It's very pleasant to see people looking out for one another. And, in reality, no matter what the CPU speed is, I'm sure the questioner will have figured out by now from the responses posted ("get a Commodore 64, anything else is overkill!") that it'll be quite adequate for the task at hand.
There you go -- you now have some spare cash to spend on a backup solution, which is probably the most important item you need after an actual functioning server.
Look it up here, at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. From their definition:
Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.
Translation -- it's not particularly well respected, but it is a word, at least in American speech, and has been since around 1912.
Maybe we need to find P2P services which share dictionaries instead of MP3s.
Makes me feel very comfortable insofar as the veracity of the rest of your post is concerned.
Do post some more details...for example:
* What is your core "real business"? * How big is your company? * How big is your network? * How long has your company been established?
You get the gist...really, just some sort of detail that, say, might lead me to believe this is anything other than a rather poor troll.
I love 2a, by the way. How did you present your offer to Microsoft? (Was it a formal business proposition, or an open letter posted on the local "MS-SUX" mailing list?) To whom did you present it? What were they supposed to get out of it? (My goodness, I'm just shocked that Microsoft wasn't falling over itself to take up your little proposal involving a whopping ten -- count 'em! -- workstations.) To whom did you present the same Linux-server-based contract?
(And it still gets modded up as Interesting. Good ol' Slashdot...)
I haven't seen the show to which you refer, but I do know what you mean (from the above-mentioned "brick in the cistern" days). That's why I think dual-flush cisterns are such a good idea. You still have the same size cistern, and so still have a full tank for flushing when necessary. However, the half tank flush is more than adequate for liquid waste and saves several gallons per flush. The best of both worlds, so to speak (and if one can use such a phrase discussing what is, after all, waste management.)
I don't know about that so much...here in the Philadelphia region, we had rather a nasty drought a few years ago (1999, I think from memory), and warnings about possible water shortages last year, along with restrictions (both here and in New Jersey) on such activities as washing your car, watering your garden, etc.
The thing that surprised me at the time was the lack of restrictions and common-sense approaches (although I'm hoping they'd be more sensitive to such things in the less soggy parts of the country). I grew up in New Zealand and would occasionally have to go through all manner of water conservation articles.
One of the examples was to replace the toilet cistern with a dual-flush system -- you have two buttons or levers, one of which flushes the full tank down for solid matter, the other of which flushes only half the tank for liquid waste. Those who didn't have such a cistern were encouraged to put a brick in the cistern, thus decreasing the amount of water needed to fill it at each flush. There was also a little ditty about flushing only when necessary:
If it's brown, flush it down. If it's yellow, let it mellow.
Ah, the good old days. I've never seen one of those dual-flush cisterns here in the States -- do they have them in places like Nevada and California?
Interestingly enough, I just pointed my browser to the home page for L.A. and saw a list of recently registered domain names.
fizzyco.la sluts.la infosec.la insu.la motor cylce.la
Number 2 is entirely appropriate for this sordid little topic.
And I'd hate to be the sucker who's just signed up for a mis-spelled domain name at $50/year. Wonder how long it'll take before his kind friends point out that motorcylce.la is somewhat, errm, unlikely?
The only thing keeping my coming here, are the obscure things. Like the Bar Monkey or the Beer Cooler, little obscure things people build and run Linux on and stuff. The lego inventions, etc. Those are the only things I'd have a harder time finding on my own.
Just for you, my friend...
2003-06-09 14:16:56 Build a harpsichord/stegosaurus out of LEGO (articles,toys) (rejected)
You can find out about it here. Personally, I thought the details about how he went about building a working LEGO harpsichord were fascinating. Ahhh, what do I know?
To give an example, how would US fundamentalists react if the Egyptians made a film in which evil Southern baptists launched an attack on a society presented as being good but called "The Third Reich"? Not, I guess, favorably.
Forget US fundamentalists, Southern baptists, etc. How would non-specific-religion-affiliated Americans react if a film was released depicting epic battle scenes under the name "The Two Towers"?
To be rather callous, however, if you do do this, let/. know about it 24 hours in advance so the hordes of unemployed/.ers here can be ready to apply for your jobs three minutes after you leave.
