The main problem I see is that its designed to reproduce print-like quality, which is great for when you need a hard copy, but the trend to turn PDF into a lazy man's HTML is definately for the worse.
PDF should not be used as a replacement for HTML. Just as people should be shot for making flash only sites, they should be shot for just slapping a bunch of images or PDFs up, and calling it a 'website'. PDF has its uses, and the problem is that there are still a fair number of folks using the technology incorrectly. Likewise, there are folks who still try to send HTML e-mails to me. You'll do better if you attempt to educate folks about the technology than just blowing it off.
First, the filesize is ridiculous.
Yes and no. When handled correctly, it's quite reasonable. The problems are when someone scans in a 50 page document, and saves it all as images, with no compression, and you're looking at 65-70k per page. When you start comparing similar, correctly formatted items (not too many folks have graphics laden 300 page manuals in MS word hanging around), but when you compare it to a similar EPS file, or even something pre-press, like Quark or PageMaker, it's about right. For those folks who need to have the memo or whatever saved electronically exactly as it came in, well, there's options for
The interface needs a lot of work, unless I have a scrolling mouse I won't even bother reading one. The little hand widget must go. Also, I don't want to have to resize my screen to be able to read half the poorly produced PDFs out there. No use in jumping to the next page when I can only display 2/3 of the current one. So back to the little hand.
This is an application issue, and not a document standards issue. Personally, I use the pageup/pagedown keys normally.
They're non-editable for the most part once you make them.
Yet another pre-conceived falsehood. The problem is that you have Acrobat Reader, which only reads PDF files. There's a similar companion program for MS Word for those who want to read MS Word files, but don't want to shell out to be able to write them.
However, in this case, last year, when my roommate was entering the Games Workshop WH40k Grand Tournament, they had put up the application as a PDF. Unfortunately, wanted you to print it out, and write in the fields. I don't like that concept, so I opened it up in a full copy of Acrobat, and make it a little more functional. (added some fields, some automatic calculations, etc.)
They are in a closed format and controlled by a litigious company unafraid to use the DMCA for their own questionable ends.
*yawn*. You're starting to pull at straws, man. You could make that argument about just about any company who had a software product that they're not giving away for free. If you want to talk about some real hard asses, look up Kodak's Picture CD format.
The plug-ins are notoriously buggy.
Once again, straws. I'm guessing my definition of 'notorious' and yours differ greatly. It's rock-solid on a Mac. You might just want to move to a more stable OS.
Its great for sending something straight to the laser printer, but as an on-line advance it really just stinks.
Once again. You have to look at folks who use it correctly. There are times when PDF is the better format. Any sort of application or form that needs to be printed and signed can be filled on online, then printed, signed, and sent in. You get your pretty-printed version, and you reduce text-entry and the possibility for user error on the backend. [You just queue it up, and have someone verify they didn't change anything when you get the signed copy].
Personally, I feel that Flash and HTML3 were crappy advancements, due to the amount that people misuse them. The same with JavaScript and CSS. There are right times, and wrong times for just about any technology. There will never be one product which will solve every problem that folks might have, and to think that it might ever happen is just plain ignorant. PDF fills certain niche markets better than HTML ever will. Likewise, HTML better fills other niches. Just because you don't have the same uses that other folks have doesn't mean the product 'just stinks'.
Unless I'm pulling a fast one on IMDB, they're still free. [They're owned by Amazon now, and the do have an 'IMDBpro' option, but the bulk of their data is still free.
I mean, hell, if I were to pick up the special version of Army of Darkness, I'd have 4 copies of just that one. (VHS, VHS Special Ed., DVD, DVD Special Ed.)
I don't know my exact count, but well, that's why one of my friends talked me into reviewing DVD special features:
One of these days, we might actually post some of the other reviews. (comparing both versions of The Princess Bride, Dune [Lynch vs. SciFi], The Holy Grail, etc.)
First off, Win3.x was never an OS. It was a GUI over top of MS-DOS, which was the OS.
The big deal, however, is that MS-DOS was a client OS. Microsoft didn't have a large share of the server market, which at that point, still had a population of mainframes (rumor is...WinNT is based on VMS/CP... I don't know if there's any truth to that) or was mostly Unix machines. There were apples running as file and print servers, but for the most part, MS products were not that well networked, even in the days of Windows for Workgroups.
It actually gets worse than that, even.
Years ago, when trying to do a check to ensure that folks didn't link directly to a frame, and linked to the frameset, I found that Netscape and IE handle HTTP_REFERER on a framed document much differently.
I can't remember which is which, however, one of them considers that the HTTP_REFERER to a frame to be the HTML page with the frameset. The other considered it to be the same as the HTTP_REFERER to the frameset.
Needless to say, I couldn't implement anything using HTTP_REFERER, as some browsers would get stuck in an infinate loop, unless I forced them to go out of the frameset, and then come back in.
Well, unfortunately, I know a few folks who aren't too young to get married, have children, etc.
Finding ones who aren't burned out, and are divorced after years of working 60-100hr weeks is an entirely different story, however.
So, let's be completely un-pc, and lump the general IT community into a few social groups:
Loner : You know the type. They work, they go home, whatever. Odds are, whomever asked the original question is one of 'em.
Lush : The ones who come in hung over at least 3 times a week, and take a liquid lunch.
Raver : Kind of rare, unless you're working with the creative folks, like graphic designers, etc.
Family Person : As soon as they get home, you know they're being yelled at by their spouse.
Gamer : You have to work a weekend, and you come in to find 5 bastards who won't stop shouting back and forth to each other while they cheat at whatever game.
Odds are, most of us fall somewhere between these categories...You get the quiet, social drinker, who will show up at the occasional lan party (Loner/Lush/Gamer), and for some reason, Lush/Family seems to go together way too often.
People's personalities also seem to vary greatly by how much free time they have. Someone who lives 5 min from work, and is gone by 4pm every day doesn't tend to be quite so pissy as the sysadmin who normally fights 2hrs of traffic each morning, and hits the bars when they finally get the server fixed at 8pm.
