That's not true. All smart phones use them. At least, any one that uses Windows Mobile or most of the Linux variants.
People write software like crazy for those things.
It's not like it's hard to port apps these days. Unless you're relying on special hardware-specific things, it's many times just a matter of cross-compiling the code and running it.
ARM machines aren't very powerful but I have an HTC Touch Pro and that little device is amazing. It has a 640x480 display and the video performance is decent. They could beef up that hardware just a little bit and it would be able to run at higher resolutions and it could run a NetBook no sweat. It practically is one already.
I did read it. I didn't pay attention to who wrote it. Sue me.
I didn't have to read every detail because I'm already familiar with most of that software.
You obviously have a predisposition against open sourced software solutions because of your derogatory statements like "duct-taped baby."
It's semantics. Okay, so under the hood it works differently. But the net result is similar with a full solution (not just the SSL accelerator part) - load balancing, offloading, caching.. If you wanted to, you could even put together a DNS failover system in it too. (I always hated the 3DNS though..)
Personally, I'd go with a more simple solution based on Squid if I needed something to do many of these things and I couldn't afford a BigIP (which most organizations can not) but Squid won't do everything either.
Besides, what do you think F5 does? The operating system is Linux and they use a lot of open source code in their systems. They just "duct tape" things together better.
Wow, you miss the point too. The point of the original article was "because you might not be able to afford a BigIP doesn't mean you can't get a lot of the functionality with Open Source software."
Not "You should use this always." Not "BigIP sucks." You filled in your own blanks - why? There were no blanks to fill in.
Sure, the open source solution isn't perfect, but it's a decent one if you can't afford a pair of fifty thousand dollar boxes but you want offloading, caching, and load balancing.
The guy from F5 is a jackass. He basically turned what was a reasonable article that did no bashing of their products into a big deal. He rehashed all the tired old arguments against open source software "Single vendor" "support" "Admin overhead".... blah blah blah. We know! We've heard it all before..
F5 makes great devices but not everyone can afford them, so this article showed how you could achieve most of the same results with open source software. I've used the BigIP and I liked working with it. Very cool, very flexible devices. Unfortunately, only one out of the last 5 companies I've worked for were able to actually buy one.
SO, you can put together a solution that doesn't MIMIC the BigIP. It can actually do the same things. Might not be as pretty, but it will work.
There's going to be some people that think twice about F5 because of this nonsense. I mean, what kind of company lashes out like this for no reason? It makes them sound like crybabies.
Lower your prices or shut up about it. If you charge $50,000 for a server that can be had for $5000 minus the F5 software and people are buying, then they really don't have anything to complain about. The people the original article was targeted at were not likely to be potential F5 customers.
First of all, you were so cheap you wouldn't just buy a little space heater? You can get a reasonable one for like $40.
And no, an LCD screen will never "lag 15 seconds." That's retarded. A few seconds, or it won't work at all; the crystals won't move. I've had LCD screens in very very cold temps and they either work or not. If they work there's a feeling of an old passive matrix LCD.
You had no idea this would have been taken as an anti-CFL rant? How about the quote:
"Until they fix these issues, I'll hold on to my incandescents"
So, because CFL's aren't absolutely perfect, and might potentially use TWICE the (ridiculously low) wattage, you'll keep on burning low efficiency traditional bulbs?
That sounds smart.
Look, I'd love if LED bulbs were practical for a lot of things now, but they aren't. CFL's have been in use for many years and now all you hear about is the mercury in them and how they're bad. There's such a small amount of mercury that you'd have to suck on a dozen of them to potentially have any ill effects from it. And I don't know about you, but I don't suck on florecent bulbs.
So let's say a big box of them is dropped from a crane. OMG THE MERCURYS! Treat it like any other hazmat spill. Problem solved.
So you say CFL's aren't perfect for everything? Sure, fine. They're good enough, though. Seriously; you say that a light which turns on for brief periods is a bad idea, because it can suck a little extra power turning a CFL bulb on. True, but is it really worth worrying about in that situation? How many times have you left the hallway light turned on? Wouldn't just a few hours of that, at less than half the wattage of an eq. incandecent bulb make up for any problems in that area?
I wouldn't use a CFL on a Ferris wheel where the lights are blinking all night, but I would use them in most household and workplace areas.
Until something else comes along that can actually provide better, more reliable light than CFL's, I'll consider it "good enough" for everything in my house.
Yea, you're right about that. Never use words like illegal. It will only serve to make the whole report get the wrong kind of attention.
It's not that hard to just report the facts.
We are licensed for: 2000 copies of MS Office We are running: 2300 copies of MS Office We can get a licensing plan that will extend the existing licenses and updates for 5 years and allow for 2500 copies for: $120,000.
