Well, the way I see it, classroom training can be good, even for a senior geek. It gives you the chance to see the theory in context, seeing that A relates to B in this and that way. It's the "ohhh thats how it works!" moment, it feels nice:)
Of course that nothing compares to an encounter with the real, chaotic, overwhelming world. But in my opinion, its a bit nicer to know that the heart must keep beating (and why), without having to open up a couple of patients to find out on my own.
On the other hand, there are obscure bits of theory and information that you might never come across in the real world. But remember that not every implementation is the same, and that today you might find that some configuration or protocol or option is unecessary, but tomorrow your new employer might use it a lot, and its nice to at least have a passing knowledge of it. "One man's trash is another's gold".
If they're going to really use MP3, how long do you think it will take for someone to come up with a tool that will simply strip the MP3 of all those nasty bits?
Seriously, I think that NIN (and Trent) is the perfect example of a new and creative way to make and promote music. Just check out the buzz and ARG around their last album, Year Zero.
Besides, Trent released a couple of tracks in a format that alows anyone (ANYONE) to mix it, remix it, cut it, mash it, to basically get a taste of what it feels like to play with the "source code" of music. Trent even said that the draft of the album was made up while they were touring, with a laptop, on buses and planes and all.
Heck, they even "leaked" selected tracks via USB pen drives on bathrooms on concerts, and I think that the objective was to spread them, using (you guessed!) the internet!
Now, could any of this be possible without the internet? Maybe, but the thing is that the internet is a new "tool", to wich the artists either adapt, or will violently bash against (like in the case of Sir Elton).
5 years without internet... the thing is that a lot of people (like Sir Elton) just don't get it, today the internet is becoming more and more a "essential" service on the civilized world, much like telephone, gas, electricity and the likes.
MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
Well, putting it like that seems that MS did a sneaky move and let people use free Office at home.
I don't know if that's the case, but some types of MS licensing allow employees to use the licensed product at home, with no extra charge. Maybe that's the case, and not a "dirty trick", like the phrase seems to imply.
Well, in the case of Silent Hill, the diference is simple: face value. You are right, the Silent Hill games are extremly scary and disturbing, from a psychological point of view, but for a stander-by that looks over your shoulder while you play Silent Hill, you are just fighting "some monsters that are a bunch of legs" or "some dogs" and dismiss it. If the same observer peeks over your shoulder while you play Manhunt (1 or 2) will say "OMG! you're killing that guy with a PLASTIC BAG!!! OMG!!!". You can see what happens next if the observer is a politic or an soccer mom (no ofense intended to either)...
Altough the events on Silent Hill games are much more disturbing in a personal level (you guys that know the games know what I'm talking about), the Manhunt games are simply about the gore, the shock and the extreme. At face value, it shocks to see someone use a plastic bag to kill another guy, but it's more "hummanly shocking" the things that some of the characters of Silent Hill do during the games.
I've read TFA, and I was hoping that it would the tale of a MS sysadmin that finally got ubuntu on his work machine. Unfortunatly, he is an linux sysadmin, so the "jump" is somewhat simpler, in my opinion, because his destkop will be in line with the servers. However, a jump from a MS sysadmin work laptop with XP/Vista to an MS sysadmin work laptop with linux won't be as easy, I'm afraid.
In my case, I'm a MS sysadmin and, obviously, my daily work revolves around several Windows machines. I've considered using Ubuntu (or some sort of Linux) on my office machine for a while, but never quite made the jump. I'm using the oportunity to expose my concerns and see if anyone in the/. comunity has gone through a similar experience.
My main concerns are:
- Outlook PST files - I have a bunch of these that I sometimes I must consult, to retrive some old email that I need and whatnot. The PSTs I use on my daily basis I can manage (I can adapt to Firebird or some other client), but my "legacy" PSTs are my real worry. I don't want to keep a VM or a second machine with Win+Outlook just to check some storic emails. Any ideas on that? Can I reliably use Outlook with wine, for example, so I can access the PSTs?
- Windows admin tools - most of my work is done with the MS admin tools installed directly on my machine, and then connecting to the servers. Sometimes I Remote Desktop the servers, but I know that linux has that part covered. Again, does anyone use the Win admin tools under linux, with wine or something?
