...the corporatists like Gates are the kind of people who will make the world a better place. God he needs to get a clue about how to behave in public! What a dick.
Because if you truly believed in the teachings of Jesus, you would know that you are SUPPOSED to help people who need help. It doesn't matter if they are christians or not. However, I think getting churches involved is asking for trouble. Religion is never a good answer to problems. Trust me, I come from a mixed background of strong connections to Catholicism, Protestant and Jehova's Witnesses. I know that religion is not about helping people. It's about money and power. Much in the same way that a company like Amway is not about making money through sales, but is about making money through recruiting members. I am not saying religion is bad. Some people need it to get by and as long as they keep their beliefs to themselves, it's fine. When they start telling other people what they need to believe, they've crossed the line of what is moral and ethical.
That's a "nice idea" but it doesn't work. Say you've got a guy who is in his 40s or 50s, has a long criminal history and an alcohol problem. When he gets out of jail the last time and finally really decides to grow up and be a productive member of society, how will he do that? He has a poor track record with holding down jobs in the past. He has no real useful skills. He has no money. What's he supposed to do to turn around? If no one will give him a job because of his history, what is he supposed to do to earn money? He may have made a lifetime of mistakes, but if he's honestly willing to change at this point, he should be allowed to and provided with lots of help to make the change. Where is this help going to come from? Where does it currently come from? I say that he's fucked. And that's not fair.
If we had free public colleges, he could then enroll in some classes (possibly geared towards ex-cons who want to clean up) that might give him some basic employable skills AND provide a litmus test to see just how serious he is about changing. If he does well, then there could be positions that the government would require all businesses to have for people like him. He could... "get a job"! if he does well at that, then he might be able to finally get off the cycle of criminall behavior. That might alleviate his desire to toally drown his woes in alcohol and cause him to not be a total drunk. He'd just be a weekend drunk like most guys are (personally I despise alcohol of any kind). But (poof), we don't have anything like that in this country and people like him are totally screwed. Yes, it's his own fault, but anyone willing to change their direction at any time in life should have the freedom to do so and the assistance needed to do so.
Most people, if they had the 50% of their income back that the government is stealing at gun-point, would choose to donate a portion of it to a charity.
This is a fallacy. There was a point in time in the United States (The Industrial Revolution) where a lot of money was held by a very small group of people. The poorest people couldn't donate to people less fortunate than them. The people who were just getting by couldn't afford to donate to the poor. And the Industrialists didn't care to. I do not believe that most people would donate a portion of their money to charity. Even I wouldn't, and I'm a pretty nice guy. I prefer being forced to do it by a fair system (even with the threat of guns being pointed at me if I don't). That is the only way to ensure more contribution than human nature would allow for. Anyone who believes that most people would donate is either naive or just doesn't grasp how rotten humans tend to be. I would also add that donations should be fairly distributed with no deference to religion, politics or "morality". I want to see art with the crucifix in a glass of pee being funded just as much as I'd like to see all churches of all denominations get equal tax exemption. I want to see a drunk who needs some food be allowed to get some without having to give his heart to the lord. I want to see the Church of Satan forced (even at gunpoint) to take a tax exempt status even though they don't want one. That is true fairness. I don't want to see a situation where the only place that some scummy Republican donates his money to is a christian church that will only help you if you promise to be born again and renounce your god given sexual preference. (Just trying to cover all the things I believe in here...) That's why it's better for a non-religious organization to enforce and control where money to help others comes from and where it goes to. As soon as you start letting individuals do it, you introduce strong biases.
Actually it completely depends on what you consider "work". Frankly, I think a multipoint touch screen would be great if you're a network engineer manageing a large network and you have a total graphical layout of your gear. However, if you take away the touchscreen and interface this with datapoint sensors on each digit of your hand, the applications expand tremendously. However, if you're a coder, this would be a terrible UI or at best a waste since you only flip between source code files every so often. I think the best application for it would be a full sized table that people can gather around. Each person having a unique ID implanted in their right arm (RFID) or on their forehead (laser scan) so that when they interact with the table they would be seen as a distinct individual from the other fifteen people using the table. Could be used for group work in a graphic design department. Could be used for playing virtual poker. Could be used for boardrooms (very likely the first application since the suits always get this stuff first). Could be used virtual foosball! THe point being that multiuser UIs don't exist yet and they should...
Mike Adams: Marxism is an emotional disorder, not a political philosophy.
Damn. That's rough. Now... I'll say that I don't really buy Marxism as a postivie solution since it's just as easy to corrupt as capitalist "democracy" has been. But, I imagine that the quote means that if you care about the fate of other people and want to help out through enforced systems like taxes, that you have an "emotional disorder"? That's, well... frankly a sick way of thinking. If you don't care about other people, you have failed as a human being.
Re:Explain the fricken 12,000 bucks for this...
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WinXP on a Mac, Hoax?
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· Score: 1
Most Linux users aren't running mission critical servers, but are doing much more interesting things. True, Linux is my choice of OS for running web servers, mail, DNS and the like, but that's hardly important stuff. The really interesting stuff is to be had in the multimedia and desktop arenas and that's where Xen is truly the better performer. I'd far rather run my home remote desktop server on Xen and be able to have my desktop ALWAYS on via VNC even if I have to take the hardware down rather than have a PC for each user in the house. I'd also like to know that my CPU cycles are being well used rather than wasted on emulating parts of a system that really work better when virtualized. Don't get me wrong, things like QEMU have their place. I use it extensively for building VMs before porting them to Xen. I also use it for testing out ISOs of new distros. Hell, I'm even currently running my home web server/mail server/DNS server on QEMU and it's smashingly good. But that was done only to free up the original box that installation sat on. I moved the entire installation to QEMU just using rsync so that I retained everything I'd worked hard on in the VM image. I only needed to make a few tweaks (different NIC). But that was done so I could set my box up with Xen and migrate to new, more MOBILE VMs. That is the key. Xen is much more mobile. It takes just a few minutes to get an entirely new VM running and completely with the feel of a real server running at the native speed of the physical host. No slowdowns at all.
