traa, like i said, i'm not making a personal attack on you, i'm making a comment on that fact that there's a great number of syntactical and grammatical errors in posts and comments. your comment just happened to be the most convenient example, so please accept my apologies...
the comparision of programming languages to a regular language might not be an interesting topic (or side topic) of discussion on slashdot, however the only point i was suggesting is that sentences can convey a specific message by the way it's structured; similarly a snippet of code will function in a specific way because of the way it is structured. a misspelling in a "regular" language sentance can convey a completely different message, or cause the message to not be conveyed at all, the same goes for programming.
man, one of these days i wish more slashdotters would learn how to spell and use grammar. sometimes reading the comments to a story posted on slashdot is like reading the script to abbott and costello's "who's on first" routine.
"add" would be the contraction of a word like "addition"! "Ad" is the correct contraction for "advertising"!
i'm not trying to personally attack traa, but i've seen too many syntax errors of this sort in posts not to respond. after all, aren't most of the slashdot members either sysadmins or programmers for whom spelling and grammar might mean the difference between something functioning or not?
english is a clumsy language with its jumble of rules, but so are programming languages! syntax and grammar are important in communication as well as.conf files!
the blue ice mod was cool, pyramac is truely a waste of deskspace, material, and time. i'd like to see more mods which have a higher level of thought and execution, such as this, the cast aluminum case.
turrettes syndrome, another friend calls me turbo. it's funny sometimes, but seriously, i've been combatting impulsive and compulsive behavior all my life. actually having adhd and being a sysadmin has kinda gone hand in hand, like being able to switch from task to task quickly or compulsive behavior in record keeping(serial numbers, warranties, etc). it's been terrible in my personal life, i've gone thru 4 major relationship in the last 20 years, and they all seem to have crumbled because of my fanatical behavior...
i started taking ritilin(60 mg) and paxil(30 mg) about a year, and it really started to help me keep an even keel on my spastic behavior(witnessed by others, never by myself). i was initially afraid that it might dull my edge, you know, take away that "jai nais se qua" that was a part of who i am... it did dull my edge, but just enough so that i wasn't cutting myself all the time(i.e. taking on too many projects). i'm able to concentrate more on internal documentation and white papers, recommendation/justification documents and other management task which, if i hadn't been able to accomplish, would have kept me in the perpetual "corporate pc piss-boy" role.
previously, the only other alternative medication was the alcohol variety, the organic combustible type only makes my paranoia kick into hyperdrive...
it's a matter of quality control...
on
iBox Episode 2
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apple defends it's products, which include the hardware as well as the software. while i don't always agree with the way they defend their IP, it is understandable that they do so in order to provide a consistent experience to ther entire product line. imagine if you had a bad experience with a mac clone that was bodged together from older(and very likely used) parts. unless you are tech saavy, you might blame the entire computer(hardware and software) instead of just isolating the blame to the hardware. what happens in this instance? you blame apple, even though they were not responsible for the end package. until there is an "apple certified" used component clone manufacturer( like car manufacturers re-certifying used/out of lease cars, outfits like corecrib will likely be pushed out of business...
NeXT did have a display postscript license from Adobe(circa 1986-87), something Apple decided not to do for cost reasons(circa 1983-84), which was the reason screen/printer fonts needed an external rendering engine to do true(or as close to true) WYSIWYG via Quickdraw. remember all the screen font sizes you used to have to add in your font suitcase? Adobe also helped with the display of it's fonts thru the ATM utility to help 'tween screen resolution renditions of the fonts by interpreting the printer fonts. i always suspected that ATM was a mini postscript interpreter. Apple and Microsoft(and others) wanted to further distance themselves from postscript and developed the QuickDrawGX standard, which is becoming the opentype standard. what's really interesting here is that innovation was forced on the industry because of a financial issue; if apple didn't care about the cost of it's initial macintoshes, it would have had display postscript in it... neccesity is the mother of invention, even if it's the pocketbook.
frankly there are some things about display postscript that i prefer to the other options(especially in the prepress world). we used to send files to a scitex ps2 RIP which had a hardware based true postscript interpreter, and it pushed a preview via display postscript. if it didn't display a preview, it wouldn't print. you could also use this feature to "debug" problem graphics by watching the postscript render on screen element by element until it stopped rendering the image, which meant that the next element to be drawn was causing the problem.
