While many would advocate Open Source (and they should) they tend to forget some common issues that business and government need to consider. Please, for the sake of legitimate arguments take a course or grab a book (or pay Gartner.com a crap load of money like I do:( ) to get concise, focused, and expert information on the Total Cost of Ownership. Every single TCO analysis that I have run Microsoft is still cheaper than Linux, and as far as the office suites are concerned Open Office is great, but still far from an effective, and as far as TCO is concerned cheaper, alternative to MS Office 2k. Oddly the last TCO I ran Office XP fell flat on it's face cost wise versus Office 2K. Translation, Office XP is crap compared to 2K. Sounds like the ME vs. 98SE blunder.
Tim as a business man looks at things that are beyond just the performance of a product. In TCO things like, Time to Train, availability of support, SLA accountability, and system maintence is a factor. When I did a TCO od Windows 2K and Linux last year the document to summarize Linux and Windows 2K EACH was over 100 pages long! That is just the summaries. Then after distilling those two documents down and comparing the final report was 327 pages long (There are about 100 pages of charts and graphs btw.) Could you imagine the figures that a conversion to Open Source would generate? If just comparing the OS systems generates 100+ pages of factors imagine what more complex solutions (database systems, office suites, etc..) would factor. OS TCOs are easier to generate then application TCOs.
A friend of mine, Bob D.(God rest his soul), was an IT manager of sorts for United Defense. One day we argued about Linux being better than Windows. He brow beat me that day with the difference between applications when you run them through a TCO. He taught me how to see things through a TCO perspective and gave me a few choice phrases to remember.
----------> Assume that your users don't handle change well. In fact assume that they are as smart as a 5 year old just to be safe. They're not, but hell it can't hurt to plan that way.
Regardless of how superior a product appears there are always flaws lurking within. Humans are flawed, humans make software. Hence software WILL have flaws. You better have a way to fix em. (+ for Open Source, sorta)
Never short change support contracts, they save you money.
Someone needs to be accountable for the software if things go wrong. If you don't have a support contract all eyes will be on you.
There are no garuntees in software unless you have an SLA. Get one!
Remember that time is money, not just yours, but each and every end user that uses the software, those that support the software, those that have to implement the software in the network, etc. While you might find it easy, the 5 year old may not.
There are 10 year olds with MCSEs for a reason. Go find me a 10 year old Linux Guru. Microsoft experts are plentiful and cheap. Linux experts tend to cost 20% to 40% more per hour.
Microsoft gives me free shirts and pens. Still waiting for Linus to send me something.
People cannot protest Microsoft's mascot, PETA will protest the Penguin (exploitation I'm sure) once Linux starts to make money. ---------->
While the last two were funny the prior ones have a good amount of truth in them.
When looking at software, better isn't always cheaper, cheaper isn't always better, and until the Open Source community, Linux community, come to understand the business side of the issues all the ranting and raving and post on how evil MS is will not help. Open Source must focus on the business of making software. I have only found out of the HUNDRED of THOUSANDS of Open Source products a few dozen that have made it into business sucessfully.
Flame away but you cannot ignore how businesses think, and that is the Open Source's communities biggest flaws, businesses feel that we are a bunch of 16 year old kids pissed at the new "Man" and lack a serious understanding of a business as a whole (Open Source seems to lean to the political left, am I wrong?). I have ranted and digressed too far. Later.
I, as many Slashdot readers am a corporate employee (I specifically am a contractor) and many times we end up eating fast food or resturant food frequently. With the exception of cold server foods that we can bag and take to work with us I have found that many foods that we "Re-Heat" tend to greatly disappoint when they are re-heated. Do you have any suggestions on foods that re-heat well and retain a fair amount of taste and texture (excluding soups) or do you have advice on better ways to re-heat food in a microwave?
You obviously religious doctrine is not sensitive to the needs of pagans, athiests, agnostics.
