There is a lot of wasted spending. No one needs 500+ channels of satellite television, costing $150/mo or more. A family does not need two brand new cars, paying $300+ for each note or monthly lease payment, when they could have slightly used vehicles for far less. Even buying an efficient hybrid car is actually less economically feasible.
How is that wasted spending?
Someone has to produce the material (and ads) for those channels. That puts people to work.
Automobiles? If people don't buy new vehicles, used ones do not enter the market. It costs far more, long-term, to rebuild ailing vehicles than it does to buy something slightly newer, at a certain point. (The Prius will be the exception to this rule, likely having little/no 'used value' after about 8 years/80k miles.)
If all those people with "wasted spending" habbits stopped spending for such luxuries, imagine the tax burden they'd have due to the many unemployed advertising specialists, TV producers, automotive manufactuer workers, etc. being out of work and on the dole.
These are just a couple of examples where people could cut out or significantly reduce their spending.
As someone who's done the single-income household on a professional salary, let me just say that it's pretty lean pickings. You simply can't afford all those luxuries if you've got even one child, you will drive a used vehicle, and you will likely not be able to afford a house at all (without first time homebuyer credit and rates, of course).
I'm not saying the excessive entertainment and vehicle expenditure is "good" by any means, but I'd hardly consider it the reason why a single-income earner can't do what they used to do. Just look at the recession of the 1980s: a single-income earner household was much more able to raise a family than they are today, if only due to the increases in the cost of food (as a ratio of income to expense). Then consider fuel costs (household heating, electricity, vehicle), and it's straight out the door without even considering things like insurance/healthcare or housing (which, thankfully, isn't nearly as drastic as the others).
In contrast, the "work less, make the same amount" ideal was a socialist/hippie utopian dream.
Believe it or not, most people like to be productive out of self-interest. If you see the guy next to you only working half the time, you're going to work the whole time if you want to improve your lot in life. That's the problem: nobody wants to live where they're at, they want to live in the next bracket up. It has nothing to do with "puritan ethic".
In the same sense, if I as an employer see someone working half the time, I'm going to can him and fire someone who's going to work all the time for the same amount. Why? It improves my division/company/whatever bottom line, which in turn improves my own bottom line/earning potential.
Believe it or not, there are quite a few Muslims and Buddhists who have the same "Puritanical Work Ethic" you describe in an unfavorable (ignorant) light - in India, Pakistan, etc.
I also think as a society it’s time to move away from the 5+ day work week. We have enough technology now that there is no reason for the majority of the population to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working.
That's a great idea! That means employers can pay 20% less (not like they're not already trying to, to cut the bottom line expenses). Way things are now, people are working 50+ hour weeks simply to "keep their jobs". I think that's the wrong approach (particularly when thinking is required), but it's the way it is. That's not going to change any time soon: inflation will continue to eat at our very essence, just as it ate away at the 2-earner-income households.
(Part of the problem there is that companies don't save for rainy days, either. They're just meeting last month's expenses, for the most part.)
Things are quite different now than they were 50 years ago. My grandparents raised 5 children on a two-earner income (as a teacher and diesel mechanic), built their own very large 3-story lake-side house on 8 acres (in NJ), and had enough cash during retirement to help out their children buy houses (after sending them all to expensive 'pedigree' universities, at that). To boot, the teacher's income was almost completely 'gravy'. Contrast that to me and mine at the same point in our lives - 2 kids, smaller house made in the 60s, two incomes from two technical BS degreed earners (nurse and engineer), in a location where the cost of living is significantly lower. To reach the level of affluence they had, we'd both have to be making roughly 2-3 times what we are now.
As a long-time Debian user (13 odd years now, I think) and someone who has been using Ubuntu since early 2008 on the desktop, I've proposed a different approach for a distro that is somewhere between Debian and Ubuntu.
For those who remember: something more akin to Stormix Linux or Progeny Debian in principle and action, but still somewhat different (in the following fashion).
Instead of having a 'distribution' you would have distribution tiers. Debian excels and appeals to many for a number of reasons which Ubuntu almost completely lacks; namely: * The ability to maintain consistency across releases * Keeping things at the "system" level as similar between releases as possible, despite the significant kernel/library/infrastructure changes taking place * Stability and completeness * dpkg/apt/aptitude
However, it falls short in a number of places where Ubuntu succeeds (and has made it wildly popular): * End-user experience/polish * Near features where people/end users want them * Accessibility/ease of installation * Inclusion of all the necessary/desired drivers/packages to get pretty much any system up and running easily (eg. nvidia binary drivers)
Of course, Ubuntu has largely broken a lot of the things which make Debian appealing (eg. the inclusion of upstart/replacement of the old linear init), which burns people like me.
Debian is much more the 'traditional' distro: we're just packaging things, not making decisions for you.
As mentioned earlier, the distros like Progeny Debian and Stormix Linux back in the dotcom era illustrated basically what made Debian great: you could take a stable, well designed base distribution and drop your "integration", installer, and the like on top of it to provide a very polished product.
Finally: here is what I would like to see. Instead of a massive "debian" distribution, I would like to see Debian broken down into further flavors, if you will. Debian would, in essence, be a base: everything you get with a base install of Debian would be "Debian" (or, alternatively, a subset thereof) - akin to how NanoBSD is a base for a number of other projects. This would be a stable base which would be updated independently (or at least, as a prerequisite to) everything built on top of it. Ubuntu 12 could use Debian 7 as a base; you'd get your consistency. Arch (or whatever) could do the same. You update your packages independently from the "OS", the packages of which do not need regular updating anyway.
