I can honestly say that I can't actually remember an occasion where it's been easier to rebuild Solaris, than fix it. I've had quite a few varying degrees of 'fubar' but invariably the problem's I've had have either been fixed by software (in most cases, not even needing a reboot) or have been a hardware fault (which in some case _have_ needed to take the system down).
The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.
*shrug*. You _can_ get utterly hosed on either, but Solaris is still better at keeping entropy at bay.
Although I _have_ done a 'wipe and restart' on a shared filesystem though on a few occasions, where whole departments have denied responsibility a massive dogpile of disorganised data. A 'restructure and clean' (tell 'em it's being ugpraded) works well for making them figure out what they actually need to keep/need backed up/are willing to pay for, and what they're not:)
System Shock 2 had this problem in a big big way. A pity. It was a really good game, that got brutally crippled by slapping some crappy copy protection on it, that had a crack out within days.
The people who pirated it in the first place, didn't have any such problem.
Or perhaps they could stop treating me like a crook, when I'm the one who's gone and bought their product, and am listening to the chortling of everyone who got the cracked version, because I guarantee you they'll not have to put up with cumbersome copy protection.
If I didn't object sufficiently to do this that I won't be buying it, I would still be inclined to install the cracked version _anyway_ because I hate having to dick around to get access to what I've legitimately paid for.
I am reminded of a rather amusing sci-fi short story I read. I think it was Cory Doctorow's 'Robby the Row boat'.
But anyway, one of the ideas it espoused was that malware is what's driving systems development to the point of passing Turing tests. Between captchas, baysian filters, and similar 'proove you're a human' malware countermeasures, with virus heuristics, and malign software detection, you have a very potent 'reaper' process, which kills off substandard malicious code.
The stuff that sticks, is the stuff that's most adaptable, the most convincing Turing test faker, and as malware improves, so too does the counter-malware environment.
I mean, malware today, is actually working on detecting 'anti' malware, and trying to blind it or otherwise remove it - I've run into numerous trojans and bots that disable virus checkers for example.
OK, so it may be far fetched, but it's not all that unreasonable an extension of the automatic spam/virus/malware filtering and detection, vs. the subversive and adaptive malware out there.
TO be fair, distribution/creation of malware -is- something that can be stomped upon. Various juristictions have computer use/abuse/misuse legislation.
But either way, it's like trying to change the weather by pissing in the wind. Isn't going to do much, apart from getting you dirty.
The _only_ solution to people using these powerful, complicated tools, without making a complete mess of them, is by adequate knowledge and training.
Until that exists, NOTHING that you do, precaution wise, is going to do any good.
Well, I can almost see that. I find sunlight to be most irritating when I'm trying to use my monitor. It's just so hard to get something that I can see clearly in bright glaring sunshine.
Energy inputs from the sun keep the wind and whatever running. There's a possibilty that the increased 'drag' would alter weather patterns a little, but no more so than e.g. building a sky scraper.
The interesting one is tidal energy harnessing. I mean, that one is powered by the gravitational potential of the moon - if you extract more energy from it, then the moon slows down just a little bit. So, it's not 'as free' as harnessing the masses of solar energy poured down every day. Scale wise though, it's about as likely to run out as the sun is though.
Hmm, that's an interesting idea, and not one that had crossed my mind.
I suppose that brighter lasers are also in use in some stuff like DVD players too, as mentioned by another poster.
But generally speaking, I think the difference between 'and in my garage I...' and 'portable device that's hazardous' is perhaps worthy of the additional legislation to control it.
Yes, I can vandalise some hardware, and make something dangerous out of it.
And yes, DVD drives do use higher power lasers. But then, that's a sealed unit, which there is NO chance of accidental exposure to the light.
Or a host bus adaptor, for speaking to a fiber channel switch.
The fact that real applications exist for really bright light, doesn't change the fact that UK law has laserpointers restricted to Class II. E.g.
Some places restrict to Class IIIa, which is
These restrictions are because whilst getting one of those in the face is annoying, it's not actually likely to cause damage to the eye, or temporarily blind the target. And vandalising your DVD player in order to get a laser to show off with, is as illegal as walking around with a class IV laser in your back pocket.
