Exactly my thought. I'm also bothered that I had to go this far through the/. comments to see this very blatant gem pointed out. Item number 5 is a good case of pure speculation.
We were told the engineer could not reboot the computer. Now, I did not get confirmation that the train ran on Windows but it is telling that that would be anyone's first assumption.
(By the way, he describes himself as a "Security Industry Innovator". Wonder if that's really what he has on his business cards.)
For someone who was the Chief Marketing Officer for Fortinet, VP Research at Gartner covering security topics, and a holder of Gartner's Thought Leadership award for 2003, I'm really surprised by such a poorly constructed article. I'm also surprised (as others have pointed out) that when he was the technician handling the gift certificate kiosks (item #3), he couldn't figure out how to turn on the scheduler service and use the AT command in Windows NT. And why blame Microsoft because a third party vendor writes software that has memory leaks?
I notice a number of replies telling you you're crazy, but interestingly enough there's this article in today's Wall Street Journal which says the same thing with different reasons.
A passenger on a 15-hour flight uses more fuel for each mile of the trip than someone on an eight-hour trip, but the airfare per mile generally doesn't rise proportionally. When fuel is cheap and traffic strong, airlines can absorb the difference.
It makes for interesting reading, particularly as it's talking about what's happening here and now, rather than merely speculating wildly.
If people are still using Internet Explorer, it can only be explained as ignorance or complacency.
Or personal preference. I downloaded Firefox about a year ago, tried it alongside IE for several weeks, determined there were parts I liked, parts I didn't, and ultimately made the decision that I preferred IE. It's nice to have a choice, and I have made my pick. Others picked something else, whether it be Firefox, Opera, or something entirely different. Fine. Good for them. I don't care because I have my browsing experience the way I want it and that's all I really care about.
If Firefox works for you, hurrah. I'm not so smug and condescending that I'm going to start calling you names. Just let me have what I prefer and we're all happy. I don't care if you think I made a poor or even stupid decision, in much the same way as I don't care if a Honda driver thinks I shouldn't be driving a Toyota. Isn't that the whole point: for people to have choices and be able to choose what they prefer?
I.e. the promised follow-up to this story about moving to the new Chicago datacenter? You know, the one where Mr. Taco promised a follow-up story "in a few days" about the "ridiculously overpowered new hardware".
I was quite looking forward to that, but it never eventuated, unless I missed it. It's certainly not filed under Topics->Slashdot.
A Windows MSCS cluster is essentially for fail-over/HA purposes. This is for high-performance purposes, and explictly excludes use as an application or database server. From the FAQs (although this is for 2003):
Windows Compute Cluster Server is licensed for use with HPC applications. HPC applications solve complex computational problems using several servers as a group, also called a cluster, to solve a single computational problem or a single set of closely related computational problems. Applications that run on a single server are not considered HPC applications. Applications that are distributed across multiple servers may not be considered HPC applications, unless they are working on a set of closely related computational problems.
You may not use Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE) as a general purpose server, database server, e-mail server, print server or file server. In order to allow Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 to be offered at a lower price, its server roles are restricted to computational use only. For example, if users want to install Microsoft SQL(TM) Server 2005 on a cluster node, they will need to purchase and install a full version of Windows Server 2003 64-bit Standard Edition or Windows Server 2003 64-bit Enterprise Edition on that cluster node. To maintain licensing compliance, Windows CCE takes advantage of a feature in Windows Server Standard to protect these applications from being executed. Please see the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Pricing and Licensing page for more information.
I don't, but there's a lot of information at the home page. Including links to case studies for NASCAR, Daresbury, etc., etc.
Including FAQs. And, finally, the answer to the burning question: will it run Linux?
The application vendor is the best source for determining if your UNIX- or Linux-based application will run on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Note that Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack in CCS can take advantage of 32- and 64-bit versions of Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) on Windows Server 2003 Release 2 (R2), which may be required to run UNIX or Linux applications.
steal may apply to any surreptitious taking of something and... commonly applying to intangibles as well as material things.
And if you want to argue semantics about the definition including the word property then I suggest you look up the definition of the word property. (By all means look it up on Merriam-Webster too; people seem to trust Wikipedia as unimpeachable here, which is laughable considering the audience.)