More germanely, I find myself wondering what it is you hope to achieve? Are you just trying to "stick it to the company"? Or are you looking for leverage?
If the latter, it's probably not going to work. If the former (which I suspect is the case), then you'll feel nice and smug for a couple of days, and then you'll realize the economy is tanked, and the bills are imminent. More power to you if you have sufficient savings, are young, and are footloose and fancy-free enough that you can afford to take such a risk. But I'd strongly caution you to think about what is in the best interests, both short-term and long-term, for number one.
"They agreed to allow Jesse to deny their allegations. They agreed to dismiss the case and all allegations against him," Andy said. "Basically they agreed that he didn't do anything wrong, but [they're] taking his 12 grand."
Andy is the kid's father, and he fully stands behind him, which is encouraging to read.
While Andy questions the motives and actions of the RIAA, he basks in pride at his son's steadfast resolve.
"He has stood up to the schoolyard bullies that are pulling this and he's said, 'You are not going to make me say something that's not true,'" Andy said.
Apart from wondering how things have changed since I was a student that any university student can have $12,000 in savings, this just plain sucks. How the #$%^ do they get away with this? Read that again...the kid gets to pay $12,000 for the privilege of being graciously permitted to continue denying he did anything wrong!
So the RIAA knows they haven't a leg to stand on (unless you can believe they were being altruistic in not forcing a black mark on the student's permanent record -- yeah, right), and still somehow forces him to pay them all his money.
Blackmail, 'blak-"mAl
a : extortion or coercion by threats especially of public exposure or criminal prosecution b : the payment that is extorted
Ahem...Kelvin exists on the same scale as Celsius but 273.15 degrees lower (unless my memory of high-school physics is even hazier than I care to admit).
15,000 / 50 = 300 300 - 273.15 = 26.85
Or approximately 27 degrees Celsius.
Now, I would concur with anyone who might argue this is rather misleading to the average reader, accustomed as we are to Celsius and Fahrenheit. If you translate it to Celsius, then
He worked on a couple of books (eg, Ruth, maybe, if my memory serves?), but (as was typical throughout his life) he got far too involved in the details. Being a lover of language above all else, he contributed vast reams of notes on the linguistic history of each phrase and missed out on the bigger picture. It's a bit of a stretch to talk about him translating the entire Bible.
This comment, by the way, is not a criticism of Tolkien as such, more an observation. If you read his Letters, time and time again you'll come across apologies for being late with submissions to his publishers, having neglected this or that work...he always bit off far more than he could chew and inevitably produced rich fragments. That's why Christopher Tolkien has such a magnificent stash of notes to exploit^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpublish.
Interestingly enough, this happens to be perhaps the major failing of Niggle in Leaf by Niggle, despite Tolkien's oft-misquoted distaste for allegory. (The other major theme you may well see in that work is an allegory of Purgatory, which some critics claim stems directly from Tolkien's strong Catholic beliefs.)
Tolkien, in fact, was a very staunch Catholic, and his Catholic beliefs pervaded everything he did (although for his views on this you really have to read his Letters, where he disclaims allegations of religious parallels in certain of his works). A long evening stroll that he took with C.S. Lewis was instrumental in Lewis' renewed interest in Christianity. Tolkien was naturally happy about this, but at the same time a bit disquieted and not a little hurt that Lewis went on to become so famous and well-regarded given he was almost a johnny-come-lately, having reconverted to Christianity at a later age in life. (Tolkien was also a bit miffed that Lewis became an Anglican (Episcopalian in the U.S.); he viewed Anglicanism as being a watered-down imitation of Catholicism, whose main recommendation was their beautiful cathedrals which had been perverted from their rightful Catholic purpose.)
Hear hear. I've been on both sides of the coin -- travelling as a tourist, I spend as little time as possible in the hotel room. But, having done the consultant thing, including a stretch of 100% travel (get up Monday morning, kiss wife goodbye, come back Friday night, kiss wife hello, enjoy weekend, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam), a comfortable hotel room with pleasant amenities makes a huge amount of difference. It's especially welcomed when you're stuck in your hotel room doing business in the evening and you can take a decent quick shower to refresh yourself, or finish off a 16 hour day by raiding the mini-bar and watching television.
