I'm pretty sure (sarcasm) that in the past, there's been a number of IE vulnerabilities that allow this crap to be installed without any user notice. And it might not even come in with IE - it might come in some other way that the user is completely unaware of.
Too bad you can play it for real with any stove or grill for about $10. Stupid.
I do think that this is a neat thing though - there's a Plasma TV out on the market that has these side lights (they point to the wall the TV would hang on) which change color to match what the majority of the screen is viewing. It seems really gimmicky at first, but it's actually pretty cool. I popped in a movie that had outdoor shots on Mars, and it was neat because the whole area got the redish mars look. It helps set the mood to the scene.
I think this has potential but it could be difficult to realize it. Little desk fans, setting up heaters and lights around the room, or whatever. It's probably expensive and a pain in the ass at this point.
The funny thing about the Phantom is that it's basically an XP PC, and they can't get it out the door. How much R&D needs to be done to get a fairly standard PC shipped? They might claim it's the backend that needs most work, but it's just a network server that sends you files. They've been doing that since the inception of digital communications.
I don't know, I think the Phantom would be a cool toy to have. But after years and years it's just stupid now.
Let's not even mention Duke Nukem - that company must be two dudes in their basement laughing. How else could theykeep their doors open for 6 years and produce no product.
You end up getting stuck in these demographics and shown the same ads over and over again. Similar to the way that if you watch SciFi channel you get bombarded by things that 20 - 35 year old men "like." But as human beings, we're more dynamic then that. We like all sorts of things. We each have our own likes.
Just because I search for "Linux Gentoo Grub SAN boot" doesn't mean that all I want to buy ever is iPods, Dell PC's, or High Speed Internet service. Who knows, maybe if you showed me something completely different then what your demographic shows I might like it - because chances are good that I already know about the iPod, Dell PC's, and HSI.
I just think special "relevant" targeted ads are pretty stupid.
Yea, I know it. A lot of the article-posts these days end with something like that. "Is this the end of the automobile?" "Is my dream of reaching space going to come true?" It's pretty annoying.
It wears you down, to take a high level of pride in your company. I've done it with almost every tech job I've held, and almost every time you're severely let down by shitty management, crappy unfair layoffs, etc.
There's no loyalty. You can be as loyal as you want to a company, but if the computer says firing 500 people who have been with the company between x and y years that earn a and b salary is good for your bonus, you're gone.
I still take pride in my work, and I'd like to think I do the best job I can. But as far as taking pride in the company, well, it would have to be a really REALLY good company.
So, it's not the Bush administration that wants to give welfare and drivers licenses to illegal immigrants? Last I checked, these guys are conservative republicans.
WTF is right. But don't start barking "Liberal scum!!!111" just because you want someone else to blame.
The 23" Apple Cinema Display uses an LG panel - at least it did several months ago when I was looking at it.
I decided to go with the HP L2335, which has a slightly upgraded version of the same LG panel at the Apple 23", but also has an adjustable arm that allows the screen to run in landscape, DVI *and* VGA, Component, S-Video, and Composite inputs. It's an awesome display, the response time is killer, and it's a full 8-bit panel.
It's been able to display every single signal I've sent at it, including oddball 1080p signals.
I'm sure this Viewsonic panel is nice, but in this day and age everyone should really be pushing widescreens. They're so much more fun for games.
It has residual effects though. A lot of people that play EQ or EQ2 have ill feeling towards the customer service. Sure, many of them will keep on playing. Over time, however, it can start to eat away at your customer base as the bad CS is just another reason to get sick of it all.
Poor customer service is a fairly big reason why many retail companies fail. When every time you need help you're faced with a big problem of trying to fight with customer service, you tend to avoid it. You shop somewhere else. When they go out of business, it's not a mystery to me why they did.
I'm certianly not a market expert or anything, but I really don't think one is required to see this common mistake.
I played Everquest for almost four years heavily. I really liked it, but I hated the GM's. Everyone I spoke to in the game had some crap thing happen to them because of a GM. Name change. Disconnect because you said "ass" in/ooc. There's nothing you can do about it.