Speaking personally, if it weren't for the headache of doing so, I'd still be doing the "install Debian, X, and a couple other staples and then build my own awesome/KDE/thunderbird/firefox/chromium/whatever" approach. I want a core set of 'stable' things I can run the latest software on (sort of how Windows has done things all these years). I don't want to have to upgrade the whole damn system just to get a newer version of a package (particularly when there's nothing 'wrong' with the rest of the software): that just means I'm going to have to deal with a whole new, different set of small bugs that were introduced. (Case in point: Ubuntu 9.10 had a bug in something that caused clusterssh to not work for months; that wasn't something I could easily regress from, because it was a fresh install; my options were to go back to 9.04, 8.10, or try something else. Not cool.) I should not be 'stuck' like this, short of building it and its requisites from source pulled from a CVS repository! I used to build + patch my own kernels, and do a myriad of things like this "just because". It was fun and I learned a lot, but for goodness sake, I shouldn't have to do those things to get a semblance of stability in my basic tools.
Like anything, it's something that requires time to complete (else I'd have done it myself, of course).
Well, the presumption here is that the "Catholic" empire/way of operation is the "evil empire" and is the ultimate point of constriction.
I guess the OP and author have never heard of Islam.
Once Apple has a sufficient market dominance they will begin to lock things down to the exclusion of all others. They've started doing that already, to some degree, but the move will increase its tenacity. You'll see more forward integration between their devices, and less support for interoperability. (Basically, what MS tried to do years ago.)
Maybe democracy, having hitched its fortunes to marketism and failed to deliver on its promises, has simply lost its lustre for westerners?
Maybe we, as Americans, are simply tired of going to fight wars on the behalf of others' freedoms - particularly on account of the current state of our rapidly eroding freedoms and continued/increased disdain from the Very Elect towards We The People? At this point, we've realized that the world as a whole is fairly unappreciative of assistance in such regard, even if it's impossible otherwise. Not every international relationship can be like that of the US and France.
There are no controls which can be instigated to prevent for one or more disks failing after being rebooted after 3+ years of uptime, regardless of the batch or binning of the disks in question. It can happen.
Realistically, frequent (once a month or so?) reboots are actually a part of this control process. It assures that upgrades to the kernel get applied, and any service configuration changes made will, barring someone's forgetfulness, still be applied.
God forbid, there is a catastrophic power failure (eg. a hurricane or week-long storm, maybe), and all your servers go down. Frequent reboots (again, probably no more than monthly) will assure that the machines are at least relatively unlikely to suffer hardware failures on coming back alive, and that any system configuration changes made prior to the reboot (but without the necessary service HUP) will, in all likelihood, be applied properly.
Please don't presume your OS is so secure and awesome that it does not need these reboots. You are wrong.
What's funny is that 'block ICMP' is the default (IIRC) on Windows firewalls. This is an agitation beyond belief, and it is therefore disabled promptly by anyone with competence.
Quick question: what is the single most useful and universally used network diagnostic tool in your arsenal, regardless of operating system?
ICMP ping. It is (or should be) the one fucking universal on your network (for a damn good reason). Without it, you're stuck trying to figure out which hosts are where (let's look at ARP!), or trying to figure out which other service you can query to determine if the host has died. (Sure, good documentation, consistency, and proper infrastructure will get you around this, but when do the pedantic tools who implement such Jurassic thinking bother with any of that fluff when it's all in their head? Who cares about the next guy who comes along...)
(Don't even get me started about conditional access restrictions within the same VLAN/subnet, often spanning multiple subnets/VLANs. What. The. Fuck.)
Who the fuck would block ICMP? Oh, that's right: someone who doesn't troubleshoot or fix things, just goes on with their precognitive concepts of 'security'. We use to give people like this jobs as night security guards, janitors, and what have you: they're pedantic and small minded, and get in the way of everyone else when allowed out of their cages.
I know that many vendors (used to?) who layered their shit on top of AIX and SCO (for instance) would recommend this. I've come across quite a few of said boxes which will reboot themselves after a nightly image + data backup script completes.
Nightly is a big excessive, IMO, but I see nothing wrong with a scheduled weekly or monthly reboot. Nightly/daily, and you run the risk of too many power cycles on your disks. Weekly or monthly, that's not such a problem (even with 5+ years of service, that's not so many). By scheduling your reboots you can hedge your bet slightly and catch hardware failures in the act.
There comes a point where it makes sense to replace a system (OS) or rebuild it. Yes, Windows admins jump on that bandwagon more often - but more often than not, it's more appropriate there than elsewhere, too.
Depending on what the cause is, and the system in question, it makes sense. An early FreeBSD 5 machine with no documentation, highly customized ports, many running services, and so on is likely better to piecemeal out to different machines ('rebuild' it) than it is to disrupt service as you figure out how to get the thing upgraded. Improperly removed programs or registry corruption/errors in Windows often means the same thing.
Ultimately, what it comes down to, is time. How long would a rebuild take, and how much downtime is being accrued from ghosts in the machine? How much is that time worth? It may take a day or two to do a rebuild, but even determining the cause of a peculiar problem can take several or more. By eliminating the software idiosyncrasies of the existing install (and often getting things to the most recent patch version in the process) you've eliminated one possible cause as to the problem: either it works now, or it was hardware/firmware/a driver/etc. that's causing the problem.
Sure, wanton reinstalls aren't a good fix. However, they're often a cost-saving measure, and in many applications, appropriate. The hardware and software on most machines is not worth the time invested to "do it the old Unix way".
Your reading comprehension is almost as lacking as your personality. You're like a harpy girlfriend who bitches about little things you did, which you never actually did.