For all intents and purposes Xen is the far better solution. I was looking for an alternative to VMWare and I did look over UML. The slow performance of UML alone was a major issue for me and I'm certain a lot of other people here would agree. Plus a lot of us aren't just virtualizing dumb services like Apache. We're virtualizing PVRs, Asterisk PBXs and GNOME or KDE application servers. Xen does that without breaking a sweat. It might be a bit more difficult to set up (not that hard if you know how to compile your own kernel) than UML, but the benefits are far greater. UML cannot, for example, virtualize a 3D accelerator card. Xen can as long as the driver is open. I dont believe you can assign a UML session to only use specific real hardware in your box (this is hand for running multiple PVRs on the same box with multiple video capture cards). And UML definitely can't do a live migration from one physical host to another with NO downtime. That's right. I can have VM1 running on HOST-A, but... I need to take HOST-A down for some repairs and I don't want the services on VM1 to stop. So... I set up HOST-B to take over for HOST-A and tell VM1 to migrate from HOST-A to HOST-B. Type a simple command and it's done. VM1 is now fully running on HOST-B and I can down HOST-A with NO impact to users. The only other thing you need is centralized storage (which anyone doing VMs SHOULD be using. Lookup GNBDs and NBDs.) on a separate host and all hosts must exist in the same network.
Xen is one of the best virtualization platforms our there and with the support of AMD's Pacifica and Intel's Vanderpool, it will even support running (yuck) Windows VMs when you need to. Sorry, but Xen is lightyears ahead of UML unless all you intend to host is some simple internet services.
Actually your comment about VMs is where I am. I like to build my stuff as close as possible from the ground up and then use the base image to make VMs. For me, update usually means updating each package by hand. It's slower, but I still like the benefits it offers over precompiled binaries.
Because they like to save time. However, if time is not an issue compiling is still better if you want high performance. EVERY pre-compiled binary I've ever used never performs as well as something custom compiled for the specific platform or CPU. Screw portability if you want performance. Frankly I'd prefer all assembly language...
Perhaps that's why I am impressed with Gentoo. It really is like having a package manager that compiles everything for you. I can't see myself every going back to a "dumbed down" distro like Fedora, SuSE or Mandriva though. They just don't offer the performance I want. Especially since I tend to use old hardware. My main machine at home is nearly ten years old and it's running the latest apps just fine. It couldn't do that without custom compiles or Gentoo. And it has no hope of running Windows XP. I tried that back when XP debuted and it took it about fifteen minutes to boot!
Up until this past year I've been a big fan of using a very stripped down Redhat (then later Fedora) distro and doing my own custom compilations of things like OpenSSL, Apache, OpenSSH, DHCPD, BIND, Courier, MySQL, PHP, XFree86 and X.org, and of course the Kernel itself. The main reason? It "just works". When I originally started using Linux and used RPMs I was very annoyed with them. I think RPM sucks. I also think BSD ports suck too. I don't like using stuff on my machine that I didn't massage first. That's just the way I am.
A co-worker introduced me to Gentoo late last year and I have to say I am very impressed. It's much faster than the optimizations I was using. Of course I didn't compile everything in RedHat or Fedora by hand. That's why Gentoo really rocks. You CAN hand compile everything from the ground up! I also used to use Linux From Scratch. And YES, I do use this stuff on production machines. You just can't get any better performance or security by doing it all yourself. The only reason to use package managers is if you are new to Linux or just don't want to learn much. But if you don't dig in, then you're at risk of thinking that something in your installation is broken, when it's not. I've seen many people throw up their hands saying, "I have to re-install my Linux box dammit!" when all they really needed to do was fix a symlink, edit a config file or downgrade something for compatibility reasons.
For example, on a laptop at home I decided I wanted to use the Xdmx server from X.org, so I hand compiled X.org. After that, I kept having this problem where the acpid (tracks the laptop's battery life among other things) daemon wasn't starting and would produce an error message whenever I logged into Gnome. I dug around on the net for quite a while and finally found out that the version of X.org (a devel version, not a stable version) grabs ACPI if you are using the RedHat graphical boot screen. The fix? Stop the RHGB from running by removing the RHGB kernel option. I think a lot of people would have assumed they hosed their installation and reinstalled if that problem really bothered them. It's not hard to find solutions to most problems in Linux no matter how obscure. That's why only knowing how to use pre-compiled binaries is a detriment if you're serious about using Linux.
Re:Explain the fricken 12,000 bucks for this...
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WinXP on a Mac, Hoax?
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· Score: 3, Funny
Is it THAT important to buy Mac hardware to put Windows on?
But of course... As soon as the number of Macs running Windows to do real work outnumbers the number of Macs running Mac OS, can you imagine the reaction of the die hard Mac fanboys? Just that alone is worth $12,000 x 100.;P (JOKE ALERT!!! JOKE ALERT!!! JOKE ALERT!!!)
