Okay, first of all, you never got any job offers. Let me be the first to inform you that most calls are monitored for various reasons. There were zero job offers.
Plus, I had no authority to offer anyone a job. On the other hand, *I* got job offers, being the one that knew the product so good that I'd rebuild a whole multi-site exchange org while listening to autechre laying on the floor with my eyes shut.
This is not a MS versus Linux thread. Why do people like you always try to fortify your posts with "We switched to Linux and our dreams came true" nonsense? I know why.
Re:Software Support
on
Duke3d in Linux
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
You'd be suprised how we were supposed to support the stuff. We didn't have access to much more then what you do.
For one thing, we had NO access to any source code or anything like it. The only thing we had access to, which was internal to MS, was a KBQuery tool to search for Q articles. It was an excellent tool, so much better then the online search tools, and we had access to some databases that the public does not. (and lots of articles have "MSINTERNAL" notes attached)
I can easily imagine that some of the deeper technical issues with some of the MS software would be hard to get support on (since you CANNOT talk to a developer. You will NEVER get a developer on the phone. Closest you can get is a CPR tech that can write hotfixes, and it was like pulling teeth trying to get one of these guys to help us front-line guys)
It depends on the product and the problem. And the tech. I worked with the NT and Exchange folks. Not the developer folks.
Re:Software Support
on
Duke3d in Linux
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Well what do you want me to say?
How about "Ohh, you're right, you had one problem that took a while to figure out and thus we're all completely braindead!"
Moron. Sorry you had a problem that took awhile to fix, hey, shit happens. For the most part though, most of the folks I worked with were top-notch.
I just don't understand. The people that support these products (be they MS or GNU/Popular) are all just people. I didn't "work for the man" or have any specific interest in pushing along the MS juggernaut. I just did my job to the best of my ability.
Just because the software is made by MS doesn't mean that everyone dealing with MS software is dumb.
Re:Software Support
on
Duke3d in Linux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Hey, I *was* a so-called "brainless" MS Support Tech. And let me tell you. We had some of the brightest people I've ever worked with at that place. It was the best group of people I ever worked with. Any problems with NT or Exchange you could POSSIBLY have and we'd be able to fix them.
And it's not $150/hr. It's $250/incident. Unlimited callbacks and time about the incident. It's not bad considering the caliber of support people we had over there.
It could be different now, I don't know. But it couldn't be too different. Maybe you got unlucky with a new tech.
Not defending MS here, and I agree that I can find solutions to most problems with OSS/GNU/Free software quick online. But don't just throw out this kind of junk because it's popular opinion.
Although I agree with the fact that a web site can do whatever they want, I don't agree with your "I'm a perfect little 'net citizen" attitude.
LIKE you've never bitched about anything? I mean, seriously, why is everything considered "whining" to some of you people, just because you don't agree?
And you gotta love this line:
> Who cares? We're Americans, we don't care what other people think.
You sure have your finger on the pulse of the nation huh? Moron.
It's Money. Money is the driving force behind 99% of all these types of electronic "laws" or bills.
The telecom/ISP/whoever companies want to make more money, so they pull strings where they need to, and we see bills like this appear. It's not more complicated then this.
The problem is, how to fight it. It's not easy - this is why we should all be voting, and voting for whom we believe will do things in the best interest of the public, not whether it says "Republican" or "Democrat" next to the name.
I haven't used much Corel software since like.. Corel Draw! about 6 years ago. I couldn't vouch for you there hehe.
So many times I see people on boards like Slashdot say "but, the NEWBIES!!! THE NEWBIES!!" in defense of all non-computer litterate people around the world. Most of the time, these people don't give the computer layperson enough credit. Just because you don't use a computer for a living does NOT mean you can't figure it out!
I think the word "condescending" you used is perfect.
Yea, I agree, about the web stuff. I guess it's their idea that since most people do the "web" so often, putting familiar looking "webified" components all over the place is the way to go.
I don't agree. There's no reason to webify something that doesn't need to be webified. Unless you change the ENTIRE system to run from a web browser (which seems to be the way MS is going anyways..) then keep that stuff for when you're surfing web pages.
