assuring the admissions people that the information transits securely.
* There is undoubtedly a faculty member with his pet requirements for email. He probably has things which will not migrate properly.
* There will undoubtedly be the people using their mail account for file storage.
* Believe it or not, it's actually fairly difficult to migrate mail from, say, Cyrus IMAP to anything else. It takes time (and anything at all with Cyrus, which I'd not be surprised if they were using, takes a lot of time). Sieve scripts, procmail, IMAP states, et al. It's a pain in the ass, and takes a loooong time to do seamlessly. Doing it under duress of hardware failure is something else entirely.
From my reading of the events (and seeing some other things not mentioned in OP or linked article) there were a number of things which caused this prolonged outage. First and foremost, the system was not designed to be resilient so much as it was designed to scale up (or proper failure condition testing was not performed beforehand). Second, they either don't have the necessary (knowledgeable) human resources, or enough time allocated to those resources, to effectively manage this system. (You would not believe how difficult it is to find a "mail administrator". Everyone's done it, but nobody seems to like it or is all that good at it. If they are, they want a LOT in compensation.) Third, they may
One could make that argument about solid-state electronics, the move away from punch-cards, the move from paper-based filing, the move to journaled filesystems, etc.
Except in this case, syslog format has been thoroughly vetted. It's gone up against some heavy hitters and still proves itself to be superior for what it does. Event Log is the biggest functional competitor, and you've got Eventlog to Syslog mechanisms, but not the other way around. Syslog is trivial to adhere to, so it's easy to log effectively.
I don't see you describing anything which isn't possible (and common) with the syslog format. Most environments have remote syslog servers, you can filter events by event type, etc. and you can get a "clean, current last record" in a number of ways quite trivially (tac or last -f, pick your poison).
Changing from syslog format will cause all sorts of problems. There are literally thousands of syslog analyzers in use, custom scripts, and people who use common utilities (such as the above, plus grep/sed/awk/etc.) to monitor and manipulate the files into something else. I personally use half a dozen different tools for this, such as Fail2Ban and loganalyzer. Many of these ship on the default install on systems because they're useful (targetting specific functionality on top of the very specific and minimal functional role of syslog).
Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".
Sorry, but no thanks. I can see the need for something else, in a limited/special purpose role, but these assholes are aggregately destroying the very basis of what makes Linux a good, robust server choice:
* you can use traditional unix tools from ssh to manipulate and analyze the system
* there are literally thousands of tools for analyzing, manipulating, and storing syslog data
* init is purely linear, whereas upstart is threaded, increasing the possible ways in which it can fail as well as increasing the difficulty of troubleshooting
* KISS means broken things are more obvious.
* KISS means there's less that can go wrong.
* Most Windows guys don't even read the logs, from what I've seen. This could quite possibly be related to the complexity and lack of utility of Event Viewer itself, granted, but even Event Logs can be exported to syslog...
While we're at it, why don't we start using XML or sqlite as a replacement for /etc.
This ain't your father's Pentium.
That made me feel really, really old.
Given how they're targeting them (servers), I'd think calling them "Pentium Pro" would be more apropos.
It's not the "sorta Celeron" it's the "Celeron of their server CPUs", the little brother to the Xeon. people were (are) buying desktop boards and putting them in cheap, low-end servers. This fills that gap, but still lets you use a full-featured server board.
There's no evidence that both intelligent design and evolution is involved, in the biological case. After all, Debian, which is designed and maintained by intelligent beings, demonstrates a very strong similarity to evolutionary process. It's not a proof in and of itself, but it's suggestive, IMO.
No, but some make it trivially easy to root their tablets. See: Amazon Fire, Asus Transformer.
On the contrary. In a smaller car, I am simply too large to get a good view of what's beside me. I don't want you to misunderstand me to say I'm fat (I'm 6' and 160lb); I mean to say the smaller cars are awkwardly tight and have poor visibility due to having to put things like A pillars in places that obscure vision to improve driver safety (on account of vehicle size).
I drive a full-size windowed van. I can see everything on both sides of me by turning my head (or using the mirrors).
My wife drives a Ford Focus. It has less 4 and 6 o'clock visibility than my van (though better 5 o'clock visibility due to its short profile). The 4 and 6 o'clock is important, because that's where it's goign to cause an accident if there's someone there when you need to move.
I don't know where you're driving, but the people I see violating traffic laws, speeding, and generally driving recklessly aren't the ones in the Suburbans, pickup trucks, etc. - it's the compact cars that do all the law breaking and dangerous behavior (out here in San Francisco).