You give 'em hell!! Speaking as a user, I can say that I could put together an entire server room in a week using off the shelf parts from CompUSA and Best Buy. And it wouldn't cost the millions that most IT departments spend on those elitist devices like SCSI drives, ECC RAM, DLT tapes, Cisco Managed Switches and SANs. The first thing I'd do is build a big system based on the latest gaming system specs (since gamers push the technology envelope) and cram it with ten 300 gig SATA drives. That's 3 terabytes of storage (more than those piddly SANs!) and at a fraction of the cost. Then I'd make sure had a dual layer DVD burner in it for backups. That way WE could have full backups on really inexpensive mediums. When I saw the price of a DLT II tape on an IT invoice, I nearly flipped. They're TOO expensive!!!!1111!!! Then I'd throw Windows 2003 Server on the box to manage all this stuff in one place. A few Linksys or Netgear switches can start connecting the resst of the networks together and they'd be WAYYY cheaper than the highway robbery that Cisco foists on us through our IT elitists.
The workstations would be even easier. I'd buy everyone the $300 AMD specials with Windows XP Home. That way they'd be more familiar with the OS since they probably have XP Home at home too. Just plug them into the network and away they go. They can all get their IP address from the Linksys router like I do at home and then they're online easy as pie. Don't need to get out any stupid manuals to manage Cisco switches or anything like that. All the gobbledygook is just for elitist snobs. For restoring a PC if it gets hosed, I'd just use a copy of Ghost. Sometimes you can even get Ghost for free if you buy the right hard drive. Just hook up a laptop with Ghost to a PC using a USB cable and make an image to burn onto a DVD. The next time the PC needs to be revived, just grab the DVD from the pouch on the side of that box, pop it in the laptop and Ghost the other way around! Easy as pie and FAST too!!
In this day and age, what company with a competent IT staff does it's own e-mail? I've been trying to tell the folks in my IT department to ditch our mail server (some antiquated Unix based thing that nobody really likes) and just let everyone get Hotmail accounts. Now that GMail is around, that's an option too since they give you a pretty comfortably sized mail box as opposed to the meager offerings of the clueless IT staff. E-mail should be able to hold whatever I put into it no matter how much or how big. Period.
The voice over IP thing is easy too. Just buy a VOIP box from Linksys and get a Vonage account for every group of ten users you've got. You'll need multiple DSL lines to do it, but that would still be far cheaper than having one of those snobby PRI or T1 lines to carry your voice traffic. Speaking of which... why on earth is anyone using T1s and T3s these days? They're so costly and they don't perform anywhere near what I get on my cable modem at home. Just get cable modem and be done with it. Your users will thank you forever.
Barron, I'm glad you gave me a chance to get that out there. The users need to know the truth.
...I hate to say it, but if you "users" know what's good for a company. Why don't you axe the entire IT department and take the reigns yourselves? After all, you guys seem to think it can't be that hard and can't or don't want to understand that most IT departments are understaffed and saddled with crap software that YOU asked us to buy. While we're on the topic of crap software, lets point the finger where it really needs to be targetted: Management. They are the people who hamstring us by making clueless decisions that are totally the opposite of what we recommend.
Trust me, IT folks try their hardest to keep these systems running, but if your company is like most, you don't have your own software development department. Instead, you have to buy software from some rinky-dink company that claims (to the management folks who make the bad decisions) that they are god's gift to your market segment. They also have their slickster sales guys shower YOU with the same claims and make sure you talk to only their happiest customers. But, when the program gets implemented onsite and it sucks ass it becomes OUR (I.T. that is) fault because everyone else who is using it has no problems. (Well... everyone that the sales folks directed you to even though we warned you after we tested the software and found it to be lacking.)
And then after we're into using the crap software for a year or two, you guys start talking about wanting to stage a revolt and go to the software from our current vendor's competitor because you hear all kinds of raves about that from users at other companies. After we've spent a lot of money just trying to support this bag of crap. Do you even have any idea how much strain YOU put on the IT department when you want to use software that is severly flawed simply because it's what other people in smaller environments (ie. lab situations or really small businesses) like? Do you realize that every time we have to fix some gigantic steaming pile of mess that the software created, we have less time to do some things that really matter to you guys? As soon as we ask for more staff to try and keep up with the steady flow of crap we're told we can't have them because we're running out of money. Well... until the next big piece of software comes along that management is dying for.
I'd say that before you stage a revolt, you might want to consider a more moderate approach and ask the IT staff what THEY need in order to improve the quality of their work. Don't be surprised if you hear: "more staff", "more hours", "more influence on software purchases" and "more testing that actually involves end users in real time with real data instead of these closed lab situations that never bring out problems that would occur in every day real life situations". Ideally, the best appraoch would be to try a temporary divorce. The IT staff get two weeks off from maintaining the looney bin and the most "technical" of the regular staff get to run IT for those two weeks. (No hiring of temps or consultants either. Since you guys want to run IT, this is your chance. Be honest about it.) Then we'll see who is incompetent. At worst, the arm chair techs will screw things up enough where we'd need to restore from tape on a few systems. At best, they'd screw things up that would only require a few reboots to fix (more likely although you'll all be screaming that the systems are totally dead). And (unlikely but possible) we might find a few new folks in house that could be added to IT to help increase our staff. So what do you say, you want to put your money where your mouth is?;P
...since Apple is planning on moving from MacOS X to MS Windows. The move to Intel. The presence of Bill Gates at an Apple conference. The fact that Apple has consistently stated that they are NOT a software company, but a hardware company. It all adds up. I believe that Apple and Microsoft are planning something huge. You heard it here first:
Apple is going to give MS what they've always wanted: the ultimate UI. Microsoft will take bits and pieces of the Mac OS backend and weld them onto future versions of Windows (in case you haven't been paying attention Windows itself has been getting more Unix-like post NT4). Then Apple will provide the high end boxes that run a special version of Windows just for Macintosh. Apple gets totally out of the software business. Microsoft gets rid of one more competitor and strengthens its monopoly. Win-win. Mark my words. It's going to happen. At that point, security will no longer be an issue since MS plans to solve tha problem with the virtualization support in newer Intel chips (Vanderpool). Future Windows PCs will be running multiple copies of the OS in different VMs with each tailored to handle a particular task. One for network security, another layer for antivirus, antiworm, antispyware stuff and then a VM for each user on the system so that one user's goof up won't take out the data for another user (including the root user). You might all think I'm crazy now. But let's see where we are in eight years...
