I agree, however I'd like to also point out that even some of the stuff on the *server* side is abandonware or near-abandonware stuff. Yes, we're very lucky to have mature apps like Samba and Apache but for every one of those, there's a million applications with websites that were last updated in 1999 promising that one feature you really need in "the next few weeks." (I'm thinking specificaly of groupware apps ATM, but there are many, many more.)
And, yes, you could pick it up and add that feature and that's a great plus, but it doesn't change the fact that there are literaly millions of unfinished server side applications that causes some people to percive the Open Source and Free Software worlds as "Places Where Nothing Gets Finished".
That being said, I don't think that "unfinished" means "unusable" and I appreciate all the efforts that have been made, even the abandoned ones.
Re:Parent point valid despite foul language
on
Worst Linux Annoyances?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's really more complicated than this, but in simple terms:
The OS constantly monitored the drives (I never had a CD-ROM for my Amiga, so this example is of the floppy) for media. When the system detected that a disk had been inserted, it would automaticaly mount the floppy. When you hit the eject button, the Floppy would automaticaly unmount. A side effect of this was that the floppy drives were always making a soft "click" sound every few seconds. You got used to it.
That's pretty much all there is to it.
Also, I haven't had a real Amiga in a long time, so take this with a grain of salt.
Yes the ops on #Linux (and even #Linuxhelp) on a lot of IRC networks need a good head thumping. On many occasions the aarogant bastards there have pissed me off for one reason or another, but usually by just being aarogant. I used to pop in and help out, but the ops would occasionally kick and ban people for asking for help in #linuxhelp or k&b people for helping others in #linux. It was just insane. It's a shame, too, because I genuinely liked helping people out -- too bad I'll never do it on IRC again.
The benefit of getting a combo set that is designed for satellite is the image quality.
I love my DirecTivo, but I have to interject here, have you seen the "quality" of the DirecTV broadcasts? Projected on my 42" toshiba almost everything looks like shit. I have to turn the sharpness way down to minimize the appearance of compression artifacts. This is not the fault of Tivo, but of DirecTV. It's almost worth it to buy two stand alone Tivos and hook them up to two DirecTV tuners, at least that way you can get the HMO and you're not stuck with a doorstop should you decide to leave the graces of the money hole in the sky.
JSYK, I did attempt to contact Linux Support Services (aka Digium), which employs Mark Spencer the author of Asterisk, about Asterisk. I sent them an email explaining the situation and was met with silence. It's about two months later now and I still haven't heard anything from them. So, yes, I tried the Asterisk route. I tried getting an Asterisk consultant to talk to me about our needs, but there was no response. (As an aside, I sent a request for bids out to about 20 vendors and only 7 got back to me. Make of that what you will.) To be perfectly honest I wanted Asterisk to be the winner. I'm a Linux bigot with ties to the very beginning, but if nobody bothers to put in a bid or bothers with a request for more information, why should I go out of my way to get that solution into my company?
I strongly recommend that you contact a local provider (or three) of PBX/Key Systems . . . to recommend the right system for you.
I have here in front of me budgetary bids from 5 vendors on 7 phone systems.
Alcatel OmniPCX
Artisoft TeleVantage
3Com NBX 100
3Com NBX 5000
Comdial FXII
Vodavi XTS
Convergent Communications PDX
The prices on the systems listed range from $28k to $48k.
Organization size is currently 40 users, up to 60 by the end of the year and around 100 during the course of 2004 (after that, who knows). Right now we have more inbound calls than outbound (we're in the mortgage industry and with rates being at record lows there's a lot of interest) and are currently being served by 17 POTS lines (well, actually a T-1 into a Vina box.) I would expect that to turn around some time in the future as interest rates go back up and the economy as a whole recovers, then our loan officers will need to make more outbound calls, but that's why I'm going with a PRI circuit when we upgrade.
I attempted to get more budgetary quotes from multiple vendors (including Nortel vendors) but phone calls have not been returned. Amazing that.