They're not cheap either. Shit, you can get basic cable for almost the same money as some of these online games per month, and if you have a problem with your reception a cable guy comes to your house! In an MMORPG, you can't even get a name of a supervisor, let alone any actual help.
The customer service in online games is positioned in a way that the customer is always lying, cheating, and trying to pull a fast one. It's not true. The vast majority of players just want to play the game and have fun doing it, and the customer service people should be happy to make their customers happy.
So, I'm glad to see a gripe like this on a busy site like Slashdot. Maybe with more pressure from the actual players of the game, they'll start to pay attention.
I think that might be why I find it so easy to work with shell scripts. I'm not a programmer. Some day I'd love to write C or something, but I'm a sys admin and I enjoy it. Bash scripts have always been easy to follow, easy to change and create, and perhaps the verbose nature of it makes it so. I also like the fact that you don't need to learn a whole language just to use it to navigate and manage your file system.
I think many programmers lose sight of these things when they've advanced to more complex systems. "Yo, you should be using Perl for everything. It's better. I wrote a one line perl script that can dry clean my underwear. It rules." Sometimes I just want to copy a file without regular expressions =)
Microsoft. It's closed source, as far as I can tell. Nobody can add the features you want, you have to beg Microsoft.
As much as MSH *might* be good for it's other strengths, there's the possibility that it might never have good tab completion, code coloring, and other such things.
That's the REAL reason OSS/Linux/Etc has taken off. The empowerment of being able to change the system to suit your needs, instead of altering your needs to suit the system.
And in the end, people like sh/bash/etc. It's extremely easy for even a beginner to do practical things and produce functional scripts. It almost seems like MSH originally stood for "Microsoft Scripting Host" and the marketing department decided that it would be better to call it a shell to compete with Linux.
First of all, I'm not the boss. Never said I was. So all this "why don't you just do this" is pretty easy for you to say, but it's not easy to get anything done quickly when you work for the state. I push, but there's only so much I can do, and only so much I *want* to do. I'm a technical person, not a business person. While I would prefer a different vendor then Dell, I'm not going to spend hours a day trying to get something else. I'd rather just get on to the work I was paid to do.
It's not that I "can't deal with different vendor recovery setups" it's that I just don't have the time to deal with it. I'm one of a very few people working the IT infrastructure, and the help desk guys help me out. While I'm good with documentation and try to stay on top of it, if someone calls me it's a lot easier to have a centralized single point of recovery, contact, etc then saying "Ohh, RIDOCP04, that's an HP. You have to login to the ILO board for that one, and use these images, and do this, and do that. Call this guy, he's the HP rep. Ohh, you said RIDOCP05? That's a Dell. Login to the DRAC, it's a completely different system. Follow the 10 page document I had to draw up for that, and the images are here, and the drivers are there. The number for them is xyz."
When you are overworked and understaffed, you need all the help you can get. It would be counter productive to have a whole different server every time, one that I can't just use my working ghost images for, and one I can't use my existing management tools for. ESX Server does help the situation a lot, and who knows, maybe the next ESX server could be a beefy Opteron Sun box because a VM is a VM. But for now, we buy server for server according to need - we can't buy a 10 pack in case we need more in the future. Would you rather me waste tax payer dollars working on the quote/bid process all day instead of just getting the job done with what I have? Especially when the benefits are mostly technical and inconsequential to most people?
And no, it's not as insidious as you make the pre-approved list to be. There's a lot of vendors on that list because it can take months to go through the bid/quote process. Sometimes we just need that new switch NOW. Just like how they might need that new roof on one of the facilities NOW. You find vendors that you can trust, and you go through the process of adding them to the list - which isn't an easy process either. Dell servers aren't the best, and they have no AMD boxes. They work for the most part and they aren't expensive. My Dell rep gets me a very fair price on everything we order - I'm not a newbie that doesn't know market value on these things. There's nothing specifically that says we HAVE to go with Dell, but we currently have no other server vendors on the list. I should also mention that every purchase over $5000 needs to be approved by another department, whether it be on the list or not.