Pretty easy. But definately get your numbers and facts together first.
You can include software running without any licenses at all, too, but you just word it as fact:
Copies of Adobe Photoshop licensed: 0 Copies of Adobe Photoshop in use: 15 We can shore up these licenses for $2500 or we can remove/replace these copies of Photoshop on the PC's.
This is nothing new to businesses. Software licensing is always a point of contention and there WILL be spill over and use above licensed head count in any company from time to time. It happens. If you do nothing about it eventually, it could be a problem down the line. As long as you are making moves to license, you'll never have a problem.
That's my take on that. I've written these types of reports in the past and they've always been well received.
I've never had any problems with Microsoft, Adobe, or any other company when you're trying to get properly licensed.
I've told my MS reps that I think we're running too many copies of Windows Server on our network, so we need to get current and is there a deal we can work out to get that done?
These companies are all very responsive when you are trying to make good.
License audit? By who? There's no IRS for computer software, and all the BSA can really do is ask. The BSA can sue you but they'd never do that when you're in the process of purchasing licenses..
No software company in their right minds is going to try to sue you if you tell them you want to shore up your licenses for Software X, so how much will it cost you to license for 100 copies of Software X?
You don't need to tell them you're running a thousand unlicensed copies. Just tell them you've outgrown your existing license count and you'll need to get them all properly licensed.
That's the perfect answer and exactly what needs to be done.
You can even go a step further and contact some of these companies to let them know your situation ahead of time.
Call Microsoft sales/licensing and tell them your situation and tell them you're working to resolve the licensing issues. Same with Adobe and the others. Get quotes and stuff. That way, if anything bad ever did happen, you have documentation that you're in the process of shoring up the licensing.
No company is going to sue you if you're in the process of correcting the issue because that means you're going to be a future paying customer.
Oh oh oh so you were actually agreeing with me. Hah, sorry. I didn't understand.
Yea, that's what I think too. And actually, you don't need to be root to mount a filesystem that doesn't require kernel access. So yea, I totally wish they would drop the Gnome virtual crap, and KDE drop the KDE virtual crap, and just create a mounted filesystem for the share. Everything would work with it, no matter what kind of app.
Even though we've gone a little off topic here, this is a prime example of just getting it wrong when the right way is obvious and totally doable. There's a lot of missing links in Linux on the Desktop like this. It's unfortunate.
But, I do love Linux and I remain optimistic for the future.
Sometimes I've had some trouble with multi-monitor setups on Windows but usually I stay away from the 3rd party apps from nVidia and such and use the built-in Windows applet. The only time I use the nVidia one is to set something special perhaps, like enable the display or set up custom resolutions. I use the Windows applet to select the primary screen and set positioning and such.
I haven't had much trouble setting up dual displays under Linux but that's because I'm good at working with such things. Generally speaking, built-in tools to perform those tasks are non-existent or broken. Partly because of crap binary drivers, partly because nobody seems to care that it's not user friendly.
When I browse a share on a network server, I should be able to double-click those files and open them without having to jump through hoops.
It works on Windows, MacOS, shit it even worked on OS/2. Yet for some reason I'm still expected to write a shell script on Linux and that's deemed as OK to you. Boggles my mind.
Well, no, because there were hardly any UNIX deployments with hundreds or thousands of machines sitting under peoples' desks.
What tools on UNIX?
There's a difference between managing a set of UNIX servers and managing a thousand UNIX workstations. Any deployments of this type were surely using customized management software built in-house or outsourced. And none of it free, and none of it for Linux.
You name me a linux based set of management tools that even come close to what you can get with Windows out of the box and I'll listen. Otherwise you're just full of shit because before Windows existed, it was centralized computing with many users connecting with dumb terminals to a server or two in the computer center.
The only thing that comes close to anything like this is Novell's Xenworks, and it only works on their Linux distribution with their closed-source software. So what about something that can run on any Linux? Enlighten us all.
Don't I know it. Even Amarok, a KDE app, has all sorts of problems trying to play music from a Windows share. It sucks. You can't open office documents from a share because OpenOffice won't support KDE or Gnome's method of opening those locations either. It's nearly useless.
Gnome isn't any better.
When you mount the share, everything works fine, so I don't know why everyone doesn't just use that method. It works fine on MacOS so what's the problem? They use all the same software to make it work; samba, etc. They just have a user interface for it that's integrated into the rest of the system. It's a lot nicer than having to mount -t smbfs//blah/blah -o username=blah,password=blah,workgroup=blah/mnt/blah.
If I could code more than a shell script, that's what I would focus on. Crap like that.
That's annoying. I've never run into the problem with trying to use two different video cards under Vista; I've always just used the one.
