...the supposedly above average intelligence of IT people cannot seem to grasp the idea that almost all software, operating systems, and computer technology in general is incredibly poorly designed.
No one should have to know as much about how computers function as any of us do (slashdot folk) to do their work, word processing, e-mail, browsing the web, etc.
When I started doing small time IT consulting in high school I found clients really liked if you would spend some time with them explaining how technology emerged and it's initial simpler forms and their evolution into the more "robust" applications they use today.
Think about how simple our first computers were in the scope of what they could do. Pre-internet, some pre-gui. It's damned easy to learn what will happen if you do something a certain way. There was only 1 way, there were limited options in software, no one even thought of using their computer for 1/10th of the things we do today.
The sheer complexity is daunting. Look at MS Word 2003, 2000. Now look at Word 2.0. Or the DOS word processors that predate my word processing needs.
Software is stupid, users are uninformed, poorly trained, and most IT people barely understand the concepts they talk about so eagerly themselves or try to "explain" to people.
I'm wondering what your problems were exactly, mac os x ships with a kerberos auth client, and I thought it supported NFS out of the box.
I've been doing a project where I may want to setup NFS or kerberos (future planning, nothing like that now) and was just interested in any problems I may run into. Basically I have the option of deploying some cool networking stuff, and may end up doing it as a learning experience.
Re:Hmmm, Not in my training and experience
on
Arson Science Rewritten
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I'm sorry, I saw your sig and just had to laugh. I'm a libertarian myself, but I do find the humor in that amusing.
We are using some "power stabilizers" right before the PC sockets (5000 watt support per stabilizer). It's saved us a few drives. We are however looking at setting up solar panels and hopefully switching to a DC-only lab. Thankfully the computer teacher here has quite a bit of experience with electrical engineering.
Also having problems with grounding. We will probably have to overhaul the power system here anyway with the integration of solar power here I won't have any real hardware problems.
I believe the "power stabilizers" are what you are referring to. However, honestly I don't know much about EE (more of a software person). This does just mean "It's time to learn Evan" to me, though.
Sorry, but support/maintenance/training costs and time are simply horrendous for mixed used equipment. If you want a project like this to succeed you need to use either locally available products (Hard for Togo) or build your own buying multiples of the same equipment (which is cheaper, perhaps not initially, than buying crap 300 dollar value PCs that will simply die or be unstable).
Real IT Departments don't buy cheap PCs, they buy many of a few different models of computers depending on what the company needs, because experience in real IT has shown that support/downtime/deployment costs are tremendous with anything different. Also, in projects like these, there are embedded motherboard/cpu combos (fanless, ULV, cool stuff) that may be better.
I skyped you, but having some conection issues right now. Africa online is difficult at times.
Anyway, I am here until 2008 (January) most likely, and planning on coming back once a year for 5 years (1-2 months at a time, or as needed).
If I can be any help with any experiences I've had, toss me an e-mail, or call me on skype.
I'm not part of any organization, my Aunt is Ghanaian and my Uncle asked me to come help their school. I used to be a independent It consultant for small companies in Boston, but I was looking to go back to school when my Uncle called me. So now I am doing this until I go back to college.
Used equipment is almost not worth deploying. At least for me. I am currently in Kumasi, Ghana, deploying a mixed network of Windows/Linux desktops, with a OpenBSD/Linux backend.
The time consumed by supporting mixed donated equipment is massive. Also, when we asked for "networking equipment" we were given 14.4 modems (Practical Peripherals... ohh those were the days), telecom switches for phone setups, but also some pretty nice 16 and 24 port 10 and 10/100 rack switches.
And the cost of getting the items from our container shipments ran the school over $1000 USD per shipment (2 so far, third one we should get by january). Not to mention shipping them to the school (roughly 200 dollars in gas + driver pay).
Now lets also discuss the computers we got. PII 350mhz to P3 933mhz, some pentium pros, some pentiums, some sub 200mhz ppc macs. Pretty good actually, you'd be amazed how well a customized XP build with every useless service and program ripped out will run on 350mhz systems with 128mb of ram.
The hard drives are the worst problem, we need APCs (for the servers) and power stabilizers to keep the drives from dying. They are all 5-10 years old ide drives, some old scsi drives.
Thankfully I am in a very well developed nation (Ghana is pretty amazing, honestly), with a well funded school (which can afford a $600USD a month 12K isdn over radio internet connection), with roots in the states where a lot of the initial funding came from. Even so, power and internet outages, drives and PSUs dying, and dust/heat problems from the dry season are really making things difficult.
We are working on securing more funding for putting together a ULV, DC-powered, fanless, diskless computer lab (Terminals, Linux/Windows), and solar power to run it all. To keep my project from falling apart when I leave I really need to get new equipment, a powerful server with a lot of ram, and train the new staff on how to manage problems. I will however be coming back once a year for 5 years (or as needed) for deploying new hardware/software, and whatever else we need.