They're relatively easy to overheat and crash/burn. Just because the fan sounds like a jet engine does not mean that it's doing a sufficient job cooling.
Considering that the Linux and Windows machines are usually substantially more awesome (in terms of "component for component capabilities") than you can even get in a Mac (despite the quoted price tag), that's doubtful.
Slight difference between the 'then' and 'now', too:
* It's always been "cool" to exploit Windows (just as it was cool to exploit old school Unix, before that) and "the man" * Being obscure makes it more interesting. * There was a lot more obscure stuff traveling BBSes back then than there is on the odd back-channel on the Internet, simply due to higher signal to noise ratio. Back then, if you were online you were probably either doing that kind of thing yourself or knew a couple people who did. * Using a mac has, for the better part of a decade, been the mark of a toolbag. Developing on one is embarrassing: there's nothing "cool", in a geeky sense, about them.
Unfortunately for Apple, they're earning the "The Man" stigma, and every popular douchebag at a frag party has an iPad or iPhone.
Not really. If an Apple laptop or iMac had to put up with the thermal and material wear issues resulting from malware that your common $400 Dell does on a daily basis, there'd likely be a number of wrongful death lawsuits. Yeah, the original iMacs and iBooks were bad, and they've improved a bit (ok, substantially) since then, but they're still liable to simply fail due to excessive heat (whereas a PC would have the fan kick up a notch, the Mac has none).
I had to read your post twice, because it made absolutely no sense to me. Then, I realized I understood you - I still don't think it makes sense.
No ads = less diverse content.
When I think of "sites with ads" I think of: sites like cracked.com, link aggregators, and facebook - sites with no content of value
There will be unintended consequences. If one person blocks ads then they're just a free-rider. If everyone does, the web will really suck.
Unsubstantiated claim. On what basis do you make it? The absence of twitter, facebook and the like is hardly a game-stopper.
Sure, some sweet folks will continue to post hobby sites, just as in the golden days of yore. And non-profits will publish. And big corporate sales and propaganda sites. And the Government and lobbyists. (BTW: They're all selling you something, aren't they?) But most of what makes the web diverse and useful and free today will die if advertising is eliminated.
Wait - I'm completely lost by these statements. Aren't these "will still be around" sites the actual content on the Internet - the stuff that brought us all here in the first place? By your Slashdot UUID it would seem you're likely old enough to remember the days of dialup and maybe even BBSes; surely "the web" isn't more functionally useful now to you than it was back then? Honestly: it was easier to find stuff back then because there was a lot less noise (at least now that google has insisted on making their search engine less functional than astavista).
There will still be sites like Debka and WND, which get most of their revenue through syndication and memberships - if that's what you'd miss. CNN, Fox News and the like would likely be cut down to size if the syndicated adverts were all gone, as well. Wikipedia, by far the most useful "modern" web source? No ads to speak of, so 'blocking' them isn't a matter.
But even if that happens, getting rid of "all ads" is unlikely to happen. Honestly: I hope it doesn't happen.
Let me explain. I'm really adverse to ads. They bother me on a 'ok, now my eyes are twitching and i need a cigarette' level. However, within specific contexts, I appreciate them. For instance, I went to the trouble of disabling ad blocking on a couple sites I frequent because:
1) the sites were small: either community or proprietor run, with strong communities 2) the ads were communally targeted (ie for the group/community interests) 3) the ads were specifically picked/allowed by the site proprietors/owners/managers 4) the ads weren't intrusive or excessive
If advertisers hadn't decided to nuke users from orbit for short-term monetary gain, the popularity (and capability) of ad blocking software would've never come to be. They dug their own grave: they're providing nothing useful to their customers at this point, and need to re-think their business. (This goes for Google as well. Their ad noise is worse now than AltaVista was when I decided to stop using them.)
Half the problem is that the 'higher education' 4-year-degree has two years of uselessness at the front-end: generals, followed by entry-level IT/CS courses that anyone getting into the field should probably at least have a basic grasp on, already.
The best way, IMO, to get 'schooled' in IT would probably be a year and off, alternating, for 5 years. You decide to do IT, so you go to a year of intensive generals - tutalage on the OSI model, 1-2 different kinds of programming languages (eg. C/C++ for the 'fundamentals' with a higher-level, "we like to use objects" language), and the hardware basics that everyone can use (hex/binary, how machines interpret code, different hw subsystems, and so on). Hopefully you pick up some of the basics of things like OS design and the like, as well (shouldn't be too hard, if you've got the proclivity). (Then again, maybe I'm just biased due to it being somewhat 'natural' and being quite entrenched).
Year 2: Good: now you've got your teeth wet, and have a pretty good idea how damn hard your life will be in IT. Hopefully, it was intensive enough to make about half the students drop out. Time to try to apply it. You work a year doing basic lowly "technician" duty. Hardware/software breakfix shit: you make a little money, but are overseen by an instructor who critiques your work, makes recommendations, and so on.
Year 3: Back to the grind. Now you get to learn some fun things, like systems design, resource contention, network/systems administration, proper documentation, project management, change control, and all the best practices that make IT work difficult and misunderstood. (I'm approaching this from a sysadmin perspective, because that's what I know; I'm sure there'd be another side for programmers.) CPU design, storage architectures, and so on would all get covered, obviously.
Year 4: more of the same, but half way through, (after a lengthy and exceptional 1-month break) you've got to actually apply the disciplines from year 3. Your schedule gets drawn out, and you're doing 'more of the same' while having to implement and maintain systems. (VT makes this awesomely simple and inexpensive, whereas in previous years it'd have been obscenely pricey.)