it's really not incredulous that consumer products were not designed/manufactured to last for any length of time. it's called planned obsolecence, and every manufactured item has a limited lifespan; otherwise there'd be no need to design and manufacture new stuff and companies would go out of business... the lifespan of consumer computer/peripheral products tend to be very short(one to two years) due to the fact that many of those products are not repairable, versus workgroup or enterprise computer/peripheral products which are built to last on the average of three to five years(and tend to be exceptionally repairable).
i've been purchasing computers and related equipment for my employer(s) for the last 10 years, and i've had a chance to see the TCO/ROI of consumer versus enterprise printers, and hands down in terms of duty cycles and consumables, the consumer level products end up costing the company (or the individual) a lot more money over the lifespan of the printer than the workgroup/enterprise printers which literally get the work squeezed out of them over 5+ years... not to mention projects like gimp print which help new computers/users to have access to legacy equipment which is still operational (i'm using it now to fire up an old epson stylus 5000 as a printer for a group of osx users).
color laser printers are too bulky, too slow, too expensive, too costly to maintain, and consumables are very expensive. if you absolutely need color, lease a color laser copier and a fiery rip, and have the leasing company service it for you.
IMHO, it's better to spend the money up front getting a solid b/w laser printer based on a commonly deployed marking engine, like those from hp or canon... you don't get the lateset and greatest gimmicky toy features of the new printers, but you'll enjoy having that trusty old printer for years to come. personally i've got an old QMS 860 printer based on a canon bx engine, and it's still cranking away after all these years. i also found a place that will sell refurb part so i can continue to repair it years after qms stopped supporting it!
is your friend. LDAP could be your friend as well, but the adoption of NIS by the major unices, and it's strong connection with NFS make it an ideal solution for one login/passwd for multi-server authentication, and email.
we used to authenticate via NIS+(before we were purchased and told we were going to LDAP, still waiting after three years, but that's another story...) and i loved it! we were a prepress company with 6 seperate locations and several dozen servers scattered thru out the enterprise serving appletalk, email, home directories, and data collection. no matter which location you were at, you could use your single login/passwd to login to any other server, mount you home dir, and go about your business.
it took a bit of end user training(users wanting to save their mail on local drives instead of home directories, among other issues) but it was well adopted, and easy to maintain thru sun's solstice frontend.
the environment was hetrogeneous(solaris, aix, irix, linux, nt, macintosh) and all machines authenticated nicely, with the exception of earlier windows machines. had we deployed samba we would have had an easier time.
beware the difference of NIS and NIS+: NIS+ was sun's "updated" version of NIS. NIS is far more open and friendlier than NIS+... the irix and linux boxes preferred plain NIS.
the best benefit was the ease of administering the end users. one entry change propogated thru all machines... no more rushing from box to box when someone was getting canned. user can't remember email and filesharing password? no problem.
wan to migrate to LDAP cause NIS doesn't have everything you need? no problem with that too, tools exist for easy migration.
the holography that tj describes on his web page is a denisyuk or on-axis reflection hologram, done with a low powered laser on to silver halide based film. the holography that is being used as anti-counterfeiting methods(credit cards, cd's, baseball cards) are using a variation of the whitelight transmission or rainbow hologram. this method requires(typically) a multi-watt, water cooled argon laser with photoresist plates and a highly toxic development procedure. after a photoresist plate hologram is created, a nickel "mother" plate is grown using a plating process(like for choming). this mother plate is used to grow several daughter plates, which in conjunction with heat, pressure, and hard to aquire materials is embossed onto paper and plactics using a hot stamp process. the manufacture of these kind of holograms is just terribly time consuming, expensive, and spans several old-school technologies(photography, photochemistry, electro-plating, web press, foil hot stamping) and requires a small army of people. the security hologram is only security thru obscurity; the return on investment for the manufacturing of these security items is horrible, and the manufacturing of the materials used is built to order(not many people order tem00, 50 watt tunable argon lasers; photoresistplates; mercuric chloride, potassium permanganate, and other obscure toxic materials). all things which are easily tracked from manufacturer to purchaser.