More importantly, such amenities will put one in a better frame of mind and result in a more relaxing time, giving added benefit to the client (a happy consultant is a more productive consultant) and the spouse when you get home. For professional and personal reasons in such a scenario, this could only be a leg up in the business traveller's world.
Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
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· Score: 2, Informative
Sorry but enterprise level and MS do not belong anywhere near each other despite what MS wants you to believe. I'm an MCSE and I can't imagine running critical services on the MS platform...as an application platform windows server is just too bug ridden.
So either you've bought into all the FUD or you're speaking from experience, in which case I call PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard). Either way, you don't know what you're doing.
We have (at last count) approximately 270 Windows Servers (as well as all our Linux and AIX servers), including DCs, file servers, print servers, etc., etc., and many application servers. We are a 24x7x365 operation, and the vast majority of those servers have been up for months or years. Most of our unplanned outages are due to hardware errors -- blown motherboards, generally, as we have redundant hardware where ever possible.
I can look at some of my servers right now and see uptimes which are pushing a year. Some of my servers are in constant use by 700 users during the day and 30 to 50 users during the night. Up until March, they had 100% availability. In March the application hung due to a bug in the vendor's application -- totally unrelated to running on MS. (Incidentally, it was fixed by restarting a service -- no need to reboot the server.)
We use firewalls and virus protection software and patch our servers (carefully -- some MS patches can break things), and don't get hit by these problems. Want to know why? Because we are expected to keep things going so we do, and we know what we're doing! If stuff breaks, people get fired. So we build servers the right way the first time, and then, remarkably, they seem to be rather robust.
We wouldn't be nearly so happy if we had to keep running to the server room all day, by the way. NT 4 was a lot more difficult to manage, but Windows 2000 allows me to do virtually everything from my desk, which is efficient and just all-round desirable. So don't believe the FUD that you can't remotely manage a Windows server, either.
For what it's worth, I'm also an MCSE. I got mine because I'd been working with MS products for several years and knew how they worked, what was wrong with them, and how to fix them. Some of my colleagues in the past have been paper MCSEs. Guess whose servers tend to be flakier?
I know what's wrong with MS products -- they're by no means a magical company, and I've learned the hard way (NT 4 service packs that broke and also modified the SAM, or horribly painful Exchange 4.0 information store recoveries, and on and on). Hey, maybe that's got something to do with it -- I worked my way up, I gained my technical knowledge by fixing things when they borked and building systems from the ground up, and in the process became intimately familiar with the products' strengths and weaknesses. What do you think?
1) Develop a strong services and solutions offering, where business will trust you with their IT and pay lots of money for good service
So how about MS starts looking into seriously beefing up the Microsoft Consulting Services division? This could be an interesting excursion for them -- start heavy promotion of the Services offerings, and simultaneously start encouraging medium and large companies to take advantage of the training centers.
Whilst at the training centers, you can have fantastic demos and presentations of how MS products can be integrated to produce all manner of solutions, all by -- you guessed it -- your friendly and knowledgeable MS Services Consultant. If you have account managers present who have any people skills at all, they can easily tell if someone's ripe to have, say, their Lotus Notes environment replaced by Exchange, or if it would be more viable to show them how MS Consulting can integrate Notes into an MS environment, and then just hang out for a couple of years and quietly encourage that customer to move to Exchange.
IBM did very well out of this, and (despite being a software powerhouse) have ended up with a powerful reputation for hardware integration services and consulting. Why couldn't MS do the same for software integration services and consulting?
Telemarketers do not follow current law. Very rarely do I get them to tell me their name or company name, let alone a manager name or address. 80% of them hang up when I ask to be placed on their DNC list.
Where do you live? If in the U.S., what state are you in? In Pennsylvania, I've never had someone hang up when I ask to be placed on the DNC list (and, by the way, I can't remember the last time I had to do that since the state enacted its own DNC list).
