Get a Garmin forerunner. I have one and I'm very happy with it. It tracks you by GPS and records your heart rate. It has many more options than you will ever need. If you don't mind a little scripting you can download garmin tools and pull raw data from it, feed it into google maps, and have really cool jogging maps and speed and heart rate calculations.
The only annoying thing about it is the time it can take to pickup your location when you first turn it on. Even that's rarely more than 10 to 20 seconds if you have a clear view of the sky.
AFAIK international law says people may claim asylum when fleeing unreasonable persecution in the first neutral country they enter.
These people are not fleeing France. So why on earth are these people trying to get from France to the UK when they could claim asylum there or any of the very many other countries they pass though?
The answer appears to be because the UK treats these people better than any other country they could go to.
It turns out the French are dicks and put people in terrible conditions (like houses that burn down and people die because they don't have any sort of fire safety), so yeah i don't think setting the standard of "we should be like the french" is a good idea!
It's not French people who want to get into the UK. It's people that got to France by traveling though a number of other countries. They appear to believe that they will be treated better in the UK than any of the other countries they traveled though.
But the % of Immigrants that come here and work is greater than the % of natives that do, so the more we let in the more productive we become as a nation!
That's unproven, however I take your point about the UK's other domestic problems. If the UK implemented a good points system like Australia, stopped the Europe free-for-all and stopped so many asylum seekers turning up it would be true.
If you don't care what England and London are like then you should leave.
I lived in London and watched it go from an overpriced racist society where where scroungers are valued above workers and non-whites are given preferential treatment over whites. All a black man has to do is claim 'racism' and he gets huge payouts, even top policemen and advisers to the London mayor get away with this rubbish.
I left because it's gone to far to be fixed no matter who is in government.
The UK has NO immigration problem. It's a freakin' ISLAND. It actually needs MORE immigrants as it is loosing population due to low birth rates and an aging population. Unfortunately it is also quite RACIST leading to stupid jingoistic policies like these to appease the football worshiping bigots.
Rubbish, it has a huge immigration problem. Anyone can request asylum and get housed and fed by the state. Why would armies of people be queuing up in France if the UK doesn't treat these people better than the rest of Europe?
That's not to say working immigrants are not very welcome, it's the ones who want to be supported that increase the burden on the rest of the working population.
Ok people - QUIT THE DAM WHINING. You are not wrong in what you say, you are totally correct but complaining won't help.
If you don't like your job work out what you would be happy doing and how to do it. There is no reason for you to stay in a position you don't want to be in. Train, study, and apply! You may fail but surely it's better to try and fail than not try and fail by default.
If you can't predict - and propose steps to minimise, if not completely eliminate - the vast, vast majority of probable failure scenarios in your IT infrastructure, then you shouldn't be in any way involved in managing it.
If you really believe it you lack real world experience in ANY profession. It's idealist nonsense.
Contingency plans can fail too and depend on having enough budget.
If the business isn't prepared to pony up the money, then it clearly doesn't consider that particular risk significant. This is not the fault of the admin or the software.
If it's IT, medical treatment, or serving food in a cafe the principle is the same. You do the best with what you have got, you will not have an unlimited budget of money and time no matter where you work or what you do. When something unexpected happens it's never acceptable to blame people or tools, save it for later when all the facts are in.
If you list some potential failure scenarios, I'm sure I can come up with a plan to cover pretty much all of them.
That's just foolish. Real world experience says you can't predict what's going to fail and you can't plan for what you don't expect.
I really don't think you have ever worked in IT. I'm starting to wonder if you have ever worked -ANYWHERE-. Thinking on your feet is critical to any and all professions not just IT. Maybe freelance astroturfers are the exception to that.
Seriously. Hit the power switch and go occupy yourself for a minute or so. Drink some coffee. Read some Baudelaire. Have some private time on the john making twosies. Whatever
You are right that boot times on user workstations don't matter so much.
However boot times on servers are much more important. Say you have a power cut, your UPS fails and you have 10 racks of stuff to get up and running PDQ. You really will care about the 3 minutes extra per server you spend watching it POST check ram and scan for SCSI disks before it even gets to the filesystem checks.
Those extra minutes could be spent fixing the things that came up in the wrong order and testing the critical services are serving.
In what way(s) is Windows obsolete and which competitor(s) are more advanced in each particular case?
You seriously expect me to spend about 12 hours documenting every possible use of windows? I have better things to do. Although not much computer administration because I scripted it all. Try scripting things on windows, it's clumsy and awkward.