okay, so i'm not the only one tripping... yeah this concept of multiple inflatable bladders tightly surrounding it's precious cargo was used in a movie(s). so which came first, the movie or the jpl concept? i suspect that jpl had the tumbleweed concept first(take a look at the drawing in cnn article, in profile the instrumentation is tiny;sublime) then the movie folks got a hold of it(holds 4 or 5 people in special harness chairs, equipment, the landing party survives the impact landing;ludicrous).
macs have it and pc's have it. even server applications such as xinet's fullpress(appletalk file sharing and opi solution) has a method for applying icc profiles to images stored in specified directories. why shouldn't linux apps have this? color management will make the linux server/workstation more useful in prepress applications, rendering engines(postscript/ghostscript/pdf rips), even shopping carts. mantaining a closer relationship to color management developments and keeping in line with other platforms is an advantage, not neccesarily a waste...
i'd be curious if anyone really releases any code, in source or binaries forms, that doesn't have any bugs. i'm speaking of actual programs/os, not scripts.
the fact is, every application being produced and released has bugs. if everyone waited to release a product until all the bugs were fixed, software would never be shipped. conversely, if you actually used a software product that contained NO bugs, why would you ever want to upgrade?
it seems like a poor choice to make, shipping software out that still has bugs, but it allows for several positive things to happen: allow the end user to see the new direction an application is taking, and allowing the developers to see if any other bugs might surface with a wider pool of users. this is the endless cycle that every application i've ever used goes thru. take the software that adobe produces, for example: photoshop 5.0 is released, and shortly after the release, 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 appear to take care of unforseen bugs wiht specific hardware. 5.5 gets released to add new features and to fix the bugs from 5.0.x.... 6.0 gets released to add even more features( and uncovers even more bugs), and so on and so forth. every application/os has these same problems.
if you want to see an operating system that ships with bugs, take a look at windows macos or even solaris. they update their updates and patch lists all the time, they just don't get announced to the user community the same way linux does. and when it comes to figuring out which patch/fix will resolve your problem, there isn't always the open forum available with these other os's the way there is for linux.
in the end, if you're a redhat user, you'll eventually end up upgrading to the latest version. personally, i wait for the.x release, i never go with the.0 releases. even on other platforms... macos9.04, win98se, solaris 7/mu4...
i got pushed into managing others about ten years ago without my knowledge... my boss at the time had an office manager who was neither good at what she did, nor managed the people who reported to her well. along with another technically adept fellow, we kept finding ourselves troubleshooting problems the other staff was unable to resolve and fixing other problems that were obscure and unique. what did the office manager do? she kept referring problems to us, the two fixit men, cause she didn't have to deal with things she couldn't figure out.
this didn't go entirely un-noticed by either our fellow workers, our owner/boss, or the clientel. the request for our attention to problem and crisis resolution became our full time job, and our co-workers started reporting to the two of us, perhaps out of respect for management that rose from the ranks. at first we were'nt very good at managing others, in fact i sucked, but never backing away from a challenging situation, a few things i learned in the last ten years were:
1) decision making is like a muscle. the more you excersize it, the stronger and more agile this skill becomes. at first you're clumsy, but over time, eventually you'll find yourself making more 'of the right' decisions quicker and easier and often with positive outcomes.
2) treat others nicely, the way you would like to be treated or 'do onto others as you would have other do unto you' it truely makes a difference.
3) praise in public, scold in private. acknowledgement of a job well done has no substitute, conversely, no need to make a bad situation worse by humiliating someone in front of their peers.
4) people are like systems, you'll find yourself maintaining 20% of the staff/system 80% of the time. just don't forget the 80% that doesn't 'seem' to need the same amount of attention. you need to maintain a PM schedule for people as well.
5) resolve situations with problem employees swiftly, with fairness. something as mundane as excessive tardyiness can affect an entire department like wildfire.
everything has some corillary with everything else. if you take a look at a problem at a macro level, you'll find that problems at a micro level have similar symptoms and solutions and vice versa. same with management. the problems/tasks you faced as a skilled technical worker have very similar solutions when managing animate objects like people, but on a macro scale. apply you experience and you'll see things in a familiar light.
who knows what the exact problem is with integrators and why equipment and services seem to be mismatched, but very rarely have we purchased equipment for use in a production environment without some type of glitch. while i agree with you that equipment purchased, no matter what quantity or price, should be delivered: on time, in working order, and complete, i would also expect that anything we're bringing in fresh will also have to be: tested, reconfigured for our environment, and retested again. i'm not talking just single server type configs either. i'm talking about $150k installs. where engineers come to your location and "build" the config onsite. and stuff still goes wrong... cause it equipment is made 100% correct before delivery, it either won't deliver, or there wouldn't be a need to upgrade.