Sadly, this entire thread has degenerated into nothing better than juvenile bickering over semantics. Why is it that almost any other topic on Slashdot can (frequently) inspire some genuinely interesting debate, but turn over to YRO and it becomes the sole province of a bunch of overgrown three year olds?
There are also some in the Philadelphia area, at the end of merge lanes going on to very busy highways. Most of the time they are disabled, but they are intended to be used to regulate the flow of merging traffic during rush hour. (I don't travel these routes during rush hour, so take this at face value.)
There are some merge lanes which are two lanes, and there will be a green light alternating between those two lanes, to allow the traffic to merge smoothly. I believe they also will be used to time the traffic merging so as to give the smoothest possible traffic flow.
After months of talk with them and compromising, it was rewritten into JSP/Oracle. Then they said we're not allowed to do that either, so we agreed on C#.net/MS SQL. I rewrote it to that and after a month, they again came back and said no way. Getting ever more frustrated (I now had the same program in several languages), I ended up in C# Desktop Application instead of web/MySQL.
What am I missing? You had discussions with IT and agreed on whatever platform. What happened when they said "no way", and you waved the sign-off sheet in their face and pointed out they'd already agreed to this? If this is a pattern (which it obviously is), I think it's crystal clear you get an agreement in writing.
Perhaps I'm naive, but this seems to be spiralling into wild hypothesis as opposed to actual legitimate concern. Or maybe I'm just too naive to know this is actually happening on a wide-spread basis. But I'd be interested if someone could actually point me to recent non-anecdotal evidence or reports of this kind of "vote my way or you're fired/out of consideration for promotion".
Especially in a country where you can sue someone for practically anything. (E.g. for slipping on your garden path; I was amazed when I had to get insurance to cover precisely that possibility. But I digress...)
Hear hear. Thanks for making my argument more succinctly than I could. This is exactly why my signature is what it is: two wrongs simply don't make a right.
I do. I also happen to know that many horoscopes today are based on positions of the stars which have since moved about two houses around the chart. This means the whole basis for those horoscopes is wrong (at least until they're bit shifted a bit). How many astrologers know this?
Seriously...really? You have? Maybe you get different engineers in the UK than here in the U.S. Not to mention the products themselves are abysmal.
I went to the training course for Storage Foundation for Windows a few months ago. During one of the class exercises my system lost all connectivity to the disks and marked them as unknown, couldn't import, etc. The instructor didn't know what to do and said I should just format the disks and start the exercise again.
My real complaint is that this has happened twice in our production environments too, and while technical support has been able to assist us in recovery, their response to our annoyed complaint "this shouldn't happen" has been "well, this is kind of complex stuff, you know...you have to expect the occasional hiccup".
No I bloody don't!. Not in an enterprise level product! I expect it to be rock solid, and if it's not I expect you to be able to interpret the logs, rather than just shrug and say I don't know.
VSFW is nothing but a pain in the proverbial, and I will not use it again. If it didn't mark all the disks dynamic and make uninstallation an impossibility without lengthy restores, I'd take it off all my systems today.
And sometimes getting rid of multiple controls, or consolidating them, can be worse. From everything I've read, the iDrive control on some recent BMWs, which has a single warty control fulfilling many tasks, is almost universally loathed by drivers as being way too complicated. This is especially silly given that the last thing you want when driving is to have to figure out the exact sequence of operations required to turn on the windscreen wipers and thereby be distracted from the road while the rain is pelting down.
Way to be defensive by going on the attack, mate. By the way, did you read the article? It seems not.
The bigger story is you (Linux community) *still* don't get it.
The vast majority of the population neither know nor care who or what the RIAA is or does.
Same with DRM.
This same vast majority actually doesn't think Microsoft is evil. They might complain about Windows or Word, but that's a far cry from the vitriolic hatred spewed forth by so many in the Linux community.
Which, by the way, often seems united more in their hatred for Microsoft than in their passion for Linux. Think about it.
And, unlike the majority of the posts I've read so far, many many people actually do possess a shred of respect for the law, whether it's convenient to them or irritating. One of the hallmarks of sociopaths is they think they have an absolute right to pick and choose how they act in the world without regard for laws which annoy them or they think are silly or unfair.