Why is it that people who no government or data center experience believe they are the only ones to have ever thought of these things?
It might have been a huge deal perhaps 5 or 6 years ago, but who doesn't run Windows whenever they want to now anyways?
The hacker kids growing up now all ran pirated versions of dos, Windows, OS/2, whatever. And they're still headed towards Linux.
As far as a company, now a days, it's not even all about the License fees, it also about the fact that Linux systems are simply more robust when it comes to getting the job done the way you want it to get done. For a lot of folks, this is very important.
I agree with your sediments about not wanting a half-assed product just to have one. Right now, Opteron servers are pretty high end. You see Opteron chips in heavy duty applications in very expensive and very sweet servers. This isn't always the case, but it is quite often. AMD chips are good - I've always liked them. What I like even more, however, is what it's forced Intel to do. With real competition on all x86 fronts, it's really made Intel release at a much faster rate then they did back in the day before the K6.
In truth, Dell stuff isn't very good. I don't like it at all, especially since I've cut my hands on the sharp edges of quite a few dell server chassis. They can't even get that smoothed out a little? Talk about cheap. Hell, even a $50 home PC case can easily have better quality then that. Dell assembles systems, they don't manufacture. IBM manufactures their systems. The effect is obvious just by handling a few IBM servers versus Dell servers. But Dell is cheap..
The one good thing about Dell, though, is that if you are a "Gold" or higher support customer, you do get decent support. That's been my experience anyways. Easy to get in touch with them, and they are responsive. I guess this is the case for most vendors with a premium support contract, but you'd figure with the cheap servers you'd also get cheap support.
Ohh - good idea. Then we'd have six different management consoles for remove recovery, six vendors for service and support, and no volume discount to speak of.
You ever work at a data center? No?
Plus, we're the state, and they chose to go with Dell. They're cheaper. Try to convince the director of corrections that they should go with IBM because.. umm, "it's better!"
We have to do three bids on everything we buy, but not with vendors on the pre-approved list. Dell is on the list.
I work for the state (RI) and we have a pre-approved setup with Dell. It means that we don't have to get bids/quotes from three vendors every time we need a new server, desktop, or mouse. They are cheaper almost every time, so that's what they set up.
I don't like the Dell servers. The chrep price comes at the price of cheap stuff. And by cheap stuff I mean it sucks. We don't have too many servers; we've virtualized a lot of them with ESX. But the servers we do have have all had strange unexplained problems. Whereas at my last contract we ran 40 Exchange servers with pretty much zero oddball issues, we've had a bunch of problems with just the two at this place. And the DC's. And file servers.
And let's not mention that the metal casing for a lot of Dell servers isn't finished very well. There's a lot of sharp edges that cut your skin too easily. Open up an HP (Compaq) or IBM server and you can tell there's more quality in the build.
Fortunately, Linux seems to be able to handle the servers better then Windows. We've got a farm of ESX servers that seem to run very well - but they've only been online for less then 6 months so we'll see.
I work for the State of Rhode Island, so no golf with the CIO. It's more like, they're the cheapest, and it was easier for them to work out a 'no bid needed' pre-approved system with Dell then any other vendor. Otherwise, every time we wanted to buy a server we'd have to get bids from three vendors.
Personally, I hate the Dell servers. They're cheaper for a reason.
"GPL is more of an All Software Should Be Open Source philosophy"
How so?
I think it's more like a "Here's my work, do whatever. But don't try to sell it closed source, bitch."
The GPL doesn't say anything about -all- software, or philosophy. Perhaps that's the goal of the people that WROTE the GPL, but the GPL itself is no such thing.
If you don't want to use it, you simply can't stand on the shoulders of someone else's work that is. It's that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure (sarcasm) that in the past, there's been a number of IE vulnerabilities that allow this crap to be installed without any user notice. And it might not even come in with IE - it might come in some other way that the user is completely unaware of.
And you nailed it - the problem is what the definition of a "zombie" is. I'm pretty sure they could make a good case for just about anything.
We don't need that kind of regulation. No way.
