Last time I bought a box from Dell, before they started selling Linux, I tried to order the box without an OS. I talked to three different sales reps, and they told me three different things:
The first said that it was against a Dell policy, but she didn't know which one. She thought, though, that it meant they couldn't test them properly. Or something. She promised to find out and call back but never did.
The second one told me that they weren't allowed to do it because their contract with Microsoft didn't allow them to ship the computers without an OS. And they only sold Microsoft OSes.
The third said that it was illegal for them to ship a computer without an OS. That's right, against the law. Of coure, they couldn't remember exactly which law that was.
At this point, I gave up and ordered a computer from Gateway. I still had to buy a copy of Windows that I threw away, but at least they didn't feed me a lot of bullshit.
Last year I ordered some hardware from Penguin and was pretty disappointed with them.
My main beef with them was that they were very disorganized, repeatedly missed delivery dates, and made a number of mistakes in getting me what I asked for. My impression was that they were growing faster than they could handle. I was also sad to discover that there were hardware problems with all three servers.
In their favor, they did eventually replace all the broken hardware for free, although it took quite a number of calls to get them to do it. And they seem to be getting more organized these days; now they seem to return calls after one or two attempts, rather than four or five.
Personally, I'd be a little cautious buying from them; you may want to test them with a small order first. Have other people had problems like this? Or did I just get lucky?
Regarding RAID, I've been pretty happy with software RAID; it's not as fast as hardware RAID, of course, but it's a lot cheaper.
Then there's the most annoying problem i faced, which is admins that either don't know how to prevent relaying, or don't care that they are being used as a relay.
Luckily, I think this is only a temporary problem. Why? The combination of a few factors:
Most shipping mail packages include relay protection, many by default, so newly installed servers generally aren't vulnerable.
Old machines are constantly being taken out of service, reducing relay supply.
Organizations like MAPS and ORBS put pressure on open relays to close.
as the number of open relays decrease, spammers will hit the remaining ones harder and harder.
Put together, these factors should make it harder and harder to run an open relay and not give a damn. A lame admin may be able to ignore a little stolen bandwidth, but the ever-decreasing number of relays will mean ever-increasing loads on the few that remain.
In the meantime, it would be nice if more dialup ISPs blocked outgoing access to port 25. I know that Mindspring does it, and I never see spam from them. Unlike, say, PSI or UUNET.
I was very impressed with the Hellmouth series, and so am doubly disappointed with this article. Mr. Katz now sounds depressingly like a crusader or a paranoid: everything wrong with the world is traced back to his supposed problem, with loads of assertion, little evidence, and no examination of other possible explanations.
The most obvious is his conflation of corporatism and conformity. Historically, strong pressure to conform was around long before the corporation existed. Were the witch-hunts in the 1600s the fault, somehow, of businesses of the time? Pressure to conform has a lot to do with our monkey heritage, and little to do with multinational corporations. And noting that non-conformity is uncontroversial approaches tautology: All controversy has some sort of expressed difference of opinion (= non-conformity) at the hear of it.
And Has it occured to Katz that the rise of Walmart or CNN or McDonald's is that most people like them? Personally, I don't; I value skill and individuality more than I value the few dollars I'd save by buying from one of those companies. But most of America has different values than me.
Why does Katz feel it necessary for everyone else to share his values? Isn't that just another demand to conform? He appears to feel that these values are the result of mass-media brainwashing that only he is safe from, but he doesn't demonstrate this. I'd bet that Americans liked cheap, greasy food long before the first McDonald's ad was on televison.
Most telling, though, is this comment:
More than any other greeting, e-mail to me often begins with the phrase: "I don't always agree with you, but..." It's well-meant, but always strikes me as curious because it's so unwittingly revealing of a society raised on corporatist pablum as a subsitute for dialogue and discussion.
That's just ridiculous. Has he considered the possibility that people are being polite? Even if it's not a vice he personally indulges in, many people like being polite to others. And although I'm not an expert on the topic, I have the impression that etiquette existed before the corporation.
Maybe Katz has a real point buried somewhere under all this. But he'll have to work a lot harder to convince me that corporations are the root of all evil.
I know you're chuffed that you figured it out, but posting the solution for everyone to see isn't so cool. This means that everyone can enter, not just the people who did the work.:-(
His comment that computers don't seem to result in producivity gains doesn't hold a lot of water. Some sensationalized studies have claimed that, but I don't think there's a lot of truth to the matter.
In their 28 Sep 1996 issue, The Economist has an extensive discussion of this topic. There are a number of reasons why those studies are probably giving the wrong answer. The most interesting, though, is that productivity measures are pretty crude.