Simply put, used hardware is not the answer for efficient uses of time/money in a lot of cases. It's a stepping stone, it gets computers there, but it doesn't mean they will remain working. Training, equipment that matches peculiar requirements and constraints of the project, well designed deployment infrastructure, and plans for catastrophic failure are what really make a lasting difference.
OLPC really starts looking good when you think about these things.
But is he 100% wrong? I dunno. I don't enter Bill's reality, but that doesn't mean I haven't done exactly what hes talking about before. I don't do what hes complaining about now, but I remember a time when I did.
Sadly, despite being as full of it as any political commentator is (at least Jon Stewart, etc make it obvious when they are kidding), He isn't always wrong.
Not every damned country in the world needs rice and water because thousands are dying of starvation every day.
And what the hell is giving only food or water purification going to do but make countries dependent on foreign aid. This is a great project because it helps self-sustained development for countries with limited capital.
I am currently in Kumasi, Ghana, setting computer networks and teaching desktop computing and will be teaching people how to setup linux and other free tools. OLPC is extremely interesting to me as it may be a viable way to get computing to be affordable in more schools here.
Yes you can buy a pentium 3 computer for about 200 dollars here (monitor, keyboard, etc). Ok, now power it, electricity is more expensive here, the power is unstable and kills our hard drives constantly (ok we bought some power stabilizers, oh that also means we have to hire an electrician, which isn't cheap). Ok, now get legal software, anti-virus, the internet (Our 128K ISDN over radio costs approx $600 a month), networking equipment, cabling, and the expertise to set all of this stuff up.
The OLPC is PRECISELY what I would like to setup at this school (http://www.jwms.org), because mesh networking makes a lot of things simpler. Even with the donated bay networks 100mb switches, hundereds of feet of networking cable, and 70 odd computers, it still would have probably been cheaper/easier to deploy OLPC systems despite all of that equipment being "free." We already had a $1000 USD a month electricity bill before I came here and that was with 5 working computers. By the time I'm done just getting the lab setup it will end up being at least 2.5 times as much.
And this is an exceptionally well off school for a nation that is very well developed (Better k-8 education here than anything I saw growing up in Boston), that has access to capital, and a linux/windows/mac guru nephew from the states who will volunteer himself for IT projects. I think I can safely say that a OLPC based setup (including their satelite link central server setup) would cost less than 1/5th of what our "free" donated PCs and networking equipment (which need massive amounts of support) within 1 year, and less and less as time goes on.
Yeah, talking about poisoned Beef in Africa wouldn't help me at all... But having had steak for dinner at a friends house in Accra a few weeks ago, it might be pertinent to know if there is mad cow or something going on in Ghana... At least for me.
Gah that's lame, I played on shadow moon (pvp server) with that guild master (not naming character as she didn't in the article) and at first was annoyed by the GLBT advertising, but then saw how many people said offensive things in both local and guild chat (hence why I did not join some guilds) that made a need for GLBT friendly guilds, especially on a PvP server where trash talking is a lot different than on a regular or RP server.
Sadly a lot of people are probably equally offended by both sides of the argument existing in a game such as WoW because its basically mainstream now.
toys for tots is more about making sure every kid gets toys on christmas rather than them needing toys, to me at least. And I can get behind that a little bit, but I hate christmas gifts now in my adult life.
I only beleive in giving legos to kids, so my nephews only get legos and other similar products (mostly bricks, not these crappy harry potter sets). Anything where their mind is the toy.
Not all add/adhd children are misbehaved or lack discipline. But since you obviously have kids, have taken care of kids for extended periods of time, and know everything I am going to assume you are right.
And of course add/adhd is always treated with drugs and therapy. It's never just accepted as normal behavior, and of course add/adhd always results in misbehaved children who aren't paid enough attention to or disciplined or raised properly by their parents.
I know of 3 people who after going to MIT make over 200k a year playing poker and have retired before the age of 25. I know 6 other people who go to MIT who pay for housing/food/trips/tuition/etc with their PartyPoker winnings.
As recently as I can remember, something like 70-80% of fibre in the US is dark. Everynetwork wanted to be the network and overbuilt their infrastructure and almost all of them (Genuity, Qwest, etc) are probably still losing money on them.
Slashdot Mirror
...the supposedly above average intelligence of IT people cannot seem to grasp the idea that almost all software, operating systems, and computer technology in general is incredibly poorly designed.
No one should have to know as much about how computers function as any of us do (slashdot folk) to do their work, word processing, e-mail, browsing the web, etc.