you could also find a var that's willing to put together the pieces you want, mix and match as you choose. Ask IBM to supply you with a list of var's, ask your fav ejb company to also supply you with a vendor list. more often than not, an integrator will act as you single point of contact, cause their the ones taking your money, it'll be their responsibility to act as the first and second tier support levels.
awhile back we were looking into a product called p-sync that would syncronize nis/nis+ and nt domain passwords. p-sync would act as a interim authenticating agent between the two systems, a handshake system if you will, passing the info to the final authenticators(s)without user intervention. i think the company was mustang terch out of alberta,ca.
ok, so we've just tried the two installs( redhat and caldrea) listed in the article, here's my humble opinion:
caldrea get's high marks for eyecandy in their install. obviously spent their development money to get the friendliest install to lure and handhold the most inexperienced. (red)hats off for helping the revolution...
redhat on the other hand get's two thumbs up by getting their installer running in x. reminds me of solaris installers. a little dry, but IMHO flash during setup is REALLY unnecessary! there is some humor in the install(kernel dev with the AC icon), but i really miss the redneck install.
overall, i think RH is still the better distro between the two, mainly 'cause i feel uncomfortable with partition magic(fuck partitioners, get another drive! they're dirt cheap!) and i'm really grooving on gnome. aside from these trivial "flavorings" that different distro's have, aren't all linux flavors pink on the inside? their all good if their running gnu/oss/open binaries, and the addition of limiting licensed software will only enchance the end user experience.
sure it sounds reasonable. on the surface alot of unilateral agreements sound reasonable. but there's a point where this type of agreement becomes out of hand and we'll be agreeing to all kinds of weird things.
case in point: shrinkwrap software agreements/elua.remember like 10 or 12 years ago when these things used to be fairly legable? now they're totally out of control, type set in 3 point type, and have more verbage than war and peace! and it's not like you can understand them either, unless you have a legal degree... so everyone who needs photoshop, quark, office, code warrior, or any commercial software for that matter just blow right past them and quickly get to the installation screens.
so back to the topic at hand... it wouldn't surprise me if within the next 18 months some type of recognition to the agreement will be enforced, similar to software installs, i.e. there'll be a "click here to agree" button on the web page or a type "y" in commandline to agree license compliance from nsi for whois.
what might seem draconian will be if nsi(maybe thru echelon?) keeps a database of who does whois...
you know that all the interest in RHAT are causing the price to increase... hope they do well, cause they'll be the benchmark for va and any other linux based systems/products that are gathering speed...
part of growing up is the adjustment that we all go thru. from being over-zelous about our object of affection(band, song, girl, sports, hero, os, whatever) to the other extreme of becoming jaded. eventually we all will reach a middle road and a balance. that's part of growing up, which is what the linux community is still doing. yeah, the kind of advocacy the we saw with the mindcraft fiasco is unfortunate, but we don't need to be facists about it either. better to let youthful exhuberance take it's course. in time the authors of bad advocacy will eventually realize how silly they look(ed) and their attitudes will shift in the other direction, and hopefully a more balanced point of view.
if you liked dark city, you'll love City of Lost Children. for the most part, i believe dark city took the theme from the earlier movie and tried to sanitize/americanize the story(i.e. underdog hero, romantic interest, happy ending)and change the story line enough not to be accused of plagiarism. COLC has the same feeling of dark city, but not quite as formulaic as a hollywood production. also, it has the same retro feeling that alot of current sci-fi has been rolling out(dark city, 5th element, even the matrix) in which the future isn't the shiny antiseptic vision, but one that somehow retains the grunge of yesteryear. this movie is definitely in my top-10, if-i-were-on-a-desert-island-and-had-to-pick-only- ten-movies list.
there is no excuse, and there never will be a valid excuse for violating privacy, no matter what the offense might have been(be it computer virus, murder, terrorism). yeah, maybe you can catch someone doing something bad if they used a M$ product to right the ranson/threat because gates violated their privacy, but what if they used vi?