You post is offensive to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucian Philosophers, Taoists, Buhdists, Wiccans, Scientologists, Gnostics, Masons, Satanists, New Dawn Members, Mormons, Jehova Wittnesses, Secularists, Monitaianism (A Term for Money Wrorshipers)
You post is an affront to the following economic\political systems: Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchsim, the Fordian Society, The Orwelling Society, Unitary Federalism, Fachism, and other misc. 'ISMs.
You post is racialy offensive to the following non-existent racial groups: Blacks, African Americans, Hispanics, Mexicans, Latinos, Spanish-Americans, Asians, Orientals, Chinese, Chinese-American, Japanese, Japanese Americans, Nise, Korean Americans, Koreans, Hawaiian-American, Vietnames , American-Vietnames, Indians, India-Americans, Native American, American Idians, Anglo-saxon, Anglo-Normans, whites, Eastern Europeans, medditeranian-americans, english-americans, scottish-americans, irish-americans, africans, arab-americans, egyptians, Kiwi, Kiwi-Americans (New Zeland), Austrian-Americans, Tazmainian-Americans, Morracan-Americas, Barzilian-Americans, and any other sensitive cultures I may have forgotten about.
You post is sexually discriminating against: males, females, hermaphridiates, she-males, he-shes, gay males, gay females, celebete males, celebate females, and various non-specific or unidentifiable sexes that may or may not exist in nature including but no limited to Virtual Life-forms, such as Sims and Mobs. Also your post neglects to have sensitivity towards non-life based organisms such as Viruses.
You post is intellectually discriminating against: stupid people, dumb people, ignorant people, ill-informed people, lazy people, brain dead people, and non-thinking objects (such as rocks).
You post is discriminating against people of challenge including: blind people, illerate people and people that cannot focus for more than 10 seconds (ADD and ADHA).
You post is economically discriminating against people who cannot afford computers or do not have time to read your post.
You post is also discriminatory to those that read right to left versus left to right
"Battle No Against Flesh, But of Powers and Principalities, and wickedness\corruption in high places."
"The love of money is the root of all evil."
"A Little Power Corrupts a little, A Lot of Power Corrupts a LOT."
and my personal favorite quote:
"WorldCom and Enron are like a well made pryamid scheme. Only the top get rich and once they get rich they'll strip the pryamid and build a private Cairo from the stone.."
(Umm long ago the limestone was stripped from the Giza pryamids and the stone was reported to have been used in building parts of Cairo)
Coward Said:...Now PG gets sues into obscurity and the book publisher has found a whole new level of book banning. Don't like someone's review? Digitally run an ad on HDTV with all the specs, the independant reviews cannot mention ANY of the data contained in the transmission as it would violate the DMCA (How about pictures... I wonder if they took a picture of you and broadcast it, would further pictures of yourself be a violation? Creepy...) We are NOT talking about copyright, fair use, etc. We are looking at the DMCA at an entity of it's own...
Coward has a point, think of the inability for someone like consumer reports! Imagine when they make Friends "The RETURN" and it's total crap. The DMCA could block anyone from posting information about it... ack.. I'm going to be ill...
Censorship is never beneficial. I warned that the DMCA could be used to prohibit access to free material (i.e. Adobe published Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" in a DRM format. Project Gutenberg is now violating the circumvention clause regardless of who came first. See the Analog section of the DMCA for details.) This is the second step in the progression to a new dark age... My suggestion is fight fire with fire. Use an encryption format on the next P2P application then, in the EULA state that you cannot use the software unless you are a Non-Corporate, Non-Government agency. If a company uses the app to spy the contents, they are in voliation of the EULA and you sue. If the hack the client they violate the DMCA by circumventing the encryption.
My 2 cents
(I spell crappy... I know... Shashdot needs a spell checker... ispell plugin anyone?)