Too bad you can play it for real with any stove or grill for about $10. Stupid.
I do think that this is a neat thing though - there's a Plasma TV out on the market that has these side lights (they point to the wall the TV would hang on) which change color to match what the majority of the screen is viewing. It seems really gimmicky at first, but it's actually pretty cool. I popped in a movie that had outdoor shots on Mars, and it was neat because the whole area got the redish mars look. It helps set the mood to the scene.
I think this has potential but it could be difficult to realize it. Little desk fans, setting up heaters and lights around the room, or whatever. It's probably expensive and a pain in the ass at this point.
The funny thing about the Phantom is that it's basically an XP PC, and they can't get it out the door. How much R&D needs to be done to get a fairly standard PC shipped? They might claim it's the backend that needs most work, but it's just a network server that sends you files. They've been doing that since the inception of digital communications.
I don't know, I think the Phantom would be a cool toy to have. But after years and years it's just stupid now.
Let's not even mention Duke Nukem - that company must be two dudes in their basement laughing. How else could theykeep their doors open for 6 years and produce no product.
There's no difference between re-distribution of and releasing code?
But what's relevant?
You end up getting stuck in these demographics and shown the same ads over and over again. Similar to the way that if you watch SciFi channel you get bombarded by things that 20 - 35 year old men "like." But as human beings, we're more dynamic then that. We like all sorts of things. We each have our own likes.
Just because I search for "Linux Gentoo Grub SAN boot" doesn't mean that all I want to buy ever is iPods, Dell PC's, or High Speed Internet service. Who knows, maybe if you showed me something completely different then what your demographic shows I might like it - because chances are good that I already know about the iPod, Dell PC's, and HSI.
I just think special "relevant" targeted ads are pretty stupid.
I was thinking the same thing. 80MB is really nothing these days.
Yea, I know it. A lot of the article-posts these days end with something like that. "Is this the end of the automobile?" "Is my dream of reaching space going to come true?" It's pretty annoying.
It wears you down, to take a high level of pride in your company. I've done it with almost every tech job I've held, and almost every time you're severely let down by shitty management, crappy unfair layoffs, etc.
There's no loyalty. You can be as loyal as you want to a company, but if the computer says firing 500 people who have been with the company between x and y years that earn a and b salary is good for your bonus, you're gone.
I still take pride in my work, and I'd like to think I do the best job I can. But as far as taking pride in the company, well, it would have to be a really REALLY good company.
A physical gear is hardly symbolic. It's more like just plain "link."
So, it's not the Bush administration that wants to give welfare and drivers licenses to illegal immigrants? Last I checked, these guys are conservative republicans.
WTF is right. But don't start barking "Liberal scum!!!111" just because you want someone else to blame.
The 23" Apple Cinema Display uses an LG panel - at least it did several months ago when I was looking at it.
I decided to go with the HP L2335, which has a slightly upgraded version of the same LG panel at the Apple 23", but also has an adjustable arm that allows the screen to run in landscape, DVI *and* VGA, Component, S-Video, and Composite inputs. It's an awesome display, the response time is killer, and it's a full 8-bit panel.
It's been able to display every single signal I've sent at it, including oddball 1080p signals.
I'm sure this Viewsonic panel is nice, but in this day and age everyone should really be pushing widescreens. They're so much more fun for games.
It depends. My LCD TV does both. Most computer LCD's don't adjust the backlight at all.
In who's eyes? I like fast response time LCD's. And the color accuracy on my HP L2335 is really great.
At lease the game players actually buy the stuff, unlike some demographics that just sit and whine about how it's not perfect.
It has residual effects though. A lot of people that play EQ or EQ2 have ill feeling towards the customer service. Sure, many of them will keep on playing. Over time, however, it can start to eat away at your customer base as the bad CS is just another reason to get sick of it all.
Poor customer service is a fairly big reason why many retail companies fail. When every time you need help you're faced with a big problem of trying to fight with customer service, you tend to avoid it. You shop somewhere else. When they go out of business, it's not a mystery to me why they did.