Year 5: time to apply it, all together now. You're supervising/managing projects staffed by year-2s under the overwatch of your 'professors'.
Everything changes so damn quickly in IT, a year is about as much time as you can pragmatically do anything in the field without growing 'soft'.
In my mind's eye, a 'year two' graduate would be the rough equivalent of current "2 year IT degree" type things. i'd much rather hire one such student than th crop of "this is how we administer windows; click.../write a vb.net app" schooling.
Such a regimen would at least increase the likelihood that the graduates would be competent and skillful. Having gone to a high school that was obscenely aggressive in its academia, I think this approach can turn a mediocre person into an overly competent one.
The problem is that IT staffing (and equipment) expenses aren't like other expenses - like electricity - though the absence of proper IT can have just as much impact as the lack of electricity upon an organization. The difference is: when power goes out, business stops. IT systems may not go out for years after being properly maintained, but when they do, it's going to take substantially longer to get them back up and running to a point where the business can conduct itself.
Let's say a company sees significant growth and deploys 50 new servers one year (on top of an existing 10) with disparate functionality, with a staff of 5 (4 of which they hire new). The following New Year, they decide 5 people is too many to maintain the 50 + 10 systems. They lay off 3, including the one who was there previously and making 50% more than the others. Things (appear to) continue to work properly.
What they don't realize is that they just shot themselves in the foot. Let's say it took the better part of the year to get that new equipment and systems up to production status. In all likelihood, little documentation took place at that time, and there was probably quite a lot of "just get it done now, worry about the details later" with half-complete configurations (eg. infrastructure wasn't fully brought up to speed to accommodate the new systems - that was slated for the next year, as the systems demand grew with its adoption).
Things start to perform poorly as the year goes on, and the two guys left start to fall behind the basics - patches, updates, monitoring - as fire control starts taking up the lion's share of their time.
Flash forward another year. The 'new hardware' is two years old, and the two guys left have been long tasked on 'new projects'. Maybe one of them quits/looks for a different job (and is replaced) because he refuses to keep doing things improperly. The idea of maintenance has long been forgotten. Suddenly, systems start having some severe 'fire control' issues: components start to fail, performance is suffering due to increased usage, and so on. Business utility starts to suffer.
The business is faced with several non-exclusive options:
* large expenses to upgrade (including staff) * hire additional (ie more than the original 5) employees to help bring the systems back up to a working state * hire expensive consultants to come in and figure out what's wrong * start over from scratch
In all cases, anyone coming in is going to have an obscene learning curve due to the original environment being undocumented and unmaintained, often with kludged fixes.
Had they kept the original staff of 5, things would be operating better. Sure, there might be problems, but they'd know the systems (and the systems would likely be better maintained and documented). Instead of massive costs every several years, they'd be able to spread it out over the years, face problems proactively, and get it done right.
I will grant that this isn't 100% plausible given the numbers, but I've seen this time in and time out. Hopefully you can understand what I mean.
I agree to a certain extent. The 'old university' approach isn't necessarily bad, it's just how business has latched onto it and expects the moon. They're still operating in a pre-2000 mentality, to a large degree: "someone with an IT/CS degree must be a computer genius".
Honestly, I'd like to see IT take the following approaches (in abstract): * A two year degree gets you a technician job * A four year degree gets you an junior engineer/administrator apprentice * A two year degree with 2-3 years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree (in terms of experience) * Six years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree
And so on. The problem arises where companies expect to hire someone with a 4-year degree and 4+ years of experience for trade school graduate rates (eg. 2 years school + 2 years of experience).
Here's the problem. While an IT/CS degree is not a pedigree of competence, it does indicate that the person is able to teach themselves (to some limited degree) - something a high school or trade school diploma usually does not indicate. It gives them a broader brush with which to paint, and is an indicating factor as to the person's drive and ability to perform the job at hand.
Sure, someone without a degree can do the job, probably. But it's much more of a crap shoot.
The difference between aerospace and IT is that a competent IT person is more than able to hone up on their experience prior to graduation: building clusters, writing programs, debugging, administering their own equipment, and reading. Most of IT is reading (and applying as you go, based on experience). There's nothing to stop someone from honing up their IT skills and experience prior to becoming a 'graduate'. (In fact, due to the nature of the career, I'd personally not hire someone who hasn't - though I'd also expect the wages to be commensurate.)
That said, companies expect to pay the same amount for a 'someone who did the coursework' graduate as they do for 'someone who worked in IT while in college' graduate or a 'has prior experience' graduate. Hell, they'll try to shank someone with 5+ years of experience with graduate wages, if they can - I've seen it time and again.
Yet, companies want to pay graduate prices (at best) for people with 5+ years of experience. Not only do they want experience, they want experience in the exact same technologies they're using - everything is extraneous. They may even be perfectly experienced in the desired skills and not be considered a 'good candidate' because they've got a degree in something tangential/unrelated, or have a couple years of experience doing something not quite the same.
The simple fact is, IT folks are considered an unwanted expense 9 times out of 10. (Thus the rise of MSPs and contractors continues - companies would rather pay by the hour or for a quantifiable checklist - even if they don't check it - than hire someone to do the same job.)
It comes down to companies not knowing shit about IT. Maybe it's our fault for pushing these 'wonder technologies' over the years, giving the illusion of 'it just works', or maybe it's vendors selling the latest-greatest wiz-bang with false pretenses, but the end result hurts everyone (companies included).
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There is a lot of wasted spending. No one needs 500+ channels of satellite television, costing $150/mo or more. A family does not need two brand new cars, paying $300+ for each note or monthly lease payment, when they could have slightly used vehicles for far less. Even buying an efficient hybrid car is actually less economically feasible.