Here's my suggestion; make it your primary goal to get the name of the company. If they're trying to sell you something, then they're going to be hooked when you politely say (with feigned mild interest and in a casual manner), "I'm sorry, I didn't catch the company name, but this sounds interesting -- who is it again?". Once you have the company name, then you have them on the hook.
It's always interesting to hear another point of view.
I personally feel that the nature of this technology makes it a poor choice for the average Joe User (userj?) in this country. There are too many factors that make it a poor choice for a non techie (example PPPOE, distance variations, cordless phones, multiple vendors, lamps, the tides, wind direction, sunspots, liver spots, etc). Cable is by far the better choice for our geography and our average level of intelligence and patience.
For over a year now, I have sworn blind that as soon as DSL became available in my area, the cable company wouldn't see me for dust. I've never had the opportunity to experience DSL, so have no idea how good or bad it may turn out, but I've always been under the impression that anything, absolutely anything, simply had to be better than my existing setup. Anyone who cares to look through my past comments will be able to tell I have a passionate loathing for Comcast. That loathing is only exacerbated by the apparent total and utterly unassailable monopoly which they exert in the Philadelphia region. I have no choice for high-speed access; any attempt to investigate options has always met with the reply "you must contact Comcast; they are the high-speed provider in your area".
Excuse me? The high-speed provider? So what -- isn't America about capitalism, competition, he who dares wins, etc? Why the hell are all the other companies so scared to take on Comcast? I don't get it, I really don't -- it appears that Comcast owns the Philadelphia region and will brook no competition.
I'm in a state of permanent anger at Comcast, because their service is non-existent, they're more expensive to keep than Jennifer Lopez, their customer focus is similarly non-existent, and their technical expertise would embarrass a badger. Comcast is so bad that I would willingly take any alternative form of service if I had the option (hello FCC? Monopoly!). I believe they've lied and bullied their way into dominance in this market, and it stinks.
They have lied to me; they have refused to accept responsibility for sending me dead equipment (insisting that I had to pay the cost of replacing their dead equipment); and they have told me in so many words "you're wrong, you don't have a service outage in your area", when I've told them about an outage and even informed them exactly which server was down.
If deregulation means getting Comcast in the neighbourhood, then I vote for more regulation in every industry. They are the most appalling company, bar none, with which it has ever been my misfortune to deal, and I cannot possibly blast them enough.
Yes it can. I do everything using the keyboard, including moving and resizing windows under X (with sawfish.) I kid you not! Care to show me how to do that in windows?
With pleasure.
Use the ALT-space key combination. This will bring up that window's control menu, including options to Restore (switch between full screen or windowed view), Minimize, Maximize, Close...and Size or Move. If you select Size or Move, you can then resize the window or move the window around the screen using the arrow keys. When done, press the Enter key. Presto -- all without a mouse.
I have no Symantec software installed. By that I mean that there is no Symantec group, there's nothing in Add/Remove, and I know all the applications on this PC and they're 100% non-Symantec.
I can search for symcjit.dll and find a couple of occurrences (under Oracle software). Looking at the properties shows those files to be (copyright) Symantec.
I have seen this in the past -- a known conflict with Symantec software causing problems, a user stating with positive assurance they had no Symantec software installed, a search for specific Symantec DLLs or components that I know are used by other packages, a removal of those DLLs, and bingo, problem fixed.
Personally, as soon as I saw Symantec mentioned, I gave this involuntary shudder. Do you remember the version of PC Anywhere they released several years ago which essentially completely crashed NT Workstation, requiring a reinstall? I sure do -- that was a Symantec problem, and they admitted it (as well as rather blithely saying the resolution was to reformat your hard drive).
Slashdot Mirror
It's very pleasant to see people looking out for one another. And, in reality, no matter what the CPU speed is, I'm sure the questioner will have figured out by now from the responses posted ("get a Commodore 64, anything else is overkill!") that it'll be quite adequate for the task at hand.
There you go -- you now have some spare cash to spend on a backup solution, which is probably the most important item you need after an actual functioning server.
Look it up here, at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. From their definition:
Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.
Translation -- it's not particularly well respected, but it is a word, at least in American speech, and has been since around 1912.
