Heh, floppies for backup. I remember those days. And I always managed to get my work back too. I think the quality decline is part of the reasons floppies are dying. No sane person who knows much about computers would really depend on a floppy now days.
But some people just have no clue about how bad floppies are. I know one place that backs up a critcle database on an e-machines server, to the same floppy every day (which sits on top of the computer in a dusty enviornment BTW). I mean that entire situation is a disaster waiting to happen, but you even hint that they should use a different floppy every now and then, or at least move it across the room and they just ignore you. I really wonder how floppies got such a reputation to warrent that ammount of trust. I mean even when they WERE dependable, you still had to be careful with them.
How about using the apple key + M which minimizes every other app, but launches mail in Firefox. At least twice a day I get caught with this. I think it even says it will minimize the window, but still launches the mail app. Rather fustrating. =/
That's the thing that's missing in the arguments for outsourcing here - the product. Jobs for linen go over seas, then they make cheap junk and sell it here cheaper due to far lower costs. In theory the American consumer wins, although once you take the huge executive salaries out of the picture, it's sort of a wash between lost jobs and savings if you ask me.
Now take software. Company spends $x ammount of dollars to develop their product, which they will sell for $y. The ammount of money $x is basically static. The ammount of $y is just a calculation of sales. So now that they reduce the cost of $x the cost of $y goes down in theory. But the simple fact is that the price of software is NOT going down. Seriously, show me software that has been made signifcantly cheaper by outsourcing. I have yet to see ANY. So if these companies are making so much more money since they just reduce their cost and still bend over the consumer, where is all that money going? The money trail isn't that hard to follow, and yet again the little guy is getting screwed by our corperate overlords.
I used to think so, then I hit the real world - where everyone seems scared shitless that patches are going to break their "system". Where I work we must have about 6 to 7 of the aforesaid systems, which involve many more computers. I sometimes wonder if this is just where I work, but I tend to find this in most other places I've seen as well.
I've seen enough bad patches/upgrades to wonder if they might be right.
Re:Upgrading from 5.2.1 to 5.3-BETA1 a little bump
on
FreeBSD 5.3 Beta1
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
why does the handbook tell you to run mergemaster -p after buildworld? I thought mergemaster was supposed to prepare your system for installworld, and that buildworld was just for compiling the system (not installing it).
I used to be intimidated by installing freebsd by source, but after having gone through the buildworld process, I find it's really easy to keep freebsd updated. Just cvsup one server and rsync the rest. While I've always done installs and upgrades by CD, I think I'll be doing 5.3 from source. Then again if I'm going to have issues, maybe I'll stick to CD's anyway.
The 50 other buttons I'll agree with, but I'd feel a bit lost without the "windows key". It's the only key that has pretty much no default use in Linux. As such it's a conviniently placed key that I am in control to bind to whatever I want. In windows you have a couple nice shortcuts like Win+F for find, and Win+E for explore. In KDE I can bind the Win key to anything I want, and that gives me a huge ammount of power to map things without worring about clashes with application shortcuts, or attempting E-macs keyboard kung fu.
I don't want to hop on the bandwagon here and start bashing microsoft, but when I looked at this, all I can think about is "upgrade disaster". Right now I can update users one at a time and if one persons computer doesn't take it so well, everyone else is still okay. That's the whole server side vs client side debate. The problem is going to be that Office is just too heavy to really do all server side, so what you are probably looking at is a heavy client, like MS Outlook is to MS Exchange. So now you are talking problems with office installs, and server problems, as well as the usual fun debugging that comes with trouble shooting closed apps talking with a closed protocol.
Right now I'm looking at a bad situation with Great Plains that runs on NT4, needs named pipes in order to work, from which clients connect using windows 98. Windows 98 is unfortunatly required, because there are some criticle DOS applications which simply do not run under 2000 or XP. So then the word comes down from MS: Great Plains now requires Win2k on clients and servers - and unfortunatly when you run HR related junk on such a system, you MUST upgrade to stay current with government stuff. The fun never stops on the upgrade roller coaster.
Overall I don't think it's a bad idea, I just see "more trouble than it's worth to the customer" comming from Microsoft.
Google's adsense technology works because the content is more relavent, and targets people who are already interested in that subject. I search for coke, then coke has some relavence to me. Watching Super Survivor Championship Edition Turbo has nothing to do with a coke, and thus has no relavence towards me. If anything you'll just alienate more people, and desensitize the rest.
Which brings me to another point, is that google's adds work because they are not obnoxious. I can seriously say I do not remember a SINGLE banner ad I've seen on Yahoo. On google I am not pressured to look at them, I know they relate to what I am looking for, and it's not as easy to mentally block out boxes of text when you are usually LOOKING at boxes of text.