How is that wasted spending?
Someone has to produce the material (and ads) for those channels. That puts people to work.
Automobiles? If people don't buy new vehicles, used ones do not enter the market. It costs far more, long-term, to rebuild ailing vehicles than it does to buy something slightly newer, at a certain point. (The Prius will be the exception to this rule, likely having little/no 'used value' after about 8 years/80k miles.)
If all those people with "wasted spending" habbits stopped spending for such luxuries, imagine the tax burden they'd have due to the many unemployed advertising specialists, TV producers, automotive manufactuer workers, etc. being out of work and on the dole.
These are just a couple of examples where people could cut out or significantly reduce their spending.
As someone who's done the single-income household on a professional salary, let me just say that it's pretty lean pickings. You simply can't afford all those luxuries if you've got even one child, you will drive a used vehicle, and you will likely not be able to afford a house at all (without first time homebuyer credit and rates, of course).
I'm not saying the excessive entertainment and vehicle expenditure is "good" by any means, but I'd hardly consider it the reason why a single-income earner can't do what they used to do. Just look at the recession of the 1980s: a single-income earner household was much more able to raise a family than they are today, if only due to the increases in the cost of food (as a ratio of income to expense). Then consider fuel costs (household heating, electricity, vehicle), and it's straight out the door without even considering things like insurance/healthcare or housing (which, thankfully, isn't nearly as drastic as the others).
In contrast, the "work less, make the same amount" ideal was a socialist/hippie utopian dream.
Believe it or not, most people like to be productive out of self-interest. If you see the guy next to you only working half the time, you're going to work the whole time if you want to improve your lot in life. That's the problem: nobody wants to live where they're at, they want to live in the next bracket up. It has nothing to do with "puritan ethic".
In the same sense, if I as an employer see someone working half the time, I'm going to can him and fire someone who's going to work all the time for the same amount. Why? It improves my division/company/whatever bottom line, which in turn improves my own bottom line/earning potential.
Believe it or not, there are quite a few Muslims and Buddhists who have the same "Puritanical Work Ethic" you describe in an unfavorable (ignorant) light - in India, Pakistan, etc.
I also think as a society it’s time to move away from the 5+ day work week. We have enough technology now that there is no reason for the majority of the population to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working.
That's a great idea! That means employers can pay 20% less (not like they're not already trying to, to cut the bottom line expenses). Way things are now, people are working 50+ hour weeks simply to "keep their jobs". I think that's the wrong approach (particularly when thinking is required), but it's the way it is. That's not going to change any time soon: inflation will continue to eat at our very essence, just as it ate away at the 2-earner-income households.
(Part of the problem there is that companies don't save for rainy days, either. They're just meeting last month's expenses, for the most part.)
Things are quite different now than they were 50 years ago. My grandparents raised 5 children on a two-earner income (as a teacher and diesel mechanic), built their own very large 3-story lake-side house on 8 acres (in NJ), and had enough cash during retirement to help out their children buy houses (after sending them all to expensive 'pedigree' universities, at that). To boot, the teacher's income was almost completely 'gravy'. Contrast that to me and mine at the same point in our lives - 2 kids, smaller house made in the 60s, two incomes from two technical BS degreed earners (nurse and engineer), in a location where the cost of living is significantly lower. To reach the level of affluence they had, we'd both have to be making roughly 2-3 times what we are now.
So does my mom, but as far as I know, there's really only been one guy working on her.
As a long-time Debian user (13 odd years now, I think) and someone who has been using Ubuntu since early 2008 on the desktop, I've proposed a different approach for a distro that is somewhere between Debian and Ubuntu.
For those who remember: something more akin to Stormix Linux or Progeny Debian in principle and action, but still somewhat different (in the following fashion).
Instead of having a 'distribution' you would have distribution tiers. Debian excels and appeals to many for a number of reasons which Ubuntu almost completely lacks; namely:
* The ability to maintain consistency across releases
* Keeping things at the "system" level as similar between releases as possible, despite the significant kernel/library/infrastructure changes taking place
* Stability and completeness
* dpkg/apt/aptitude
However, it falls short in a number of places where Ubuntu succeeds (and has made it wildly popular):
* End-user experience/polish
* Near features where people/end users want them
* Accessibility/ease of installation
* Inclusion of all the necessary/desired drivers/packages to get pretty much any system up and running easily (eg. nvidia binary drivers)
Of course, Ubuntu has largely broken a lot of the things which make Debian appealing (eg. the inclusion of upstart/replacement of the old linear init), which burns people like me.
Debian is much more the 'traditional' distro: we're just packaging things, not making decisions for you.
As mentioned earlier, the distros like Progeny Debian and Stormix Linux back in the dotcom era illustrated basically what made Debian great: you could take a stable, well designed base distribution and drop your "integration", installer, and the like on top of it to provide a very polished product.
Finally: here is what I would like to see. Instead of a massive "debian" distribution, I would like to see Debian broken down into further flavors, if you will. Debian would, in essence, be a base: everything you get with a base install of Debian would be "Debian" (or, alternatively, a subset thereof) - akin to how NanoBSD is a base for a number of other projects. This would be a stable base which would be updated independently (or at least, as a prerequisite to) everything built on top of it. Ubuntu 12 could use Debian 7 as a base; you'd get your consistency. Arch (or whatever) could do the same. You update your packages independently from the "OS", the packages of which do not need regular updating anyway.