Maybe we need to find P2P services which share dictionaries instead of MP3s.
Thousands of Slashdot brains slowly start to implode...
Posted Anonymous Coward
Makes me feel very comfortable insofar as the veracity of the rest of your post is concerned.
Do post some more details...for example:
* What is your core "real business"?
* How big is your company?
* How big is your network?
* How long has your company been established?
You get the gist...really, just some sort of detail that, say, might lead me to believe this is anything other than a rather poor troll.
I love 2a, by the way. How did you present your offer to Microsoft? (Was it a formal business proposition, or an open letter posted on the local "MS-SUX" mailing list?) To whom did you present it? What were they supposed to get out of it? (My goodness, I'm just shocked that Microsoft wasn't falling over itself to take up your little proposal involving a whopping ten -- count 'em! -- workstations.) To whom did you present the same Linux-server-based contract?
(And it still gets modded up as Interesting. Good ol' Slashdot...)
I haven't seen the show to which you refer, but I do know what you mean (from the above-mentioned "brick in the cistern" days). That's why I think dual-flush cisterns are such a good idea. You still have the same size cistern, and so still have a full tank for flushing when necessary. However, the half tank flush is more than adequate for liquid waste and saves several gallons per flush. The best of both worlds, so to speak (and if one can use such a phrase discussing what is, after all, waste management.)
I don't know about that so much...here in the Philadelphia region, we had rather a nasty drought a few years ago (1999, I think from memory), and warnings about possible water shortages last year, along with restrictions (both here and in New Jersey) on such activities as washing your car, watering your garden, etc.
The thing that surprised me at the time was the lack of restrictions and common-sense approaches (although I'm hoping they'd be more sensitive to such things in the less soggy parts of the country). I grew up in New Zealand and would occasionally have to go through all manner of water conservation articles.
One of the examples was to replace the toilet cistern with a dual-flush system -- you have two buttons or levers, one of which flushes the full tank down for solid matter, the other of which flushes only half the tank for liquid waste. Those who didn't have such a cistern were encouraged to put a brick in the cistern, thus decreasing the amount of water needed to fill it at each flush. There was also a little ditty about flushing only when necessary:
If it's brown, flush it down.
If it's yellow, let it mellow.
Ah, the good old days. I've never seen one of those dual-flush cisterns here in the States -- do they have them in places like Nevada and California?
There are still a few left, you know.
And, for the benefit of those of you who don't live in PA, look here.
Interestingly enough, I just pointed my browser to the home page for L.A. and saw a list of recently registered domain names.
r cylce.la
fizzyco.la
sluts.la
infosec.la
insu.la
moto
Number 2 is entirely appropriate for this sordid little topic.
And I'd hate to be the sucker who's just signed up for a mis-spelled domain name at $50/year. Wonder how long it'll take before his kind friends point out that motorcylce.la is somewhat, errm, unlikely?
The only thing keeping my coming here, are the obscure things. Like the Bar Monkey or the Beer Cooler, little obscure things people build and run Linux on and stuff. The lego inventions, etc. Those are the only things I'd have a harder time finding on my own.
Just for you, my friend...
2003-06-09 14:16:56 Build a harpsichord/stegosaurus out of LEGO (articles,toys) (rejected)
You can find out about it here. Personally, I thought the details about how he went about building a working LEGO harpsichord were fascinating. Ahhh, what do I know?
To give an example, how would US fundamentalists react if the Egyptians made a film in which evil Southern baptists launched an attack on a society presented as being good but called "The Third Reich"? Not, I guess, favorably.
Forget US fundamentalists, Southern baptists, etc. How would non-specific-religion-affiliated Americans react if a film was released depicting epic battle scenes under the name "The Two Towers"?
To be rather callous, however, if you do do this, let /. know about it 24 hours in advance so the hordes of unemployed /.ers here can be ready to apply for your jobs three minutes after you leave.
More germanely, I find myself wondering what it is you hope to achieve? Are you just trying to "stick it to the company"? Or are you looking for leverage?