I think the overall idea behind all of this is that they think "people are stupid." You need to be spoon fed everything. This seems to be the mentality that *MANY* technical or seasoned computer has. It's not right.
You can't underestimate people. A computer is a complicated thing, sure, but there's no reason to always put a big red button that says "PUSH ME TO USE XYZ!!"
Not to mention the help isn't generally very helpful. I've tried REALLY hard to use help in various MS softwares.
Just today, I was in Outlook XP and I wanted to show the "From:" field to specify a different address. It wasn't in the drop down that it was in in Outlook 2000.
I popped open help. "Show From Field" is the query. It's all help for MS Word! I couldn't find a single help for Outlook no matter how hard I tried, and forget finding anything useful even in the word help. I ended up bringing up AD Users and Computers and changing my default e-mail address on the exchange server.
Does pskill change the behavior of Task Manager, or is it a command line thing like the good old kill.exe I used to use to kill store.exe in Exhange? =)
The funny thing is, as an (ex)MS tech support person, I used to e-mail (obviously by hotmail or something) kill.exe to stop a hung store. Probably not the best thing to do but boy, it sure saved me a lot of time.
I've ended tasks like the best of them from Windows NT 3.1 all the way up to XP. And I'm TELLING you, on Windows XP, using the End Task function in Task Manager, by clicking a process in the list, and then clicking the button, does NOT function the same as Windows 2000.
It does not work "no matter what." Maybe you don't do as much stuff with your machine as I do with mine, but I have lots of stuff hang on me for this reason or that, and End Task on XP is flakey. It doesn't always end the task right away, sometimes it takes minutes, and in some rare cases it doesn't end the task at all.
Of course, it IS possible that the drives just died and you had bad luck. Stranger things have happened.
Heat can be a factor like the other guy said, but I have these two 10k 9GB SCSI drives in a linux box, along with three other drives in a mini-tower case with one fan, and they get so hot you can't touch them. They've been running for over three years now without a problem. =) Not saying you SHOULD have the drives poorly cooled... but it makes me wonder how hot a drive needs to be before it's too hot.
It doesn't handle it the same way, because when a program becomes defunct, unresponsive, whatever, XP doesn't kill it straight away like Windows 2000 does. Sometimes they are never killed and I need to reboot.
The other day, I had a hung explorer Window. I tried to End Task it, and of course it didn't end. I logged out, and then logged back on - and it was STILL there.
I never had a problem with Windows 2000's end task, and it's the same machine.
Sure, if a program is running fine, you can end task and it'll close down. That's a given. I mean when a program is hung. Otherwise I don't use End Task for much.
Well, you're right about one thing, you can't get the SAME interface on a Linux dist with a very small footprint. But you can easily get a nice graphical desktop, complete with lots of nifty packages with plenty of different types of serving software (samba, apache, etc) for well under 200MB.
The reason lots of linux distributions are so big by default is that they install lots of stuff you don't need and they usually install development packages (gcc, etc.) You can get a nice working Linux desktop for a suprisingly small amount of space. You could try installing Gentoo sometime, and see that it's possible!
But, that's not the point. This don't always have to be a compaison between NT and Linux!
The explorer in '95 and NT4 were quick since they didn't have any of the IE stuff integrated. There's a few tools out there you can get for the newer windows versions to use the old fashoned (NT4/'95) explorer back and even remove IE alltogether. Kinda neat.
NT4 can run on old hardware because it is itself pretty damned old. It's 8 years old now. It had a very long life if you ask me, but this is also due in part of the fact that PC's haven't changed too much in the last decade; they are basically just faster.
Yea, I agree. Until I can run new games on Linux, I can't swith on my main desktop. I used to run Windows 2000, but it had problems with some of the new games, when I switched to XP those problems went away, but added some other problems.
XP is basically Windows 2000 with an updated explorer.exe, but there's little anomalies. One of them being, in Windows 2000, when you END TASK something, it's gone. With Windows XP, if you END TASK something, it usually doesn't, or if it does terminate the task, it does so at it's own leisure.
Actually, NT4 wasn't a bad Windows. It was very simple. There's not much to it. Any versions SP3 and above were as stable as NT can get.
Windows 2000 is much more complicated then NT4. The Active Directory stuff is ridiculous for anything besides a large many site organization. There's a lot more to go wrong with Windows 2000, and it does.