Me: "Hello, I'd like to lay out $30k, can you call back?"
Vendor: "No."
Anyway. Hopefully that helps, like you said, I am out of my league here, I'm just hoping to get some good suggestions and to hear the horror stories from people who had been sold on one thing and got another.
Believe me,/. isn't my one stop advice shop. I appreciate all the suggestions from everyone here (there are some good ones) but on an investment of this size asking here is just one small part of the overall evaluation.
I wanted to get a feel for what else was out there and see if there were any systems that I missed when I was searching (well, let's be honest, googling) for them.
And you're right about the boss thing. Right now my boss is gunning for the televantage because he liked the GUI. I seriously doubt anyone will use it after the neato factor wears off, but there it is.:/
Thanks for your concern, but I'm just going to evaluate and buy this sucker. I'll probably do basic administration like adding users and whatnot, but anything other than that will be for the vendor to support. I just have to make the phone calls.:)
AFAIK there aren't any local to me (St. Louis) and that puts a big damper on what the bosses will allow. I'm a competent *nix admin, but I will be the first to admit that I don't know enough to make repairs on telephone equipment if it should take a dive. Therefore, I'd need local and available support for this beast. I know Asterisk isn't that complicated (I've had it running as a VOIP system) but it doesn't have all the apps that we need and I don't have the time or experience (I guess I should add "yet") to write them myself. I really, really wish it did. However, our current system is getting very close to maxed out and they keep hiring more cow orkers so I need to get something in a hurry.
Granted, I've just given it a cursory glance at your site, and the answer may be there, but how fine grained is it?
For example, right now I'm needing ACL support for some Samba servers. I can either use MDK and get support out of the box, use SGI's RedHat installer or roll my own. Since I have to maintain several of these boxes I don't want to have to roll my own, and Mandrake is still just a little iffy for me. Can I, using LPM, apply kernel patches & change build options for packages? Other than the slideshow, is there a demo I can check out?
You know, a review about all the desktop stuff is fine and all, but I care about server production environments.
Where can one find a list of all the changes in RH 9? I've checked their site (albeit quickly) and all I can find is how to sign up for RHN and get it before everyone else. I don't care about getting it before everyone else, I want the damn changelog to find out if I want it at all.
Oh, I've got UAE. I even bought Amiga Forever so I could have legal roms, but it's still not the same thing as having a real Amiga in front of you clicking the drives every 10 seconds.:)
wouldn't the vacum tubes tend to shatter somewhat easily
Not really. I've got loads of amps that have tubes in them. Never had a problem with them shattering, even when things get a little rough.:) Now, they do burn out though, but that's so rare it's hardly worth talking about.
"Malboro Advisory: These cigarettes will not cause cancer!"
"Surgeon Genral's warning: these will cause cancer."
This has nothing to do with Celene Dion or Sony, but I did see an add for some brand of cigarettes that advertized "less carcinogens" with a Surgeon General warning stating something like "none of these claims have been verified." I believe the brand was Monarch, or something that started with an M. Strange stuff these days.
If anyone's interested: www.brothercake.com has a JS menu, UDM, that works very well cross-browser.
And it's free-as-in-the-guy-who-wrote-it-says-so. Gimme-credit-ware.
I use it on the main page and the web-store for navigation. It can be slow on some browsers, but it's actively developed and gets better every day. I just checked it with konq 2.2.1 and Opera 5.0, no problems. In mozilla it's slow as hell, but I haven't tried moz 1.0 yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, however I'd like to also point out that even some of the stuff on the *server* side is abandonware or near-abandonware stuff. Yes, we're very lucky to have mature apps like Samba and Apache but for every one of those, there's a million applications with websites that were last updated in 1999 promising that one feature you really need in "the next few weeks." (I'm thinking specificaly of groupware apps ATM, but there are many, many more.)