If the latter, it's probably not going to work. If the former (which I suspect is the case), then you'll feel nice and smug for a couple of days, and then you'll realize the economy is tanked, and the bills are imminent. More power to you if you have sufficient savings, are young, and are footloose and fancy-free enough that you can afford to take such a risk. But I'd strongly caution you to think about what is in the best interests, both short-term and long-term, for number one.
"They agreed to allow Jesse to deny their allegations. They agreed to dismiss the case and all allegations against him," Andy said. "Basically they agreed that he didn't do anything wrong, but [they're] taking his 12 grand."
Andy is the kid's father, and he fully stands behind him, which is encouraging to read.
While Andy questions the motives and actions of the RIAA, he basks in pride at his son's steadfast resolve.
"He has stood up to the schoolyard bullies that are pulling this and he's said, 'You are not going to make me say something that's not true,'" Andy said.
Apart from wondering how things have changed since I was a student that any university student can have $12,000 in savings, this just plain sucks. How the #$%^ do they get away with this? Read that again...the kid gets to pay $12,000 for the privilege of being graciously permitted to continue denying he did anything wrong!
So the RIAA knows they haven't a leg to stand on (unless you can believe they were being altruistic in not forcing a black mark on the student's permanent record -- yeah, right), and still somehow forces him to pay them all his money.
Blackmail, 'blak-"mAl
a : extortion or coercion by threats especially of public exposure or criminal prosecution b : the payment that is extorted
Ahem...Kelvin exists on the same scale as Celsius but 273.15 degrees lower (unless my memory of high-school physics is even hazier than I care to admit).
15,000 / 50 = 300
300 - 273.15 = 26.85
Or approximately 27 degrees Celsius.
Now, I would concur with anyone who might argue this is rather misleading to the average reader, accustomed as we are to Celsius and Fahrenheit. If you translate it to Celsius, then
15,000 - 273 = 14,727
14,727 / 27 = 545.4 recurring
Which means in Celsius it's about 545 times greater than room temperature.
Proving once again that, yes, consistency in measurement units isn't just a Martha Stewart good thing, it should be the law!
Well...um...yes...but...
He worked on a couple of books (eg, Ruth, maybe, if my memory serves?), but (as was typical throughout his life) he got far too involved in the details. Being a lover of language above all else, he contributed vast reams of notes on the linguistic history of each phrase and missed out on the bigger picture. It's a bit of a stretch to talk about him translating the entire Bible.
This comment, by the way, is not a criticism of Tolkien as such, more an observation. If you read his Letters, time and time again you'll come across apologies for being late with submissions to his publishers, having neglected this or that work...he always bit off far more than he could chew and inevitably produced rich fragments. That's why Christopher Tolkien has such a magnificent stash of notes to exploit^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpublish.
Interestingly enough, this happens to be perhaps the major failing of Niggle in Leaf by Niggle, despite Tolkien's oft-misquoted distaste for allegory. (The other major theme you may well see in that work is an allegory of Purgatory, which some critics claim stems directly from Tolkien's strong Catholic beliefs.)
Tolkien, in fact, was a very staunch Catholic, and his Catholic beliefs pervaded everything he did (although for his views on this you really have to read his Letters, where he disclaims allegations of religious parallels in certain of his works). A long evening stroll that he took with C.S. Lewis was instrumental in Lewis' renewed interest in Christianity. Tolkien was naturally happy about this, but at the same time a bit disquieted and not a little hurt that Lewis went on to become so famous and well-regarded given he was almost a johnny-come-lately, having reconverted to Christianity at a later age in life. (Tolkien was also a bit miffed that Lewis became an Anglican (Episcopalian in the U.S.); he viewed Anglicanism as being a watered-down imitation of Catholicism, whose main recommendation was their beautiful cathedrals which had been perverted from their rightful Catholic purpose.)
Hear hear. I've been on both sides of the coin -- travelling as a tourist, I spend as little time as possible in the hotel room. But, having done the consultant thing, including a stretch of 100% travel (get up Monday morning, kiss wife goodbye, come back Friday night, kiss wife hello, enjoy weekend, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam), a comfortable hotel room with pleasant amenities makes a huge amount of difference. It's especially welcomed when you're stuck in your hotel room doing business in the evening and you can take a decent quick shower to refresh yourself, or finish off a 16 hour day by raiding the mini-bar and watching television.