Speaking personally, if it weren't for the headache of doing so, I'd still be doing the "install Debian, X, and a couple other staples and then build my own awesome/KDE/thunderbird/firefox/chromium/whatever" approach. I want a core set of 'stable' things I can run the latest software on (sort of how Windows has done things all these years). I don't want to have to upgrade the whole damn system just to get a newer version of a package (particularly when there's nothing 'wrong' with the rest of the software): that just means I'm going to have to deal with a whole new, different set of small bugs that were introduced. (Case in point: Ubuntu 9.10 had a bug in something that caused clusterssh to not work for months; that wasn't something I could easily regress from, because it was a fresh install; my options were to go back to 9.04, 8.10, or try something else. Not cool.) I should not be 'stuck' like this, short of building it and its requisites from source pulled from a CVS repository! I used to build + patch my own kernels, and do a myriad of things like this "just because". It was fun and I learned a lot, but for goodness sake, I shouldn't have to do those things to get a semblance of stability in my basic tools.
Like anything, it's something that requires time to complete (else I'd have done it myself, of course).
Well, the presumption here is that the "Catholic" empire/way of operation is the "evil empire" and is the ultimate point of constriction.
I guess the OP and author have never heard of Islam.
Once Apple has a sufficient market dominance they will begin to lock things down to the exclusion of all others. They've started doing that already, to some degree, but the move will increase its tenacity. You'll see more forward integration between their devices, and less support for interoperability. (Basically, what MS tried to do years ago.)
That's not support. That's murmuring in a crowd, thousands of miles away: completely useless.
"Support" is:
* arms
* food
* money
* feet on the ground
* official recognition
Anything other than at least two of those and you may as well not even bother.
Maybe democracy, having hitched its fortunes to marketism and failed to deliver on its promises, has simply lost its lustre for westerners?
Maybe we, as Americans, are simply tired of going to fight wars on the behalf of others' freedoms - particularly on account of the current state of our rapidly eroding freedoms and continued/increased disdain from the Very Elect towards We The People? At this point, we've realized that the world as a whole is fairly unappreciative of assistance in such regard, even if it's impossible otherwise. Not every international relationship can be like that of the US and France.
Western Europe lost the plot some time ago.
There are no controls which can be instigated to prevent for one or more disks failing after being rebooted after 3+ years of uptime, regardless of the batch or binning of the disks in question. It can happen.
Realistically, frequent (once a month or so?) reboots are actually a part of this control process. It assures that upgrades to the kernel get applied, and any service configuration changes made will, barring someone's forgetfulness, still be applied.
God forbid, there is a catastrophic power failure (eg. a hurricane or week-long storm, maybe), and all your servers go down. Frequent reboots (again, probably no more than monthly) will assure that the machines are at least relatively unlikely to suffer hardware failures on coming back alive, and that any system configuration changes made prior to the reboot (but without the necessary service HUP) will, in all likelihood, be applied properly.
Please don't presume your OS is so secure and awesome that it does not need these reboots. You are wrong.
What's funny is that 'block ICMP' is the default (IIRC) on Windows firewalls. This is an agitation beyond belief, and it is therefore disabled promptly by anyone with competence.
Quick question: what is the single most useful and universally used network diagnostic tool in your arsenal, regardless of operating system?
ICMP ping. It is (or should be) the one fucking universal on your network (for a damn good reason). Without it, you're stuck trying to figure out which hosts are where (let's look at ARP!), or trying to figure out which other service you can query to determine if the host has died. (Sure, good documentation, consistency, and proper infrastructure will get you around this, but when do the pedantic tools who implement such Jurassic thinking bother with any of that fluff when it's all in their head? Who cares about the next guy who comes along...)
(Don't even get me started about conditional access restrictions within the same VLAN/subnet, often spanning multiple subnets/VLANs. What. The. Fuck.)
Who the fuck would block ICMP? Oh, that's right: someone who doesn't troubleshoot or fix things, just goes on with their precognitive concepts of 'security'. We use to give people like this jobs as night security guards, janitors, and what have you: they're pedantic and small minded, and get in the way of everyone else when allowed out of their cages.
(That felt good, too.)
I know that many vendors (used to?) who layered their shit on top of AIX and SCO (for instance) would recommend this. I've come across quite a few of said boxes which will reboot themselves after a nightly image + data backup script completes.
Nightly is a big excessive, IMO, but I see nothing wrong with a scheduled weekly or monthly reboot. Nightly/daily, and you run the risk of too many power cycles on your disks. Weekly or monthly, that's not such a problem (even with 5+ years of service, that's not so many). By scheduling your reboots you can hedge your bet slightly and catch hardware failures in the act.
There comes a point where it makes sense to replace a system (OS) or rebuild it. Yes, Windows admins jump on that bandwagon more often - but more often than not, it's more appropriate there than elsewhere, too.
Depending on what the cause is, and the system in question, it makes sense. An early FreeBSD 5 machine with no documentation, highly customized ports, many running services, and so on is likely better to piecemeal out to different machines ('rebuild' it) than it is to disrupt service as you figure out how to get the thing upgraded. Improperly removed programs or registry corruption/errors in Windows often means the same thing.
Ultimately, what it comes down to, is time. How long would a rebuild take, and how much downtime is being accrued from ghosts in the machine? How much is that time worth? It may take a day or two to do a rebuild, but even determining the cause of a peculiar problem can take several or more. By eliminating the software idiosyncrasies of the existing install (and often getting things to the most recent patch version in the process) you've eliminated one possible cause as to the problem: either it works now, or it was hardware/firmware/a driver/etc. that's causing the problem.
Sure, wanton reinstalls aren't a good fix. However, they're often a cost-saving measure, and in many applications, appropriate. The hardware and software on most machines is not worth the time invested to "do it the old Unix way".