Besides, Windows 2000 IS NT4. It's just got a lot more junk added, and the LanManager server partially disabled (can't be an old LM server without AD.)
As for a Desktop/Workstation, sure, Windows 2000 is better. Supports D3D and stuff. Easier hardware management. More plug'n'play support, better for notebook computers. It's NOT more stable.
Considering that planes aren't going to fly into most workplaces, I think they are okay.
Plus, I said "way down on the list" because it's a damned rare occurance that total system failures occure. If it's a single machine, you should have some sort of backup machine sitting ready to go (cluster type thing) anyways, since a backup restore could be hours away.
Because RedHat doesn't MAKE the software that you're using. They distribute it.
You can freely upgrade any part of your system that's insecure yourself. With Windows NT, you can't do that.
Although RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.. would like you to believe that you have to upgrade to their latest version for the newest software, it's not true.
I have a Redhat "version 5" machine that runs gcc3, KDE3, and Samba 2.2.5 just fine. It wasn't hard, I just kept it up to date.
I still think RAID is the #1 way to protect data from hardware failure. Backups are never the newest data, and generally backups are only used to recover data from user error, data traansportation (copy a large database to tape, mail it to DR site), archival. Way way down on the list is recovery due to hardware failure, because RAID is such a perfect solution.
I worked at a data center with thousands of drives, some of them in a 30+ drive RAID set. In the five years I worked there, not once did we lose data due to drive failure.
For home, IDE/ATA RAID is becomming more and more of a reality. When serial ATA comes to saturation, I forsee lots more built-in hardware raid functionality due to easy cable management.
Slashdot Mirror
There were TONS of problems with NT. TONS of problems with Exchange.
I'm not trying to say that the software was great (although I do like Exchange 5.5.)
It was difficult to support.
Okay, first of all, you never got any job offers. Let me be the first to inform you that most calls are monitored for various reasons. There were zero job offers.
Plus, I had no authority to offer anyone a job. On the other hand, *I* got job offers, being the one that knew the product so good that I'd rebuild a whole multi-site exchange org while listening to autechre laying on the floor with my eyes shut.
This is not a MS versus Linux thread. Why do people like you always try to fortify your posts with "We switched to Linux and our dreams came true" nonsense? I know why.
You'd be suprised how we were supposed to support the stuff. We didn't have access to much more then what you do.
For one thing, we had NO access to any source code or anything like it. The only thing we had access to, which was internal to MS, was a KBQuery tool to search for Q articles. It was an excellent tool, so much better then the online search tools, and we had access to some databases that the public does not. (and lots of articles have "MSINTERNAL" notes attached)
I can easily imagine that some of the deeper technical issues with some of the MS software would be hard to get support on (since you CANNOT talk to a developer. You will NEVER get a developer on the phone. Closest you can get is a CPR tech that can write hotfixes, and it was like pulling teeth trying to get one of these guys to help us front-line guys)
It depends on the product and the problem. And the tech. I worked with the NT and Exchange folks. Not the developer folks.
Well what do you want me to say?
How about "Ohh, you're right, you had one problem that took a while to figure out and thus we're all completely braindead!"
Moron. Sorry you had a problem that took awhile to fix, hey, shit happens. For the most part though, most of the folks I worked with were top-notch.
I just don't understand. The people that support these products (be they MS or GNU/Popular) are all just people. I didn't "work for the man" or have any specific interest in pushing along the MS juggernaut. I just did my job to the best of my ability.
Just because the software is made by MS doesn't mean that everyone dealing with MS software is dumb.
Hey, I *was* a so-called "brainless" MS Support Tech. And let me tell you. We had some of the brightest people I've ever worked with at that place. It was the best group of people I ever worked with. Any problems with NT or Exchange you could POSSIBLY have and we'd be able to fix them.
And it's not $150/hr. It's $250/incident. Unlimited callbacks and time about the incident. It's not bad considering the caliber of support people we had over there.
It could be different now, I don't know. But it couldn't be too different. Maybe you got unlucky with a new tech.
Not defending MS here, and I agree that I can find solutions to most problems with OSS/GNU/Free software quick online. But don't just throw out this kind of junk because it's popular opinion.