When I started doing small time IT consulting in high school I found clients really liked if you would spend some time with them explaining how technology emerged and it's initial simpler forms and their evolution into the more "robust" applications they use today.
Think about how simple our first computers were in the scope of what they could do. Pre-internet, some pre-gui. It's damned easy to learn what will happen if you do something a certain way. There was only 1 way, there were limited options in software, no one even thought of using their computer for 1/10th of the things we do today.
The sheer complexity is daunting. Look at MS Word 2003, 2000. Now look at Word 2.0. Or the DOS word processors that predate my word processing needs.
Software is stupid, users are uninformed, poorly trained, and most IT people barely understand the concepts they talk about so eagerly themselves or try to "explain" to people.
I'm wondering what your problems were exactly, mac os x ships with a kerberos auth client, and I thought it supported NFS out of the box.
I've been doing a project where I may want to setup NFS or kerberos (future planning, nothing like that now) and was just interested in any problems I may run into. Basically I have the option of deploying some cool networking stuff, and may end up doing it as a learning experience.
I'm sorry, I saw your sig and just had to laugh. I'm a libertarian myself, but I do find the humor in that amusing.
We are using some "power stabilizers" right before the PC sockets (5000 watt support per stabilizer). It's saved us a few drives. We are however looking at setting up solar panels and hopefully switching to a DC-only lab. Thankfully the computer teacher here has quite a bit of experience with electrical engineering.
Also having problems with grounding. We will probably have to overhaul the power system here anyway with the integration of solar power here I won't have any real hardware problems.
I believe the "power stabilizers" are what you are referring to. However, honestly I don't know much about EE (more of a software person). This does just mean "It's time to learn Evan" to me, though.
Sorry, but support/maintenance/training costs and time are simply horrendous for mixed used equipment. If you want a project like this to succeed you need to use either locally available products (Hard for Togo) or build your own buying multiples of the same equipment (which is cheaper, perhaps not initially, than buying crap 300 dollar value PCs that will simply die or be unstable).
Real IT Departments don't buy cheap PCs, they buy many of a few different models of computers depending on what the company needs, because experience in real IT has shown that support/downtime/deployment costs are tremendous with anything different. Also, in projects like these, there are embedded motherboard/cpu combos (fanless, ULV, cool stuff) that may be better.
I skyped you, but having some conection issues right now. Africa online is difficult at times.
Anyway, I am here until 2008 (January) most likely, and planning on coming back once a year for 5 years (1-2 months at a time, or as needed).
If I can be any help with any experiences I've had, toss me an e-mail, or call me on skype.
I'm not part of any organization, my Aunt is Ghanaian and my Uncle asked me to come help their school. I used to be a independent It consultant for small companies in Boston, but I was looking to go back to school when my Uncle called me. So now I am doing this until I go back to college.
Used equipment is almost not worth deploying. At least for me. I am currently in Kumasi, Ghana, deploying a mixed network of Windows/Linux desktops, with a OpenBSD/Linux backend.
The time consumed by supporting mixed donated equipment is massive. Also, when we asked for "networking equipment" we were given 14.4 modems (Practical Peripherals... ohh those were the days), telecom switches for phone setups, but also some pretty nice 16 and 24 port 10 and 10/100 rack switches.
And the cost of getting the items from our container shipments ran the school over $1000 USD per shipment (2 so far, third one we should get by january). Not to mention shipping them to the school (roughly 200 dollars in gas + driver pay).
Now lets also discuss the computers we got. PII 350mhz to P3 933mhz, some pentium pros, some pentiums, some sub 200mhz ppc macs. Pretty good actually, you'd be amazed how well a customized XP build with every useless service and program ripped out will run on 350mhz systems with 128mb of ram.
The hard drives are the worst problem, we need APCs (for the servers) and power stabilizers to keep the drives from dying. They are all 5-10 years old ide drives, some old scsi drives.
Thankfully I am in a very well developed nation (Ghana is pretty amazing, honestly), with a well funded school (which can afford a $600USD a month 12K isdn over radio internet connection), with roots in the states where a lot of the initial funding came from. Even so, power and internet outages, drives and PSUs dying, and dust/heat problems from the dry season are really making things difficult.
We are working on securing more funding for putting together a ULV, DC-powered, fanless, diskless computer lab (Terminals, Linux/Windows), and solar power to run it all. To keep my project from falling apart when I leave I really need to get new equipment, a powerful server with a lot of ram, and train the new staff on how to manage problems. I will however be coming back once a year for 5 years (or as needed) for deploying new hardware/software, and whatever else we need.
Simply put, used hardware is not the answer for efficient uses of time/money in a lot of cases. It's a stepping stone, it gets computers there, but it doesn't mean they will remain working. Training, equipment that matches peculiar requirements and constraints of the project, well designed deployment infrastructure, and plans for catastrophic failure are what really make a lasting difference.