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traa, like i said, i'm not making a personal attack on you, i'm making a comment on that fact that there's a great number of syntactical and grammatical errors in posts and comments. your comment just happened to be the most convenient example, so please accept my apologies...
the comparision of programming languages to a regular language might not be an interesting topic (or side topic) of discussion on slashdot, however the only point i was suggesting is that sentences can convey a specific message by the way it's structured; similarly a snippet of code will function in a specific way because of the way it is structured. a misspelling in a "regular" language sentance can convey a completely different message, or cause the message to not be conveyed at all, the same goes for programming.
man, one of these days i wish more slashdotters would learn how to spell and use grammar. sometimes reading the comments to a story posted on slashdot is like reading the script to abbott and costello's "who's on first" routine.
.conf files!
"add" would be the contraction of a word like "addition"! "Ad" is the correct contraction for "advertising"!
i'm not trying to personally attack traa, but i've seen too many syntax errors of this sort in posts not to respond. after all, aren't most of the slashdot members either sysadmins or programmers for whom spelling and grammar might mean the difference between something functioning or not?
english is a clumsy language with its jumble of rules, but so are programming languages! syntax and grammar are important in communication as well as
sheesh!
wow! that's actually kinda funny...
the blue ice mod was cool, pyramac is truely a waste of deskspace, material, and time. i'd like to see more mods which have a higher level of thought and execution, such as this, the cast aluminum case.
turrettes syndrome, another friend calls me turbo. it's funny sometimes, but seriously, i've been combatting impulsive and compulsive behavior all my life. actually having adhd and being a sysadmin has kinda gone hand in hand, like being able to switch from task to task quickly or compulsive behavior in record keeping(serial numbers, warranties, etc). it's been terrible in my personal life, i've gone thru 4 major relationship in the last 20 years, and they all seem to have crumbled because of my fanatical behavior...
i started taking ritilin(60 mg) and paxil(30 mg) about a year, and it really started to help me keep an even keel on my spastic behavior(witnessed by others, never by myself). i was initially afraid that it might dull my edge, you know, take away that "jai nais se qua" that was a part of who i am... it did dull my edge, but just enough so that i wasn't cutting myself all the time(i.e. taking on too many projects). i'm able to concentrate more on internal documentation and white papers, recommendation/justification documents and other management task which, if i hadn't been able to accomplish, would have kept me in the perpetual "corporate pc piss-boy" role.
previously, the only other alternative medication was the alcohol variety, the organic combustible type only makes my paranoia kick into hyperdrive...
apple defends it's products, which include the hardware as well as the software. while i don't always agree with the way they defend their IP, it is understandable that they do so in order to provide a consistent experience to ther entire product line. imagine if you had a bad experience with a mac clone that was bodged together from older(and very likely used) parts. unless you are tech saavy, you might blame the entire computer(hardware and software) instead of just isolating the blame to the hardware. what happens in this instance? you blame apple, even though they were not responsible for the end package. until there is an "apple certified" used component clone manufacturer( like car manufacturers re-certifying used/out of lease cars, outfits like corecrib will likely be pushed out of business...
NeXT did have a display postscript license from Adobe(circa 1986-87), something Apple decided not to do for cost reasons(circa 1983-84), which was the reason screen/printer fonts needed an external rendering engine to do true(or as close to true) WYSIWYG via Quickdraw. remember all the screen font sizes you used to have to add in your font suitcase? Adobe also helped with the display of it's fonts thru the ATM utility to help 'tween screen resolution renditions of the fonts by interpreting the printer fonts. i always suspected that ATM was a mini postscript interpreter. Apple and Microsoft(and others) wanted to further distance themselves from postscript and developed the QuickDrawGX standard, which is becoming the opentype standard. what's really interesting here is that innovation was forced on the industry because of a financial issue; if apple didn't care about the cost of it's initial macintoshes, it would have had display postscript in it... neccesity is the mother of invention, even if it's the pocketbook.
frankly there are some things about display postscript that i prefer to the other options(especially in the prepress world). we used to send files to a scitex ps2 RIP which had a hardware based true postscript interpreter, and it pushed a preview via display postscript. if it didn't display a preview, it wouldn't print. you could also use this feature to "debug" problem graphics by watching the postscript render on screen element by element until it stopped rendering the image, which meant that the next element to be drawn was causing the problem.