If you really want to run servers, and you need a static IP address, you may want to look into seeing what ISPs in your area charge for business class, if they offer it at all.
Yes, I'm only getting 192 SDSL, for the same price that other folks are getting higher download speeds, but they'll handle my DNS, give me up to a/27 (2^5 = 32 addresses), and have no port restrictions.
My roommates would probably prefer faster download speeds, but the static IP address means that I can open up my box at work to our firewall, so that I can do work from home.
Obviously, if you throw enough money at a problem, it'll go away, but well, sometimes dropping the max speed for a little convenience, while still saving cash is worth it.
I've never shipped large quantities of books, as I'm anal retentive, so I'd rather just do the drive myself. [luckily, I packed the trailer well enough that even with the fact that I managed to roll it, I didn't even even break any of the lightbulbs in there]
Okay, so that's a bad way to start off moving advice, but anyway... paper comes in boxes of a certain size. Anything larger than that stuffed with paper products is just asking for trouble. And those don't handle abuse well, so you can't just use 'em directly unless you're using them for your personal packing/moving.
There is, however, one advantage to using normal paper boxes... the tops of the boxes are loose, so you can crush the size of the box down to perfectly fit the size of the contents. With a normal box, you'll want to slit the sides (carefully, so that you can enlarge the flaps), and make sure the books have no wiggle room in them.
If you're looking for more book shipping tips...try asking someone who's ordered a large shipment from Amazon. [but remember...lots of small boxes are better than fewer large boxes]
Macs have FOR MORE THAN A DECADE read DOS formatted disks. My macs can read FAT formatted zip disks. [Luckily, I had SCSI in my pc, so I didn't have to wait for the IDE Zip drives].
I've now had one of the 80G Maxtor drives since about April/May, and it's worked fine for me, moving files between a G3 portable, G4 desktop, win98 desktop, win2k desktop, and a winME desktop.
On the windows side, you have to go down to the lower right corner, and tell it to unmount the disk before you pull it. With the Mac, you just handle it as you would normally unmount a disk (drag to the trash).
Now, as for this 'doesn't read others' crap, let's look at the whole details -- As HFS uses two forks (data, resource), if you attempt to write a Mac file in anything other than 'raw data' mode, it'll create a directory 'resourcefolder' or something of that sort, and store the resource fork there. If you then use a non-mac to move the file, you'll lose the resource fork. This isn't an issue for many types of data files, as may have comments (like where a JPEG was downloaded from), or some minor save state information (BBEdit save state). This is an issue for applications, however. If you're going to need to move files around on the non-mac system, it's best to save them as some sort of an archive, or write 'em out to MacBinary.
There is, however, one additional issue. UNIX, DOS and Mac all use different line endings on text files. Normally, files are transfered between different systems using 'FTP', and you'd just force it to acsii mode to deal with this problem. If you're writing to a local disk, you'll have to know what line endings the recipient will need. WordPad (PC) or BBEdit (Mac) will handle foreign line endings. Not being a Linux user, I don't know if there are editors that handle this issue. [there's 'dos2unix' and the like, or you can just do some simple subsitutions on the file].
Macs for a damned long time even shipped with 'MacLink', a program which would let you convert different DOS/Mac/whatever files from different applications, so that you could open a Word5DOS file in WP3.5Mac without losing formatting. DataViz also makes a program for the PC, but well, PCs can't read Mac disks, like Macs can read PC disks, so I don't know how useful it'd be.
Personally, these days, I use my PCs, and my Solaris box at work more than my mac (until I need BBEdit), however, I'm surpised to see this sort of completely unsupported mac-bashing on a website that always bitches about the 'FUD' from Microsoft.
You'd be amazed at how many folks come up from the dregs of their university helpdesk. Unfortunately, as you're already 33, and most have had a job that actually pays well, and you don't have to deal with abusive people, this may not be the best way for you to go.
For me, and quite a few of the folks that I've seen, they get a part time job during college, supervising the computer labs in some way, then once they're seen as dependable and hard working, they might be given a few extra tasks to do by your manager, or they might just been seen as the person that everyone keeps refering questions to.
From there, you either use that as a job reference to go someone else, or if you like working for the university, you wait for a good job opening (expanding the department, someone leaving), and work your way up from there. [I did a little of both -- I left for a couple of years, then came back]
Of all of the folks I've dealt with in the past dozen years or so, I've only seen one person recently make the change over once they were over 30. [Quite a few did so decades ago, but it doesn't seem to be a common thing these days]. Unfortunately, he was a little bit of a black sheep, as he kept making poor decisions which affected other departments, and many of the other system admins wanted nothing to do with him. The person who hired him had also been stripped of all of their hiring abilities. Of course, he didn't try to take the slow route, but went to a certificate course, and then applied for the job.
I would say that the folks who don't come from an all-computer background tend to make better system/network admins overall. I've worked with some great folks with Psych/History/Art/construction backgrounds, and because they don't think in the conventional CompSci/CompE terms, they can sometimes circumvent many of the problems. There have been quite a few CompSci folks that have made spectacular system admins, but there also tend to be so many of 'em in the field who suck, and bring down their average.
So, well, where's that leave you? Unfortunately, there aren't many places to go. You say you're a teacher, but not where. If it's in higher education (college, university, whatever), you might be able to teach a class with a computer slant once a year/semester whatever, come up with a reason to put up your own server, so that you can work it all back into fleshing out a resume. For high school/middle school, you might be able to do some of the same stuff with extracurricular activities...maybe be an advisor for a computer club, etc.
If you're a seasonal teacher (eg, high school, and have 2months off for the summer), or you have enough extra time, you might try moonlighting for an ISP helpdesk, and flesh out your resume from there. Although it might be possible to take some certificate course, and then get some manager to hire you when you have to experience, you'll do better in the long run if you get a good foundation, and build from there.
I thought all Apple users knew the rules.... never buy anything ending with '100' from Apple.
[Okay, the PowerMac 7200 had a flakey PCI Bus, and the PowerBook 5400? got the 'extended 7 year warrenty' because just about the whole thing was flakey]
My SE/30, IIci, ClassicII, Centris650, Powerbook 520c all still run fine. [well, as powerful as they ever were...as the newest one's from 1994?5?]