Joking aside, I manage IT for a fairly large internet based "small business" (80-100 employees, couple thousand online clients, real time operations). We use pretty much everything, and I am willing to try whatever new comes along. There are places I go for cheap, there are places I go for easy, and of course there are places I go for fucking rock solid and gimme two of them.
Most places I go for stuff that works today, tomorrow, and every day and never, ever causes me to get phone calls at 2am. Sadly thats never possible with windows servers so I stay away from them where possible. They break randomly, the security updates break applications randomly, they reboot sometimes when you really don't need them too.
SQL Server never, ever, failed me
It failed me. When one person created a VPN bridge from his home computer to work and 50 of them started throwing out UDP traffic at an incredible rate. It upset the network guys so much they just started disabling ports until the their problem went away.
I think the 'Genuine Innovation' bit comes in when they lie about having done it first in some huge expensive marketing campaign.
Can you provide an example of this ?
I can provide a few.
MS-DOS was QDOS brought and rebranded. MS didn't create it yet they told everyone they did.
The windows desktop environment was a mac or PARC or X clone, not sure which. It wasn't new but they pushed it like it was.
The Windows NT OS was reimplementation of VMS and UNIX systems, only not done nearly as well as either. They called it NT for New Technology and marketing it as the stable 'business' alternative to dos based windows.
Excel was a Lotus 1-2-3 clone. The pivot tables accountants love so much were copied from Lotus too. They sell their office package like crazy but they didn't develop the core of it.
Word was a wordstar clone.
Internet Explorer was a mosaic clone. Although MS are giving it away for nothing they are still marketing it like crazy.
Active Directory is just a LDAP clone. They market it as something which will solve all the worlds problems.
Indeed. It's a selling point, but that doesn't make it true. It's just what their marketing claims and what people that don't really know IT believe because they have little other information on which to base their choices.
You claim it's easier to deploy windows and I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that total cost of ownership, including additional costs like downtime are higher with windows in almost every case and in many cases they are a great deal higher. Losing the use of email or losing a few websites at an unexpected time is something customers will notice and will judge you on. Losing your whole user authentication system in the middle of a business day can cost a fortune. It might just make the difference between profit and bust.
I never said people that use windows are stupid. In most cases they just stick to what they know and what the adverts tell them they should use. They believe any companies who sells stuff thats used so widely has to be good, sadly that is bad reasoning.
.net is their only real innovation that comes to mind.
In what way is.net an innovation? It's not an innovation without being new in some way.
MS's real strength is in their ability to take technologies and make them easy to use, consistent and reliable.
No. Their real strength is marketing, sales, strongarming hardware suppliers, and consumer ignorance. Their software isn't easier to use or more consistent than anything else and it certainly isn't more reliable. Actually it is shockingly unreliable.
Ever had to deal with active directory? Chain crashes of multiple machines do happen and application level errors often cause a blue screen and leave no logs to indicate what went wrong. In big environments bugs like that cost a few million a day and they happen every day. Companies pay a fortune just to cover things like that up, it happens everywhere.
Ever seen a virus wipe out over a thousand production servers in a day? I have on windows but never on anything unix based.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but their research division does a hell of a lot of genuine innovation.
I don't think so. I'll give them credit for trying really hard and for having a huge budget though.
Can you give a few examples of really original research? Everything I've seen was either trivial or a rehash of old mainframe ideas. Not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with old mainframe ideas but it's hardly 'genuine innovation'.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop over charging for your software, and perhaps more people would buy it instead of pirating it.
They should keep overcharging to encourage their customers to look for cheaper and better alternatives.
Get a Garmin forerunner. I have one and I'm very happy with it. It tracks you by GPS and records your heart rate. It has many more options than you will ever need. If you don't mind a little scripting you can download garmin tools and pull raw data from it, feed it into google maps, and have really cool jogging maps and speed and heart rate calculations.
The only annoying thing about it is the time it can take to pickup your location when you first turn it on. Even that's rarely more than 10 to 20 seconds if you have a clear view of the sky.
Oh come on....
perhaps meanwhile TNG became a classic too?
Star trek - councilors in space. On a five year mission to find new life and solve its emotional problems.
Voyager or DS9 might become classics but TNG was crippled by political correctness.
AFAIK international law says people may claim asylum when fleeing unreasonable persecution in the first neutral country they enter.
These people are not fleeing France. So why on earth are these people trying to get from France to the UK when they could claim asylum there or any of the very many other countries they pass though?