Consider, for example, the field of publishing. When you compare magazines now with magazines from a few decades ago, modern magazines are generally slicker, and a lot of that is due to the use of desktop publishing systems. For the same amount of effort, you can get a much better result. From the productivity measure point of view, though, the quality improvement is invisible; that's because magazines still use about the same number of people to produce the same number of magazines.
They also mention some interesting examples in other areas:
In areas such as finance health care and education government statisticians typically assume that output rises in line with the number of hours worked. The bizarre effect is that measured productivity growth is zero by definition. Likewise telecommunications output is measured in minutes of calls leaving out the huge increase in information transmitted via faxes or faster modems. Or suppose a road-haulage firm introduces a computer system which helps drivers to pick the quickest route and thus provide a better service for its customers. If mileage drops as a consequence the official statistics will show a fall in real output.
The basic upshot of this that traditional producivity measures were great for the industrial revolution, but don't mean as much today.
For more information, check out The Economist; it's a lot more than just a financial magazine. I've been reading it for years, and I think it's one of the best general newsweeklies in existence. It's certainly a lot more substantial and thoughtful than Time or Newsweek.
Gil Amelio, ex-CEO of Apple, tells the story in his book On the Firing Line this way:
--------------------------------
Here's a guy [Woz] who still loves the company. He's thoughtful, and he cares. I knew at once that it would benefit the company if Woz would agree to server in a no-pay advisor capacity, as Steve Jobs already was.
I put that to him and he seemed willing to give it a try. But since it would mean he and Steve Jobs attending meetings together, he thought there was some background I needed to hear.
I may not be recalling a few of the details accurately, but as near as I can remember, the story went like this:
"Back when Steve Jobs and I were still just kids hanging out together, we were looking for ways to make some money. Before Mike Markkula, before the Apple in the garage, Steve managed to get an assignment from Nolan Bushnell of Atari to do som circuits for one of their electronic toys. I'd do the designs and build the circuit board, and we'd get $1,000. Nolan wanted it fast--it was on a real short deadline.
It tooks some all-night design sessions, but I got it done on time and gave it to Steve, who took it in to Atari. He came back and gave me $300. I said, 'I thought we were getting $1,000.' Steve told me, 'No, they talked us down to $600, and I figured, you know, it was better than nothing.' So I said 'Okay.'
Years later, I found out from a guy who had been at Atari that they had really paid Steve the full $1000. I did the work; he kept $700 for himself and gave me $300.
When Steve knew I'd found out, that sort of ended it. We've never been close since."
Woz admitted to a bad feeling in both directions, but he thought they could manage to serve together for the benefit of Apple, and agreed to give it a try.
I would come to build a true and lasting admiration for Steve Wozniak and to respect his integrity. I was glad he had told me the story; otherwise I would have always wondered why there seemed to be such animosity wheneve these Apple founders were together in the same room.
The adage says that tijme heals all wounds; the parody says that time wounds all heels. In this case, neither version seems to have worked.
--------------------------------
As a guy who has followed Apple and these folks for years (had an Apple ][, a Mac, and a NeXT), I found Gil Amelio's book fascinating.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I bought a box from Dell, before they started selling Linux, I tried to order the box without an OS. I talked to three different sales reps, and they told me three different things:
At this point, I gave up and ordered a computer from Gateway. I still had to buy a copy of Windows that I threw away, but at least they didn't feed me a lot of bullshit.
Last year I ordered some hardware from Penguin and was pretty disappointed with them.
My main beef with them was that they were very disorganized, repeatedly missed delivery dates, and made a number of mistakes in getting me what I asked for. My impression was that they were growing faster than they could handle. I was also sad to discover that there were hardware problems with all three servers.
In their favor, they did eventually replace all the broken hardware for free, although it took quite a number of calls to get them to do it. And they seem to be getting more organized these days; now they seem to return calls after one or two attempts, rather than four or five.
Personally, I'd be a little cautious buying from them; you may want to test them with a small order first. Have other people had problems like this? Or did I just get lucky?
Regarding RAID, I've been pretty happy with software RAID; it's not as fast as hardware RAID, of course, but it's a lot cheaper.
Put together, these factors should make it harder and harder to run an open relay and not give a damn. A lame admin may be able to ignore a little stolen bandwidth, but the ever-decreasing number of relays will mean ever-increasing loads on the few that remain.
In the meantime, it would be nice if more dialup ISPs blocked outgoing access to port 25. I know that Mindspring does it, and I never see spam from them. Unlike, say, PSI or UUNET.