I'm pretty happy with WinXP, and I haven't touched Vista yet (I'll wait for SP1), but I feel that I should take a closer look at that thing that they call linux, but the only way to really do it on a regular basis is use it on the work machine (I game a lot on my home PC, so changing it to linux is not exactly an option for me). But since I'm a MS sysadmin, I don't know if I can make it all work.
Does anyone done it before? Thanks in advance for your help.
Oh, and am I the only one who's tired of the old, "I'm a gamer and I'm not violent so obviously games don't contribute to violence," gem being busted out time and time again, as if its actual proof? If you want to convince people, how about trying something a bit more scientific?
I thought that the burden of proof was on the side that raises the theory...
It's not directly related, but I can see a paralel between the media format and the console market. Paralel as in "they're gonna crash hard!"
In the the console wars, it seems that Sony and Microsoft are pushing just "bigger, faster, more" poligons/shades/textures/whatever, without any real "value-added" in terms of gameplay. Nintendo is (wisely, I think) playing the "gameplay" card, with some inovations that might make the Wii the real winner of this generation.
In the media-format wars, it seems that both groups of makers are pushing some "bigger, louder" format, without any real aditional value to the consumer. Like someone mentioned, the DVDs were a huge leap from the VHS, but the new formats aren't just that diferent from the DVDs.
So all this coupled with the (slowing) CD sales, might triger some serious thinking by the several industries big names... I just hope they don't blame it all on piracy:P
Now this, my friends, is an awesome example of the way science works. There are no "sacred" thruths, no absolutes, no "authority" to tell us what to think or do.
If the definition of planet is not good enough, so we tweak it. If someone doesn't agree with the tweaking, he/they can express it and defend their point of view. If we come to the conclusion that our tweaking wasn't necessary or errouneous, we tweak it some more. Science is allways changing, trying to improve our view of the world and the universe.
This is the method we should be using all over our human activities. We as a whole should be able to think more with our own heads, be able to have an argument exchange with someone else, defend our points of view, and when we are wrong, be humble enough to admit it.
Unfortunatly, our society is flooded with examples of the oposite: we are presured to act fast, don't think! buy now! vote now! quick! think of the children! no time to analise, no time to evaluate both sides of the discussion, no time to stop and think "wait a minute, does this even makes sense?"...
As long as we society as a whole keep teaching our children that they should be "lemmings" and follow authority "just because" and don't think for their own, we are pretty much getting backwards, back into the dark ages...
This is the kind of zealotism that each day drives me farther from Firefox and more into the arms of Opera...
I've been using Opera for a long while but lately I've given Firefox a try... It's nice and all, but Opera has some neat details that Firefox lacks. A very simple and frivolous example: I can move my tabs from the top to any other the side! Yeah! Oh, Firefox has an extension for it? Is it the one that breaks with every new Firefox version? You get my drift...
Anyways, I see less and less advantages in Firefox when compared to Opera. So Firefox is opensource... well, I couldn't care less. It's the same if someone said "hey, don't drink Coke, drink Shomke, because we know the recipy and we can all change it!". I don't give a flying rat's ass about code and source code, I, as a end user, just want things to work a certain way. And Opera does work that way, and does let me change things around out of the box. In Firefox, we need a stupid "extensions" just to clip a toenail in the interface.
"Firefox can't do this" "Hey, here's an extension" "Firefox can't do that" "Here's another extension". Prety quickly you will have a handfull of extensions, that might or might not break with the next Firefox version...
Heck, I'll give you another example! There is an extension to (gasp!) minimize Firefox to the system tray, right next to the clock. In one of the last Firefox updates, that extension stoped working at my computer at work. Yes, FF is updated to the latest version and so is that extension, but everytime I use both together, FF just displays a big, empty window, with *nothing* to click or any menus. And guess what! At my home computer, I have the *same* version of both and it runs fine! And don't go blaming it on Windows, because I'm using the same Windows XP in both computers. Oh and in Opera, the hotkey for that specific funtion is Ctrl-H. No extensions, no breakups...