The answer appears to be because the UK treats these people better than any other country they could go to.
It turns out the French are dicks and put people in terrible conditions (like houses that burn down and people die because they don't have any sort of fire safety), so yeah i don't think setting the standard of "we should be like the french" is a good idea!
It's not French people who want to get into the UK. It's people that got to France by traveling though a number of other countries. They appear to believe that they will be treated better in the UK than any of the other countries they traveled though.
But the % of Immigrants that come here and work is greater than the % of natives that do, so the more we let in the more productive we become as a nation!
That's unproven, however I take your point about the UK's other domestic problems. If the UK implemented a good points system like Australia, stopped the Europe free-for-all and stopped so many asylum seekers turning up it would be true.
If you don't care what England and London are like then you should leave.
I lived in London and watched it go from an overpriced racist society where where scroungers are valued above workers and non-whites are given preferential treatment over whites. All a black man has to do is claim 'racism' and he gets huge payouts, even top policemen and advisers to the London mayor get away with this rubbish.
I left because it's gone to far to be fixed no matter who is in government.
The UK has NO immigration problem. It's a freakin' ISLAND. It actually needs MORE immigrants as it is loosing population due to low birth rates and an aging population. Unfortunately it is also quite RACIST leading to stupid jingoistic policies like these to appease the football worshiping bigots.
Rubbish, it has a huge immigration problem. Anyone can request asylum and get housed and fed by the state. Why would armies of people be queuing up in France if the UK doesn't treat these people better than the rest of Europe?
That's not to say working immigrants are not very welcome, it's the ones who want to be supported that increase the burden on the rest of the working population.
Ok people - QUIT THE DAM WHINING. You are not wrong in what you say, you are totally correct but complaining won't help.
If you don't like your job work out what you would be happy doing and how to do it. There is no reason for you to stay in a position you don't want to be in. Train, study, and apply! You may fail but surely it's better to try and fail than not try and fail by default.
I have a PayPal security key on my key chain
You are securing yourself against the wrong people.
Paypal have the habit of demanding payment for some non-existing debt and cleaning out every account and credit card they can access.
...your personal financial advisor from the bank will call you directly to verify...
Your bank has personal financial advisors? I don't think I've ever talked to the same person twice at my bank.
What bank is that?
If you can't predict - and propose steps to minimise, if not completely eliminate - the vast, vast majority of probable failure scenarios in your IT infrastructure, then you shouldn't be in any way involved in managing it.
If you really believe it you lack real world experience in ANY profession. It's idealist nonsense.
4) I'd love to know what you were thinking when you said public transport is more risky.
I may be wrong but I think he meant that plenty of people get mugged or stabbed on buses and trains.
I don't think he was talking about the small risk of getting blown up on an airplane.
So, that would be a "no", then.
Only a script kiddy would be asking how to crash windows on slashdot. If you are smart enough to use a web browser you are smart enough to google it.
Contingency plans can fail too and depend on having enough budget.
If the business isn't prepared to pony up the money, then it clearly doesn't consider that particular risk significant. This is not the fault of the admin or the software.
If it's IT, medical treatment, or serving food in a cafe the principle is the same. You do the best with what you have got, you will not have an unlimited budget of money and time no matter where you work or what you do. When something unexpected happens it's never acceptable to blame people or tools, save it for later when all the facts are in.
If you list some potential failure scenarios, I'm sure I can come up with a plan to cover pretty much all of them.
That's just foolish. Real world experience says you can't predict what's going to fail and you can't plan for what you don't expect.
I really don't think you have ever worked in IT. I'm starting to wonder if you have ever worked -ANYWHERE-. Thinking on your feet is critical to any and all professions not just IT. Maybe freelance astroturfers are the exception to that.
If you cared that much, you'd have contingency plans in place so that how long those servers took to restart didn't matter.
Contingency plans can fail too and depend on having enough budget.
Can you provide examples of how contingency plans fit into every possible IT failure?
Sorry, just could not resist ending that with one of the pointless leading questions you are so fond of.
Chain crashes of multiple machines do happen and application level errors often cause a blue screen and leave no logs to indicate what went wrong.
Can you provide details on how to replicate this behaviour ?
Google it yourself.
Seriously. Hit the power switch and go occupy yourself for a minute or so. Drink some coffee. Read some Baudelaire. Have some private time on the john making twosies. Whatever
You are right that boot times on user workstations don't matter so much.