Back in the Midwest, that's not the case - you'll see idiots in trucks barreling along snowy roads at 75mph much more often than any other 'reckless' driving. But out here? Let's just say I've yet to have an SUV or truck edge up on me in the turn lane when I'm trying to get over, preventing me from getting off, be cut off by one, or notice more than a single (ie, I've seen one) SUV traveling recklessly. It is ALWAYS the BMWs, Priuses, and other smaller trendy commuter vehicles that are waiting until the exit until quickly merging into the flow of traffic. Always.
(Also, don't honk your damn horn at me because I'm going 'slow', 'leaving space', or 'letting people get ahead'. That's to avoid idiots like you cutting me off and giving me no braking room.)
My experience with witnessing about one vehicle accident a week on my way to or from work is that the accidents appear to be, almost invariably, caused by the smaller vehicle. I saw an accident occur the other day where someone in a small sedan (Honda, I think) zipped in front of a larger vehicle (work pickup) that was going faster than it was, at the speed of traffic.
Legally? Sure, the truck driver was responsible. But it was still the car driver's fault.
I deal with this on a daily basis, as a driver of a larger vehicle. People in smaller cars, often hybrids (Prius), will zip in and out of traffic lanes jockying for a single vehicle advantage. They'll slip in, hit the brakes, slip back, and so on. They try to do what the people on the motorcycles do (which is dangerous as well), but are too large to split lanes.
The biggest safety problem with EVs are either the drivers, or the vehicle ergonomic design. (Of particular note is the Prius.)
Why do I say this?
* Prius drivers don't yield or stop at signs. "Oh, there's a Prius" is almost synonymous with "Careful, here comes an idiot. Stand back/slow down."
* Prius drivers don't know how to merge or change lanes, or the blinkers are broken. It's also possible the A-pillar and seat/etc. prevent the driver from actually turning their body/head to see what's beside them, so they just scream "roulette!" and switch lanes anyway.
* The dashboard is too high, or there's an odd tinting on the windshield, or something like that, because pedestrians are ignored on crosswalks. (They're like landsharks - you can't hear them coming and you least expect them.)
The alternative to the design being defective is that the Prius appeals to a certain breed of self-absorbed, oblivious driver. This is a bit more tangible.
(That, and Asian women.)
It seems like only yesterday, still, that floppy drives stopped shipping with desktops. Time flies - that was what, 5-8 years ago?
Truth be told, I've not build a machine for myself with either a floppy drive or CD/DVD drive in some time, aside from my main workstation. There are really only a handful of times I've needed one, and I suspect I'm somewhat the exception in how frequently it's needed (as I work in IT, and have done entirely too much "home PC repair").
* burning OS install media
* copying the rare movie I purchase
* playing rented DVDs
* reading some vendor's supplied media (due to the nature of where I work, many distributions still come on manually burned, Sharpie-labeled media).
And, that's it. If I didn't work in IT, I suspect I'd not even have a working optical drive in the house. (The last time I had to use an optical drive, both the one in my system didn't work, and the spare I had - which was IDE - didn't work. So I took about 5 minutes to set up the environment and booted off the network like I do with everything else, instead.)
My wife's laptop has a DVD drive, which we use regularly to watch movies (both for us and the kids). This is very useful, because Netflix doesn't ship USB flash drives. :D
These days, DVD burner drives are a dime a dozen. I suspect most of the cost is due to material cost alone. They're cheaper than a commodity, really, and probably aren't long for this world as a common or easily acquirable device, what with the cost of USB flash drives continually dropping. With the ubiquitous network, I suspect we'll likely see "install media" go away outright, at some point relatively soon.
Maybe 5, 10 years ago. Certainly not a year ago. For the cost of a single 150Gb tape you could buy a 1Tb drive. Then you need to sink over $1,000 (4k? 10k?) into your tape drive and deal with proprietary/esoteric applications. No thanks.
Granted, this may have a reversal with the hard drive manufacturing disasters, but "pain in the ass" is still higher with tape.
If the press really wanted to understand the Occupy movement, it wouldn't just stand back and complain that the movement is not producing a manifesto.
What? It's been published for a very long time. Calling the Occupy movement "leaderless" or rudderless is a fairly bold-faced lie given this, and when their playbook is widely disseminated .
Occupy Occupy? I've been doing that for the past week. What you do is this: you show up at the Occupy* movement encampment and occupy it. But only between the hours of 2AM to 8AM. Wear good running shoes and/or kevlar, because these types are somewhat violent, particularly at night. Bull horns and an audio event van is a good idea, too.