Oh...I've seen a few dozen PM7100's that run like champs, so I guess we can't completely blanket the '100' rule.
For the most part, it's like installing bleeding edge software.... version '6.0.5' sounds so much safer to me than '6.0'
Oh...and to somewhat keep this on topic -- I have a Maxtor 80G firewire drive as we have a restriction on 'no MP3s on work computers', so they're just on a personal peripheral device attached to a work computer. I'm using 2.5G for mp3s, and another 25G for misc. backups. The portability is great, as this would be smaller than the power supply of my firewire drive now [3.5" form factor, needs external power].
For some reason, my last boss would say that type of crap, too.
50x the speed is 4900% faster, not 5000% faster.
[For some reason, he was convinced that my shaving something down to 1/6 the time was a 600% time savings. In reality, it was actually that the older method was 500% slower than the new version, and time savings of 5/6 (83.33%)]
For some reasons, some standards always seem to be listed in MBps and some in Mbps. [Normally, it's an order of magnitude thing...I had an engineering teacher who prefered numbers that stayed between 1 and 10, if possible, as he could conceptualize those numbers more easily than 100-1000.]
SCSI, UDMA and Firewire you normally see in MB/s. USB and network connections are normally listed in Mb/s.
There are folks at my office whom I would define as quirky. They are not, however, people who neglect to come into work, and do not meet their project deadlines.
There are quite a few of us, whom, unfortunately, work into the night and on weekends. Sometimes it's just because that's the only time that we can get downtime for a machine. Normally, it's because of production problems [which have been most commonly caused by upper level management setting drop-dead deadlines, and not giving us sufficient time to load test the system before it goes live, which was in turned partially caused by production problems -- wash, rinse, repeat]
Of our rag-tag group, we have two-ex military [one retired, who's seen a lot, been lots of places, and you really don't want to piss off, because he gets really, really, quiet, until you're just sure that he's planning revenge somehow], the other's we never see as he only works part time, and always seems to be fixing problems in other offices.
We've got our stereotypical grizzled 'unix engineer', an ex-military contractor who used to build pools for a living, but now just bitches when people keep changing stuff at the last second. We've got your typical BOFH, who can rebuild a solaris box damned quick, but you really don't want to catch her on a bad day.
We've got a handful of 'boring' people, who just sit there, do their work, and you never really see causing trouble. [I think they're actually allowed to go to meetings].
And of course, there's me, who finds every opportunity to send subversive e-mails, complain about the dress code, etc. [I've since been asked not to wear armour to work, even though a gorget, is, technically, a collar]
You do, however, had to know your environment, and how far you can push your 'quirkiness'. I make sure that I just shoot people's screens with nerf guns and make 'em jump back, I don't shoot them in the back of the head [anymore]. I know that my work is so paranoid about lawsuits that I would have to actively assault someone, or steal something to be fired, so I can give it a good push. [That's not to say, however, that I won't be passed over for promotion, etc, but well, I don't want to be management, so that's fine for me] I've also proven myself as a hard worker, and can make my deadlines, and I've been here long enough that I've made friends in enough departments that I got requests to transfer when I had to leave one department when my manager pissed me off.
So well, 'quirky' is here to stay. 'Incompetant' and 'lazy piece of crap' are not. 'Scares co-workers' is out, also.
As someone who's been involved with three different wireless networks, I just don't see this being a threat to the ILECs like you're thinking it will be.
First, I had Ricochet. For what I wanted, it was great. I wasn't tying up my phone line, I could take my portable anywhere on campus and get a connection, and hell, it was a PPP connection, as opposed to the terminal connections my school was offering, for not much more than what a dialup through an ISP would cost. And it wasn't significantly slower, as it was in the days before kFlex/x2/v.90. It had its problems, however, as there were times when I would get some massive latency. The worst location I could keep the modem was in my apartment...other places were great, but the fact that I was in a concrete building sucked ass.
My next network was a bunch of us from my work living in an appartment complex. We had some ISA wavelan cards that one of the guys had, and it connected up three of our apartments, to an ISDN line outbound. For what we wanted, it worked fine. When there was snow, rain, whatever, the connections would flake out, and you'd have to find a new 'optimal' place for the antenna. Of course, then the person with the ISDN line bought a house, and moved out. The new uplink was put in my place, but GTE had changed their tarrifing for residential ISDN lines [and our complex was 19k feet from the switch, so no DSL, which had just come into the area, and they weren't on the public cable system, so that was out, too]. For what we needed, it worked, but it wasn't a sort of 'set it up and forget it' situation.
Now, I've set the wavelan cards up, and I've got line of sight to my neighbor, who's sharing my DSL [business class, not residential] line. It works better having line of sight, but it still flakes out randomly once in a while, and you have to nudge the antennas a little bit 'till you find a good connection [that whole problem with nodes and antinodes in wavelength].
Wireless may solve problems that you have, and you may be willing to deal with issues, but I don't see people setting up a network, and watching other people start hogging their uplink, or probing their boxes, dealing with the support issues, etc. I do think that wireless has good potential in many, many areas, but I don't see it being anything for the telcos to worry about any time soon.
Yeah, the problem probably comes from using rent-a-pops like UUNet.
They can't just restrict down to IPs that outgoing mail might come from, as the IP ranges may change, and the people in those IP ranges may not be their customers, so they don't have a way to shut them down should they start spamming through them.
Blocking by requiring an '@msn.com' e-mail address is flat out lame, and the wrong way to do things. They'd be better served by using some sort of authenticated SMTP for outgoing messages in the ip ranges that are considered local to them, and rejecting mail from outside IP addresses that don't have a to address from @msn.com.