So, about this whole "holy-war" agains IE... I'm just sitting and watching, waiting for the inevitable moment when this will blow on the face of the zealots... remember folks, FUD works both ways, and if you spread FUD to suport your product of choice, sooner or later it will bite you in the ass.
Oh, are you talking about the sensible people that floods the user with pop-up-under-slide-growing_under_the_rock ads, or that other bunch of sensible people that tries to install dialers to international numbers without the user knowledge?
Don't get me wrong. As in everything, there is good people and bad people in the web porn business, but given the current practices, I would hardly call the porn buch "sensible people"... And I'm talking about the guys that come up and green-light things like "under-the-radar" dialers, not the actors and actresses...
Jesus, some guys never get it, do they?
He seems to see the games industry as some sort of trash can, where he (or someone) can dig the "buzzwords" (Alone in the Dark, Far Cry, etc) to put together his sorry excuses for a movie... Ok, so what if House of the Dead is a "shooter"... So the Bible is a bunch of stupid stories! It's not what it is, it's how it's made!! He talks about Schindler's List... What's that? It's a story about a guy that saves a bunch of people during a world war! So what, right? No biggie!
Hey hey, what about LOTR? A stupid collection of stupid books about hair-feet-people that must destroy a stupid ring that someone stupid created with infinite power...
Oh well... Wait a minute! I know! Let's make a movie about Bowl, but using only trained monkeys, see if he likes it... Even better, let the movie be directed by monkeys, given enough time they will come up with something way better than Bowl ever did...
"(...) the game over a decade in development."
Hummm 2006 - 1997 = 9... over a decade? Come on, guys, sure, 9 years it's a lot, but no need to puff up the numbers...
But this wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that a lot of software trading can be done through newsgroups, right? I mean, P2P is neat and all, but to get something fast in the "underworld", one would turn to the "newz"... of course, since someone has to upload it, it's a bit slow to actually get a large piece of software up there, but once is there... theoretically anyone in the world can download it from their ISP servers and in the worst case scenario, "just" anyone in your ISP can get it.
Maybe this is taxing the ISPs in terms of bandwith or something, or caught the atention of the "big boys", but my guess is that all this talk about getting rid of the usenet servers is a bit paralel with baning P2P, it's just not admited openly.
well well well... the man that cryes about Microsoft racket uses a commercial antispyware product. I have nothing against commercial antispyware products, but there are free, very good alternatives, like Spybot and Lavasoft's Ad-aware. What? You don't trust "free" software? Or are you afraid of "exploits"? Well, that didn't stop the "hakorzs" from finding and exploiting bugs and holes in commercial antivirus products...
Altough I'm a sort of "windows hore", I learned one thing from the Linux / Open source comunity: sometimes, the best choice is not the commercial one. There a lot of talented and good intentioned people out there, and there is good free software for Windows, as with any OS.
You just have to search for it and read what others have to say. In this time and age, were everything is just a googling away, I don't understand why people won't search for free alternatives to commercial (and sometimes pretty expensive) software products. If a product is a fraud, it will be denounced somewere, the "word" will get out.
Some examples of good, free software (in this area of security):
Spybot Search and Destroy
Lavasoft Ad-aware
Kerio Personal Firewall
Spyblaster
Hijack This!
About Norton. well, just scrap the "bloatware" and use AVG, for example. Mean, slick client, light on memory (and interface), it doesn't need IE 6 just to install and gets daily updates, as the big names in AV do. Oh, did I mention that there is a free version?
Of course that Windows has its flaws but come one, there are good and bad aplications in every OS. Yes, maybe even in linux:P
The "trick" to survive in the Windows world is: get to know the best free alternatives (AV, firewall, the works), update your "windozebox", follow some common sense rules:don't run with administrator unless you really really have to, do not open unknow exe files, use a safer browser (I use Opera with javacrap, I mean, javascript turned off and I'm yet to get infected by spyware).
You probably know these things already, but the feeling I get sometimes is that we get so "blinded" for "our" hate for Microsoft that we sometimes forget that yes, Windows has it's flaws but there are ways to mend and live with it, if we need or have the will to.