It's freedom of speech, right? It must be expressed or it will be lost.
Look at the power numbers. You're not gaining much, if anything, by going mini-ITX. If you need more than 2 drives, you're going to need a larger chassis anyway - in which case the a mini-itx will barely fill much of the tower/chassis.
1) Foxconn branded equipment is some of the worst out there. I find this incredibly odd, since they make so much shit for other companies, you'd thinkt hey'd be able to steal something decent every now and then.
2) I bought this board, as well as the Asus and Asrock variants. I've had nothing but problems with them in ways I've never seen before in Linux (crashing storage drivers, odd VT bugs). They have some of the absolute worst performance I've ever seen in Windows.
3) The power budget on these isn't all that great unless you're going to be using it for its video capabilities, and even then it's really not that much better than, say, a first-generation Atom Ion board. (Hell, for video playback, the Intel chipset on the firstgen Atom wasn't a slouch, either.)
4) For $150, I can get an i3 system with a better board that will blow the ever loving shit out of an E350 board.
5) For $50 I can get an atom-based Logitech Revue (and put custom Android roms on it) which is a cheap COTS solution.
6) For $60 I can get a plain-jane Foxconn board + psu + case (with a dualcore Atom) which will do the same thing.
All in all, #1 and #4 irritate me the most. I like my E-350s (they make pretty decent cheap storage servers), and I've bought a hell of a lot of AMD products in the past decade, but this latest run (post-Phenom II) has been a huge disappointment. Intel is eating their lunch.
As a long-time user of sid (I used it exclusively for my workstations for about 6 years, so I've seen the whole cycle at least twice), forgive me a comment.The problemsI have with sid are:
* There is no such thing as stable. (Ironically, it's state is very close, albeit somewhat better than, FreeBSD's so-called 'stable' branch). You can expect at least one significant thing to break if you do an apt-get upgrade.
* The previous has bit me twice where hardware in my system has stopped working with an upgrade.
* It's sometimes difficult to regress to a previous version of a file, because it's no longer there. dpkg dependency resolution is also somewhat less stable or finessed, negating half the reason to use a debian distro in the first place.
Honestly, I don't like either of the "line in the sand" or "rolling update" approaches. The best way to do things, IMO, would be to have a combination of both so you get the advantages of both, without many of the shortcomings:
* Have a Hardware Support Release cycle, on which end-user applications sit. This would include libraries, kernel, and general platform support. Change this roughly every 24 months.
* Have a rolling end-user application release. Everything from your version of emacs to KDE to mousepad.
* have the ability to update them independently of each other. (Naturally, this would require the entire application release to be rebuilt for each of multiple library versions, but I don't think this should be a significant problem.)
IMO, this approach would also likely help isolate the origin of certain bugs, helping them get triaged to the right people.
I've been thinking of going back to Debian myself, lately. The only problem, of course, is that Debian lacks a lot of the newer packages and hardware hardware support that Ubuntu has, making putting it on a new machine and keeping 'cutting edge' on various things somewhat frustrating at times.
That, and there are usually Ubuntu .debs where there aren't any Debian .debs.
Though, honestly, it's not worth putting up with Ubuntu stupidity, most of the time. For the time being, I'll stick with 10.04 LTS, but from the looks of things, this will be the last release I'll use on teh desktop.
Unity has caused an uproar in the Linux community — especially amongst the power users who decry its lack of customizability and inability to scale on big- and multi-monitor setups
No, it's because it's slow, buggy, and makes it almost impossible to get to the programs and files you need to get work done by increasing the number of steps to do so. I don't know about multi-monitor support, but I'm guessing it's more to do with the UI's general functionality not support.
What is this guy smoking? Maybe the numbers don't work out, but from what I can tell, the Revue is the best thing to come to TV since the personal DVR (even at $100). At $50-60 it's a steal - almost literally, the thing has more hardware than that (and could tentatively be used as a workstation or any number of other roles).
Maybe it just didn't sell well. The idea works well, and even with the initial release (3.1 is much better) it's a great addition to a TV.
Having to support Windows Vista almost got me out of IT permanently. Fortunately, I hopped into a larger organization which was still using XP before it became too late, and hastily started helping make plans to jump straight to W7.
Hopefully I'll be entrenched enough in Linux and misc. Unix administration before Windows 8 comes down the pipe for it to matter for me.