One of the many, many reasons Linux hasn't taken over the desktop is that people are intimidated by the Linux community. You can respond all you like about big companies pushing Linux, how respectable it is, IBM is Linux friendly, etc., and all it demonstrates to me is you still don't get it. The perception is of the uber-geek community speaking in a foreign language with high disdain for users who don't care about the mechanics but just want to get their job done, enjoy the Internet, send e-mail, and maybe play the occasional game.
So take this article and respond how you will. But if your response falls along the lines of "who cares about it being illegal" or "never mind that, the real problem is DRM" or the other stock standard responses from the Slashdot crowd, it only shows that you still don't get it. And perhaps you never really will.
Interesting...I can't stand SG-1. Banal and predictable, formulaic tripe. The few sci-fi shows I truly enjoy are Doctor Who (of course), Blake's 7 (fondly remembered series from my childhood in New Zealand, and now I have started watching the DVDs I find the tense forward-looking storylines are just as exciting to watch), and Farscape.
For me, especially the latter two series had well-thought out plots, which went through the series and kept you hanging on. None of this oh-so-predictable nonsense that passes for shows today. A list of the absolute worst collection of series on television in the last decade, I think, would have to include the Law and Order franchise. When the actors are obviously speaking their lines by rote with no inflection or emotion whatsoever -- just following the same, tired, worn formula -- you know the show desperately needs to be cancelled.
And here's the equally bad logic: the last time I called them about e-mail problems, they told me they only support Outlook Express; they do not support Outlook.
Or it could well be simply that they're following the rationale suggested by many other posters: pick the most common system and stick with that, it makes the scripts for level one support easier.
I know everyone loves to bash Microsoft on/. - but lets be fair, this really shouldn't be tagged with the "Windows" tag.
Ever wonder why there's a "Linux" and an "Apple" section, but no "Microsoft" or even cleverly abbreviated "M$"?
I agree; my first thought was, "a film about Windows? Declassified? Some super-secret NT background study? What the...????". So yes, poorly tagged.
However, there is a Microsoft topic; it's the one with the puerile Bill Gates as Borg icon. Some people never grow up. Nor does Slashdot ever update topics; check them out here. Amongst some of the gems:
Not to rain on your parade, but the linked article does rather make the opposite point from what you're saying. If I were in his position, this would be all grist to the mill:
Analysts say that the chain has been hit by the rise of supermarkets and online retailers selling CDs and DVDs, as well as the surging popularity of downloading music from the internet.
Similar factors led to HMV announcing on Thursday that its annual profits had more than halved.
Is it just me or does it seem like the only correct answer to the bank's request would be, "I'm sorry, I am so security conscious that I simply cannot allow you to access my computer"?
In which case -- says the article -- they may refuse your claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly my thought. I'm also bothered that I had to go this far through the /. comments to see this very blatant gem pointed out. Item number 5 is a good case of pure speculation.
(By the way, he describes himself as a "Security Industry Innovator". Wonder if that's really what he has on his business cards.)
For someone who was the Chief Marketing Officer for Fortinet, VP Research at Gartner covering security topics, and a holder of Gartner's Thought Leadership award for 2003, I'm really surprised by such a poorly constructed article. I'm also surprised (as others have pointed out) that when he was the technician handling the gift certificate kiosks (item #3), he couldn't figure out how to turn on the scheduler service and use the AT command in Windows NT. And why blame Microsoft because a third party vendor writes software that has memory leaks?
I notice a number of replies telling you you're crazy, but interestingly enough there's this article in today's Wall Street Journal which says the same thing with different reasons.
It makes for interesting reading, particularly as it's talking about what's happening here and now, rather than merely speculating wildly.
If people are still using Internet Explorer, it can only be explained as ignorance or complacency.
Or personal preference. I downloaded Firefox about a year ago, tried it alongside IE for several weeks, determined there were parts I liked, parts I didn't, and ultimately made the decision that I preferred IE. It's nice to have a choice, and I have made my pick. Others picked something else, whether it be Firefox, Opera, or something entirely different. Fine. Good for them. I don't care because I have my browsing experience the way I want it and that's all I really care about.