it's really not incredulous that consumer products were not designed/manufactured to last for any length of time. it's called planned obsolecence, and every manufactured item has a limited lifespan; otherwise there'd be no need to design and manufacture new stuff and companies would go out of business... the lifespan of consumer computer/peripheral products tend to be very short(one to two years) due to the fact that many of those products are not repairable, versus workgroup or enterprise computer/peripheral products which are built to last on the average of three to five years(and tend to be exceptionally repairable).
i've been purchasing computers and related equipment for my employer(s) for the last 10 years, and i've had a chance to see the TCO/ROI of consumer versus enterprise printers, and hands down in terms of duty cycles and consumables, the consumer level products end up costing the company (or the individual) a lot more money over the lifespan of the printer than the workgroup/enterprise printers which literally get the work squeezed out of them over 5+ years... not to mention projects like gimp print which help new computers/users to have access to legacy equipment which is still operational (i'm using it now to fire up an old epson stylus 5000 as a printer for a group of osx users).
color laser printers are too bulky, too slow, too expensive, too costly to maintain, and consumables are very expensive. if you absolutely need color, lease a color laser copier and a fiery rip, and have the leasing company service it for you.
IMHO, it's better to spend the money up front getting a solid b/w laser printer based on a commonly deployed marking engine, like those from hp or canon... you don't get the lateset and greatest gimmicky toy features of the new printers, but you'll enjoy having that trusty old printer for years to come. personally i've got an old QMS 860 printer based on a canon bx engine, and it's still cranking away after all these years. i also found a place that will sell refurb part so i can continue to repair it years after qms stopped supporting it!
is your friend. LDAP could be your friend as well, but the adoption of NIS by the major unices, and it's strong connection with NFS make it an ideal solution for one login/passwd for multi-server authentication, and email.
we used to authenticate via NIS+(before we were purchased and told we were going to LDAP, still waiting after three years, but that's another story...) and i loved it! we were a prepress company with 6 seperate locations and several dozen servers scattered thru out the enterprise serving appletalk, email, home directories, and data collection. no matter which location you were at, you could use your single login/passwd to login to any other server, mount you home dir, and go about your business.
it took a bit of end user training(users wanting to save their mail on local drives instead of home directories, among other issues) but it was well adopted, and easy to maintain thru sun's solstice frontend.
the environment was hetrogeneous(solaris, aix, irix, linux, nt, macintosh) and all machines authenticated nicely, with the exception of earlier windows machines. had we deployed samba we would have had an easier time.
beware the difference of NIS and NIS+: NIS+ was sun's "updated" version of NIS. NIS is far more open and friendlier than NIS+... the irix and linux boxes preferred plain NIS.
the best benefit was the ease of administering the end users. one entry change propogated thru all machines... no more rushing from box to box when someone was getting canned. user can't remember email and filesharing password? no problem.
wan to migrate to LDAP cause NIS doesn't have everything you need? no problem with that too, tools exist for easy migration.
the holography that tj describes on his web page is a denisyuk or on-axis reflection hologram, done with a low powered laser on to silver halide based film. the holography that is being used as anti-counterfeiting methods(credit cards, cd's, baseball cards) are using a variation of the whitelight transmission or rainbow hologram. this method requires(typically) a multi-watt, water cooled argon laser with photoresist plates and a highly toxic development procedure. after a photoresist plate hologram is created, a nickel "mother" plate is grown using a plating process(like for choming). this mother plate is used to grow several daughter plates, which in conjunction with heat, pressure, and hard to aquire materials is embossed onto paper and plactics using a hot stamp process. the manufacture of these kind of holograms is just terribly time consuming, expensive, and spans several old-school technologies(photography, photochemistry, electro-plating, web press, foil hot stamping) and requires a small army of people. the security hologram is only security thru obscurity; the return on investment for the manufacturing of these security items is horrible, and the manufacturing of the materials used is built to order(not many people order tem00, 50 watt tunable argon lasers; photoresistplates; mercuric chloride, potassium permanganate, and other obscure toxic materials). all things which are easily tracked from manufacturer to purchaser.
okay, so i'm not the only one tripping... yeah this concept of multiple inflatable bladders tightly surrounding it's precious cargo was used in a movie(s). so which came first, the movie or the jpl concept? i suspect that jpl had the tumbleweed concept first(take a look at the drawing in cnn article, in profile the instrumentation is tiny;sublime) then the movie folks got a hold of it(holds 4 or 5 people in special harness chairs, equipment, the landing party survives the impact landing;ludicrous).