Well, about the magazine ads, specially the IT magazines, I have a pet peeve: the magazines that are almost 50% advertizing. You know, the ones that, when we open a random page, we get an add, or we get the catalog of some IT shop. Come on! Why should I have to comb a page for ads, just to find the column that I want to read? I think that in that particular segment, the ads are getting similar to web ads: anoying, obscuring the real content, and simply just getting in the way.
Now this is a franchise I would like to see revived, using the next generation of consoles as an excuse (a la the slashdot article from days ago). It was an awesome game, and since we get to play the "bad guy's" side, it was a very fun game indeed!:D
Slashdot Mirror
Of course that nothing compares to an encounter with the real, chaotic, overwhelming world. But in my opinion, its a bit nicer to know that the heart must keep beating (and why), without having to open up a couple of patients to find out on my own.
On the other hand, there are obscure bits of theory and information that you might never come across in the real world. But remember that not every implementation is the same, and that today you might find that some configuration or protocol or option is unecessary, but tomorrow your new employer might use it a lot, and its nice to at least have a passing knowledge of it. "One man's trash is another's gold".
If they're going to really use MP3, how long do you think it will take for someone to come up with a tool that will simply strip the MP3 of all those nasty bits?
Besides, Trent released a couple of tracks in a format that alows anyone (ANYONE) to mix it, remix it, cut it, mash it, to basically get a taste of what it feels like to play with the "source code" of music. Trent even said that the draft of the album was made up while they were touring, with a laptop, on buses and planes and all.
Heck, they even "leaked" selected tracks via USB pen drives on bathrooms on concerts, and I think that the objective was to spread them, using (you guessed!) the internet!
Now, could any of this be possible without the internet? Maybe, but the thing is that the internet is a new "tool", to wich the artists either adapt, or will violently bash against (like in the case of Sir Elton).
5 years without internet... the thing is that a lot of people (like Sir Elton) just don't get it, today the internet is becoming more and more a "essential" service on the civilized world, much like telephone, gas, electricity and the likes.
Well, putting it like that seems that MS did a sneaky move and let people use free Office at home.
I don't know if that's the case, but some types of MS licensing allow employees to use the licensed product at home, with no extra charge. Maybe that's the case, and not a "dirty trick", like the phrase seems to imply.
Altough the events on Silent Hill games are much more disturbing in a personal level (you guys that know the games know what I'm talking about), the Manhunt games are simply about the gore, the shock and the extreme. At face value, it shocks to see someone use a plastic bag to kill another guy, but it's more "hummanly shocking" the things that some of the characters of Silent Hill do during the games.
I've read TFA, and I was hoping that it would the tale of a MS sysadmin that finally got ubuntu on his work machine. Unfortunatly, he is an linux sysadmin, so the "jump" is somewhat simpler, in my opinion, because his destkop will be in line with the servers. However, a jump from a MS sysadmin work laptop with XP/Vista to an MS sysadmin work laptop with linux won't be as easy, I'm afraid. In my case, I'm a MS sysadmin and, obviously, my daily work revolves around several Windows machines. I've considered using Ubuntu (or some sort of Linux) on my office machine for a while, but never quite made the jump. I'm using the oportunity to expose my concerns and see if anyone in the /. comunity has gone through a similar experience.
My main concerns are:
- Outlook PST files - I have a bunch of these that I sometimes I must consult, to retrive some old email that I need and whatnot. The PSTs I use on my daily basis I can manage (I can adapt to Firebird or some other client), but my "legacy" PSTs are my real worry. I don't want to keep a VM or a second machine with Win+Outlook just to check some storic emails. Any ideas on that? Can I reliably use Outlook with wine, for example, so I can access the PSTs?
- Windows admin tools - most of my work is done with the MS admin tools installed directly on my machine, and then connecting to the servers. Sometimes I Remote Desktop the servers, but I know that linux has that part covered. Again, does anyone use the Win admin tools under linux, with wine or something?
I'm pretty happy with WinXP, and I haven't touched Vista yet (I'll wait for SP1), but I feel that I should take a closer look at that thing that they call linux, but the only way to really do it on a regular basis is use it on the work machine (I game a lot on my home PC, so changing it to linux is not exactly an option for me). But since I'm a MS sysadmin, I don't know if I can make it all work.