I'm certianly not a market expert or anything, but I really don't think one is required to see this common mistake.
I played Everquest for almost four years heavily. I really liked it, but I hated the GM's. Everyone I spoke to in the game had some crap thing happen to them because of a GM. Name change. Disconnect because you said "ass" in /ooc. There's nothing you can do about it.
They're not cheap either. Shit, you can get basic cable for almost the same money as some of these online games per month, and if you have a problem with your reception a cable guy comes to your house! In an MMORPG, you can't even get a name of a supervisor, let alone any actual help.
The customer service in online games is positioned in a way that the customer is always lying, cheating, and trying to pull a fast one. It's not true. The vast majority of players just want to play the game and have fun doing it, and the customer service people should be happy to make their customers happy.
So, I'm glad to see a gripe like this on a busy site like Slashdot. Maybe with more pressure from the actual players of the game, they'll start to pay attention.
I think that might be why I find it so easy to work with shell scripts. I'm not a programmer. Some day I'd love to write C or something, but I'm a sys admin and I enjoy it. Bash scripts have always been easy to follow, easy to change and create, and perhaps the verbose nature of it makes it so. I also like the fact that you don't need to learn a whole language just to use it to navigate and manage your file system.
I think many programmers lose sight of these things when they've advanced to more complex systems. "Yo, you should be using Perl for everything. It's better. I wrote a one line perl script that can dry clean my underwear. It rules." Sometimes I just want to copy a file without regular expressions =)
Microsoft. It's closed source, as far as I can tell. Nobody can add the features you want, you have to beg Microsoft.
As much as MSH *might* be good for it's other strengths, there's the possibility that it might never have good tab completion, code coloring, and other such things.
That's the REAL reason OSS/Linux/Etc has taken off. The empowerment of being able to change the system to suit your needs, instead of altering your needs to suit the system.
And in the end, people like sh/bash/etc. It's extremely easy for even a beginner to do practical things and produce functional scripts. It almost seems like MSH originally stood for "Microsoft Scripting Host" and the marketing department decided that it would be better to call it a shell to compete with Linux.
First of all, I'm not the boss. Never said I was. So all this "why don't you just do this" is pretty easy for you to say, but it's not easy to get anything done quickly when you work for the state. I push, but there's only so much I can do, and only so much I *want* to do. I'm a technical person, not a business person. While I would prefer a different vendor then Dell, I'm not going to spend hours a day trying to get something else. I'd rather just get on to the work I was paid to do.
It's not that I "can't deal with different vendor recovery setups" it's that I just don't have the time to deal with it. I'm one of a very few people working the IT infrastructure, and the help desk guys help me out. While I'm good with documentation and try to stay on top of it, if someone calls me it's a lot easier to have a centralized single point of recovery, contact, etc then saying "Ohh, RIDOCP04, that's an HP. You have to login to the ILO board for that one, and use these images, and do this, and do that. Call this guy, he's the HP rep. Ohh, you said RIDOCP05? That's a Dell. Login to the DRAC, it's a completely different system. Follow the 10 page document I had to draw up for that, and the images are here, and the drivers are there. The number for them is xyz."
When you are overworked and understaffed, you need all the help you can get. It would be counter productive to have a whole different server every time, one that I can't just use my working ghost images for, and one I can't use my existing management tools for. ESX Server does help the situation a lot, and who knows, maybe the next ESX server could be a beefy Opteron Sun box because a VM is a VM. But for now, we buy server for server according to need - we can't buy a 10 pack in case we need more in the future. Would you rather me waste tax payer dollars working on the quote/bid process all day instead of just getting the job done with what I have? Especially when the benefits are mostly technical and inconsequential to most people?
And no, it's not as insidious as you make the pre-approved list to be. There's a lot of vendors on that list because it can take months to go through the bid/quote process. Sometimes we just need that new switch NOW. Just like how they might need that new roof on one of the facilities NOW. You find vendors that you can trust, and you go through the process of adding them to the list - which isn't an easy process either. Dell servers aren't the best, and they have no AMD boxes. They work for the most part and they aren't expensive. My Dell rep gets me a very fair price on everything we order - I'm not a newbie that doesn't know market value on these things. There's nothing specifically that says we HAVE to go with Dell, but we currently have no other server vendors on the list. I should also mention that every purchase over $5000 needs to be approved by another department, whether it be on the list or not.