I really don't see a problem with this. Class II lasers are fine for almost anything you need a little laser dot for.
Legitimate applications are almost exclusively something that can be done in a relatively controlled environment, and having the legal restriction to back this up, means you're not faced with idiots with a class 4 laser thinking it's funny after they've had a beer or two, to shine it across a road.
Most of those applications don't _require_ high intensity lasers though. A
Restricting the ones that can actually burn out eyeballs, doesn't strike me as a particularly stupid move.
When I found out that it was legal to own and buy a 300mW laser pointer, I was actually quite suprised. Those are really quite hazardous without 'sensitive' handling. No one really cares about burning through paper or popping balloons, but the 'and might blind bystanders, even with just beam scatter' is IMO a good enough reason to restrict their usage.
Unlike arcwelders, or cars, I can't think of a lot of good reasons for a high intensity laser.
Having them available to 'everyone' in my opinion vastly increases the probabilty of a random fool doing something foolish.
But then, I think the same about firearms too, except even there there's 'real' self defense possibilities.
Yeah, I use the same password, for all the sites that require that I 'register'. So I use a fairly generic, almost dictionary word, because that way I actually get to _probably_ log into J random nonentity site that I don't give a toss about registering on, next time around.
Stuff I vaguely care about, gets better passwords, and regular changes.
That's not 'insecurity' that's 'too many places insisting on registration'.
I'm really looking forward to 'exec mode'. It's an awesome kernel feature that pipelines applications for faster execution. It's still experimental though, so you've got to enable it.
It's an option in your system profile (usually/etc/profile).
Just add 'exec true' in there, and it'll start using the prefetch code. OK, so it's not a huge performance boost, but I'll take a free 5-7% any day of the week.
I think you can do it as a non-privileged user by adding it to your 'personal' profile (.profile or.bashrc typically) but obviously it's not then affecting the core system processes.
Funnily enough, most companies are interested in making a profit. That's not 'being a cheapskate' that's 'being efficient with resources'. My IT department budget... well, there's a lot of things it has to cover. Letting you play with toys on company time isn't actually all that high on the list.
And yes, I do raise barriers. Because for every user out there who know's what they're doing, there's about 100 who _think_ they know what they're doing. And I can, and have supported that. Where I am at the moment, the business is not prepared to pay for the overhead that implies.
Infrastructure already in place is all well and good, but... well, I note you've just commented on having a 75Gb free on your drive, but then have referred to restoring it from backup.
So I assume you want it backed up? Which means I need to ensure your machine is backed up, and I need to ensure that it's done regularly. And then I have to take account of the fact that you've increased the data volume by a factor of 16, which I assure you is far from trivial.
And then there's the question of software maintenance - who gets to patch it? You or me? Who gets to check that it doesn't have interoperability issues? Who gets to troubleshoot when it doesn't work?
Your time has a cost. My time has a cost. One or other has to deal with all these problems. If the cost justifies the gain of the software, then yes, get installing.
No, you don't need the 60 page report. As simple as pointing out what you just did, and maybe factoring in the other considerations that you didn't, should be enough to get your app deployed. But that still doesn't mean it's you who gets to do it. Sometimes your time is worth little enough that that's fine, but more often it's done in a centrally supported fashion
I may be the admin who raises barriers, but you would seem to be the kind of user who feels they should be allowed to just do stuff because they think it's fine, without much regard for the fact that what you're actually being paid for is something else entirely. As the unique and special snowflake that you are, I'm sure you are entirely capable of doing something that's not covered by the general business support arrangements, but if it improves your productivity, then surely there's a case to be made that it improves everyone's productivity?
And if it's not, then stop wasting time, and get back to work.
I'm fairly sure I paid money for my Trillian license backwhen. Have they changed that recently? I know we looked at SIMP (secure keypair IM proxy thing) which also cost money.
It's probably worth the cost vs. productivity, but sometimes justifying that kind of thing can be hard. (especially as there's the hidden 'but you'll just goof off and chat to your RL mates' counter argument)
But if you scroll up a little, you'll see someone who's suggesting pretty much that, bypassing the firewall with a proxy to do it.