OK you fucking cowards. POINT to exactly where he said that the writer's opinions were invalid because of who was paying him. You CAN'T, because the original poster DIDN'T say that. He simply warned people to consider where the opinion was coming from. Anyone who doesn't want to consider the source is either a fucking worthless idiot who deserves the screwing he's getting in his asshole or supports the agenda being espoused.
Is it me or has Slashdot been slowing down in terms of traffic lately. Stories seem to be getting lower volumes of responses and slower responses. You can't tell me this is the result of Dig. Personally I think Dig sucks because it's not specific enough like Slashdot. Don't get me wrong, I've been annoyed with the direction Slashdot has taken for years but there are currently no better alternatives when your mail interests are Linux, Unix, and the people who love them. What gives?
Hmmm... sounds to me like the packing, cooler, refrigerator, insulation and plastic cup industries could be in BIG trouble if this little bacteria gets out in the wild in warm climates. Would you believe picking up your cooler in the park and having the bottom fall out?;P
The UI on live.com seems to suck in general. But I think most of the UI stuff they did was to add to the "oooh shiny" effect that Microsoft is mediocre at (Apple does it better). However, the "oooh shiny" factor is important in attracting the masses. Even though it's completely stupid, I'll bet a lot of users will intially think "Wow! Live.com just looks and works so much faster than Google" when they are paying attention to the FX. But in the long run, it's all about the search results. I tried searching for information that I found easily and quickly with Google yesterday and I didn't even get results for those same searches in live.com. THAT'S what matters. Live.com seems to do OK compared to Google in terms of results, but it's not as good as Google. All the UI crap will, however, likely "win minds and hearts" as it were... Especially when Vista debuts with live.com posing as a part of the OS and applications. Hopefully Google won't go the wrong route of trying to keep up with "oooh shiny".
Your definition of "efficiency" may not match everyone else's.
Fair enough....But they suck for any sort of "real work" vis -a vis email communucations...
The bulk of my users do not have a need for relying on e-mail to do their work. Those that do need longer term retention of e-mail may request it (as I stated originally and you conveniently ignored) and in the end get it if there is a justifiable business need. I do have the occasional user who has 48 or 64 megs of space because their job justifis the need. This is good policy for ANY business (you seem to have some kind of problem with people who aren't in the business world since you have so many derrogatory names for them like "grunt workers"). First, you set your base mail quota for your environment. It doesn't have to be 10 megs, but there is no justification for anything beyond 50 megs for typical users either. (People who keep Powerpoint presentations in e-mail should be shot.) Then you set up your guidlines for justifying requests for more space than the base limit. This is a pretty sensible thing to do instead of letting the idiots run away with no limits at all which is what it sounds like the original submitter's business did.
It is *your* responsibility to provide them with the tools that let them do their job in a productive manner.
Ahem... I do. They get a 10 meg mail store which is sufficient for most typical users in my environment. If they must keep larger attachments they also have a network file server to which they are attached as a "G:> Drive". There is no quota on that and they can store as much work related data as they wish on it. Both the mail server and file server get backed up regularly so they are guaranteed that data that was important enough to them to put on the G drive can be easily recovered (which we also do). Once again, you conveniently ignored what I mentioned in my previous posts just to further your cock-eyed cause for the user.
If your users are trying to treat email as a document repository, they're not doing it to annoy you, they're doing it because you haven't given them a better way of doing it [0].
They're doing it because they aren't very good at computers. To a lot of them the G Drive is a mystery no matter how much training they get. They don't understand it. They don't care to understand it. This is VERY typical of non-IT folks. IT provides them with wondeeful tools to do their job but due to the abstract nature of those tools, they refuse to learn them and then bitch about it.
So you give them a measly 10M of centralised, backed-up email storage, then tell them they effectively can't even back up old mail for reference on their machines, because it might be lost. I shudder to think of the amount of potentially important business information that your policies have destroyed.
Because... 95% of the time they DON'T NEED to keep old mail for reference!!! This is true of most businesses as long as they got their quota sized properly for their business. I'm not having my users waste space on my server for photos of babies, parties, flyers for various get togethers and the like. This is not work related but is typical of what most e-mail users will do if they are given more space than they need. Anyone who thinks that backing data up on a local machine is a good idea in a large environment is obviously NOT an IT worker. If you're not in IT then you have no right to be making commentary on this at all. Everyone worth their salt in IT knows that you CENTRALIZE CENTRALIZE CENTRALIZE your valuable data. This is what we do via the mail server and the file server. (I should note once again that you COMPLETELY ignored the file server statement to justify your wrongheaded views.)