macs have it and pc's have it. even server applications such as xinet's fullpress(appletalk file sharing and opi solution) has a method for applying icc profiles to images stored in specified directories. why shouldn't linux apps have this? color management will make the linux server/workstation more useful in prepress applications, rendering engines(postscript/ghostscript/pdf rips), even shopping carts. mantaining a closer relationship to color management developments and keeping in line with other platforms is an advantage, not neccesarily a waste...
i'd be curious if anyone really releases any code, in source or binaries forms, that doesn't have any bugs. i'm speaking of actual programs/os, not scripts.
.x release, i never go with the .0 releases. even on other platforms... macos9.04, win98se, solaris 7/mu4...
the fact is, every application being produced and released has bugs. if everyone waited to release a product until all the bugs were fixed, software would never be shipped. conversely, if you actually used a software product that contained NO bugs, why would you ever want to upgrade?
it seems like a poor choice to make, shipping software out that still has bugs, but it allows for several positive things to happen: allow the end user to see the new direction an application is taking, and allowing the developers to see if any other bugs might surface with a wider pool of users. this is the endless cycle that every application i've ever used goes thru. take the software that adobe produces, for example: photoshop 5.0 is released, and shortly after the release, 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 appear to take care of unforseen bugs wiht specific hardware. 5.5 gets released to add new features and to fix the bugs from 5.0.x.... 6.0 gets released to add even more features( and uncovers even more bugs), and so on and so forth. every application/os has these same problems.
if you want to see an operating system that ships with bugs, take a look at windows macos or even solaris. they update their updates and patch lists all the time, they just don't get announced to the user community the same way linux does. and when it comes to figuring out which patch/fix will resolve your problem, there isn't always the open forum available with these other os's the way there is for linux.
in the end, if you're a redhat user, you'll eventually end up upgrading to the latest version. personally, i wait for the
i got pushed into managing others about ten years ago without my knowledge... my boss at the time had an office manager who was neither good at what she did, nor managed the people who reported to her well. along with another technically adept fellow, we kept finding ourselves troubleshooting problems the other staff was unable to resolve and fixing other problems that were obscure and unique. what did the office manager do? she kept referring problems to us, the two fixit men, cause she didn't have to deal with things she couldn't figure out.
this didn't go entirely un-noticed by either our fellow workers, our owner/boss, or the clientel. the request for our attention to problem and crisis resolution became our full time job, and our co-workers started reporting to the two of us, perhaps out of respect for management that rose from the ranks. at first we were'nt very good at managing others, in fact i sucked, but never backing away from a challenging situation, a few things i learned in the last ten years were:
1) decision making is like a muscle. the more you excersize it, the stronger and more agile this skill becomes. at first you're clumsy, but over time, eventually you'll find yourself making more 'of the right' decisions quicker and easier and often with positive outcomes.
2) treat others nicely, the way you would like to be treated or 'do onto others as you would have other do unto you' it truely makes a difference.
3) praise in public, scold in private. acknowledgement of a job well done has no substitute, conversely, no need to make a bad situation worse by humiliating someone in front of their peers.
4) people are like systems, you'll find yourself maintaining 20% of the staff/system 80% of the time. just don't forget the 80% that doesn't 'seem' to need the same amount of attention. you need to maintain a PM schedule for people as well.
5) resolve situations with problem employees swiftly, with fairness. something as mundane as excessive tardyiness can affect an entire department like wildfire.
everything has some corillary with everything else. if you take a look at a problem at a macro level, you'll find that problems at a micro level have similar symptoms and solutions and vice versa. same with management. the problems/tasks you faced as a skilled technical worker have very similar solutions when managing animate objects like people, but on a macro scale. apply you experience and you'll see things in a familiar light.
who knows what the exact problem is with integrators and why equipment and services seem to be mismatched, but very rarely have we purchased equipment for use in a production environment without some type of glitch. while i agree with you that equipment purchased, no matter what quantity or price, should be delivered: on time, in working order, and complete, i would also expect that anything we're bringing in fresh will also have to be: tested, reconfigured for our environment, and retested again. i'm not talking just single server type configs either. i'm talking about $150k installs. where engineers come to your location and "build" the config onsite. and stuff still goes wrong... cause it equipment is made 100% correct before delivery, it either won't deliver, or there wouldn't be a need to upgrade.