Google ad sense can work in various places, but it really does have to be sensable. I'd think that if you inject it into a medium like TV you've just turned it into a different form of billboard - and I think google has something that works much better than any sort of billboard.
I'm not sure what distro or version of KDE you've seen, but on my menus KDE puts the description in there for me for each thing.
On my menu
Instant Messenger (kompete) Music Player (juk)
If you use Kappfinder to add applications, it often adds the descriptions for NON KDE apps as well. It's a nice feature for people who are new, and easily turned off if you don't like it. Hard to beat that.
Well maybe they want to waste money being a government body and all? You know what's really sad about this was a proposed Hybrid solution was rejected. You know, like Linux isn't perfect, and Microsoft isn't perfect, so you use whatever makes sense? Personally I like Linux, but don't advocate it's use in every situation. It just doesn't make sense on desktops in a lot of places, but does a good job on servers. Hell, just switching to Open Office would be a great start in most places to save ass loads of money.
So I guess that's probably my issue with all of this. Each "study" takes the black and white approach. You do all Linux, or you do all MS... never seems to be much about stuff like running MS software off of a postgres database and the like.
And I don't know if Munich will have a lower TCO or not. But they'll probably give less money to MS and spend more money on their own staff, so that's a win in it's own right.
Well if SHA-1 has collisions, then that doesn't leave much in the place of strait hashing algorithms. But, you can pretty much use any encryption algorithm for simple passwords. Just encrypt a password using itself as they key. I may be mistaken, but I believe this is what is done if you choose to use Blowfish for password encryption on FreeBSD (I'm guessing Linux supports this as well). So it's probably just as likely that you could use something like 256bit AES (if you trust such a new algorithm) to secure passwords.
As for checksums... well I really don't care so much. MD5 will probably work just fine for that purpose.
I'd say that copyright protections do hamper casual copying of games, for those individuals who WOULD copy it but aren't technical to figure out workarounds by themselves. But lets face it, Gentoo users are more than technical enough to pirate anything if they really want to.
It's not totally ineffective, but in this case it's like... well I don't think I even have a good analogy. Like putting a goat in with a pack of wolves, then telling the wolves to act like sheep?
I wouldn't be so sure that they're not making money off of it. Personally, I bought an nvidia card because of the Linux/BSD support (whee, big deal right?) I also make the purchasing decisions where I work (we build our own machines). I always try to make sure that our machines aren't tied to any OS be it by software OR hardware. Yeah, we use windows now, but if we switch to Linux then I know the nvidia support will (hopefully still) be there. So nvidia is the default choice. That's 50 machines and counting.
In a similar way I was looking for a SATA RAID card for my machine since I couldn't get the on board Promise junk to work. Now what card would I choose? It seems like the best support came from 3ware , and they make pretty good cards too. Now they have a loyal customer and I'll ALWAYS recommend them over the competition.
They might not make the money back on a 1 on 1 customer basis, but I think that they're making quite a bit of it back in mind share of tech people. I'm not significant by myself, but my range of influence between work, my friends, and various people reaches pretty far. At some point marketing glitz can only go so far. Proof of support for your products can make a bigger difference than marketing in some cases.
The Mac OSX firewall only works that way if you use the GUI. You can also directly access ipfw which gives you about as much control as you'd ever need from a firewall - well assuming your a power user that needs that power. The new XP firewall has GUI options to limit connections for certain ranges, so I'd probably put the XP firewall ahead of the OSX firewall for novices (assuming a novice knows how to limit an ip range).
Actually this finally fixes one major problem that I've had with the way windows networking works - you allow SMB from anywhere. The vast majority of situations you only need to talk to machines on your local subnet via SMB. It's not that hard to include the machines you only need. Generally the machines I'm in control of are behind a firewall anyway, but I'm a bit paranoid.
As a side note, the Laptops I admin run on IP's that are 172.16.xx.xx , when a laptop leaves they'll probably get a different IP via DHCP (usually 192.xx... or 10.xx.. ) if they hook up somewhere else, so this reduces the risks of them catching stuff via SMB.
Well my windows experience hasn't been that good. Just about every windows network I've seen has been slapped together backwards. Shit is totally installed wrong. And quite often people just barely got it working. As an aside I've also noticed that there are a lot of Windows programming shops that slap together some really crappy code with no error checking.
But of course Linux could just as easily be in the same position, but for some reason I have yet to see it. Maybe it's because I deal with smaller businesses that can't afford an uber admin, or may not no any better on who to hire?