And, yes, you could pick it up and add that feature and that's a great plus, but it doesn't change the fact that there are literaly millions of unfinished server side applications that causes some people to percive the Open Source and Free Software worlds as "Places Where Nothing Gets Finished".
That being said, I don't think that "unfinished" means "unusable" and I appreciate all the efforts that have been made, even the abandoned ones.
It's really more complicated than this, but in simple terms:
The OS constantly monitored the drives (I never had a CD-ROM for my Amiga, so this example is of the floppy) for media. When the system detected that a disk had been inserted, it would automaticaly mount the floppy. When you hit the eject button, the Floppy would automaticaly unmount. A side effect of this was that the floppy drives were always making a soft "click" sound every few seconds. You got used to it.
That's pretty much all there is to it.
Also, I haven't had a real Amiga in a long time, so take this with a grain of salt.
Yes the ops on #Linux (and even #Linuxhelp) on a lot of IRC networks need a good head thumping. On many occasions the aarogant bastards there have pissed me off for one reason or another, but usually by just being aarogant. I used to pop in and help out, but the ops would occasionally kick and ban people for asking for help in #linuxhelp or k&b people for helping others in #linux. It was just insane. It's a shame, too, because I genuinely liked helping people out -- too bad I'll never do it on IRC again.
. . . for as long as I can remember, which is about six years.
Bartender, I'll have what he's having.
Head out on the highway
Lookin' for adventure...
Oh, *Steven Wolfram* not Steppenwolf.
Nevermind.
The benefit of getting a combo set that is designed for satellite is the image quality.
I love my DirecTivo, but I have to interject here, have you seen the "quality" of the DirecTV broadcasts? Projected on my 42" toshiba almost everything looks like shit. I have to turn the sharpness way down to minimize the appearance of compression artifacts. This is not the fault of Tivo, but of DirecTV. It's almost worth it to buy two stand alone Tivos and hook them up to two DirecTV tuners, at least that way you can get the HMO and you're not stuck with a doorstop should you decide to leave the graces of the money hole in the sky.
JSYK, I did attempt to contact Linux Support Services (aka Digium), which employs Mark Spencer the author of Asterisk, about Asterisk. I sent them an email explaining the situation and was met with silence. It's about two months later now and I still haven't heard anything from them. So, yes, I tried the Asterisk route. I tried getting an Asterisk consultant to talk to me about our needs, but there was no response. (As an aside, I sent a request for bids out to about 20 vendors and only 7 got back to me. Make of that what you will.) To be perfectly honest I wanted Asterisk to be the winner. I'm a Linux bigot with ties to the very beginning, but if nobody bothers to put in a bid or bothers with a request for more information, why should I go out of my way to get that solution into my company?
I blame "convergence".
I have here in front of me budgetary bids from 5 vendors on 7 phone systems.
Alcatel OmniPCX
Artisoft TeleVantage
3Com NBX 100
3Com NBX 5000
Comdial FXII
Vodavi XTS
Convergent Communications PDX
The prices on the systems listed range from $28k to $48k.
Organization size is currently 40 users, up to 60 by the end of the year and around 100 during the course of 2004 (after that, who knows). Right now we have more inbound calls than outbound (we're in the mortgage industry and with rates being at record lows there's a lot of interest) and are currently being served by 17 POTS lines (well, actually a T-1 into a Vina box.) I would expect that to turn around some time in the future as interest rates go back up and the economy as a whole recovers, then our loan officers will need to make more outbound calls, but that's why I'm going with a PRI circuit when we upgrade.
I attempted to get more budgetary quotes from multiple vendors (including Nortel vendors) but phone calls have not been returned. Amazing that.
Me: "Hello, I'd like to lay out $30k, can you call back?"
Vendor: "No."
Anyway. Hopefully that helps, like you said, I am out of my league here, I'm just hoping to get some good suggestions and to hear the horror stories from people who had been sold on one thing and got another.
Believe me, /. isn't my one stop advice shop. I appreciate all the suggestions from everyone here (there are some good ones) but on an investment of this size asking here is just one small part of the overall evaluation.