Umm yep, one interface with one company behind it. Nope there won't be any innovation snuffing there, only stiff licensing fees to anyone who wants to make a product that uses it... hmmm... I worry... but on a lighter side you while you chat about this idea you could:
A: Eat Sharp Glass
B: Clean your ears out with super glue
C: Drive surgical needles under you fingernail then type your 400 page manefesto
D: Sexually Experiment with Razor Blades
E: Jump rope with a metal chain (insulated handles of course) on an electrified plate carried 2000 amps at 240 volts as you ponder how long it takes before you screw up
F: Floss with a mono-filament thread
or finally
G: Go out and get a college education with a major in "Traversing the 12 Seprioths in a pursuit to become God"
You Said:... But they still use traditional storyboards a lot, because those are easier to carry around than a computer....
I say try
Removable Hard Drives
CDRWs
DVDRWs
Laptops
I can fit 144 full novels on a CDRW at over 100k pages. I can also fit 2000+ PNG or JPEG images. How could they still think that story boards are more convienient? Ufda! Oh well to each their own. I still think there hasn't been a good movie made since Blade Runner so all this digital crap means little when it comes to making a good movie.
How has the emerging real time rendering capabilities of current hardware given film directors and CGI artists the ability to story board in real time and make changes before a final rendering? Has the industry used things like the unreal or quake engines to proto-type scenes, picking camera angles etc, using real time rendering? And if not why hasn't anyone thought of using these real-time techniques to potentially storyboard (in realtime 3D) the entire project prior to starting the project?
Hell someone could make a quake mod that acts like a sound stage and you could make movies though a simpler interface that non-techies could use to make movies! Doh! The possibilities.
THROW YOU T.V. OUT!! There hasn't been any good programming on it since... better yet... READ A BOOK! They havn't put ads in that yet!
My TV. was RIP since 1997 and I've never been happier. The only time I see a T.V. is at work when someone in the lunch room turns it on.
The keymappings didn't work for the sleep key. It will not remap E0 5F to null or anything else for that matter. I used a Keyboard filter to correct it.
He's just venting his POV, my question to him is why would I expect M$ to support this? The sleep key is working just fine, there is no "problem." Should a car manufacturer have to provide me a way to bypass the perfectly functioning parking break? I need to basically "BREAK" the sleep key in a sense. Let him rant about it, if it wasn't for MS he wouldn't have a PC to run Linux on, he'd still be waiting for mainframe access time to play Space Trader.
In the real world of business Linux is not free, go to Gartner and do research on a concept called TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). It's still cheaper to go with MS for now under most circumstances (Server market Linux is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY cheaper) but do you honestly think that I can load Redhat on a user's machine and in 1 hour get them to 100% productivity using Star Office? I admire Linux for it's strength but until they get the GUI solidified and "Groomed" I'll patiently wait for Linux to be cheaper than MS products.
See several of my updates for further explainations, but these aren't user workstations but Kiosk systems with little or no user interaction. They aren't domain machines (not even on the LAN most of the time) and are ran via touch screen systems. We have Tivoli for assest managment, software pushes etc. They also are non-networked except at scheduled intervals to a local server so I can only access the server and set up the push script for when they hook into the lan.
Correct on al counts but distribution is no problem I have access to Tivoli for managment. But I was seeking help on how to remap the sleep key (or a good mailing list) as I could not get it to work through the registry or most keyboard tools. I wasn't looking for how to distribute it. I should have made it clearer. You hve plenty of good ideas. Also these machines are Kisok machines, no workstation apps at all, just in house stuff.
So do I but the editor changed a few things to make the headline more... slashdot'ish. The original headline was Seeking Mailing List for Distribution Issue but I kinda like it better the way it is.
The problem is I didn't have anything to send. I can easily manager 4k machines, we have Tivoli and all that what I didn't have was a specific way to remove the Sleep key. It couldn't be remapped in any way. I found a solution (I went with the Filter Driver). I think the Sleep key (E0 5F, in mode 1) wasn't even hitting the key mapping "system". I think the driver was redirecting the code to the kernel before it ever hit the output "system" to be remapped. Problem is fixed but thank you for the help. I will check out Darkside, as a contractor I have more flexability in eval'ing new software to use and suggest to clients.