The sole purpose of a company's IT department is to keep its users happy by providing them with the tools and resources they require to best do their job. There is no othe
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. But... your Slashdot name is... BWAHAHAHA!!! CORNFACE!!!! Whoo boy!
...the corporatists like Gates are the kind of people who will make the world a better place. God he needs to get a clue about how to behave in public! What a dick.
Because if you truly believed in the teachings of Jesus, you would know that you are SUPPOSED to help people who need help. It doesn't matter if they are christians or not. However, I think getting churches involved is asking for trouble. Religion is never a good answer to problems. Trust me, I come from a mixed background of strong connections to Catholicism, Protestant and Jehova's Witnesses. I know that religion is not about helping people. It's about money and power. Much in the same way that a company like Amway is not about making money through sales, but is about making money through recruiting members. I am not saying religion is bad. Some people need it to get by and as long as they keep their beliefs to themselves, it's fine. When they start telling other people what they need to believe, they've crossed the line of what is moral and ethical.
That's a "nice idea" but it doesn't work. Say you've got a guy who is in his 40s or 50s, has a long criminal history and an alcohol problem. When he gets out of jail the last time and finally really decides to grow up and be a productive member of society, how will he do that? He has a poor track record with holding down jobs in the past. He has no real useful skills. He has no money. What's he supposed to do to turn around? If no one will give him a job because of his history, what is he supposed to do to earn money? He may have made a lifetime of mistakes, but if he's honestly willing to change at this point, he should be allowed to and provided with lots of help to make the change. Where is this help going to come from? Where does it currently come from? I say that he's fucked. And that's not fair.
If we had free public colleges, he could then enroll in some classes (possibly geared towards ex-cons who want to clean up) that might give him some basic employable skills AND provide a litmus test to see just how serious he is about changing. If he does well, then there could be positions that the government would require all businesses to have for people like him. He could... "get a job"! if he does well at that, then he might be able to finally get off the cycle of criminall behavior. That might alleviate his desire to toally drown his woes in alcohol and cause him to not be a total drunk. He'd just be a weekend drunk like most guys are (personally I despise alcohol of any kind). But (poof), we don't have anything like that in this country and people like him are totally screwed. Yes, it's his own fault, but anyone willing to change their direction at any time in life should have the freedom to do so and the assistance needed to do so.
This is a fallacy. There was a point in time in the United States (The Industrial Revolution) where a lot of money was held by a very small group of people. The poorest people couldn't donate to people less fortunate than them. The people who were just getting by couldn't afford to donate to the poor. And the Industrialists didn't care to. I do not believe that most people would donate a portion of their money to charity. Even I wouldn't, and I'm a pretty nice guy. I prefer being forced to do it by a fair system (even with the threat of guns being pointed at me if I don't). That is the only way to ensure more contribution than human nature would allow for. Anyone who believes that most people would donate is either naive or just doesn't grasp how rotten humans tend to be. I would also add that donations should be fairly distributed with no deference to religion, politics or "morality". I want to see art with the crucifix in a glass of pee being funded just as much as I'd like to see all churches of all denominations get equal tax exemption. I want to see a drunk who needs some food be allowed to get some without having to give his heart to the lord. I want to see the Church of Satan forced (even at gunpoint) to take a tax exempt status even though they don't want one. That is true fairness. I don't want to see a situation where the only place that some scummy Republican donates his money to is a christian church that will only help you if you promise to be born again and renounce your god given sexual preference. (Just trying to cover all the things I believe in here...) That's why it's better for a non-religious organization to enforce and control where money to help others comes from and where it goes to. As soon as you start letting individuals do it, you introduce strong biases.
Actually it completely depends on what you consider "work". Frankly, I think a multipoint touch screen would be great if you're a network engineer manageing a large network and you have a total graphical layout of your gear. However, if you take away the touchscreen and interface this with datapoint sensors on each digit of your hand, the applications expand tremendously. However, if you're a coder, this would be a terrible UI or at best a waste since you only flip between source code files every so often. I think the best application for it would be a full sized table that people can gather around. Each person having a unique ID implanted in their right arm (RFID) or on their forehead (laser scan) so that when they interact with the table they would be seen as a distinct individual from the other fifteen people using the table. Could be used for group work in a graphic design department. Could be used for playing virtual poker. Could be used for boardrooms (very likely the first application since the suits always get this stuff first). Could be used virtual foosball! THe point being that multiuser UIs don't exist yet and they should...
Damn. That's rough. Now... I'll say that I don't really buy Marxism as a postivie solution since it's just as easy to corrupt as capitalist "democracy" has been. But, I imagine that the quote means that if you care about the fate of other people and want to help out through enforced systems like taxes, that you have an "emotional disorder"? That's, well... frankly a sick way of thinking. If you don't care about other people, you have failed as a human being.
Nah. Real work in Windows XP = GAMEZ!!!! ;P
Most Linux users aren't running mission critical servers, but are doing much more interesting things. True, Linux is my choice of OS for running web servers, mail, DNS and the like, but that's hardly important stuff. The really interesting stuff is to be had in the multimedia and desktop arenas and that's where Xen is truly the better performer. I'd far rather run my home remote desktop server on Xen and be able to have my desktop ALWAYS on via VNC even if I have to take the hardware down rather than have a PC for each user in the house. I'd also like to know that my CPU cycles are being well used rather than wasted on emulating parts of a system that really work better when virtualized. Don't get me wrong, things like QEMU have their place. I use it extensively for building VMs before porting them to Xen. I also use it for testing out ISOs of new distros. Hell, I'm even currently running my home web server/mail server/DNS server on QEMU and it's smashingly good. But that was done only to free up the original box that installation sat on. I moved the entire installation to QEMU just using rsync so that I retained everything I'd worked hard on in the VM image. I only needed to make a few tweaks (different NIC). But that was done so I could set my box up with Xen and migrate to new, more MOBILE VMs. That is the key. Xen is much more mobile. It takes just a few minutes to get an entirely new VM running and completely with the feel of a real server running at the native speed of the physical host. No slowdowns at all.