Hmmm....as I haven't had to deal with these issues with MSN [most of our faculty seem to be on Erols/RCN, AOL, or just forwarding everything to Hotmail], it would be interesting to see if they're doing the 'from' checks on the From: header, or the envelope from. [Unfortunately, I don't know of any mail clients that let you set the envelope from independantly, other than using 'bounce' from within Pine]
If it's the envelope from, however, it might be possible to cook up a program which would work with MSN, but still send with a From: header from something other than MSN. [Getting people to switch to it, and MSN not being pricks and shutting it down like users of Netscape/Mailsmith/Eudora, are other matters, however]
MSN has no clue if you're sending spam through a third party relay, or if you're connecting to a legitimate authenticating mail relay, or if you're handing your own SMTP, and connecting to the proper MX.
MSN allowing outbound port 25 connections from a dialup customer is a step backwards for spam prevention. As someone who's being affected en mass by their changing policies, your university should contact them, and inform them that they either need to make provisions for your case, or that your group will have to make sure that your users take their business elsewhere, and find an ISP that you can work with.
If the faculty members were using their university e-mail addresses, and not their MSN one, they will have no issue in moving to a new ISP, save for the initial time in re-configuration. If they were using their local MSN e-mail address, and they're not willing to give it up, then they have to weigh the costs & benefits in switching. The only ones who are really screwed in this situation are not those that are concerned with third party relay, but wished to use some other non-MS client to read their mail from.
Realisticly, you should be using authenticated SMTP to see if there's some prick in the dorms starting up his own little spamming business. You should not expect outside ISPs however, to allow your users to connect to the server from a dialup connection. [Hell, we don't even allow allow relaying for connections from off-campus, although, that was a recent change [this morning] due to the lack of being able to authenticate with the trend micro virus scanner in front of the SIMS mail cloud, and we're just waiting to see how many users start complaining as they didn't get the messages regarding the policy changes]
As both someone who's worked at an ISP, and who has worked at a University, what they're doing by disallowing outbound port 25 connections is a GOOD thing, as it keeps spammers from using a throwaway account to originate and inject to open relays.
Odds are, it's not based on the from address, but based on the originating IP address. [as to just allow 'from: *@msn.com' is setting themselves up as a third party relay for messages with forged headers.] It may also not be MSN, but it may be UUNet, who I believe MSN rents POPs from.
Now, for the solution -- tell the faculty to follow the instructions from their ISP for their home machines, not the instructions from the university, which is for local machines. If they have to have a from address with MSN in it to use the SMTP servers, just tag on a reply-to address.
The only whining that might take a little bit of a work arround is for those folks who use a laptop from both home and from work. You need to use an ISP that can push DNS server information to you in the PPP negotiation, or a broadband connection with DNS defined by the DHCP server, so that they're getting dynamic DNS at home, and using DHCP sending DNS at work, so they have dynamic DNS there. Then, they need to put in a non-FQDN for the SMTP server.
For example, you have someone at isp.net, and work for lame.edu. The isp has a host named smtp.isp.net which they can deliver their mail to, and you have a machine named smtp.lame.edu which the faculty [why do the faculty always complain the most?] can use when they're on campus.
When off campus, they're using the dns servers at isp.net, and so, when sending to 'smtp', it looks up 'smtp.isp.net'. When on campus, they're using the dns servers at lame.edu, and so, 'smtp' would be 'smtp.lame.edu'.
If you have enough users on their system, you can normally get issues pushed through to someone more signficant at the ISP, so that you can find some working solution before having the users try it. [Our university's been in talks with AOL for a week or two, as it seems that when we set up a Trend virus firewall, we opened ourselves up for third party relaying, and AOL started sporaticly dropping our e-mail when their spam traps were triggered]
I have to wonder if any OS that is primarily used as a server needs something like Gnome.
Yes, conventional wisdom would suggest that servers don't need GUIs. Unfortunately, it's getting to where more and more applications (Oracle for one) are nearly impossible to install from the command line. Although some applications (Sun Cluster) have HTTP interfaces for configuration, others (iPlanet Directory) have Java interfaces. Sometimes it's either to go to the individual machine and do the work from there. Other times, you'll want to send the session back to your local machine.
If you're sending it back to your local machine, you'd have to ask what's on your desk. Well, if you're monitoring a whole bunch of Solaris boxes, it makes sense to have at least one Solaris machine on your desk, some sort of a windows machine (as it will run the software that people would be using to connect to the systems), and a few have an extra machine [linux, another solaris, or my mac, as I refuse to live without BBEdit])
Hands down, the Solaris boxes tend to be our primary machines, as you can use them for light development, they handle virtual desktops, etc. Of course, all but one of the nine folks in my office are running CDE. Does that mean that CDE's the best thing to be running? Probably not. I use it because it's here.
Would I switch to Gnome? Probably not with anything but a cold install, as I'm busy enough during the day to take the time to install without messing up my project schedule, and I'm not familiar with Gnome, so I'd have a learning curve.
I see this as being most beneficial to the folks that run linux/freebsd/openbsd at home with gnome, and have ultrasparc machines at work, and would prefer to just deal with one GUI. I don't fit into that category, but I know that I would love to get away from CDE, but I can't afford to expend significant time in switching over.
The problem is, there are so many commands, it's hard to fit that much information into a small space. So, for quick reference, I normally turn to 'man -k' [which is the same as 'apropos'].
Failing that, a quick search through google or google groups.
Some people prefer printed materials, however, and I know that one of the folks here always seems to go for one book which just has the quick usage of most shell commands [but well, she doesn't get in for a few hours, and it wasn't obvious in her stacks of books] She also had the Linux Command Reference, published by the Linux Journal, which is slightly bigger than the ORA pocket books, but still very portable.
Once of the books that I started out with was the UNIX System Administration Handbook, which I've heard includes linux in the latest version. It's not cheap, it's not small, but it nicely organizes things by topic, and points out possible pitfalls.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem I see is that its designed to reproduce print-like quality, which is great for when you need a hard copy, but the trend to turn PDF into a lazy man's HTML is definately for the worse.
PDF should not be used as a replacement for HTML. Just as people should be shot for making flash only sites, they should be shot for just slapping a bunch of images or PDFs up, and calling it a 'website'. PDF has its uses, and the problem is that there are still a fair number of folks using the technology incorrectly. Likewise, there are folks who still try to send HTML e-mails to me. You'll do better if you attempt to educate folks about the technology than just blowing it off.