We have a support contract with Dell but this isn't a problem (i.e Malfunction) so it falls under different support issues that I do not have access to as a contractor. It's a dept. politics thing.
The setup is uber complex. I have to hop through like 4 DMZ to get to the machine and even then I can only hit a proxy server of sorts and set up a push to the machine... ack. Problem is fixed but thank you for the suggestion.
P.S Perhaps we should set up a/. based Linux, BSD, and MS problem resolution site... hmmm....
No ghost, powerquest deploy suite. I need to send this as a package to existing workstations. I cannot alter the existing image. I recenty resolved the problem using a Keyboard filter driver (and manually modding the PNP ID in the INF to match) and M$ devcon (commandline device manager, ultra cool. I use it like mad now!) with a simple batch file. I'll probably send it as a Winzip self extracting archive.
I was actually more poking around from some good mailing lists to subscribe to versus answers. I am very greatful for the responses. The problem with scripting and what not is they are Kiosk systems made for us by Dell. I can only push to the machine via an FTP script (These machines are the most ultra-locked down systems I have seen in my 7+ years consulting!). I found a keyboard filter driver to use and a M$ tool called devcon to auto install it. I am still searching for a few good NT/2000/XP mailing lists to subscribe to. The problem has been soved thanks to the help of the slashdot community. Now I just need some leads on Uber mailing lists to join! Thanks again people, you've been a great help.
It amazes me that MSNBC would state that linux is dead. Local BBS systems are dead since the Internet. As an IT consultant I learned real quick that no OS dies. I still have to support an old DOS 3 machine currently. I hardly would call Linux dead.
Slashdot Mirror
While many would advocate Open Source (and they should) they tend to forget some common issues that business and government need to consider. Please, for the sake of legitimate arguments take a course or grab a book (or pay Gartner.com a crap load of money like I do :( ) to get concise, focused, and expert information on the Total Cost of Ownership. Every single TCO analysis that I have run Microsoft is still cheaper than Linux, and as far as the office suites are concerned Open Office is great, but still far from an effective, and as far as TCO is concerned cheaper, alternative to MS Office 2k. Oddly the last TCO I ran Office XP fell flat on it's face cost wise versus Office 2K. Translation, Office XP is crap compared to 2K. Sounds like the ME vs. 98SE blunder.
;)
Tim as a business man looks at things that are beyond just the performance of a product. In TCO things like, Time to Train, availability of support, SLA accountability, and system maintence is a factor. When I did a TCO od Windows 2K and Linux last year the document to summarize Linux and Windows 2K EACH was over 100 pages long! That is just the summaries. Then after distilling those two documents down and comparing the final report was 327 pages long (There are about 100 pages of charts and graphs btw.) Could you imagine the figures that a conversion to Open Source would generate? If just comparing the OS systems generates 100+ pages of factors imagine what more complex solutions (database systems, office suites, etc..) would factor. OS TCOs are easier to generate then application TCOs.
A friend of mine, Bob D.(God rest his soul), was an IT manager of sorts for United Defense. One day we argued about Linux being better than Windows. He brow beat me that day with the difference between applications when you run them through a TCO. He taught me how to see things through a TCO perspective and gave me a few choice phrases to remember.
---------->
Assume that your users don't handle change well. In fact assume that they are as smart as a 5 year old just to be safe. They're not, but hell it can't hurt to plan that way.
Regardless of how superior a product appears there are always flaws lurking within. Humans are flawed, humans make software. Hence software WILL have flaws. You better have a way to fix em. (+ for Open Source, sorta)
Never short change support contracts, they save you money.
Someone needs to be accountable for the software if things go wrong. If you don't have a support contract all eyes will be on you.
There are no garuntees in software unless you have an SLA. Get one!