For all intents and purposes Xen is the far better solution. I was looking for an alternative to VMWare and I did look over UML. The slow performance of UML alone was a major issue for me and I'm certain a lot of other people here would agree. Plus a lot of us aren't just virtualizing dumb services like Apache. We're virtualizing PVRs, Asterisk PBXs and GNOME or KDE application servers. Xen does that without breaking a sweat. It might be a bit more difficult to set up (not that hard if you know how to compile your own kernel) than UML, but the benefits are far greater. UML cannot, for example, virtualize a 3D accelerator card. Xen can as long as the driver is open. I dont believe you can assign a UML session to only use specific real hardware in your box (this is hand for running multiple PVRs on the same box with multiple video capture cards). And UML definitely can't do a live migration from one physical host to another with NO downtime. That's right. I can have VM1 running on HOST-A, but... I need to take HOST-A down for some repairs and I don't want the services on VM1 to stop. So... I set up HOST-B to take over for HOST-A and tell VM1 to migrate from HOST-A to HOST-B. Type a simple command and it's done. VM1 is now fully running on HOST-B and I can down HOST-A with NO impact to users. The only other thing you need is centralized storage (which anyone doing VMs SHOULD be using. Lookup GNBDs and NBDs.) on a separate host and all hosts must exist in the same network.
Xen is one of the best virtualization platforms our there and with the support of AMD's Pacifica and Intel's Vanderpool, it will even support running (yuck) Windows VMs when you need to. Sorry, but Xen is lightyears ahead of UML unless all you intend to host is some simple internet services.
Actually your comment about VMs is where I am. I like to build my stuff as close as possible from the ground up and then use the base image to make VMs. For me, update usually means updating each package by hand. It's slower, but I still like the benefits it offers over precompiled binaries.
Because they like to save time. However, if time is not an issue compiling is still better if you want high performance. EVERY pre-compiled binary I've ever used never performs as well as something custom compiled for the specific platform or CPU. Screw portability if you want performance. Frankly I'd prefer all assembly language...
Perhaps that's why I am impressed with Gentoo. It really is like having a package manager that compiles everything for you. I can't see myself every going back to a "dumbed down" distro like Fedora, SuSE or Mandriva though. They just don't offer the performance I want. Especially since I tend to use old hardware. My main machine at home is nearly ten years old and it's running the latest apps just fine. It couldn't do that without custom compiles or Gentoo. And it has no hope of running Windows XP. I tried that back when XP debuted and it took it about fifteen minutes to boot!
Up until this past year I've been a big fan of using a very stripped down Redhat (then later Fedora) distro and doing my own custom compilations of things like OpenSSL, Apache, OpenSSH, DHCPD, BIND, Courier, MySQL, PHP, XFree86 and X.org, and of course the Kernel itself. The main reason? It "just works". When I originally started using Linux and used RPMs I was very annoyed with them. I think RPM sucks. I also think BSD ports suck too. I don't like using stuff on my machine that I didn't massage first. That's just the way I am.
A co-worker introduced me to Gentoo late last year and I have to say I am very impressed. It's much faster than the optimizations I was using. Of course I didn't compile everything in RedHat or Fedora by hand. That's why Gentoo really rocks. You CAN hand compile everything from the ground up! I also used to use Linux From Scratch. And YES, I do use this stuff on production machines. You just can't get any better performance or security by doing it all yourself. The only reason to use package managers is if you are new to Linux or just don't want to learn much. But if you don't dig in, then you're at risk of thinking that something in your installation is broken, when it's not. I've seen many people throw up their hands saying, "I have to re-install my Linux box dammit!" when all they really needed to do was fix a symlink, edit a config file or downgrade something for compatibility reasons.
For example, on a laptop at home I decided I wanted to use the Xdmx server from X.org, so I hand compiled X.org. After that, I kept having this problem where the acpid (tracks the laptop's battery life among other things) daemon wasn't starting and would produce an error message whenever I logged into Gnome. I dug around on the net for quite a while and finally found out that the version of X.org (a devel version, not a stable version) grabs ACPI if you are using the RedHat graphical boot screen. The fix? Stop the RHGB from running by removing the RHGB kernel option. I think a lot of people would have assumed they hosed their installation and reinstalled if that problem really bothered them. It's not hard to find solutions to most problems in Linux no matter how obscure. That's why only knowing how to use pre-compiled binaries is a detriment if you're serious about using Linux.
But of course... As soon as the number of Macs running Windows to do real work outnumbers the number of Macs running Mac OS, can you imagine the reaction of the die hard Mac fanboys? Just that alone is worth $12,000 x 100. ;P (JOKE ALERT!!! JOKE ALERT!!! JOKE ALERT!!!)