I've had my share of problems on Linux as well, and at times they took WAY too long, but with that knowlege under my belt I was always able to easily fix similar problems much faster. The other problem with Linux is - which distro do you use. Half the time you chase down documentation that explains how distro X does it, but distro Y apperently does something different. With MS it always seems like a new mysterious - and sometimes totally random issue. Maybe I'm just unlucky, I donno =P
Because there are so many jobs available for Windows admins, more people who are not skilled are operating as Windows admins.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I'm the only IT guy where I work. We have Windows,Linux and some BSD here. I'll agree that it is easier to find compitent Linux people but why?
Part of it is because of the "MS Money train". You have to pay to get certified. Probably pay for books for useful documentation. Probably pay for windows just to mess with what they ALLOW you to mess with. Topple onto that the fact that in many aspects, Windows is just far too complex for it's own good.
I'm not all that smart, but I find I can learn problems with Linux and fix them. I can generally troubleshoot problems because of easily available free documentation, and giving you the TOOLS to troubleshoot. And Linux is just more comprehendable in how many parts interact. I'm not sure many of those Windows admins are all that stupid, it's just that it doesn't justify itself by spending years studying the guts of MS internals with a million books on the subject when 90% of the time you just point/click/drool anyway.
This is going to get sort of old after the third or forth time. It's like Friday the 13th movies for the next millennium. I think I'll start ignoring it long before "Napster takes Manhatten".
Does XP still require you have a floppy to load RAID drivers? I put a new set of hard drives in my machine and was sort of stuck when it was time to specify additional drivers since my computer doesn't have a floppy. Luckily I pulled one out of my Pentium 133 machine and got it to work. With Intel pushing the "no more floppy" stuff, I'm thinking that I might not be so lucky in 2 years to even have a floppy connector.
More like most people don't know how to mess with electronic voting, and therefore assume that it must be hard for others as well. Most people could probably think up a scheme to tamper with paper ballots off of the top of their head. It doesn't really take an expert on security and networking to understand how easy it can be to comprimise a system, it just takes a little understanding - which is often beyond the general public.
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Heh, floppies for backup. I remember those days. And I always managed to get my work back too. I think the quality decline is part of the reasons floppies are dying. No sane person who knows much about computers would really depend on a floppy now days.
But some people just have no clue about how bad floppies are. I know one place that backs up a critcle database on an e-machines server, to the same floppy every day (which sits on top of the computer in a dusty enviornment BTW). I mean that entire situation is a disaster waiting to happen, but you even hint that they should use a different floppy every now and then, or at least move it across the room and they just ignore you. I really wonder how floppies got such a reputation to warrent that ammount of trust. I mean even when they WERE dependable, you still had to be careful with them.
This means no Sender ID support for SpamAssassin, Apache JAMES, etc.
Funny, I thought Apache supported these things called modules that allowed you to extend Apache.
Just because it doesn't come from the Apache Foundation doesn't mean it wont happen.
How about using the apple key + M which minimizes every other app, but launches mail in Firefox. At least twice a day I get caught with this. I think it even says it will minimize the window, but still launches the mail app. Rather fustrating. =/
That's the thing that's missing in the arguments for outsourcing here - the product. Jobs for linen go over seas, then they make cheap junk and sell it here cheaper due to far lower costs. In theory the American consumer wins, although once you take the huge executive salaries out of the picture, it's sort of a wash between lost jobs and savings if you ask me.
Now take software. Company spends $x ammount of dollars to develop their product, which they will sell for $y. The ammount of money $x is basically static. The ammount of $y is just a calculation of sales. So now that they reduce the cost of $x the cost of $y goes down in theory. But the simple fact is that the price of software is NOT going down. Seriously, show me software that has been made signifcantly cheaper by outsourcing. I have yet to see ANY. So if these companies are making so much more money since they just reduce their cost and still bend over the consumer, where is all that money going? The money trail isn't that hard to follow, and yet again the little guy is getting screwed by our corperate overlords.
I used to think so, then I hit the real world - where everyone seems scared shitless that patches are going to break their "system". Where I work we must have about 6 to 7 of the aforesaid systems, which involve many more computers. I sometimes wonder if this is just where I work, but I tend to find this in most other places I've seen as well.
I've seen enough bad patches/upgrades to wonder if they might be right.
why does the handbook tell you to run mergemaster -p after buildworld? I thought mergemaster was supposed to prepare your system for installworld, and that buildworld was just for compiling the system (not installing it).
I used to be intimidated by installing freebsd by source, but after having gone through the buildworld process, I find it's really easy to keep freebsd updated. Just cvsup one server and rsync the rest. While I've always done installs and upgrades by CD, I think I'll be doing 5.3 from source. Then again if I'm going to have issues, maybe I'll stick to CD's anyway.