Remember that time is money, not just yours, but each and every end user that uses the software, those that support the software, those that have to implement the software in the network, etc. While you might find it easy, the 5 year old may not.
There are 10 year olds with MCSEs for a reason. Go find me a 10 year old Linux Guru. Microsoft experts are plentiful and cheap. Linux experts tend to cost 20% to 40% more per hour.
Microsoft gives me free shirts and pens. Still waiting for Linus to send me something.
People cannot protest Microsoft's mascot, PETA will protest the Penguin (exploitation I'm sure) once Linux starts to make money.
---------->
While the last two were funny the prior ones have a good amount of truth in them.
When looking at software, better isn't always cheaper, cheaper isn't always better, and until the Open Source community, Linux community, come to understand the business side of the issues all the ranting and raving and post on how evil MS is will not help. Open Source must focus on the business of making software. I have only found out of the HUNDRED of THOUSANDS of Open Source products a few dozen that have made it into business sucessfully.
Flame away but you cannot ignore how businesses think, and that is the Open Source's communities biggest flaws, businesses feel that we are a bunch of 16 year old kids pissed at the new "Man" and lack a serious understanding of a business as a whole (Open Source seems to lean to the political left, am I wrong?). I have ranted and digressed too far. Later.
P.S Still begging for a built in spell checker
I, as many Slashdot readers am a corporate employee (I specifically am a contractor) and many times we end up eating fast food or resturant food frequently. With the exception of cold server foods that we can bag and take to work with us I have found that many foods that we "Re-Heat" tend to greatly disappoint when they are re-heated. Do you have any suggestions on foods that re-heat well and retain a fair amount of taste and texture (excluding soups) or do you have advice on better ways to re-heat food in a microwave?
You obviously religious doctrine is not sensitive to the needs of pagans, athiests, agnostics.
You post is offensive to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucian Philosophers, Taoists, Buhdists, Wiccans, Scientologists, Gnostics, Masons, Satanists, New Dawn Members, Mormons, Jehova Wittnesses, Secularists, Monitaianism (A Term for Money Wrorshipers)
You post is an affront to the following economic\political systems: Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchsim, the Fordian Society, The Orwelling Society, Unitary Federalism, Fachism, and other misc. 'ISMs.
You post is racialy offensive to the following non-existent racial groups: Blacks, African Americans, Hispanics, Mexicans, Latinos, Spanish-Americans, Asians, Orientals, Chinese, Chinese-American, Japanese, Japanese Americans, Nise, Korean Americans, Koreans, Hawaiian-American, Vietnames , American-Vietnames, Indians, India-Americans, Native American, American Idians, Anglo-saxon, Anglo-Normans, whites, Eastern Europeans, medditeranian-americans, english-americans, scottish-americans, irish-americans, africans, arab-americans, egyptians, Kiwi, Kiwi-Americans (New Zeland), Austrian-Americans, Tazmainian-Americans, Morracan-Americas, Barzilian-Americans, and any other sensitive cultures I may have forgotten about.
You post is sexually discriminating against: males, females, hermaphridiates, she-males, he-shes, gay males, gay females, celebete males, celebate females, and various non-specific or unidentifiable sexes that may or may not exist in nature including but no limited to Virtual Life-forms, such as Sims and Mobs. Also your post neglects to have sensitivity towards non-life based organisms such as Viruses.
You post is intellectually discriminating against: stupid people, dumb people, ignorant people, ill-informed people, lazy people, brain dead people, and non-thinking objects (such as rocks).
You post is discriminating against people of challenge including: blind people, illerate people
and people that cannot focus for more than 10 seconds (ADD and ADHA).
You post is economically discriminating against people who cannot afford computers or do not have time to read your post.
You post is also discriminatory to those that read right to left versus left to right
In summary: KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!