Unfortunately that's the bottom line on the user empowerment - there's other stuff to think about. Licensing in particular is a good one - stuff that's free for home use, often isn't for corporate. And whilst there's always some who do know and think about the hidden constraints, there's also quite a lot who just don't realise. Unrestricted user empowerment is pretty much guaranteed that you'll get 'a few' who are doing something without fully thinking it through.
I've used IM to quite some success in a distributed working environment. When you've IT staff who're 'multi-site' the ability to get IM (or something similar, e.g. IRC) to just do a simple query like 'hey, has anyone seen errorcode 0xDEADBEEF before?' without having to do root cause troubleshooting saves quite a lot of time and effort.
I can imagine similar being useful in some office environments where staff are physically distributed for whatever reasons.
IM however, introduces another overhead on auditing, monitoring, encryption, that means stuff like MSN really isn't a particularly good solution to the problem.
Additional cost trading off on increased functionality.
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The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.
*shrug*. You _can_ get utterly hosed on either, but Solaris is still better at keeping entropy at bay.
Although I _have_ done a 'wipe and restart' on a shared filesystem though on a few occasions, where whole departments have denied responsibility a massive dogpile of disorganised data. A 'restructure and clean' (tell 'em it's being ugpraded) works well for making them figure out what they actually need to keep/need backed up/are willing to pay for, and what they're not :)
I would consider applying pirate cracks to a game that made my life, as a legitimate customer, more irritating.
The people who pirated it in the first place, didn't have any such problem.
If I didn't object sufficiently to do this that I won't be buying it, I would still be inclined to install the cracked version _anyway_ because I hate having to dick around to get access to what I've legitimately paid for.
Especially those that object and pirate it instead. I mean, clearly that just means their copy protection needs to be _more_ draconian!
But anyway, one of the ideas it espoused was that malware is what's driving systems development to the point of passing Turing tests. Between captchas, baysian filters, and similar 'proove you're a human' malware countermeasures, with virus heuristics, and malign software detection, you have a very potent 'reaper' process, which kills off substandard malicious code.
The stuff that sticks, is the stuff that's most adaptable, the most convincing Turing test faker, and as malware improves, so too does the counter-malware environment.
I mean, malware today, is actually working on detecting 'anti' malware, and trying to blind it or otherwise remove it - I've run into numerous trojans and bots that disable virus checkers for example.
OK, so it may be far fetched, but it's not all that unreasonable an extension of the automatic spam/virus/malware filtering and detection, vs. the subversive and adaptive malware out there.
No one ever died as a result of a computer virus.
But either way, it's like trying to change the weather by pissing in the wind. Isn't going to do much, apart from getting you dirty.
The _only_ solution to people using these powerful, complicated tools, without making a complete mess of them, is by adequate knowledge and training.
Until that exists, NOTHING that you do, precaution wise, is going to do any good.
Well, I can almost see that. I find sunlight to be most irritating when I'm trying to use my monitor. It's just so hard to get something that I can see clearly in bright glaring sunshine.
I'd love a 'more sci-fi' workspace, but I'd settle for a PoeticTech Aura: http://www.poetictech.com/aura/index.html
The interesting one is tidal energy harnessing. I mean, that one is powered by the gravitational potential of the moon - if you extract more energy from it, then the moon slows down just a little bit. So, it's not 'as free' as harnessing the masses of solar energy poured down every day. Scale wise though, it's about as likely to run out as the sun is though.
But Pans Labyrinth is truly wonderful, so I have high hopes.
I suppose that brighter lasers are also in use in some stuff like DVD players too, as mentioned by another poster.
But generally speaking, I think the difference between 'and in my garage I ...' and 'portable device that's hazardous' is perhaps worthy of the additional legislation to control it.
And yes, DVD drives do use higher power lasers. But then, that's a sealed unit, which there is NO chance of accidental exposure to the light.
Or a host bus adaptor, for speaking to a fiber channel switch.