You give 'em hell!! Speaking as a user, I can say that I could put together an entire server room in a week using off the shelf parts from CompUSA and Best Buy. And it wouldn't cost the millions that most IT departments spend on those elitist devices like SCSI drives, ECC RAM, DLT tapes, Cisco Managed Switches and SANs. The first thing I'd do is build a big system based on the latest gaming system specs (since gamers push the technology envelope) and cram it with ten 300 gig SATA drives. That's 3 terabytes of storage (more than those piddly SANs!) and at a fraction of the cost. Then I'd make sure had a dual layer DVD burner in it for backups. That way WE could have full backups on really inexpensive mediums. When I saw the price of a DLT II tape on an IT invoice, I nearly flipped. They're TOO expensive!!!!1111!!! Then I'd throw Windows 2003 Server on the box to manage all this stuff in one place. A few Linksys or Netgear switches can start connecting the resst of the networks together and they'd be WAYYY cheaper than the highway robbery that Cisco foists on us through our IT elitists.
The workstations would be even easier. I'd buy everyone the $300 AMD specials with Windows XP Home. That way they'd be more familiar with the OS since they probably have XP Home at home too. Just plug them into the network and away they go. They can all get their IP address from the Linksys router like I do at home and then they're online easy as pie. Don't need to get out any stupid manuals to manage Cisco switches or anything like that. All the gobbledygook is just for elitist snobs. For restoring a PC if it gets hosed, I'd just use a copy of Ghost. Sometimes you can even get Ghost for free if you buy the right hard drive. Just hook up a laptop with Ghost to a PC using a USB cable and make an image to burn onto a DVD. The next time the PC needs to be revived, just grab the DVD from the pouch on the side of that box, pop it in the laptop and Ghost the other way around! Easy as pie and FAST too!!
In this day and age, what company with a competent IT staff does it's own e-mail? I've been trying to tell the folks in my IT department to ditch our mail server (some antiquated Unix based thing that nobody really likes) and just let everyone get Hotmail accounts. Now that GMail is around, that's an option too since they give you a pretty comfortably sized mail box as opposed to the meager offerings of the clueless IT staff. E-mail should be able to hold whatever I put into it no matter how much or how big. Period.
The voice over IP thing is easy too. Just buy a VOIP box from Linksys and get a Vonage account for every group of ten users you've got. You'll need multiple DSL lines to do it, but that would still be far cheaper than having one of those snobby PRI or T1 lines to carry your voice traffic. Speaking of which... why on earth is anyone using T1s and T3s these days? They're so costly and they don't perform anywhere near what I get on my cable modem at home. Just get cable modem and be done with it. Your users will thank you forever.
Barron, I'm glad you gave me a chance to get that out there. The users need to know the truth.
...I hate to say it, but if you "users" know what's good for a company. Why don't you axe the entire IT department and take the reigns yourselves? After all, you guys seem to think it can't be that hard and can't or don't want to understand that most IT departments are understaffed and saddled with crap software that YOU asked us to buy. While we're on the topic of crap software, lets point the finger where it really needs to be targetted: Management. They are the people who hamstring us by making clueless decisions that are totally the opposite of what we recommend.
;P
Trust me, IT folks try their hardest to keep these systems running, but if your company is like most, you don't have your own software development department. Instead, you have to buy software from some rinky-dink company that claims (to the management folks who make the bad decisions) that they are god's gift to your market segment. They also have their slickster sales guys shower YOU with the same claims and make sure you talk to only their happiest customers. But, when the program gets implemented onsite and it sucks ass it becomes OUR (I.T. that is) fault because everyone else who is using it has no problems. (Well... everyone that the sales folks directed you to even though we warned you after we tested the software and found it to be lacking.)
And then after we're into using the crap software for a year or two, you guys start talking about wanting to stage a revolt and go to the software from our current vendor's competitor because you hear all kinds of raves about that from users at other companies. After we've spent a lot of money just trying to support this bag of crap. Do you even have any idea how much strain YOU put on the IT department when you want to use software that is severly flawed simply because it's what other people in smaller environments (ie. lab situations or really small businesses) like? Do you realize that every time we have to fix some gigantic steaming pile of mess that the software created, we have less time to do some things that really matter to you guys? As soon as we ask for more staff to try and keep up with the steady flow of crap we're told we can't have them because we're running out of money. Well... until the next big piece of software comes along that management is dying for.
I'd say that before you stage a revolt, you might want to consider a more moderate approach and ask the IT staff what THEY need in order to improve the quality of their work. Don't be surprised if you hear: "more staff", "more hours", "more influence on software purchases" and "more testing that actually involves end users in real time with real data instead of these closed lab situations that never bring out problems that would occur in every day real life situations". Ideally, the best appraoch would be to try a temporary divorce. The IT staff get two weeks off from maintaining the looney bin and the most "technical" of the regular staff get to run IT for those two weeks. (No hiring of temps or consultants either. Since you guys want to run IT, this is your chance. Be honest about it.) Then we'll see who is incompetent. At worst, the arm chair techs will screw things up enough where we'd need to restore from tape on a few systems. At best, they'd screw things up that would only require a few reboots to fix (more likely although you'll all be screaming that the systems are totally dead). And (unlikely but possible) we might find a few new folks in house that could be added to IT to help increase our staff. So what do you say, you want to put your money where your mouth is?