Your reading comprehension is almost as lacking as your personality. You're like a harpy girlfriend who bitches about little things you did, which you never actually did.
They're relatively easy to overheat and crash/burn. Just because the fan sounds like a jet engine does not mean that it's doing a sufficient job cooling.
Considering that the Linux and Windows machines are usually substantially more awesome (in terms of "component for component capabilities") than you can even get in a Mac (despite the quoted price tag), that's doubtful.
Slight difference between the 'then' and 'now', too:
* It's always been "cool" to exploit Windows (just as it was cool to exploit old school Unix, before that) and "the man"
* Being obscure makes it more interesting.
* There was a lot more obscure stuff traveling BBSes back then than there is on the odd back-channel on the Internet, simply due to higher signal to noise ratio. Back then, if you were online you were probably either doing that kind of thing yourself or knew a couple people who did.
* Using a mac has, for the better part of a decade, been the mark of a toolbag. Developing on one is embarrassing: there's nothing "cool", in a geeky sense, about them.
Unfortunately for Apple, they're earning the "The Man" stigma, and every popular douchebag at a frag party has an iPad or iPhone.
Not really. If an Apple laptop or iMac had to put up with the thermal and material wear issues resulting from malware that your common $400 Dell does on a daily basis, there'd likely be a number of wrongful death lawsuits. Yeah, the original iMacs and iBooks were bad, and they've improved a bit (ok, substantially) since then, but they're still liable to simply fail due to excessive heat (whereas a PC would have the fan kick up a notch, the Mac has none).
I had to read your post twice, because it made absolutely no sense to me. Then, I realized I understood you - I still don't think it makes sense.
No ads = less diverse content.
When I think of "sites with ads" I think of: sites like cracked.com, link aggregators, and facebook - sites with no content of value
There will be unintended consequences. If one person blocks ads then they're just a free-rider. If everyone does, the web will really suck.
Unsubstantiated claim. On what basis do you make it? The absence of twitter, facebook and the like is hardly a game-stopper.
Sure, some sweet folks will continue to post hobby sites, just as in the golden days of yore. And non-profits will publish. And big corporate sales and propaganda sites. And the Government and lobbyists. (BTW: They're all selling you something, aren't they?) But most of what makes the web diverse and useful and free today will die if advertising is eliminated.
Wait - I'm completely lost by these statements. Aren't these "will still be around" sites the actual content on the Internet - the stuff that brought us all here in the first place? By your Slashdot UUID it would seem you're likely old enough to remember the days of dialup and maybe even BBSes; surely "the web" isn't more functionally useful now to you than it was back then? Honestly: it was easier to find stuff back then because there was a lot less noise (at least now that google has insisted on making their search engine less functional than astavista).
There will still be sites like Debka and WND, which get most of their revenue through syndication and memberships - if that's what you'd miss. CNN, Fox News and the like would likely be cut down to size if the syndicated adverts were all gone, as well. Wikipedia, by far the most useful "modern" web source? No ads to speak of, so 'blocking' them isn't a matter.
But even if that happens, getting rid of "all ads" is unlikely to happen. Honestly: I hope it doesn't happen.
Let me explain. I'm really adverse to ads. They bother me on a 'ok, now my eyes are twitching and i need a cigarette' level. However, within specific contexts, I appreciate them. For instance, I went to the trouble of disabling ad blocking on a couple sites I frequent because:
1) the sites were small: either community or proprietor run, with strong communities
2) the ads were communally targeted (ie for the group/community interests)
3) the ads were specifically picked/allowed by the site proprietors/owners/managers
4) the ads weren't intrusive or excessive
If advertisers hadn't decided to nuke users from orbit for short-term monetary gain, the popularity (and capability) of ad blocking software would've never come to be. They dug their own grave: they're providing nothing useful to their customers at this point, and need to re-think their business. (This goes for Google as well. Their ad noise is worse now than AltaVista was when I decided to stop using them.)
Half the problem is that the 'higher education' 4-year-degree has two years of uselessness at the front-end: generals, followed by entry-level IT/CS courses that anyone getting into the field should probably at least have a basic grasp on, already.
The best way, IMO, to get 'schooled' in IT would probably be a year and off, alternating, for 5 years. You decide to do IT, so you go to a year of intensive generals - tutalage on the OSI model, 1-2 different kinds of programming languages (eg. C/C++ for the 'fundamentals' with a higher-level, "we like to use objects" language), and the hardware basics that everyone can use (hex/binary, how machines interpret code, different hw subsystems, and so on). Hopefully you pick up some of the basics of things like OS design and the like, as well (shouldn't be too hard, if you've got the proclivity). (Then again, maybe I'm just biased due to it being somewhat 'natural' and being quite entrenched).
Year 2: Good: now you've got your teeth wet, and have a pretty good idea how damn hard your life will be in IT. Hopefully, it was intensive enough to make about half the students drop out. Time to try to apply it. You work a year doing basic lowly "technician" duty. Hardware/software breakfix shit: you make a little money, but are overseen by an instructor who critiques your work, makes recommendations, and so on.
Year 3: Back to the grind. Now you get to learn some fun things, like systems design, resource contention, network/systems administration, proper documentation, project management, change control, and all the best practices that make IT work difficult and misunderstood. (I'm approaching this from a sysadmin perspective, because that's what I know; I'm sure there'd be another side for programmers.) CPU design, storage architectures, and so on would all get covered, obviously.
Year 4: more of the same, but half way through, (after a lengthy and exceptional 1-month break) you've got to actually apply the disciplines from year 3. Your schedule gets drawn out, and you're doing 'more of the same' while having to implement and maintain systems. (VT makes this awesomely simple and inexpensive, whereas in previous years it'd have been obscenely pricey.)