"Battle No Against Flesh, But of Powers and Principalities, and wickedness\corruption in high places." "The love of money is the root of all evil." "A Little Power Corrupts a little, A Lot of Power Corrupts a LOT." and my personal favorite quote: "WorldCom and Enron are like a well made pryamid scheme. Only the top get rich and once they get rich they'll strip the pryamid and build a private Cairo from the stone.." (Umm long ago the limestone was stripped from the Giza pryamids and the stone was reported to have been used in building parts of Cairo)
Coward Said: ...Now PG gets sues into obscurity and the book publisher has found a whole new level of book banning. Don't like someone's review? Digitally run an ad on HDTV with all the specs, the independant reviews cannot mention ANY of the data contained in the transmission as it would violate the DMCA (How about pictures... I wonder if they took a picture of you and broadcast it, would further pictures of yourself be a violation? Creepy...) We are NOT talking about copyright, fair use, etc. We are looking at the DMCA at an entity of it's own...
Coward has a point, think of the inability for someone like consumer reports! Imagine when they make Friends "The RETURN" and it's total crap. The DMCA could block anyone from posting information about it... ack.. I'm going to be ill...
I think he is pointing out the content is irellivant, it's the encryption that is the focus.
The FCC licesenes the bandwidth. HDTV = More Bandwidth to license = More Profit
Censorship is never beneficial. I warned that the DMCA could be used to prohibit access to free material (i.e. Adobe published Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" in a DRM format. Project Gutenberg is now violating the circumvention clause regardless of who came first. See the Analog section of the DMCA for details.) This is the second step in the progression to a new dark age... My suggestion is fight fire with fire. Use an encryption format on the next P2P application then, in the EULA state that you cannot use the software unless you are a Non-Corporate, Non-Government agency. If a company uses the app to spy the contents, they are in voliation of the EULA and you sue. If the hack the client they violate the DMCA by circumventing the encryption.
My 2 cents
(I spell crappy... I know... Shashdot needs a spell checker... ispell plugin anyone?)
Umm yep, one interface with one company behind it. Nope there won't be any innovation snuffing there, only stiff licensing fees to anyone who wants to make a product that uses it... hmmm... I worry... but on a lighter side you while you chat about this idea you could: A: Eat Sharp Glass B: Clean your ears out with super glue C: Drive surgical needles under you fingernail then type your 400 page manefesto D: Sexually Experiment with Razor Blades E: Jump rope with a metal chain (insulated handles of course) on an electrified plate carried 2000 amps at 240 volts as you ponder how long it takes before you screw up F: Floss with a mono-filament thread or finally G: Go out and get a college education with a major in "Traversing the 12 Seprioths in a pursuit to become God"
You Said: ... But they still use traditional storyboards a lot, because those are easier to carry around than a computer. ...
I say try
Removable Hard Drives
CDRWs
DVDRWs
Laptops
I can fit 144 full novels on a CDRW at over 100k pages. I can also fit 2000+ PNG or JPEG images. How could they still think that story boards are more convienient? Ufda! Oh well to each their own. I still think there hasn't been a good movie made since Blade Runner so all this digital crap means little when it comes to making a good movie.
How has the emerging real time rendering capabilities of current hardware given film directors and CGI artists the ability to story board in real time and make changes before a final rendering? Has the industry used things like the unreal or quake engines to proto-type scenes, picking camera angles etc, using real time rendering? And if not why hasn't anyone thought of using these real-time techniques to potentially storyboard (in realtime 3D) the entire project prior to starting the project? Hell someone could make a quake mod that acts like a sound stage and you could make movies though a simpler interface that non-techies could use to make movies! Doh! The possibilities.
THROW YOU T.V. OUT!! There hasn't been any good programming on it since ... better yet... READ A BOOK! They havn't put ads in that yet!
My TV. was RIP since 1997 and I've never been happier. The only time I see a T.V. is at work when someone in the lunch room turns it on.
MSCE a go, I know how to remap a keyboard but I was unable to remap the Sleep key. Try it before you try to tell someone to "get educated."
The keymappings didn't work for the sleep key. It will not remap E0 5F to null or anything else for that matter. I used a Keyboard filter to correct it.