More importantly, such amenities will put one in a better frame of mind and result in a more relaxing time, giving added benefit to the client (a happy consultant is a more productive consultant) and the spouse when you get home. For professional and personal reasons in such a scenario, this could only be a leg up in the business traveller's world.
Sorry but enterprise level and MS do not belong anywhere near each other despite what MS wants you to believe. I'm an MCSE and I can't imagine running critical services on the MS platform...as an application platform windows server is just too bug ridden.
So either you've bought into all the FUD or you're speaking from experience, in which case I call PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard). Either way, you don't know what you're doing.
We have (at last count) approximately 270 Windows Servers (as well as all our Linux and AIX servers), including DCs, file servers, print servers, etc., etc., and many application servers. We are a 24x7x365 operation, and the vast majority of those servers have been up for months or years. Most of our unplanned outages are due to hardware errors -- blown motherboards, generally, as we have redundant hardware where ever possible.
I can look at some of my servers right now and see uptimes which are pushing a year. Some of my servers are in constant use by 700 users during the day and 30 to 50 users during the night. Up until March, they had 100% availability. In March the application hung due to a bug in the vendor's application -- totally unrelated to running on MS. (Incidentally, it was fixed by restarting a service -- no need to reboot the server.)
We use firewalls and virus protection software and patch our servers (carefully -- some MS patches can break things), and don't get hit by these problems. Want to know why? Because we are expected to keep things going so we do, and we know what we're doing! If stuff breaks, people get fired. So we build servers the right way the first time, and then, remarkably, they seem to be rather robust.
We wouldn't be nearly so happy if we had to keep running to the server room all day, by the way. NT 4 was a lot more difficult to manage, but Windows 2000 allows me to do virtually everything from my desk, which is efficient and just all-round desirable. So don't believe the FUD that you can't remotely manage a Windows server, either.
For what it's worth, I'm also an MCSE. I got mine because I'd been working with MS products for several years and knew how they worked, what was wrong with them, and how to fix them. Some of my colleagues in the past have been paper MCSEs. Guess whose servers tend to be flakier?
I know what's wrong with MS products -- they're by no means a magical company, and I've learned the hard way (NT 4 service packs that broke and also modified the SAM, or horribly painful Exchange 4.0 information store recoveries, and on and on). Hey, maybe that's got something to do with it -- I worked my way up, I gained my technical knowledge by fixing things when they borked and building systems from the ground up, and in the process became intimately familiar with the products' strengths and weaknesses. What do you think?
1) Develop a strong services and solutions offering, where business will trust you with their IT and pay lots of money for good service
So how about MS starts looking into seriously beefing up the Microsoft Consulting Services division? This could be an interesting excursion for them -- start heavy promotion of the Services offerings, and simultaneously start encouraging medium and large companies to take advantage of the training centers.
Whilst at the training centers, you can have fantastic demos and presentations of how MS products can be integrated to produce all manner of solutions, all by -- you guessed it -- your friendly and knowledgeable MS Services Consultant. If you have account managers present who have any people skills at all, they can easily tell if someone's ripe to have, say, their Lotus Notes environment replaced by Exchange, or if it would be more viable to show them how MS Consulting can integrate Notes into an MS environment, and then just hang out for a couple of years and quietly encourage that customer to move to Exchange.
IBM did very well out of this, and (despite being a software powerhouse) have ended up with a powerful reputation for hardware integration services and consulting. Why couldn't MS do the same for software integration services and consulting?
Telemarketers do not follow current law. Very rarely do I get them to tell me their name or company name, let alone a manager name or address. 80% of them hang up when I ask to be placed on their DNC list.
Where do you live? If in the U.S., what state are you in? In Pennsylvania, I've never had someone hang up when I ask to be placed on the DNC list (and, by the way, I can't remember the last time I had to do that since the state enacted its own DNC list).