Shut it! I bear no resemblence to the false prophet Dvorak! I am simply attempting to rouse some rabble. ;P
...since Apple is planning on moving from MacOS X to MS Windows. The move to Intel. The presence of Bill Gates at an Apple conference. The fact that Apple has consistently stated that they are NOT a software company, but a hardware company. It all adds up. I believe that Apple and Microsoft are planning something huge. You heard it here first:
Apple is going to give MS what they've always wanted: the ultimate UI. Microsoft will take bits and pieces of the Mac OS backend and weld them onto future versions of Windows (in case you haven't been paying attention Windows itself has been getting more Unix-like post NT4). Then Apple will provide the high end boxes that run a special version of Windows just for Macintosh. Apple gets totally out of the software business. Microsoft gets rid of one more competitor and strengthens its monopoly. Win-win. Mark my words. It's going to happen. At that point, security will no longer be an issue since MS plans to solve tha problem with the virtualization support in newer Intel chips (Vanderpool). Future Windows PCs will be running multiple copies of the OS in different VMs with each tailored to handle a particular task. One for network security, another layer for antivirus, antiworm, antispyware stuff and then a VM for each user on the system so that one user's goof up won't take out the data for another user (including the root user). You might all think I'm crazy now. But let's see where we are in eight years...
OK you fucking cowards. POINT to exactly where he said that the writer's opinions were invalid because of who was paying him. You CAN'T, because the original poster DIDN'T say that. He simply warned people to consider where the opinion was coming from. Anyone who doesn't want to consider the source is either a fucking worthless idiot who deserves the screwing he's getting in his asshole or supports the agenda being espoused.
Is it me or has Slashdot been slowing down in terms of traffic lately. Stories seem to be getting lower volumes of responses and slower responses. You can't tell me this is the result of Dig. Personally I think Dig sucks because it's not specific enough like Slashdot. Don't get me wrong, I've been annoyed with the direction Slashdot has taken for years but there are currently no better alternatives when your mail interests are Linux, Unix, and the people who love them. What gives?
Hmmm... sounds to me like the packing, cooler, refrigerator, insulation and plastic cup industries could be in BIG trouble if this little bacteria gets out in the wild in warm climates. Would you believe picking up your cooler in the park and having the bottom fall out? ;P
The UI on live.com seems to suck in general. But I think most of the UI stuff they did was to add to the "oooh shiny" effect that Microsoft is mediocre at (Apple does it better). However, the "oooh shiny" factor is important in attracting the masses. Even though it's completely stupid, I'll bet a lot of users will intially think "Wow! Live.com just looks and works so much faster than Google" when they are paying attention to the FX. But in the long run, it's all about the search results. I tried searching for information that I found easily and quickly with Google yesterday and I didn't even get results for those same searches in live.com. THAT'S what matters. Live.com seems to do OK compared to Google in terms of results, but it's not as good as Google. All the UI crap will, however, likely "win minds and hearts" as it were... Especially when Vista debuts with live.com posing as a part of the OS and applications. Hopefully Google won't go the wrong route of trying to keep up with "oooh shiny".
Fair enough. ...But they suck for any sort of "real work" vis -a vis email communucations...
The bulk of my users do not have a need for relying on e-mail to do their work. Those that do need longer term retention of e-mail may request it (as I stated originally and you conveniently ignored) and in the end get it if there is a justifiable business need. I do have the occasional user who has 48 or 64 megs of space because their job justifis the need. This is good policy for ANY business (you seem to have some kind of problem with people who aren't in the business world since you have so many derrogatory names for them like "grunt workers"). First, you set your base mail quota for your environment. It doesn't have to be 10 megs, but there is no justification for anything beyond 50 megs for typical users either. (People who keep Powerpoint presentations in e-mail should be shot.) Then you set up your guidlines for justifying requests for more space than the base limit. This is a pretty sensible thing to do instead of letting the idiots run away with no limits at all which is what it sounds like the original submitter's business did.
It is *your* responsibility to provide them with the tools that let them do their job in a productive manner.
Ahem... I do. They get a 10 meg mail store which is sufficient for most typical users in my environment. If they must keep larger attachments they also have a network file server to which they are attached as a "G:> Drive". There is no quota on that and they can store as much work related data as they wish on it. Both the mail server and file server get backed up regularly so they are guaranteed that data that was important enough to them to put on the G drive can be easily recovered (which we also do). Once again, you conveniently ignored what I mentioned in my previous posts just to further your cock-eyed cause for the user.
If your users are trying to treat email as a document repository, they're not doing it to annoy you, they're doing it because you haven't given them a better way of doing it [0].
They're doing it because they aren't very good at computers. To a lot of them the G Drive is a mystery no matter how much training they get. They don't understand it. They don't care to understand it. This is VERY typical of non-IT folks. IT provides them with wondeeful tools to do their job but due to the abstract nature of those tools, they refuse to learn them and then bitch about it.
So you give them a measly 10M of centralised, backed-up email storage, then tell them they effectively can't even back up old mail for reference on their machines, because it might be lost. I shudder to think of the amount of potentially important business information that your policies have destroyed.
Because... 95% of the time they DON'T NEED to keep old mail for reference!!! This is true of most businesses as long as they got their quota sized properly for their business. I'm not having my users waste space on my server for photos of babies, parties, flyers for various get togethers and the like. This is not work related but is typical of what most e-mail users will do if they are given more space than they need. Anyone who thinks that backing data up on a local machine is a good idea in a large environment is obviously NOT an IT worker. If you're not in IT then you have no right to be making commentary on this at all. Everyone worth their salt in IT knows that you CENTRALIZE CENTRALIZE CENTRALIZE your valuable data. This is what we do via the mail server and the file server. (I should note once again that you COMPLETELY ignored the file server statement to justify your wrongheaded views.)
The sole purpose of a company's IT department is to keep its users happy by providing them with the tools and resources they require to best do their job. There is no othe
...one COULD become a rockstar in one's own parent's basement after all!!! Will the technology wonders never cease?! ;P