However boot times on servers are much more important. Say you have a power cut, your UPS fails and you have 10 racks of stuff to get up and running PDQ. You really will care about the 3 minutes extra per server you spend watching it POST check ram and scan for SCSI disks before it even gets to the filesystem checks.
Those extra minutes could be spent fixing the things that came up in the wrong order and testing the critical services are serving.
In what way(s) is Windows obsolete and which competitor(s) are more advanced in each particular case?
You seriously expect me to spend about 12 hours documenting every possible use of windows? I have better things to do. Although not much computer administration because I scripted it all. Try scripting things on windows, it's clumsy and awkward.
Joking aside, I manage IT for a fairly large internet based "small business" (80-100 employees, couple thousand online clients, real time operations). We use pretty much everything, and I am willing to try whatever new comes along. There are places I go for cheap, there are places I go for easy, and of course there are places I go for fucking rock solid and gimme two of them.
Most places I go for stuff that works today, tomorrow, and every day and never, ever causes me to get phone calls at 2am. Sadly thats never possible with windows servers so I stay away from them where possible. They break randomly, the security updates break applications randomly, they reboot sometimes when you really don't need them too.
SQL Server never, ever, failed me
It failed me. When one person created a VPN bridge from his home computer to work and 50 of them started throwing out UDP traffic at an incredible rate. It upset the network guys so much they just started disabling ports until the their problem went away.
I think the 'Genuine Innovation' bit comes in when they lie about having done it first in some huge expensive marketing campaign.
Can you provide an example of this ?
I can provide a few.
MS-DOS was QDOS brought and rebranded. MS didn't create it yet they told everyone they did.
The windows desktop environment was a mac or PARC or X clone, not sure which. It wasn't new but they pushed it like it was.
The Windows NT OS was reimplementation of VMS and UNIX systems, only not done nearly as well as either. They called it NT for New Technology and marketing it as the stable 'business' alternative to dos based windows.
Excel was a Lotus 1-2-3 clone. The pivot tables accountants love so much were copied from Lotus too. They sell their office package like crazy but they didn't develop the core of it.
Word was a wordstar clone.
Internet Explorer was a mosaic clone. Although MS are giving it away for nothing they are still marketing it like crazy.
Active Directory is just a LDAP clone. They market it as something which will solve all the worlds problems.
Besides you didn't answer the question. .net an innovation?
In what way is
Or don't you have that section in your pro-microsoft copy and paste script?
Ease of use is their no 1 selling point
Indeed. It's a selling point, but that doesn't make it true. It's just what their marketing claims and what people that don't really know IT believe because they have little other information on which to base their choices.
You claim it's easier to deploy windows and I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that total cost of ownership, including additional costs like downtime are higher with windows in almost every case and in many cases they are a great deal higher. Losing the use of email or losing a few websites at an unexpected time is something customers will notice and will judge you on. Losing your whole user authentication system in the middle of a business day can cost a fortune. It might just make the difference between profit and bust.
I never said people that use windows are stupid. In most cases they just stick to what they know and what the adverts tell them they should use. They believe any companies who sells stuff thats used so widely has to be good, sadly that is bad reasoning.
.net is their only real innovation that comes to mind.
In what way is .net an innovation? It's not an innovation without being new in some way.
MS's real strength is in their ability to take technologies and make them easy to use, consistent and reliable.
No. Their real strength is marketing, sales, strongarming hardware suppliers, and consumer ignorance. Their software isn't easier to use or more consistent than anything else and it certainly isn't more reliable. Actually it is shockingly unreliable.
Ever had to deal with active directory? Chain crashes of multiple machines do happen and application level errors often cause a blue screen and leave no logs to indicate what went wrong. In big environments bugs like that cost a few million a day and they happen every day. Companies pay a fortune just to cover things like that up, it happens everywhere.
Ever seen a virus wipe out over a thousand production servers in a day? I have on windows but never on anything unix based.
Nothing has 'efficient use of multicore hardware'.
As far as I'm aware no compiler can take a single program and split it over multiple cores in any useful way.
By Genuine Innovation you mean "doing stuff Sun was doing well over a decade ago?" Sounds pretty innovative to me.
I think the 'Genuine Innovation' bit comes in when they lie about having done it first in some huge expensive marketing campaign.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but their research division does a hell of a lot of genuine innovation.
I don't think so. I'll give them credit for trying really hard and for having a huge budget though.
Can you give a few examples of really original research? Everything I've seen was either trivial or a rehash of old mainframe ideas. Not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with old mainframe ideas but it's hardly 'genuine innovation'.