The fact that real applications exist for really bright light, doesn't change the fact that UK law has laserpointers restricted to Class II. E.g. Some places restrict to Class IIIa, which is These restrictions are because whilst getting one of those in the face is annoying, it's not actually likely to cause damage to the eye, or temporarily blind the target. And vandalising your DVD player in order to get a laser to show off with, is as illegal as walking around with a class IV laser in your back pocket.
I really don't see a problem with this. Class II lasers are fine for almost anything you need a little laser dot for.
Legitimate applications are almost exclusively something that can be done in a relatively controlled environment, and having the legal restriction to back this up, means you're not faced with idiots with a class 4 laser thinking it's funny after they've had a beer or two, to shine it across a road.
Most of those applications don't _require_ high intensity lasers though. A Restricting the ones that can actually burn out eyeballs, doesn't strike me as a particularly stupid move.
Unlike arcwelders, or cars, I can't think of a lot of good reasons for a high intensity laser.
Having them available to 'everyone' in my opinion vastly increases the probabilty of a random fool doing something foolish.
But then, I think the same about firearms too, except even there there's 'real' self defense possibilities.
When computers were hard work, the newbie didn't get past the 'so where's this "any" key them?'. Sometimes I think it was better that way.
Stuff I vaguely care about, gets better passwords, and regular changes.
That's not 'insecurity' that's 'too many places insisting on registration'.
It's an option in your system profile (usually /etc/profile).
Just add 'exec true' in there, and it'll start using the prefetch code. OK, so it's not a huge performance boost, but I'll take a free 5-7% any day of the week.
I think you can do it as a non-privileged user by adding it to your 'personal' profile (.profile or .bashrc typically) but obviously it's not then affecting the core system processes.
Don't worry. It's all OK. They've managed to automate CAPTCHA filling.
Problem sorted.
On most forums, that's a good thing.
And yes, I do raise barriers. Because for every user out there who know's what they're doing, there's about 100 who _think_ they know what they're doing. And I can, and have supported that. Where I am at the moment, the business is not prepared to pay for the overhead that implies.
Infrastructure already in place is all well and good, but ... well, I note you've just commented on having a 75Gb free on your drive, but then have referred to restoring it from backup.
So I assume you want it backed up? Which means I need to ensure your machine is backed up, and I need to ensure that it's done regularly. And then I have to take account of the fact that you've increased the data volume by a factor of 16, which I assure you is far from trivial.
And then there's the question of software maintenance - who gets to patch it? You or me? Who gets to check that it doesn't have interoperability issues? Who gets to troubleshoot when it doesn't work?
Your time has a cost. My time has a cost. One or other has to deal with all these problems. If the cost justifies the gain of the software, then yes, get installing.
No, you don't need the 60 page report. As simple as pointing out what you just did, and maybe factoring in the other considerations that you didn't, should be enough to get your app deployed. But that still doesn't mean it's you who gets to do it. Sometimes your time is worth little enough that that's fine, but more often it's done in a centrally supported fashion
I may be the admin who raises barriers, but you would seem to be the kind of user who feels they should be allowed to just do stuff because they think it's fine, without much regard for the fact that what you're actually being paid for is something else entirely. As the unique and special snowflake that you are, I'm sure you are entirely capable of doing something that's not covered by the general business support arrangements, but if it improves your productivity, then surely there's a case to be made that it improves everyone's productivity?
And if it's not, then stop wasting time, and get back to work.
It's probably worth the cost vs. productivity, but sometimes justifying that kind of thing can be hard. (especially as there's the hidden 'but you'll just goof off and chat to your RL mates' counter argument)
Unfortunately that's the bottom line on the user empowerment - there's other stuff to think about. Licensing in particular is a good one - stuff that's free for home use, often isn't for corporate. And whilst there's always some who do know and think about the hidden constraints, there's also quite a lot who just don't realise. Unrestricted user empowerment is pretty much guaranteed that you'll get 'a few' who are doing something without fully thinking it through.
I can imagine similar being useful in some office environments where staff are physically distributed for whatever reasons.
IM however, introduces another overhead on auditing, monitoring, encryption, that means stuff like MSN really isn't a particularly good solution to the problem.
Additional cost trading off on increased functionality.