Does anyone done it before? Thanks in advance for your help.
I thought that the burden of proof was on the side that raises the theory...
Because all the Space Colony and Space Elevator engineers and experts were busy...
In the the console wars, it seems that Sony and Microsoft are pushing just "bigger, faster, more" poligons/shades/textures/whatever, without any real "value-added" in terms of gameplay. Nintendo is (wisely, I think) playing the "gameplay" card, with some inovations that might make the Wii the real winner of this generation.
In the media-format wars, it seems that both groups of makers are pushing some "bigger, louder" format, without any real aditional value to the consumer. Like someone mentioned, the DVDs were a huge leap from the VHS, but the new formats aren't just that diferent from the DVDs.
So all this coupled with the (slowing) CD sales, might triger some serious thinking by the several industries big names... I just hope they don't blame it all on piracy :P
Now this, my friends, is an awesome example of the way science works. There are no "sacred" thruths, no absolutes, no "authority" to tell us what to think or do.
If the definition of planet is not good enough, so we tweak it. If someone doesn't agree with the tweaking, he/they can express it and defend their point of view. If we come to the conclusion that our tweaking wasn't necessary or errouneous, we tweak it some more. Science is allways changing, trying to improve our view of the world and the universe.
This is the method we should be using all over our human activities. We as a whole should be able to think more with our own heads, be able to have an argument exchange with someone else, defend our points of view, and when we are wrong, be humble enough to admit it.
Unfortunatly, our society is flooded with examples of the oposite: we are presured to act fast, don't think! buy now! vote now! quick! think of the children! no time to analise, no time to evaluate both sides of the discussion, no time to stop and think "wait a minute, does this even makes sense?"...
As long as we society as a whole keep teaching our children that they should be "lemmings" and follow authority "just because" and don't think for their own, we are pretty much getting backwards, back into the dark ages...
Ah yes... finally we can play several episodes of that beloved franchise called Half-Life 2... oh wait...
If you don't know him, go on, google it, hear it, and form an opinion. Changes are that you'll love it to bits.
I've been using Opera for a long while but lately I've given Firefox a try... It's nice and all, but Opera has some neat details that Firefox lacks. A very simple and frivolous example: I can move my tabs from the top to any other the side! Yeah! Oh, Firefox has an extension for it? Is it the one that breaks with every new Firefox version? You get my drift...
Anyways, I see less and less advantages in Firefox when compared to Opera. So Firefox is opensource... well, I couldn't care less. It's the same if someone said "hey, don't drink Coke, drink Shomke, because we know the recipy and we can all change it!". I don't give a flying rat's ass about code and source code, I, as a end user, just want things to work a certain way. And Opera does work that way, and does let me change things around out of the box. In Firefox, we need a stupid "extensions" just to clip a toenail in the interface.
"Firefox can't do this" "Hey, here's an extension" "Firefox can't do that" "Here's another extension". Prety quickly you will have a handfull of extensions, that might or might not break with the next Firefox version...
Heck, I'll give you another example! There is an extension to (gasp!) minimize Firefox to the system tray, right next to the clock. In one of the last Firefox updates, that extension stoped working at my computer at work. Yes, FF is updated to the latest version and so is that extension, but everytime I use both together, FF just displays a big, empty window, with *nothing* to click or any menus. And guess what! At my home computer, I have the *same* version of both and it runs fine! And don't go blaming it on Windows, because I'm using the same Windows XP in both computers. Oh and in Opera, the hotkey for that specific funtion is Ctrl-H. No extensions, no breakups...
So, about this whole "holy-war" agains IE... I'm just sitting and watching, waiting for the inevitable moment when this will blow on the face of the zealots... remember folks, FUD works both ways, and if you spread FUD to suport your product of choice, sooner or later it will bite you in the ass.
And heres a little site for you to read: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyt hs.html#Security
Oh, are you talking about the sensible people that floods the user with pop-up-under-slide-growing_under_the_rock ads, or that other bunch of sensible people that tries to install dialers to international numbers without the user knowledge? Don't get me wrong. As in everything, there is good people and bad people in the web porn business, but given the current practices, I would hardly call the porn buch "sensible people"... And I'm talking about the guys that come up and green-light things like "under-the-radar" dialers, not the actors and actresses...