OLPC really starts looking good when you think about these things.
-Evan
Ohh lets add rules of engagement too. You know, how American Soldiers aren't allowed to shoot first!
But is he 100% wrong? I dunno. I don't enter Bill's reality, but that doesn't mean I haven't done exactly what hes talking about before.
I don't do what hes complaining about now, but I remember a time when I did.
Sadly, despite being as full of it as any political commentator is (at least Jon Stewart, etc make it obvious when they are kidding), He isn't always wrong.
I think you meant "tighting."
Ok, point taken... havent posted in so long I didnt notice..
Not every damned country in the world needs rice and water because thousands are dying of starvation every day.
And what the hell is giving only food or water purification going to do but make countries dependent on foreign aid. This is a great project because it helps self-sustained development for countries with limited capital.
I am currently in Kumasi, Ghana, setting computer networks and teaching desktop computing and will be teaching people how to setup linux and other free tools. OLPC is extremely interesting to me as it may be a viable way to get computing to be affordable in more schools here.
Yes you can buy a pentium 3 computer for about 200 dollars here (monitor, keyboard, etc). Ok, now power it, electricity is more expensive here, the power is unstable and kills our hard drives constantly (ok we bought some power stabilizers, oh that also means we have to hire an electrician, which isn't cheap). Ok, now get legal software, anti-virus, the internet (Our 128K ISDN over radio costs approx $600 a month), networking equipment, cabling, and the expertise to set all of this stuff up.
The OLPC is PRECISELY what I would like to setup at this school (http://www.jwms.org), because mesh networking makes a lot of things simpler. Even with the donated bay networks 100mb switches, hundereds of feet of networking cable, and 70 odd computers, it still would have probably been cheaper/easier to deploy OLPC systems despite all of that equipment being "free." We already had a $1000 USD a month electricity bill before I came here and that was with 5 working computers. By the time I'm done just getting the lab setup it will end up being at least 2.5 times as much.
And this is an exceptionally well off school for a nation that is very well developed (Better k-8 education here than anything I saw growing up in Boston), that has access to capital, and a linux/windows/mac guru nephew from the states who will volunteer himself for IT projects. I think I can safely say that a OLPC based setup (including their satelite link central server setup) would cost less than 1/5th of what our "free" donated PCs and networking equipment (which need massive amounts of support) within 1 year, and less and less as time goes on.
Yeah, talking about poisoned Beef in Africa wouldn't help me at all... But having had steak for dinner at a friends house in Accra a few weeks ago, it might be pertinent to know if there is mad cow or something going on in Ghana... At least for me.
Less than I expect from some first-world shithole ruled by scary religious freaks...
but not much less.
Gah that's lame, I played on shadow moon (pvp server) with that guild master (not naming character as she didn't in the article) and at first was annoyed by the GLBT advertising, but then saw how many people said offensive things in both local and guild chat (hence why I did not join some guilds) that made a need for GLBT friendly guilds, especially on a PvP server where trash talking is a lot different than on a regular or RP server.
Sadly a lot of people are probably equally offended by both sides of the argument existing in a game such as WoW because its basically mainstream now.
Bah that sucks.
haha, and lets not forget he used 3 different server acronyms in one sentence in a post on slash dot....
toys for tots is more about making sure every kid gets toys on christmas rather than them needing toys, to me at least. And I can get behind that a little bit, but I hate christmas gifts now in my adult life.
I only beleive in giving legos to kids, so my nephews only get legos and other similar products (mostly bricks, not these crappy harry potter sets). Anything where their mind is the toy.
no its not the speed holes, its the quad spoilers.
I take it you only buy vinyl albums then?
in Massachusetts there is no such thing as a legal return policy under 30 days (for any reason), it may be like that i your state.
Not all add/adhd children are misbehaved or lack discipline. But since you obviously have kids, have taken care of kids for extended periods of time, and know everything I am going to assume you are right.
And of course add/adhd is always treated with drugs and therapy. It's never just accepted as normal behavior, and of course add/adhd always results in misbehaved children who aren't paid enough attention to or disciplined or raised properly by their parents.
You are an idiot, don't breed.
I know of 3 people who after going to MIT make over 200k a year playing poker and have retired before the age of 25. I know 6 other people who go to MIT who pay for housing/food/trips/tuition/etc with their PartyPoker winnings.
As recently as I can remember, something like 70-80% of fibre in the US is dark. Everynetwork wanted to be the network and overbuilt their infrastructure and almost all of them (Genuity, Qwest, etc) are probably still losing money on them.
Heres a little secret... Almost all sci-fi shows are really westerns.
maybe they mean airtunes, the airport express device which is told to play music off the itunes host?