He's just venting his POV, my question to him is why would I expect M$ to support this? The sleep key is working just fine, there is no "problem." Should a car manufacturer have to provide me a way to bypass the perfectly functioning parking break? I need to basically "BREAK" the sleep key in a sense. Let him rant about it, if it wasn't for MS he wouldn't have a PC to run Linux on, he'd still be waiting for mainframe access time to play Space Trader. In the real world of business Linux is not free, go to Gartner and do research on a concept called TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). It's still cheaper to go with MS for now under most circumstances (Server market Linux is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY cheaper) but do you honestly think that I can load Redhat on a user's machine and in 1 hour get them to 100% productivity using Star Office? I admire Linux for it's strength but until they get the GUI solidified and "Groomed" I'll patiently wait for Linux to be cheaper than MS products.
See several of my updates for further explainations, but these aren't user workstations but Kiosk systems with little or no user interaction. They aren't domain machines (not even on the LAN most of the time) and are ran via touch screen systems. We have Tivoli for assest managment, software pushes etc. They also are non-networked except at scheduled intervals to a local server so I can only access the server and set up the push script for when they hook into the lan.
Correct on al counts but distribution is no problem I have access to Tivoli for managment. But I was seeking help on how to remap the sleep key (or a good mailing list) as I could not get it to work through the registry or most keyboard tools. I wasn't looking for how to distribute it. I should have made it clearer. You hve plenty of good ideas. Also these machines are Kisok machines, no workstation apps at all, just in house stuff.
So do I but the editor changed a few things to make the headline more... slashdot'ish. The original headline was Seeking Mailing List for Distribution Issue but I kinda like it better the way it is.
The problem is I didn't have anything to send. I can easily manager 4k machines, we have Tivoli and all that what I didn't have was a specific way to remove the Sleep key. It couldn't be remapped in any way. I found a solution (I went with the Filter Driver). I think the Sleep key (E0 5F, in mode 1) wasn't even hitting the key mapping "system". I think the driver was redirecting the code to the kernel before it ever hit the output "system" to be remapped. Problem is fixed but thank you for the help. I will check out Darkside, as a contractor I have more flexability in eval'ing new software to use and suggest to clients.
We have a support contract with Dell but this isn't a problem (i.e Malfunction) so it falls under different support issues that I do not have access to as a contractor. It's a dept. politics thing.
Thank you I will certainly check it out today. It's hard to find a good MS list. Why does Linux hog all the good mailing list people =)
The setup is uber complex. I have to hop through like 4 DMZ to get to the machine and even then I can only hit a proxy server of sorts and set up a push to the machine... ack. Problem is fixed but thank you for the suggestion. P.S Perhaps we should set up a /. based Linux, BSD, and MS problem resolution site... hmmm....
No ghost, powerquest deploy suite. I need to send this as a package to existing workstations. I cannot alter the existing image. I recenty resolved the problem using a Keyboard filter driver (and manually modding the PNP ID in the INF to match) and M$ devcon (commandline device manager, ultra cool. I use it like mad now!) with a simple batch file. I'll probably send it as a Winzip self extracting archive.
I was actually more poking around from some good mailing lists to subscribe to versus answers. I am very greatful for the responses. The problem with scripting and what not is they are Kiosk systems made for us by Dell. I can only push to the machine via an FTP script (These machines are the most ultra-locked down systems I have seen in my 7+ years consulting!). I found a keyboard filter driver to use and a M$ tool called devcon to auto install it. I am still searching for a few good NT/2000/XP mailing lists to subscribe to. The problem has been soved thanks to the help of the slashdot community. Now I just need some leads on Uber mailing lists to join! Thanks again people, you've been a great help.
It amazes me that MSNBC would state that linux is dead. Local BBS systems are dead since the Internet. As an IT consultant I learned real quick that no OS dies. I still have to support an old DOS 3 machine currently. I hardly would call Linux dead.