Jesus, some guys never get it, do they? He seems to see the games industry as some sort of trash can, where he (or someone) can dig the "buzzwords" (Alone in the Dark, Far Cry, etc) to put together his sorry excuses for a movie... Ok, so what if House of the Dead is a "shooter"... So the Bible is a bunch of stupid stories! It's not what it is, it's how it's made!! He talks about Schindler's List... What's that? It's a story about a guy that saves a bunch of people during a world war! So what, right? No biggie! Hey hey, what about LOTR? A stupid collection of stupid books about hair-feet-people that must destroy a stupid ring that someone stupid created with infinite power... Oh well... Wait a minute! I know! Let's make a movie about Bowl, but using only trained monkeys, see if he likes it... Even better, let the movie be directed by monkeys, given enough time they will come up with something way better than Bowl ever did...
"(...) the game over a decade in development." Hummm 2006 - 1997 = 9... over a decade? Come on, guys, sure, 9 years it's a lot, but no need to puff up the numbers...
The classic reply: "A major one" :D
But this wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that a lot of software trading can be done through newsgroups, right? I mean, P2P is neat and all, but to get something fast in the "underworld", one would turn to the "newz"... of course, since someone has to upload it, it's a bit slow to actually get a large piece of software up there, but once is there... theoretically anyone in the world can download it from their ISP servers and in the worst case scenario, "just" anyone in your ISP can get it. Maybe this is taxing the ISPs in terms of bandwith or something, or caught the atention of the "big boys", but my guess is that all this talk about getting rid of the usenet servers is a bit paralel with baning P2P, it's just not admited openly.
Altough I'm a sort of "windows hore", I learned one thing from the Linux / Open source comunity: sometimes, the best choice is not the commercial one. There a lot of talented and good intentioned people out there, and there is good free software for Windows, as with any OS.
You just have to search for it and read what others have to say. In this time and age, were everything is just a googling away, I don't understand why people won't search for free alternatives to commercial (and sometimes pretty expensive) software products. If a product is a fraud, it will be denounced somewere, the "word" will get out. Some examples of good, free software (in this area of security): Spybot Search and Destroy Lavasoft Ad-aware Kerio Personal Firewall Spyblaster Hijack This!
About Norton. well, just scrap the "bloatware" and use AVG, for example. Mean, slick client, light on memory (and interface), it doesn't need IE 6 just to install and gets daily updates, as the big names in AV do. Oh, did I mention that there is a free version? Of course that Windows has its flaws but come one, there are good and bad aplications in every OS. Yes, maybe even in linux :P
The "trick" to survive in the Windows world is: get to know the best free alternatives (AV, firewall, the works), update your "windozebox", follow some common sense rules :don't run with administrator unless you really really have to, do not open unknow exe files, use a safer browser (I use Opera with javacrap, I mean, javascript turned off and I'm yet to get infected by spyware).
You probably know these things already, but the feeling I get sometimes is that we get so "blinded" for "our" hate for Microsoft that we sometimes forget that yes, Windows has it's flaws but there are ways to mend and live with it, if we need or have the will to.
Well, about the magazine ads, specially the IT magazines, I have a pet peeve: the magazines that are almost 50% advertizing. You know, the ones that, when we open a random page, we get an add, or we get the catalog of some IT shop. Come on! Why should I have to comb a page for ads, just to find the column that I want to read? I think that in that particular segment, the ads are getting similar to web ads: anoying, obscuring the real content, and simply just getting in the way.
...Sega's Sonic showing up on a Nintendo console ;)
Well, the extensions are the best thing in Firefox, except when it goes up a version and breaks compatibility with older extensions...
Now this is a franchise I would like to see revived, using the next generation of consoles as an excuse (a la the slashdot article from days ago). It was an awesome game, and since we get to play the "bad guy's" side, it was a very fun game indeed!:D
Yeah, I know, but I was trying to keep the sig PG13 ;)