The 50 other buttons I'll agree with, but I'd feel a bit lost without the "windows key". It's the only key that has pretty much no default use in Linux. As such it's a conviniently placed key that I am in control to bind to whatever I want. In windows you have a couple nice shortcuts like Win+F for find, and Win+E for explore. In KDE I can bind the Win key to anything I want, and that gives me a huge ammount of power to map things without worring about clashes with application shortcuts, or attempting E-macs keyboard kung fu.
I don't want to hop on the bandwagon here and start bashing microsoft, but when I looked at this, all I can think about is "upgrade disaster". Right now I can update users one at a time and if one persons computer doesn't take it so well, everyone else is still okay. That's the whole server side vs client side debate. The problem is going to be that Office is just too heavy to really do all server side, so what you are probably looking at is a heavy client, like MS Outlook is to MS Exchange. So now you are talking problems with office installs, and server problems, as well as the usual fun debugging that comes with trouble shooting closed apps talking with a closed protocol.
Right now I'm looking at a bad situation with Great Plains that runs on NT4, needs named pipes in order to work, from which clients connect using windows 98. Windows 98 is unfortunatly required, because there are some criticle DOS applications which simply do not run under 2000 or XP. So then the word comes down from MS: Great Plains now requires Win2k on clients and servers - and unfortunatly when you run HR related junk on such a system, you MUST upgrade to stay current with government stuff. The fun never stops on the upgrade roller coaster.
Overall I don't think it's a bad idea, I just see "more trouble than it's worth to the customer" comming from Microsoft.
This could be one of the best flamebait posts ever. Includes:
Java is dead.
Java is like COBAL.
Perl forever.
I think this could make just about any Java programmer's head explode. Good job.
Google's adsense technology works because the content is more relavent, and targets people who are already interested in that subject. I search for coke, then coke has some relavence to me. Watching Super Survivor Championship Edition Turbo has nothing to do with a coke, and thus has no relavence towards me. If anything you'll just alienate more people, and desensitize the rest.
Which brings me to another point, is that google's adds work because they are not obnoxious. I can seriously say I do not remember a SINGLE banner ad I've seen on Yahoo. On google I am not pressured to look at them, I know they relate to what I am looking for, and it's not as easy to mentally block out boxes of text when you are usually LOOKING at boxes of text.
Google ad sense can work in various places, but it really does have to be sensable. I'd think that if you inject it into a medium like TV you've just turned it into a different form of billboard - and I think google has something that works much better than any sort of billboard.
I'm not sure what distro or version of KDE you've seen, but on my menus KDE puts the description in there for me for each thing.
On my menu
Instant Messenger (kompete)
Music Player (juk)
If you use Kappfinder to add applications, it often adds the descriptions for NON KDE apps as well. It's a nice feature for people who are new, and easily turned off if you don't like it. Hard to beat that.
Well maybe they want to waste money being a government body and all? You know what's really sad about this was a proposed Hybrid solution was rejected. You know, like Linux isn't perfect, and Microsoft isn't perfect, so you use whatever makes sense? Personally I like Linux, but don't advocate it's use in every situation. It just doesn't make sense on desktops in a lot of places, but does a good job on servers. Hell, just switching to Open Office would be a great start in most places to save ass loads of money.
So I guess that's probably my issue with all of this. Each "study" takes the black and white approach. You do all Linux, or you do all MS... never seems to be much about stuff like running MS software off of a postgres database and the like.
And I don't know if Munich will have a lower TCO or not. But they'll probably give less money to MS and spend more money on their own staff, so that's a win in it's own right.
Well if SHA-1 has collisions, then that doesn't leave much in the place of strait hashing algorithms. But, you can pretty much use any encryption algorithm for simple passwords. Just encrypt a password using itself as they key. I may be mistaken, but I believe this is what is done if you choose to use Blowfish for password encryption on FreeBSD (I'm guessing Linux supports this as well). So it's probably just as likely that you could use something like 256bit AES (if you trust such a new algorithm) to secure passwords.
As for checksums... well I really don't care so much. MD5 will probably work just fine for that purpose.
I'd say that copyright protections do hamper casual copying of games, for those individuals who WOULD copy it but aren't technical to figure out workarounds by themselves. But lets face it, Gentoo users are more than technical enough to pirate anything if they really want to.
... well I don't think I even have a good analogy. Like putting a goat in with a pack of wolves, then telling the wolves to act like sheep?