Although I agree with the fact that a web site can do whatever they want, I don't agree with your "I'm a perfect little 'net citizen" attitude.
LIKE you've never bitched about anything? I mean, seriously, why is everything considered "whining" to some of you people, just because you don't agree?
And you gotta love this line:
> Who cares? We're Americans, we don't care what other people think.
You sure have your finger on the pulse of the nation huh? Moron.
It's Money. Money is the driving force behind 99% of all these types of electronic "laws" or bills.
The telecom/ISP/whoever companies want to make more money, so they pull strings where they need to, and we see bills like this appear. It's not more complicated then this.
The problem is, how to fight it. It's not easy - this is why we should all be voting, and voting for whom we believe will do things in the best interest of the public, not whether it says "Republican" or "Democrat" next to the name.
Yea =)
I haven't used much Corel software since like.. Corel Draw! about 6 years ago. I couldn't vouch for you there hehe.
So many times I see people on boards like Slashdot say "but, the NEWBIES!!! THE NEWBIES!!" in defense of all non-computer litterate people around the world. Most of the time, these people don't give the computer layperson enough credit. Just because you don't use a computer for a living does NOT mean you can't figure it out!
I think the word "condescending" you used is perfect.
Yea, I agree, about the web stuff. I guess it's their idea that since most people do the "web" so often, putting familiar looking "webified" components all over the place is the way to go.
I don't agree. There's no reason to webify something that doesn't need to be webified. Unless you change the ENTIRE system to run from a web browser (which seems to be the way MS is going anyways..) then keep that stuff for when you're surfing web pages.
I think the overall idea behind all of this is that they think "people are stupid." You need to be spoon fed everything. This seems to be the mentality that *MANY* technical or seasoned computer has. It's not right.
You can't underestimate people. A computer is a complicated thing, sure, but there's no reason to always put a big red button that says "PUSH ME TO USE XYZ!!"
What if you are the one with the internet connection problem? In that case you would only have access to one data source.
Not to mention the help isn't generally very helpful. I've tried REALLY hard to use help in various MS softwares.
Just today, I was in Outlook XP and I wanted to show the "From:" field to specify a different address. It wasn't in the drop down that it was in in Outlook 2000.
I popped open help. "Show From Field" is the query. It's all help for MS Word! I couldn't find a single help for Outlook no matter how hard I tried, and forget finding anything useful even in the word help. I ended up bringing up AD Users and Computers and changing my default e-mail address on the exchange server.
See, I knew there was a difference.
Does pskill change the behavior of Task Manager, or is it a command line thing like the good old kill.exe I used to use to kill store.exe in Exhange? =)
The funny thing is, as an (ex)MS tech support person, I used to e-mail (obviously by hotmail or something) kill.exe to stop a hung store. Probably not the best thing to do but boy, it sure saved me a lot of time.
You think I'm lying about this?
I've ended tasks like the best of them from Windows NT 3.1 all the way up to XP. And I'm TELLING you, on Windows XP, using the End Task function in Task Manager, by clicking a process in the list, and then clicking the button, does NOT function the same as Windows 2000.
It does not work "no matter what." Maybe you don't do as much stuff with your machine as I do with mine, but I have lots of stuff hang on me for this reason or that, and End Task on XP is flakey. It doesn't always end the task right away, sometimes it takes minutes, and in some rare cases it doesn't end the task at all.
Of course, it IS possible that the drives just died and you had bad luck. Stranger things have happened.
Heat can be a factor like the other guy said, but I have these two 10k 9GB SCSI drives in a linux box, along with three other drives in a mini-tower case with one fan, and they get so hot you can't touch them. They've been running for over three years now without a problem. =) Not saying you SHOULD have the drives poorly cooled... but it makes me wonder how hot a drive needs to be before it's too hot.
It doesn't handle it the same way, because when a program becomes defunct, unresponsive, whatever, XP doesn't kill it straight away like Windows 2000 does. Sometimes they are never killed and I need to reboot.
The other day, I had a hung explorer Window. I tried to End Task it, and of course it didn't end. I logged out, and then logged back on - and it was STILL there.
I never had a problem with Windows 2000's end task, and it's the same machine.