If Firefox works for you, hurrah. I'm not so smug and condescending that I'm going to start calling you names. Just let me have what I prefer and we're all happy. I don't care if you think I made a poor or even stupid decision, in much the same way as I don't care if a Honda driver thinks I shouldn't be driving a Toyota. Isn't that the whole point: for people to have choices and be able to choose what they prefer?
You know what I thought was interesting? This story (which was linked to from this /. story titled A Look At the Workings of Google's Data Centers contained the following snippets.
and
But this was immediately followed by:
For some reason I'd always believed they used pretty much standard components in everything.
I.e. the promised follow-up to this story about moving to the new Chicago datacenter? You know, the one where Mr. Taco promised a follow-up story "in a few days" about the "ridiculously overpowered new hardware".
I was quite looking forward to that, but it never eventuated, unless I missed it. It's certainly not filed under Topics->Slashdot.
A Windows MSCS cluster is essentially for fail-over/HA purposes. This is for high-performance purposes, and explictly excludes use as an application or database server. From the FAQs (although this is for 2003):
I don't, but there's a lot of information at the home page. Including links to case studies for NASCAR, Daresbury, etc., etc.
Including FAQs. And, finally, the answer to the burning question: will it run Linux?
It sounds exactly like a report on an ACL. Set up the permissions as you wish, then see them in an easily comprehended summary.
Wrong.
... commonly applying to intangibles as well as material things.
steal may apply to any surreptitious taking of something and
And if you want to argue semantics about the definition including the word property then I suggest you look up the definition of the word property . (By all means look it up on Merriam-Webster too; people seem to trust Wikipedia as unimpeachable here, which is laughable considering the audience.)
Sadly, this entire thread has degenerated into nothing better than juvenile bickering over semantics. Why is it that almost any other topic on Slashdot can (frequently) inspire some genuinely interesting debate, but turn over to YRO and it becomes the sole province of a bunch of overgrown three year olds?
There are also some in the Philadelphia area, at the end of merge lanes going on to very busy highways. Most of the time they are disabled, but they are intended to be used to regulate the flow of merging traffic during rush hour. (I don't travel these routes during rush hour, so take this at face value.)
There are some merge lanes which are two lanes, and there will be a green light alternating between those two lanes, to allow the traffic to merge smoothly. I believe they also will be used to time the traffic merging so as to give the smoothest possible traffic flow.
That, I was not wondering. I do wonder what the retail price for the game might be.
After months of talk with them and compromising, it was rewritten into JSP/Oracle. Then they said we're not allowed to do that either, so we agreed on C#.net/MS SQL. I rewrote it to that and after a month, they again came back and said no way. Getting ever more frustrated (I now had the same program in several languages), I ended up in C# Desktop Application instead of web/MySQL.
What am I missing? You had discussions with IT and agreed on whatever platform. What happened when they said "no way", and you waved the sign-off sheet in their face and pointed out they'd already agreed to this? If this is a pattern (which it obviously is), I think it's crystal clear you get an agreement in writing.
I can't verify this, but from comment 28 on the blog:
IdahoPotato Said,
Before you declare Mission Accomplished! - there seems to be a sip.oscar.aol.com, and my SIP client can connect there as well.
Perhaps I'm naive, but this seems to be spiralling into wild hypothesis as opposed to actual legitimate concern. Or maybe I'm just too naive to know this is actually happening on a wide-spread basis. But I'd be interested if someone could actually point me to recent non-anecdotal evidence or reports of this kind of "vote my way or you're fired/out of consideration for promotion".
Especially in a country where you can sue someone for practically anything. (E.g. for slipping on your garden path; I was amazed when I had to get insurance to cover precisely that possibility. But I digress...)
Hear hear. Thanks for making my argument more succinctly than I could. This is exactly why my signature is what it is: two wrongs simply don't make a right.
I do. I also happen to know that many horoscopes today are based on positions of the stars which have since moved about two houses around the chart. This means the whole basis for those horoscopes is wrong (at least until they're bit shifted a bit). How many astrologers know this?