Why is it that people who no government or data center experience believe they are the only ones to have ever thought of these things?
No, it COULD slow the adoption rate of Linux.
It might have been a huge deal perhaps 5 or 6 years ago, but who doesn't run Windows whenever they want to now anyways?
The hacker kids growing up now all ran pirated versions of dos, Windows, OS/2, whatever. And they're still headed towards Linux.
As far as a company, now a days, it's not even all about the License fees, it also about the fact that Linux systems are simply more robust when it comes to getting the job done the way you want it to get done. For a lot of folks, this is very important.
I agree with your sediments about not wanting a half-assed product just to have one. Right now, Opteron servers are pretty high end. You see Opteron chips in heavy duty applications in very expensive and very sweet servers. This isn't always the case, but it is quite often. AMD chips are good - I've always liked them. What I like even more, however, is what it's forced Intel to do. With real competition on all x86 fronts, it's really made Intel release at a much faster rate then they did back in the day before the K6.
In truth, Dell stuff isn't very good. I don't like it at all, especially since I've cut my hands on the sharp edges of quite a few dell server chassis. They can't even get that smoothed out a little? Talk about cheap. Hell, even a $50 home PC case can easily have better quality then that. Dell assembles systems, they don't manufacture. IBM manufactures their systems. The effect is obvious just by handling a few IBM servers versus Dell servers. But Dell is cheap..
The one good thing about Dell, though, is that if you are a "Gold" or higher support customer, you do get decent support. That's been my experience anyways. Easy to get in touch with them, and they are responsive. I guess this is the case for most vendors with a premium support contract, but you'd figure with the cheap servers you'd also get cheap support.
Ohh - good idea. Then we'd have six different management consoles for remove recovery, six vendors for service and support, and no volume discount to speak of.
.. umm, "it's better!"
You ever work at a data center? No?
Plus, we're the state, and they chose to go with Dell. They're cheaper. Try to convince the director of corrections that they should go with IBM because
We have to do three bids on everything we buy, but not with vendors on the pre-approved list. Dell is on the list.
I work for the state (RI) and we have a pre-approved setup with Dell. It means that we don't have to get bids/quotes from three vendors every time we need a new server, desktop, or mouse. They are cheaper almost every time, so that's what they set up.
I don't like the Dell servers. The chrep price comes at the price of cheap stuff. And by cheap stuff I mean it sucks. We don't have too many servers; we've virtualized a lot of them with ESX. But the servers we do have have all had strange unexplained problems. Whereas at my last contract we ran 40 Exchange servers with pretty much zero oddball issues, we've had a bunch of problems with just the two at this place. And the DC's. And file servers.
And let's not mention that the metal casing for a lot of Dell servers isn't finished very well. There's a lot of sharp edges that cut your skin too easily. Open up an HP (Compaq) or IBM server and you can tell there's more quality in the build.
Fortunately, Linux seems to be able to handle the servers better then Windows. We've got a farm of ESX servers that seem to run very well - but they've only been online for less then 6 months so we'll see.
I work for the State of Rhode Island, so no golf with the CIO. It's more like, they're the cheapest, and it was easier for them to work out a 'no bid needed' pre-approved system with Dell then any other vendor. Otherwise, every time we wanted to buy a server we'd have to get bids from three vendors.
Personally, I hate the Dell servers. They're cheaper for a reason.
"GPL is more of an All Software Should Be Open Source philosophy"
How so?
I think it's more like a "Here's my work, do whatever. But don't try to sell it closed source, bitch."
The GPL doesn't say anything about -all- software, or philosophy. Perhaps that's the goal of the people that WROTE the GPL, but the GPL itself is no such thing.
If you don't want to use it, you simply can't stand on the shoulders of someone else's work that is. It's that simple.