you could also find a var that's willing to put together the pieces you want, mix and match as you choose. Ask IBM to supply you with a list of var's, ask your fav ejb company to also supply you with a vendor list. more often than not, an integrator will act as you single point of contact, cause their the ones taking your money, it'll be their responsibility to act as the first and second tier support levels.
awhile back we were looking into a product called p-sync that would syncronize nis/nis+ and nt domain passwords. p-sync would act as a interim authenticating agent between the two systems, a handshake system if you will, passing the info to the final authenticators(s)without user intervention. i think the company was mustang terch out of alberta,ca.
what is you assesment of OSS(open source software) and its competion with commercial, closed source software?
ok, so we've just tried the two installs( redhat and caldrea) listed in the article, here's my humble opinion:
caldrea get's high marks for eyecandy in their install. obviously spent their development money to get the friendliest install to lure and handhold the most inexperienced. (red)hats off for helping the revolution...
redhat on the other hand get's two thumbs up by getting their installer running in x. reminds me of solaris installers. a little dry, but IMHO flash during setup is REALLY unnecessary! there is some humor in the install(kernel dev with the AC icon), but i really miss the redneck install.
overall, i think RH is still the better distro between the two, mainly 'cause i feel uncomfortable with partition magic(fuck partitioners, get another drive! they're dirt cheap!) and i'm really grooving on gnome. aside from these trivial "flavorings" that different distro's have, aren't all linux flavors pink on the inside? their all good if their running gnu/oss/open binaries, and the addition of limiting licensed software will only enchance the end user experience.
sure it sounds reasonable. on the surface alot of unilateral agreements sound reasonable. but there's a point where this type of agreement becomes out of hand and we'll be agreeing to all kinds of weird things.
case in point: shrinkwrap software agreements/elua.remember like 10 or 12 years ago when these things used to be fairly legable? now they're totally out of control, type set in 3 point type, and have more verbage than war and peace! and it's not like you can understand them either, unless you have a legal degree... so everyone who needs photoshop, quark, office, code warrior, or any commercial software for that matter just blow right past them and quickly get to the installation screens.
so back to the topic at hand...
it wouldn't surprise me if within the next 18 months some type of recognition to the agreement will be enforced, similar to software installs, i.e. there'll be a "click here to agree" button on the web page or a type "y" in commandline to agree license compliance from nsi for whois.
what might seem draconian will be if nsi(maybe thru echelon?) keeps a database of who does whois...
you know that all the interest in RHAT are causing the price to increase... hope they do well, cause they'll be the benchmark for va and any other linux based systems/products that are gathering speed...
part of growing up is the adjustment that we all go thru. from being over-zelous about our object of affection(band, song, girl, sports, hero, os, whatever) to the other extreme of becoming jaded. eventually we all will reach a middle road and a balance. that's part of growing up, which is what the linux community is still doing. yeah, the kind of advocacy the we saw with the mindcraft fiasco is unfortunate, but we don't need to be facists about it either. better to let youthful exhuberance take it's course. in time the authors of bad advocacy will eventually realize how silly they look(ed) and their attitudes will shift in the other direction, and hopefully a more balanced point of view.
if you liked dark city, you'll love City of Lost Children. for the most part, i believe dark city took the theme from the earlier movie and tried to sanitize/americanize the story(i.e. underdog hero, romantic interest, happy ending)and change the story line enough not to be accused of plagiarism. COLC has the same feeling of dark city, but not quite as formulaic as a hollywood production. also, it has the same retro feeling that alot of current sci-fi has been rolling out(dark city, 5th element, even the matrix) in which the future isn't the shiny antiseptic vision, but one that somehow retains the grunge of yesteryear. this movie is definitely in my top-10, if-i-were-on-a-desert-island-and-had-to-pick-only- ten-movies list.
i actually like it, man.
frankly the whole retro-underwood look is probably gonna catch on with other manufacturers...
there is no excuse, and there never will be a valid excuse for violating privacy, no matter what the offense might have been(be it computer virus, murder, terrorism). yeah, maybe you can catch someone doing something bad if they used a M$ product to right the ranson/threat because gates violated their privacy, but what if they used vi?