The most obvious is his conflation of corporatism and conformity. Historically, strong pressure to conform was around long before the corporation existed. Were the witch-hunts in the 1600s the fault, somehow, of businesses of the time? Pressure to conform has a lot to do with our monkey heritage, and little to do with multinational corporations. And noting that non-conformity is uncontroversial approaches tautology: All controversy has some sort of expressed difference of opinion (= non-conformity) at the hear of it.
And Has it occured to Katz that the rise of Walmart or CNN or McDonald's is that most people like them? Personally, I don't; I value skill and individuality more than I value the few dollars I'd save by buying from one of those companies. But most of America has different values than me.
Why does Katz feel it necessary for everyone else to share his values? Isn't that just another demand to conform? He appears to feel that these values are the result of mass-media brainwashing that only he is safe from, but he doesn't demonstrate this. I'd bet that Americans liked cheap, greasy food long before the first McDonald's ad was on televison.
Most telling, though, is this comment:
That's just ridiculous. Has he considered the possibility that people are being polite? Even if it's not a vice he personally indulges in, many people like being polite to others. And although I'm not an expert on the topic, I have the impression that etiquette existed before the corporation.
Maybe Katz has a real point buried somewhere under all this. But he'll have to work a lot harder to convince me that corporations are the root of all evil.
That's four words.
I know you're chuffed that you figured it out, but posting the solution for everyone to see isn't so cool. This means that everyone can enter, not just the people who did the work. :-(
For those of us who have already solved it, I have a couple of comments:
:-)
038-549-53-15-170-136-91-110-256-110-26-32
038-549-53-15-245-285-252-181-236-202-251-283
And for the rest of you, good luck getting the goods!
His comment that computers don't seem to result in producivity gains doesn't hold a lot of water. Some sensationalized studies have claimed that, but I don't think there's a lot of truth to the matter.
In their 28 Sep 1996 issue, The Economist has an extensive discussion of this topic. There are a number of reasons why those studies are probably giving the wrong answer. The most interesting, though, is that productivity measures are pretty crude.
Consider, for example, the field of publishing. When you compare magazines now with magazines from a few decades ago, modern magazines are generally slicker, and a lot of that is due to the use of desktop publishing systems. For the same amount of effort, you can get a much better result. From the productivity measure point of view, though, the quality improvement is invisible; that's because magazines still use about the same number of people to produce the same number of magazines.
They also mention some interesting examples in other areas:
The basic upshot of this that traditional producivity measures were great for the industrial revolution, but don't mean as much today.
For more information, check out The Economist; it's a lot more than just a financial magazine. I've been reading it for years, and I think it's one of the best general newsweeklies in existence. It's certainly a lot more substantial and thoughtful than Time or Newsweek.
William
email: dubl-u (at) pota.to (no foolin!)
Gil Amelio, ex-CEO of Apple, tells the story in his book On the Firing Line this way:
--------------------------------
Here's a guy [Woz] who still loves the company. He's thoughtful, and he cares. I knew at once that it would benefit the company if Woz would agree to server in a no-pay advisor capacity, as Steve Jobs already was.
I put that to him and he seemed willing to give it a try. But since it would mean he and Steve Jobs attending meetings together, he thought there was some background I needed to hear.
I may not be recalling a few of the details accurately, but as near as I can remember, the story went like this:
"Back when Steve Jobs and I were still just kids hanging out together, we were looking for ways to make some money. Before Mike Markkula, before the Apple in the garage, Steve managed to get an assignment from Nolan Bushnell of Atari to do som circuits for one of their electronic toys. I'd do the designs and build the circuit board, and we'd get $1,000. Nolan wanted it fast--it was on a real short deadline.
It tooks some all-night design sessions, but I got it done on time and gave it to Steve, who took it in to Atari. He came back and gave me $300. I said, 'I thought we were getting $1,000.' Steve told me, 'No, they talked us down to $600, and I figured, you know, it was better than nothing.' So I said 'Okay.'
Years later, I found out from a guy who had been at Atari that they had really paid Steve the full $1000. I did the work; he kept $700 for himself and gave me $300.
When Steve knew I'd found out, that sort of ended it. We've never been close since."
Woz admitted to a bad feeling in both directions, but he thought they could manage to serve together for the benefit of Apple, and agreed to give it a try.
I would come to build a true and lasting admiration for Steve Wozniak and to respect his integrity. I was glad he had told me the story; otherwise I would have always wondered why there seemed to be such animosity wheneve these Apple founders were together in the same room.
The adage says that tijme heals all wounds; the parody says that time wounds all heels. In this case, neither version seems to have worked.
--------------------------------
As a guy who has followed Apple and these folks for years (had an Apple ][, a Mac, and a NeXT), I found Gil Amelio's book fascinating.