First, the filesize is ridiculous.
Yes and no. When handled correctly, it's quite reasonable. The problems are when someone scans in a 50 page document, and saves it all as images, with no compression, and you're looking at 65-70k per page. When you start comparing similar, correctly formatted items (not too many folks have graphics laden 300 page manuals in MS word hanging around), but when you compare it to a similar EPS file, or even something pre-press, like Quark or PageMaker, it's about right. For those folks who need to have the memo or whatever saved electronically exactly as it came in, well, there's options for
The interface needs a lot of work, unless I have a scrolling mouse I won't even bother reading one. The little hand widget must go. Also, I don't want to have to resize my screen to be able to read half the poorly produced PDFs out there. No use in jumping to the next page when I can only display 2/3 of the current one. So back to the little hand.
This is an application issue, and not a document standards issue. Personally, I use the pageup/pagedown keys normally.
They're non-editable for the most part once you make them.
Yet another pre-conceived falsehood. The problem is that you have Acrobat Reader, which only reads PDF files. There's a similar companion program for MS Word for those who want to read MS Word files, but don't want to shell out to be able to write them.
However, in this case, last year, when my roommate was entering the Games Workshop WH40k Grand Tournament, they had put up the application as a PDF. Unfortunately, wanted you to print it out, and write in the fields. I don't like that concept, so I opened it up in a full copy of Acrobat, and make it a little more functional. (added some fields, some automatic calculations, etc.)
They are in a closed format and controlled by a litigious company unafraid to use the DMCA for their own questionable ends.
*yawn*. You're starting to pull at straws, man. You could make that argument about just about any company who had a software product that they're not giving away for free. If you want to talk about some real hard asses, look up Kodak's Picture CD format.
The plug-ins are notoriously buggy.
Once again, straws. I'm guessing my definition of 'notorious' and yours differ greatly. It's rock-solid on a Mac. You might just want to move to a more stable OS.
Its great for sending something straight to the laser printer, but as an on-line advance it really just stinks.
Once again. You have to look at folks who use it correctly. There are times when PDF is the better format. Any sort of application or form that needs to be printed and signed can be filled on online, then printed, signed, and sent in. You get your pretty-printed version, and you reduce text-entry and the possibility for user error on the backend. [You just queue it up, and have someone verify they didn't change anything when you get the signed copy].
Personally, I feel that Flash and HTML3 were crappy advancements, due to the amount that people misuse them. The same with JavaScript and CSS. There are right times, and wrong times for just about any technology. There will never be one product which will solve every problem that folks might have, and to think that it might ever happen is just plain ignorant. PDF fills certain niche markets better than HTML ever will. Likewise, HTML better fills other niches. Just because you don't have the same uses that other folks have doesn't mean the product 'just stinks'.
Um...I think you're refering to the CDDB...
Unless I'm pulling a fast one on IMDB, they're still free. [They're owned by Amazon now, and the do have an 'IMDBpro' option, but the bulk of their data is still free.
Wow, you're just slacking there.
I mean, hell, if I were to pick up the special version of Army of Darkness, I'd have 4 copies of just that one. (VHS, VHS Special Ed., DVD, DVD Special Ed.)
I don't know my exact count, but well, that's why one of my friends talked me into reviewing DVD special features:
Dogma (sp.ed vs. regular)
One of these days, we might actually post some of the other reviews. (comparing both versions of The Princess Bride, Dune [Lynch vs. SciFi], The Holy Grail, etc.)
First off, Win3.x was never an OS. It was a GUI over top of MS-DOS, which was the OS.
The big deal, however, is that MS-DOS was a client OS. Microsoft didn't have a large share of the server market, which at that point, still had a population of mainframes (rumor is...WinNT is based on VMS/CP... I don't know if there's any truth to that) or was mostly Unix machines. There were apples running as file and print servers, but for the most part, MS products were not that well networked, even in the days of Windows for Workgroups.
It actually gets worse than that, even.
Years ago, when trying to do a check to ensure that folks didn't link directly to a frame, and linked to the frameset, I found that Netscape and IE handle HTTP_REFERER on a framed document much differently.
I can't remember which is which, however, one of them considers that the HTTP_REFERER to a frame to be the HTML page with the frameset. The other considered it to be the same as the HTTP_REFERER to the frameset.
Needless to say, I couldn't implement anything using HTTP_REFERER, as some browsers would get stuck in an infinate loop, unless I forced them to go out of the frameset, and then come back in.
Finding ones who aren't burned out, and are divorced after years of working 60-100hr weeks is an entirely different story, however.
So, let's be completely un-pc, and lump the general IT community into a few social groups:
- Loner : You know the type. They work, they go home, whatever. Odds are, whomever asked the original question is one of 'em.
- Lush : The ones who come in hung over at least 3 times a week, and take a liquid lunch.
- Raver : Kind of rare, unless you're working with the creative folks, like graphic designers, etc.
- Family Person : As soon as they get home, you know they're being yelled at by their spouse.
- Gamer : You have to work a weekend, and you come in to find 5 bastards who won't stop shouting back and forth to each other while they cheat at whatever game.
Odds are, most of us fall somewhere between these categories...You get the quiet, social drinker, who will show up at the occasional lan party (Loner/Lush/Gamer), and for some reason, Lush/Family seems to go together way too often.People's personalities also seem to vary greatly by how much free time they have. Someone who lives 5 min from work, and is gone by 4pm every day doesn't tend to be quite so pissy as the sysadmin who normally fights 2hrs of traffic each morning, and hits the bars when they finally get the server fixed at 8pm.
I'd be much more impressed if someone gave me one of those little robots that you hooked up to your computer, and controlled via. LOGO.
[okay...I played with LOGO for much too long... I harrassed my instructor until he told me how to pass variables between functions]
Logo Robotics
If you really want to run servers, and you need a static IP address, you may want to look into seeing what ISPs in your area charge for business class, if they offer it at all.