Year 5: time to apply it, all together now. You're supervising/managing projects staffed by year-2s under the overwatch of your 'professors'.
Everything changes so damn quickly in IT, a year is about as much time as you can pragmatically do anything in the field without growing 'soft'.
In my mind's eye, a 'year two' graduate would be the rough equivalent of current "2 year IT degree" type things. i'd much rather hire one such student than th crop of "this is how we administer windows; click.../write a vb.net app" schooling.
Such a regimen would at least increase the likelihood that the graduates would be competent and skillful. Having gone to a high school that was obscenely aggressive in its academia, I think this approach can turn a mediocre person into an overly competent one.
The problem is that IT staffing (and equipment) expenses aren't like other expenses - like electricity - though the absence of proper IT can have just as much impact as the lack of electricity upon an organization. The difference is: when power goes out, business stops. IT systems may not go out for years after being properly maintained, but when they do, it's going to take substantially longer to get them back up and running to a point where the business can conduct itself.
Let's say a company sees significant growth and deploys 50 new servers one year (on top of an existing 10) with disparate functionality, with a staff of 5 (4 of which they hire new). The following New Year, they decide 5 people is too many to maintain the 50 + 10 systems. They lay off 3, including the one who was there previously and making 50% more than the others. Things (appear to) continue to work properly.
What they don't realize is that they just shot themselves in the foot. Let's say it took the better part of the year to get that new equipment and systems up to production status. In all likelihood, little documentation took place at that time, and there was probably quite a lot of "just get it done now, worry about the details later" with half-complete configurations (eg. infrastructure wasn't fully brought up to speed to accommodate the new systems - that was slated for the next year, as the systems demand grew with its adoption).
Things start to perform poorly as the year goes on, and the two guys left start to fall behind the basics - patches, updates, monitoring - as fire control starts taking up the lion's share of their time.
Flash forward another year. The 'new hardware' is two years old, and the two guys left have been long tasked on 'new projects'. Maybe one of them quits/looks for a different job (and is replaced) because he refuses to keep doing things improperly. The idea of maintenance has long been forgotten. Suddenly, systems start having some severe 'fire control' issues: components start to fail, performance is suffering due to increased usage, and so on. Business utility starts to suffer.
The business is faced with several non-exclusive options:
* large expenses to upgrade (including staff)
* hire additional (ie more than the original 5) employees to help bring the systems back up to a working state
* hire expensive consultants to come in and figure out what's wrong
* start over from scratch
In all cases, anyone coming in is going to have an obscene learning curve due to the original environment being undocumented and unmaintained, often with kludged fixes.
Had they kept the original staff of 5, things would be operating better. Sure, there might be problems, but they'd know the systems (and the systems would likely be better maintained and documented). Instead of massive costs every several years, they'd be able to spread it out over the years, face problems proactively, and get it done right.
I will grant that this isn't 100% plausible given the numbers, but I've seen this time in and time out. Hopefully you can understand what I mean.
I agree to a certain extent. The 'old university' approach isn't necessarily bad, it's just how business has latched onto it and expects the moon. They're still operating in a pre-2000 mentality, to a large degree: "someone with an IT/CS degree must be a computer genius".
Honestly, I'd like to see IT take the following approaches (in abstract):
* A two year degree gets you a technician job
* A four year degree gets you an junior engineer/administrator apprentice
* A two year degree with 2-3 years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree (in terms of experience)
* Six years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree
And so on. The problem arises where companies expect to hire someone with a 4-year degree and 4+ years of experience for trade school graduate rates (eg. 2 years school + 2 years of experience).
Here's the problem. While an IT/CS degree is not a pedigree of competence, it does indicate that the person is able to teach themselves (to some limited degree) - something a high school or trade school diploma usually does not indicate. It gives them a broader brush with which to paint, and is an indicating factor as to the person's drive and ability to perform the job at hand.
Sure, someone without a degree can do the job, probably. But it's much more of a crap shoot.
The difference between aerospace and IT is that a competent IT person is more than able to hone up on their experience prior to graduation: building clusters, writing programs, debugging, administering their own equipment, and reading. Most of IT is reading (and applying as you go, based on experience). There's nothing to stop someone from honing up their IT skills and experience prior to becoming a 'graduate'. (In fact, due to the nature of the career, I'd personally not hire someone who hasn't - though I'd also expect the wages to be commensurate.)
That said, companies expect to pay the same amount for a 'someone who did the coursework' graduate as they do for 'someone who worked in IT while in college' graduate or a 'has prior experience' graduate. Hell, they'll try to shank someone with 5+ years of experience with graduate wages, if they can - I've seen it time and again.
Yet, companies want to pay graduate prices (at best) for people with 5+ years of experience. Not only do they want experience, they want experience in the exact same technologies they're using - everything is extraneous. They may even be perfectly experienced in the desired skills and not be considered a 'good candidate' because they've got a degree in something tangential/unrelated, or have a couple years of experience doing something not quite the same.
The simple fact is, IT folks are considered an unwanted expense 9 times out of 10. (Thus the rise of MSPs and contractors continues - companies would rather pay by the hour or for a quantifiable checklist - even if they don't check it - than hire someone to do the same job.)
It comes down to companies not knowing shit about IT. Maybe it's our fault for pushing these 'wonder technologies' over the years, giving the illusion of 'it just works', or maybe it's vendors selling the latest-greatest wiz-bang with false pretenses, but the end result hurts everyone (companies included).
Best. Comment. Ever. That's going on my door at work - thanks.