I had to call them recently for support and they are indeed Symantec. See the ugly Symantec logo here.
Seriously...really? You have? Maybe you get different engineers in the UK than here in the U.S. Not to mention the products themselves are abysmal.
I went to the training course for Storage Foundation for Windows a few months ago. During one of the class exercises my system lost all connectivity to the disks and marked them as unknown, couldn't import, etc. The instructor didn't know what to do and said I should just format the disks and start the exercise again.
My real complaint is that this has happened twice in our production environments too, and while technical support has been able to assist us in recovery, their response to our annoyed complaint "this shouldn't happen" has been "well, this is kind of complex stuff, you know...you have to expect the occasional hiccup".
No I bloody don't!. Not in an enterprise level product! I expect it to be rock solid, and if it's not I expect you to be able to interpret the logs, rather than just shrug and say I don't know.
VSFW is nothing but a pain in the proverbial, and I will not use it again. If it didn't mark all the disks dynamic and make uninstallation an impossibility without lengthy restores, I'd take it off all my systems today.
And sometimes getting rid of multiple controls, or consolidating them, can be worse. From everything I've read, the iDrive control on some recent BMWs, which has a single warty control fulfilling many tasks, is almost universally loathed by drivers as being way too complicated. This is especially silly given that the last thing you want when driving is to have to figure out the exact sequence of operations required to turn on the windscreen wipers and thereby be distracted from the road while the rain is pelting down.
The bigger story is you (Linux community) *still* don't get it.
One of the many, many reasons Linux hasn't taken over the desktop is that people are intimidated by the Linux community. You can respond all you like about big companies pushing Linux, how respectable it is, IBM is Linux friendly, etc., and all it demonstrates to me is you still don't get it. The perception is of the uber-geek community speaking in a foreign language with high disdain for users who don't care about the mechanics but just want to get their job done, enjoy the Internet, send e-mail, and maybe play the occasional game.
So take this article and respond how you will. But if your response falls along the lines of "who cares about it being illegal" or "never mind that, the real problem is DRM" or the other stock standard responses from the Slashdot crowd, it only shows that you still don't get it. And perhaps you never really will.
Interesting...I can't stand SG-1. Banal and predictable, formulaic tripe. The few sci-fi shows I truly enjoy are Doctor Who (of course), Blake's 7 (fondly remembered series from my childhood in New Zealand, and now I have started watching the DVDs I find the tense forward-looking storylines are just as exciting to watch), and Farscape.
For me, especially the latter two series had well-thought out plots, which went through the series and kept you hanging on. None of this oh-so-predictable nonsense that passes for shows today. A list of the absolute worst collection of series on television in the last decade, I think, would have to include the Law and Order franchise. When the actors are obviously speaking their lines by rote with no inflection or emotion whatsoever -- just following the same, tired, worn formula -- you know the show desperately needs to be cancelled.
And here's the equally bad logic: the last time I called them about e-mail problems, they told me they only support Outlook Express; they do not support Outlook.
Or it could well be simply that they're following the rationale suggested by many other posters: pick the most common system and stick with that, it makes the scripts for level one support easier.
Ever wonder why there's a "Linux" and an "Apple" section, but no "Microsoft" or even cleverly abbreviated "M$"?
I agree; my first thought was, "a film about Windows? Declassified? Some super-secret NT background study? What the...????". So yes, poorly tagged.
However, there is a Microsoft topic; it's the one with the puerile Bill Gates as Borg icon. Some people never grow up. Nor does Slashdot ever update topics; check them out here. Amongst some of the gems:
Try clicking on some of those topic icons and see when the last story in that category was posted. (Taco Hell, for instance...)
Not to rain on your parade, but the linked article does rather make the opposite point from what you're saying. If I were in his position, this would be all grist to the mill:
Analysts say that the chain has been hit by the rise of supermarkets and online retailers selling CDs and DVDs, as well as the surging popularity of downloading music from the internet.
Similar factors led to HMV announcing on Thursday that its annual profits had more than halved.
Is it just me or does it seem like the only correct answer to the bank's request would be, "I'm sorry, I am so security conscious that I simply cannot allow you to access my computer"?
In which case -- says the article -- they may refuse your claim.