/27 (2^5 = 32 addresses), and have no port restrictions.
Yes, I'm only getting 192 SDSL, for the same price that other folks are getting higher download speeds, but they'll handle my DNS, give me up to a
My roommates would probably prefer faster download speeds, but the static IP address means that I can open up my box at work to our firewall, so that I can do work from home.
Obviously, if you throw enough money at a problem, it'll go away, but well, sometimes dropping the max speed for a little convenience, while still saving cash is worth it.
I've never shipped large quantities of books, as I'm anal retentive, so I'd rather just do the drive myself. [luckily, I packed the trailer well enough that even with the fact that I managed to roll it, I didn't even even break any of the lightbulbs in there]
Okay, so that's a bad way to start off moving advice, but anyway... paper comes in boxes of a certain size. Anything larger than that stuffed with paper products is just asking for trouble. And those don't handle abuse well, so you can't just use 'em directly unless you're using them for your personal packing/moving.
There is, however, one advantage to using normal paper boxes... the tops of the boxes are loose, so you can crush the size of the box down to perfectly fit the size of the contents. With a normal box, you'll want to slit the sides (carefully, so that you can enlarge the flaps), and make sure the books have no wiggle room in them.
If you're looking for more book shipping tips...try asking someone who's ordered a large shipment from Amazon. [but remember...lots of small boxes are better than fewer large boxes]
Macs have FOR MORE THAN A DECADE read DOS formatted disks. My macs can read FAT formatted zip disks. [Luckily, I had SCSI in my pc, so I didn't have to wait for the IDE Zip drives].
n dex.html
I've now had one of the 80G Maxtor drives since about April/May, and it's worked fine for me, moving files between a G3 portable, G4 desktop, win98 desktop, win2k desktop, and a winME desktop.
On the windows side, you have to go down to the lower right corner, and tell it to unmount the disk before you pull it. With the Mac, you just handle it as you would normally unmount a disk (drag to the trash).
Now, as for this 'doesn't read others' crap, let's look at the whole details -- As HFS uses two forks (data, resource), if you attempt to write a Mac file in anything other than 'raw data' mode, it'll create a directory 'resourcefolder' or something of that sort, and store the resource fork there. If you then use a non-mac to move the file, you'll lose the resource fork. This isn't an issue for many types of data files, as may have comments (like where a JPEG was downloaded from), or some minor save state information (BBEdit save state). This is an issue for applications, however. If you're going to need to move files around on the non-mac system, it's best to save them as some sort of an archive, or write 'em out to MacBinary.
There is, however, one additional issue. UNIX, DOS and Mac all use different line endings on text files. Normally, files are transfered between different systems using 'FTP', and you'd just force it to acsii mode to deal with this problem. If you're writing to a local disk, you'll have to know what line endings the recipient will need. WordPad (PC) or BBEdit (Mac) will handle foreign line endings. Not being a Linux user, I don't know if there are editors that handle this issue. [there's 'dos2unix' and the like, or you can just do some simple subsitutions on the file].
Macs for a damned long time even shipped with 'MacLink', a program which would let you convert different DOS/Mac/whatever files from different applications, so that you could open a Word5DOS file in WP3.5Mac without losing formatting. DataViz also makes a program for the PC, but well, PCs can't read Mac disks, like Macs can read PC disks, so I don't know how useful it'd be.
http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/i
Personally, these days, I use my PCs, and my Solaris box at work more than my mac (until I need BBEdit), however, I'm surpised to see this sort of completely unsupported mac-bashing on a website that always bitches about the 'FUD' from Microsoft.
There was a lot of talk about if Bungie would go to xbox only when they were bought by microsoft...
0 0/MacGamesPR.asp
a c.shtml
http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/press/2000/Jul
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0007/20.halom
Bungie's promised Mac versions of Halo, but I haven't seen any definate promises of a PC version.
Various companies are making 'sleeves' these days for portables...
A quick search on google turned up the following:
http://www.macyummies.com/jammacsleevf.html.
For $30 or so, you can keep away most scratches, and get a little bit of extra cushion for those accidental drops.
You'd be amazed at how many folks come up from the dregs of their university helpdesk. Unfortunately, as you're already 33, and most have had a job that actually pays well, and you don't have to deal with abusive people, this may not be the best way for you to go.
For me, and quite a few of the folks that I've seen, they get a part time job during college, supervising the computer labs in some way, then once they're seen as dependable and hard working, they might be given a few extra tasks to do by your manager, or they might just been seen as the person that everyone keeps refering questions to.
From there, you either use that as a job reference to go someone else, or if you like working for the university, you wait for a good job opening (expanding the department, someone leaving), and work your way up from there. [I did a little of both -- I left for a couple of years, then came back]
Of all of the folks I've dealt with in the past dozen years or so, I've only seen one person recently make the change over once they were over 30. [Quite a few did so decades ago, but it doesn't seem to be a common thing these days]. Unfortunately, he was a little bit of a black sheep, as he kept making poor decisions which affected other departments, and many of the other system admins wanted nothing to do with him. The person who hired him had also been stripped of all of their hiring abilities. Of course, he didn't try to take the slow route, but went to a certificate course, and then applied for the job.
I would say that the folks who don't come from an all-computer background tend to make better system/network admins overall. I've worked with some great folks with Psych/History/Art/construction backgrounds, and because they don't think in the conventional CompSci/CompE terms, they can sometimes circumvent many of the problems. There have been quite a few CompSci folks that have made spectacular system admins, but there also tend to be so many of 'em in the field who suck, and bring down their average.
So, well, where's that leave you? Unfortunately, there aren't many places to go. You say you're a teacher, but not where. If it's in higher education (college, university, whatever), you might be able to teach a class with a computer slant once a year/semester whatever, come up with a reason to put up your own server, so that you can work it all back into fleshing out a resume. For high school/middle school, you might be able to do some of the same stuff with extracurricular activities...maybe be an advisor for a computer club, etc.
If you're a seasonal teacher (eg, high school, and have 2months off for the summer), or you have enough extra time, you might try moonlighting for an ISP helpdesk, and flesh out your resume from there. Although it might be possible to take some certificate course, and then get some manager to hire you when you have to experience, you'll do better in the long run if you get a good foundation, and build from there.