It's not totally ineffective, but in this case it's like
I wouldn't be so sure that they're not making money off of it. Personally, I bought an nvidia card because of the Linux/BSD support (whee, big deal right?) I also make the purchasing decisions where I work (we build our own machines). I always try to make sure that our machines aren't tied to any OS be it by software OR hardware. Yeah, we use windows now, but if we switch to Linux then I know the nvidia support will (hopefully still) be there. So nvidia is the default choice. That's 50 machines and counting.
In a similar way I was looking for a SATA RAID card for my machine since I couldn't get the on board Promise junk to work. Now what card would I choose? It seems like the best support came from 3ware , and they make pretty good cards too. Now they have a loyal customer and I'll ALWAYS recommend them over the competition.
They might not make the money back on a 1 on 1 customer basis, but I think that they're making quite a bit of it back in mind share of tech people. I'm not significant by myself, but my range of influence between work, my friends, and various people reaches pretty far. At some point marketing glitz can only go so far. Proof of support for your products can make a bigger difference than marketing in some cases.
The Mac OSX firewall only works that way if you use the GUI. You can also directly access ipfw which gives you about as much control as you'd ever need from a firewall - well assuming your a power user that needs that power. The new XP firewall has GUI options to limit connections for certain ranges, so I'd probably put the XP firewall ahead of the OSX firewall for novices (assuming a novice knows how to limit an ip range).
Actually this finally fixes one major problem that I've had with the way windows networking works - you allow SMB from anywhere. The vast majority of situations you only need to talk to machines on your local subnet via SMB. It's not that hard to include the machines you only need. Generally the machines I'm in control of are behind a firewall anyway, but I'm a bit paranoid.
As a side note, the Laptops I admin run on IP's that are 172.16.xx.xx , when a laptop leaves they'll probably get a different IP via DHCP (usually 192.xx... or 10.xx.. ) if they hook up somewhere else, so this reduces the risks of them catching stuff via SMB.
Well my windows experience hasn't been that good. Just about every windows network I've seen has been slapped together backwards. Shit is totally installed wrong. And quite often people just barely got it working. As an aside I've also noticed that there are a lot of Windows programming shops that slap together some really crappy code with no error checking.
But of course Linux could just as easily be in the same position, but for some reason I have yet to see it. Maybe it's because I deal with smaller businesses that can't afford an uber admin, or may not no any better on who to hire?
I've had my share of problems on Linux as well, and at times they took WAY too long, but with that knowlege under my belt I was always able to easily fix similar problems much faster. The other problem with Linux is - which distro do you use. Half the time you chase down documentation that explains how distro X does it, but distro Y apperently does something different. With MS it always seems like a new mysterious - and sometimes totally random issue. Maybe I'm just unlucky, I donno =P
Because there are so many jobs available for Windows admins, more people who are not skilled are operating as Windows admins.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I'm the only IT guy where I work. We have Windows,Linux and some BSD here. I'll agree that it is easier to find compitent Linux people but why?
Part of it is because of the "MS Money train". You have to pay to get certified. Probably pay for books for useful documentation. Probably pay for windows just to mess with what they ALLOW you to mess with. Topple onto that the fact that in many aspects, Windows is just far too complex for it's own good.
I'm not all that smart, but I find I can learn problems with Linux and fix them. I can generally troubleshoot problems because of easily available free documentation, and giving you the TOOLS to troubleshoot. And Linux is just more comprehendable in how many parts interact. I'm not sure many of those Windows admins are all that stupid, it's just that it doesn't justify itself by spending years studying the guts of MS internals with a million books on the subject when 90% of the time you just point/click/drool anyway.
Remember, most women would rather chew off a leg than be rude to a man to his face
I'd be interested too because apperently no one on that planet is married.
I was thinking "roadkill" would be a good mascott for SCO, but that's not really an animal =\
This is going to get sort of old after the third or forth time. It's like Friday the 13th movies for the next millennium. I think I'll start ignoring it long before "Napster takes Manhatten".
Does XP still require you have a floppy to load RAID drivers? I put a new set of hard drives in my machine and was sort of stuck when it was time to specify additional drivers since my computer doesn't have a floppy. Luckily I pulled one out of my Pentium 133 machine and got it to work. With Intel pushing the "no more floppy" stuff, I'm thinking that I might not be so lucky in 2 years to even have a floppy connector.
More like most people don't know how to mess with electronic voting, and therefore assume that it must be hard for others as well. Most people could probably think up a scheme to tamper with paper ballots off of the top of their head. It doesn't really take an expert on security and networking to understand how easy it can be to comprimise a system, it just takes a little understanding - which is often beyond the general public.
Words that work really well:
Politicians
Democrats
Republicans