Here's my suggestion; make it your primary goal to get the name of the company. If they're trying to sell you something, then they're going to be hooked when you politely say (with feigned mild interest and in a casual manner), "I'm sorry, I didn't catch the company name, but this sounds interesting -- who is it again?". Once you have the company name, then you have them on the hook.
It's always interesting to hear another point of view.
I personally feel that the nature of this technology makes it a poor choice for the average Joe User (userj?) in this country. There are too many factors that make it a poor choice for a non techie (example PPPOE, distance variations, cordless phones, multiple vendors, lamps, the tides, wind direction, sunspots, liver spots, etc). Cable is by far the better choice for our geography and our average level of intelligence and patience.
For over a year now, I have sworn blind that as soon as DSL became available in my area, the cable company wouldn't see me for dust. I've never had the opportunity to experience DSL, so have no idea how good or bad it may turn out, but I've always been under the impression that anything, absolutely anything, simply had to be better than my existing setup. Anyone who cares to look through my past comments will be able to tell I have a passionate loathing for Comcast. That loathing is only exacerbated by the apparent total and utterly unassailable monopoly which they exert in the Philadelphia region. I have no choice for high-speed access; any attempt to investigate options has always met with the reply "you must contact Comcast; they are the high-speed provider in your area".
Excuse me? The high-speed provider? So what -- isn't America about capitalism, competition, he who dares wins, etc? Why the hell are all the other companies so scared to take on Comcast? I don't get it, I really don't -- it appears that Comcast owns the Philadelphia region and will brook no competition.
I'm in a state of permanent anger at Comcast, because their service is non-existent, they're more expensive to keep than Jennifer Lopez, their customer focus is similarly non-existent, and their technical expertise would embarrass a badger. Comcast is so bad that I would willingly take any alternative form of service if I had the option (hello FCC? Monopoly!). I believe they've lied and bullied their way into dominance in this market, and it stinks.
They have lied to me; they have refused to accept responsibility for sending me dead equipment (insisting that I had to pay the cost of replacing their dead equipment); and they have told me in so many words "you're wrong, you don't have a service outage in your area", when I've told them about an outage and even informed them exactly which server was down.
If deregulation means getting Comcast in the neighbourhood, then I vote for more regulation in every industry. They are the most appalling company, bar none, with which it has ever been my misfortune to deal, and I cannot possibly blast them enough.
Your sig...
:P
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your 0.02, so
Umm...have you checked the exchange rate lately? IIRC, I think your $0.02 is only worth around 0.017.
I would try to figure this out in terms of free speech, but there's that pesky divide-by-zero problem.
Yes it can. I do everything using the keyboard, including moving and resizing windows under X (with sawfish.) I kid you not! Care to show me how to do that in windows?
With pleasure.
Use the ALT-space key combination. This will bring up that window's control menu, including options to Restore (switch between full screen or windowed view), Minimize, Maximize, Close...and Size or Move. If you select Size or Move, you can then resize the window or move the window around the screen using the arrow keys. When done, press the Enter key. Presto -- all without a mouse.
You're welcome.
I have no Symantec software installed. By that I mean that there is no Symantec group, there's nothing in Add/Remove, and I know all the applications on this PC and they're 100% non-Symantec.
I can search for symcjit.dll and find a couple of occurrences (under Oracle software). Looking at the properties shows those files to be (copyright) Symantec.
I have seen this in the past -- a known conflict with Symantec software causing problems, a user stating with positive assurance they had no Symantec software installed, a search for specific Symantec DLLs or components that I know are used by other packages, a removal of those DLLs, and bingo, problem fixed.
Personally, as soon as I saw Symantec mentioned, I gave this involuntary shudder. Do you remember the version of PC Anywhere they released several years ago which essentially completely crashed NT Workstation, requiring a reinstall? I sure do -- that was a Symantec problem, and they admitted it (as well as rather blithely saying the resolution was to reformat your hard drive).
Wouldn't that be a pagan cadence rather than a plagal cadence?
5. Play silly buggers with British air traffic.
that'll be fun. "you seem to be 96% human. you get 96% of a vote in the next elections."
Please no...how would the Florida elections turn out with that in the mix?