:/
I wanted to get a feel for what else was out there and see if there were any systems that I missed when I was searching (well, let's be honest, googling) for them.
And you're right about the boss thing. Right now my boss is gunning for the televantage because he liked the GUI. I seriously doubt anyone will use it after the neato factor wears off, but there it is.
Thanks for your concern, but I'm just going to evaluate and buy this sucker. I'll probably do basic administration like adding users and whatnot, but anything other than that will be for the vendor to support. I just have to make the phone calls. :)
AFAIK there aren't any local to me (St. Louis) and that puts a big damper on what the bosses will allow. I'm a competent *nix admin, but I will be the first to admit that I don't know enough to make repairs on telephone equipment if it should take a dive. Therefore, I'd need local and available support for this beast. I know Asterisk isn't that complicated (I've had it running as a VOIP system) but it doesn't have all the apps that we need and I don't have the time or experience (I guess I should add "yet") to write them myself. I really, really wish it did. However, our current system is getting very close to maxed out and they keep hiring more cow orkers so I need to get something in a hurry.
Ian,
Granted, I've just given it a cursory glance at your site, and the answer may be there, but how fine grained is it?
For example, right now I'm needing ACL support for some Samba servers. I can either use MDK and get support out of the box, use SGI's RedHat installer or roll my own. Since I have to maintain several of these boxes I don't want to have to roll my own, and Mandrake is still just a little iffy for me. Can I, using LPM, apply kernel patches & change build options for packages? Other than the slideshow, is there a demo I can check out?
Oh, and, uh, hi again.
You know, a review about all the desktop stuff is fine and all, but I care about server production environments.
Where can one find a list of all the changes in RH 9? I've checked their site (albeit quickly) and all I can find is how to sign up for RHN and get it before everyone else. I don't care about getting it before everyone else, I want the damn changelog to find out if I want it at all.
Sorry, rant over.
Yeah, but they're so not southpark it's not even funny. Wait, yeah it is funny.
"Ah do what Ahm told". --Homsar
Oh, I've got UAE. I even bought Amiga Forever so I could have legal roms, but it's still not the same thing as having a real Amiga in front of you clicking the drives every 10 seconds. :)
Thanks though.
You can go to Ami Demos [planet-d.net] for DivX versions.
.
What I find incredibly humorous is that what was once a 40k intro is now a 21.7MB DivX.
Makes me wish I hadn't traded my Amiga away so many years ago. .
Astute observation.
Rabbit mobile phone access points
I am interested in this. Please describe further.
wouldn't the vacum tubes tend to shatter somewhat easily
:) Now, they do burn out though, but that's so rare it's hardly worth talking about.
Not really. I've got loads of amps that have tubes in them. Never had a problem with them shattering, even when things get a little rough.
I'm game if there's beer involved.
"Malboro Advisory: These cigarettes will not cause cancer!"
"Surgeon Genral's warning: these will cause cancer."
This has nothing to do with Celene Dion or Sony, but I did see an add for some brand of cigarettes that advertized "less carcinogens" with a Surgeon General warning stating something like "none of these claims have been verified." I believe the brand was Monarch, or something that started with an M. Strange stuff these days.
If anyone's interested: www.brothercake.com has a JS menu, UDM, that works very well cross-browser.
And it's free-as-in-the-guy-who-wrote-it-says-so. Gimme-credit-ware.
I use it on the main page and the web-store for navigation. It can be slow on some browsers, but it's actively developed and gets better every day. I just checked it with konq 2.2.1 and Opera 5.0, no problems. In mozilla it's slow as hell, but I haven't tried moz 1.0 yet.
The last war, against Afghanistan, was fought with almost no loss of life on either side.
It's not over, yet.
What happens if someone comes along who can "just see" a large number as the product of a couple of prime factors...?
He gets a high paying job with the NSA.
Or a nice dark cell.