Sure, if a program is running fine, you can end task and it'll close down. That's a given. I mean when a program is hung. Otherwise I don't use End Task for much.
For what you speak of you could use one of the many, many applications out there to simply sync your local data store with a remote one.
rsync comes to mind. You could even schedule it to run every couple of minutes if you really needed to.
I think a WAN raid filesystem would be kinda flakey. I mean, it's pretty easy to lose connectivity temporarily over the Internet.
Well, you're right about one thing, you can't get the SAME interface on a Linux dist with a very small footprint. But you can easily get a nice graphical desktop, complete with lots of nifty packages with plenty of different types of serving software (samba, apache, etc) for well under 200MB.
The reason lots of linux distributions are so big by default is that they install lots of stuff you don't need and they usually install development packages (gcc, etc.) You can get a nice working Linux desktop for a suprisingly small amount of space. You could try installing Gentoo sometime, and see that it's possible!
But, that's not the point. This don't always have to be a compaison between NT and Linux!
The explorer in '95 and NT4 were quick since they didn't have any of the IE stuff integrated. There's a few tools out there you can get for the newer windows versions to use the old fashoned (NT4/'95) explorer back and even remove IE alltogether. Kinda neat.
NT4 can run on old hardware because it is itself pretty damned old. It's 8 years old now. It had a very long life if you ask me, but this is also due in part of the fact that PC's haven't changed too much in the last decade; they are basically just faster.
Ho Ho Ho.
(Now I have a Machine Gun.)
Yea, I agree. Until I can run new games on Linux, I can't swith on my main desktop. I used to run Windows 2000, but it had problems with some of the new games, when I switched to XP those problems went away, but added some other problems.
XP is basically Windows 2000 with an updated explorer.exe, but there's little anomalies. One of them being, in Windows 2000, when you END TASK something, it's gone. With Windows XP, if you END TASK something, it usually doesn't, or if it does terminate the task, it does so at it's own leisure.
Actually, NT4 wasn't a bad Windows. It was very simple. There's not much to it. Any versions SP3 and above were as stable as NT can get.
Windows 2000 is much more complicated then NT4. The Active Directory stuff is ridiculous for anything besides a large many site organization. There's a lot more to go wrong with Windows 2000, and it does.
Besides, Windows 2000 IS NT4. It's just got a lot more junk added, and the LanManager server partially disabled (can't be an old LM server without AD.)
As for a Desktop/Workstation, sure, Windows 2000 is better. Supports D3D and stuff. Easier hardware management. More plug'n'play support, better for notebook computers. It's NOT more stable.
Maybe, but I guess it's not a big deal considering I'm firewalled/natted and the only one that touches these machines from the inside.
OMFG! I even said in my post that RAID won't prevent your (1) or (2)!
My post was in reply to the guy that said "Well with this new medium as backup, I won't need the RAID!"
Does anyone ELSE want to remind me why RAID isn't a replacement for a backup, and completly miss the point?
Considering that planes aren't going to fly into most workplaces, I think they are okay.
Plus, I said "way down on the list" because it's a damned rare occurance that total system failures occure. If it's a single machine, you should have some sort of backup machine sitting ready to go (cluster type thing) anyways, since a backup restore could be hours away.
Because RedHat doesn't MAKE the software that you're using. They distribute it.
You can freely upgrade any part of your system that's insecure yourself. With Windows NT, you can't do that.
Although RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.. would like you to believe that you have to upgrade to their latest version for the newest software, it's not true.
I have a Redhat "version 5" machine that runs gcc3, KDE3, and Samba 2.2.5 just fine. It wasn't hard, I just kept it up to date.
I still think RAID is the #1 way to protect data from hardware failure. Backups are never the newest data, and generally backups are only used to recover data from user error, data traansportation (copy a large database to tape, mail it to DR site), archival. Way way down on the list is recovery due to hardware failure, because RAID is such a perfect solution.
I worked at a data center with thousands of drives, some of them in a 30+ drive RAID set. In the five years I worked there, not once did we lose data due to drive failure.
For home, IDE/ATA RAID is becomming more and more of a reality. When serial ATA comes to saturation, I forsee lots more built-in hardware raid functionality due to easy cable management.