Oh...for shame...
.... never buy anything ending with '100' from Apple.
I thought all Apple users knew the rules
[Okay, the PowerMac 7200 had a flakey PCI Bus, and the PowerBook 5400? got the 'extended 7 year warrenty' because just about the whole thing was flakey]
My SE/30, IIci, ClassicII, Centris650, Powerbook 520c all still run fine. [well, as powerful as they ever were...as the newest one's from 1994?5?]
Oh...I've seen a few dozen PM7100's that run like champs, so I guess we can't completely blanket the '100' rule.
For the most part, it's like installing bleeding edge software.... version '6.0.5' sounds so much safer to me than '6.0'
Oh...and to somewhat keep this on topic -- I have a Maxtor 80G firewire drive as we have a restriction on 'no MP3s on work computers', so they're just on a personal peripheral device attached to a work computer. I'm using 2.5G for mp3s, and another 25G for misc. backups. The portability is great, as this would be smaller than the power supply of my firewire drive now [3.5" form factor, needs external power].
For some reason, my last boss would say that type of crap, too.
50x the speed is 4900% faster, not 5000% faster.
[For some reason, he was convinced that my shaving something down to 1/6 the time was a 600% time savings. In reality, it was actually that the older method was 500% slower than the new version, and time savings of 5/6 (83.33%)]
MB = Mega Byte.
Mb = Mega Bit.
Therefore, 400Mb/s = 50MB/s
For some reasons, some standards always seem to be listed in MBps and some in Mbps. [Normally, it's an order of magnitude thing...I had an engineering teacher who prefered numbers that stayed between 1 and 10, if possible, as he could conceptualize those numbers more easily than 100-1000.]
SCSI, UDMA and Firewire you normally see in MB/s. USB and network connections are normally listed in Mb/s.
50MB/s is the max throughput for firewire.
Odds are, the drive can't handle the full bus speed.
If it's using the Toshiba 1.8" drive, you're looking at a top end of 12MB/s, which means a about 50x the speed of USB.
(assuming it's the same drive that someone pointed out in another post, is listed for $400, without the mp3 playing ability, at smartdisk.com)
There are folks at my office whom I would define as quirky. They are not, however, people who neglect to come into work, and do not meet their project deadlines.
There are quite a few of us, whom, unfortunately, work into the night and on weekends. Sometimes it's just because that's the only time that we can get downtime for a machine. Normally, it's because of production problems [which have been most commonly caused by upper level management setting drop-dead deadlines, and not giving us sufficient time to load test the system before it goes live, which was in turned partially caused by production problems -- wash, rinse, repeat]
Of our rag-tag group, we have two-ex military [one retired, who's seen a lot, been lots of places, and you really don't want to piss off, because he gets really, really, quiet, until you're just sure that he's planning revenge somehow], the other's we never see as he only works part time, and always seems to be fixing problems in other offices.
We've got our stereotypical grizzled 'unix engineer', an ex-military contractor who used to build pools for a living, but now just bitches when people keep changing stuff at the last second. We've got your typical BOFH, who can rebuild a solaris box damned quick, but you really don't want to catch her on a bad day.
We've got a handful of 'boring' people, who just sit there, do their work, and you never really see causing trouble. [I think they're actually allowed to go to meetings].
And of course, there's me, who finds every opportunity to send subversive e-mails, complain about the dress code, etc. [I've since been asked not to wear armour to work, even though a gorget, is, technically, a collar]
You do, however, had to know your environment, and how far you can push your 'quirkiness'. I make sure that I just shoot people's screens with nerf guns and make 'em jump back, I don't shoot them in the back of the head [anymore]. I know that my work is so paranoid about lawsuits that I would have to actively assault someone, or steal something to be fired, so I can give it a good push. [That's not to say, however, that I won't be passed over for promotion, etc, but well, I don't want to be management, so that's fine for me] I've also proven myself as a hard worker, and can make my deadlines, and I've been here long enough that I've made friends in enough departments that I got requests to transfer when I had to leave one department when my manager pissed me off.
So well, 'quirky' is here to stay. 'Incompetant' and 'lazy piece of crap' are not. 'Scares co-workers' is out, also.
As someone who's been involved with three different wireless networks, I just don't see this being a threat to the ILECs like you're thinking it will be.
First, I had Ricochet. For what I wanted, it was great. I wasn't tying up my phone line, I could take my portable anywhere on campus and get a connection, and hell, it was a PPP connection, as opposed to the terminal connections my school was offering, for not much more than what a dialup through an ISP would cost. And it wasn't significantly slower, as it was in the days before kFlex/x2/v.90. It had its problems, however, as there were times when I would get some massive latency. The worst location I could keep the modem was in my apartment...other places were great, but the fact that I was in a concrete building sucked ass.
My next network was a bunch of us from my work living in an appartment complex. We had some ISA wavelan cards that one of the guys had, and it connected up three of our apartments, to an ISDN line outbound. For what we wanted, it worked fine. When there was snow, rain, whatever, the connections would flake out, and you'd have to find a new 'optimal' place for the antenna. Of course, then the person with the ISDN line bought a house, and moved out. The new uplink was put in my place, but GTE had changed their tarrifing for residential ISDN lines [and our complex was 19k feet from the switch, so no DSL, which had just come into the area, and they weren't on the public cable system, so that was out, too]. For what we needed, it worked, but it wasn't a sort of 'set it up and forget it' situation.
Now, I've set the wavelan cards up, and I've got line of sight to my neighbor, who's sharing my DSL [business class, not residential] line. It works better having line of sight, but it still flakes out randomly once in a while, and you have to nudge the antennas a little bit 'till you find a good connection [that whole problem with nodes and antinodes in wavelength].
Wireless may solve problems that you have, and you may be willing to deal with issues, but I don't see people setting up a network, and watching other people start hogging their uplink, or probing their boxes, dealing with the support issues, etc. I do think that wireless has good potential in many, many areas, but I don't see it being anything for the telcos to worry about any time soon.
Yeah, the problem probably comes from using rent-a-pops like UUNet.
They can't just restrict down to IPs that outgoing mail might come from, as the IP ranges may change, and the people in those IP ranges may not be their customers, so they don't have a way to shut them down should they start spamming through them.
Blocking by requiring an '@msn.com' e-mail address is flat out lame, and the wrong way to do things. They'd be better served by using some sort of authenticated SMTP for outgoing messages in the ip ranges that are considered local to them, and rejecting mail from outside IP addresses that don't have a to address from @msn.com.
Hmmm....as I haven't had to deal with these issues with MSN [most of our faculty seem to be on Erols/RCN, AOL, or just forwarding everything to Hotmail], it would be interesting to see if they're doing the 'from' checks on the From: header, or the envelope from. [Unfortunately, I don't know of any mail clients that let you set the envelope from independantly, other than using 'bounce' from within Pine]
If it's the envelope from, however, it might be possible to cook up a program which would work with MSN, but still send with a From: header from something other than MSN. [Getting people to switch to it, and MSN not being pricks and shutting it down like users of Netscape/Mailsmith/Eudora, are other matters, however]
MSN has no clue if you're sending spam through a third party relay, or if you're connecting to a legitimate authenticating mail relay, or if you're handing your own SMTP, and connecting to the proper MX.
MSN allowing outbound port 25 connections from a dialup customer is a step backwards for spam prevention. As someone who's being affected en mass by their changing policies, your university should contact them, and inform them that they either need to make provisions for your case, or that your group will have to make sure that your users take their business elsewhere, and find an ISP that you can work with.
If the faculty members were using their university e-mail addresses, and not their MSN one, they will have no issue in moving to a new ISP, save for the initial time in re-configuration. If they were using their local MSN e-mail address, and they're not willing to give it up, then they have to weigh the costs & benefits in switching. The only ones who are really screwed in this situation are not those that are concerned with third party relay, but wished to use some other non-MS client to read their mail from.
Realisticly, you should be using authenticated SMTP to see if there's some prick in the dorms starting up his own little spamming business. You should not expect outside ISPs however, to allow your users to connect to the server from a dialup connection. [Hell, we don't even allow allow relaying for connections from off-campus, although, that was a recent change [this morning] due to the lack of being able to authenticate with the trend micro virus scanner in front of the SIMS mail cloud, and we're just waiting to see how many users start complaining as they didn't get the messages regarding the policy changes]
As both someone who's worked at an ISP, and who has worked at a University, what they're doing by disallowing outbound port 25 connections is a GOOD thing, as it keeps spammers from using a throwaway account to originate and inject to open relays.
Odds are, it's not based on the from address, but based on the originating IP address. [as to just allow 'from: *@msn.com' is setting themselves up as a third party relay for messages with forged headers.] It may also not be MSN, but it may be UUNet, who I believe MSN rents POPs from.
Now, for the solution -- tell the faculty to follow the instructions from their ISP for their home machines, not the instructions from the university, which is for local machines. If they have to have a from address with MSN in it to use the SMTP servers, just tag on a reply-to address.
The only whining that might take a little bit of a work arround is for those folks who use a laptop from both home and from work. You need to use an ISP that can push DNS server information to you in the PPP negotiation, or a broadband connection with DNS defined by the DHCP server, so that they're getting dynamic DNS at home, and using DHCP sending DNS at work, so they have dynamic DNS there. Then, they need to put in a non-FQDN for the SMTP server.
For example, you have someone at isp.net, and work for lame.edu. The isp has a host named smtp.isp.net which they can deliver their mail to, and you have a machine named smtp.lame.edu which the faculty [why do the faculty always complain the most?] can use when they're on campus.
When off campus, they're using the dns servers at isp.net, and so, when sending to 'smtp', it looks up 'smtp.isp.net'. When on campus, they're using the dns servers at lame.edu, and so, 'smtp' would be 'smtp.lame.edu'.
If you have enough users on their system, you can normally get issues pushed through to someone more signficant at the ISP, so that you can find some working solution before having the users try it. [Our university's been in talks with AOL for a week or two, as it seems that when we set up a Trend virus firewall, we opened ourselves up for third party relaying, and AOL started sporaticly dropping our e-mail when their spam traps were triggered]
If you're sending it back to your local machine, you'd have to ask what's on your desk. Well, if you're monitoring a whole bunch of Solaris boxes, it makes sense to have at least one Solaris machine on your desk, some sort of a windows machine (as it will run the software that people would be using to connect to the systems), and a few have an extra machine [linux, another solaris, or my mac, as I refuse to live without BBEdit])
Hands down, the Solaris boxes tend to be our primary machines, as you can use them for light development, they handle virtual desktops, etc. Of course, all but one of the nine folks in my office are running CDE. Does that mean that CDE's the best thing to be running? Probably not. I use it because it's here.
Would I switch to Gnome? Probably not with anything but a cold install, as I'm busy enough during the day to take the time to install without messing up my project schedule, and I'm not familiar with Gnome, so I'd have a learning curve.
I see this as being most beneficial to the folks that run linux/freebsd/openbsd at home with gnome, and have ultrasparc machines at work, and would prefer to just deal with one GUI. I don't fit into that category, but I know that I would love to get away from CDE, but I can't afford to expend significant time in switching over.
The problem is, there are so many commands, it's hard to fit that much information into a small space. So, for quick reference, I normally turn to 'man -k' [which is the same as 'apropos'].
Failing that, a quick search through google or google groups.
Some people prefer printed materials, however, and I know that one of the folks here always seems to go for one book which just has the quick usage of most shell commands [but well, she doesn't get in for a few hours, and it wasn't obvious in her stacks of books] She also had the Linux Command Reference, published by the Linux Journal, which is slightly bigger than the ORA pocket books, but still very portable.
Once of the books that I started out with was the UNIX System Administration Handbook, which I've heard includes linux in the latest version. It's not cheap, it's not small, but it nicely organizes things by topic, and points out possible pitfalls.