However, the Windows multiple monitor support has always just worked for me at least in the configurations I've used. Vista seems even better at it than XP - with my Notebook I would plug in the HDMI cable and Vista would automatically enable the monitor and let me use that screen for whatever.
Big time. Partly because of the fact that the cards you're likely to use require closed-source drivers, but also because none of the GUI tools are up to the challenge.
Unfortunately, everyone that uses Linux knows of 100 ways it's way worse, too.
A huge gap in Linux desktop systems is management. There's almost nothing out there. While Windows systems have had central administration for a LONG time, neither Linux nor MacOS provide much in the way of that. MacOS has almost nothing, and Linux is even more sparce.
In a Windows environment, when all the machines are joined to a domain, you have nearly complete control over the entire infrastructure from one console. You can force thousands of policies and settings down to the desktops to manage everything from password policy to desktop backgrounds to security settings.
The playing field levels a bit when you're talking about home users but the big reason Microsoft got so big is because people used it at work and felt comfortable with it at home. I'd love to see more deployments of Linux systems - the workplace is a perfect place because you can better manage the user experience. But since there's hardly any way to centrally manage those desktops, we won't see it anytime soon.
The depressing thing is that all the pieces are there. Linux has all the things you'd expect from a modern operating system; speed, decent user interface, good hardware support. But it falls flat on the little things that SHOULD NOT BE A PROBLEM ANYMORE.
I mean, why is it still a hassle to access a Windows share? Sure, I can (usually) browse a Windows share from KDE, but almost no apps can actually DO anything with the files. You end up having to copy them locally first, which sometimes works. (Why isn't everyone taking the MacOS approach where it will mount the share, so everything can use it, rather than use all sorts of API bullshit that nothing will take advantage of?)
There's so many little things like this that just end it for so many people, including myself. Sure, I use Linux a lot, but only for the server end. I continue to keep up to date on the Desktop side of things; I always install new versions of this distribution or that. Things have improved, but not as much as they should be.
I never try to push Linux on anyone. It's not worth it because simple tasks are often not simple and they COULD BE simple if someone took the time to put the pieces together. I had high hopes for Ubuntu, but each distribution release from them is basically just the same exact thing as the last one with updated versions of the kernel and other software. Yay.
Don't worry. There's a lot of PS3 haters out there, and they love to be heard. The folks that like the PS3 don't care enough to post how much they enjoy the system.
I have a PS3 and I like it a lot. I don't play too many games on it, but I do play some. I play a lot of media with it - it's my main media head to my collecton of music, movies, etc. The uPNP media support is superb.
I have played around with Linux on it a lot and it's great being able to do so. Boots a little slow, but it works pretty well.
I like that I can attach any USB mouse, keyboard, drive, etc to it. I like that I can charge the controllers with my cell phone charger.
And I have about 40 bluray movies to play on it so far.
It's a great machine. Never a glitch or problem to speak of. It just works, and it's fun. I don't really care if 360 sales are higher. Why would anyone? Does that make the PS3 any less awesome to me?
Right? I sometimes don't think that people really appreciate Slashdot when it comes to that stuff. Overall, you'll get a better discussion and less bullshit on Slashdot than many other sites of this nature.
Some of it has to do with the fact that the readership for Slashdot has gotten older along with the site, and some of it is that sites like Digg.com have sprung up to pull away a lot of the kiddies.
It's not all roses here, but I continue to use Slashdot because you actually can get some decent discussions going here, and there's a lot of actually funny responses too.
Yea, it matters eventually, but it doesn't matter WHAT you use usually. I think the Wiki idea is a good one, but my point was that the most important part of a documentation library is the documentation itself. Don't let the fact that you have no great place to put documentation get in the way of generating it.
Most methods of storing documents also has the ability to text search so even if you begin with a dumping ground of random documents on a file server you should still be able to locate what you need until such time as you decide on a document management system.
It really doesn't matter what you decide to use. Wiki, Sharepoint, a file share with a bunch of Word docs. It doesn't matter. Just get things written down.
Now, that being said, I tend to mix procedure docs with configuration docs. You can try to keep those seperate but it's often easier to combine the two. So, say you have a thin client system set up, you can have one doc that documents how the system is configured and how to perform basic tasks.
You don't need to get too detailed, of course. The intended audience isn't a non-technical user. Each document should have a few basic sections; Revision history, purpose, intended audience, and a simple explaination of terms such as for certian acronyms used. It's also useful to include software versions so you know what version of the software the document was written for. As you upgrade the softwasre, update the doc and update the software version.
Create a document template and with pre-formatted styles. That way, you cab bust out organized documents that all look the same and every one will automatically get things like a TOC based on your styles. It's worth putting in effort here.
In the end, though, just get as much information as possible down on "paper" and then work on making it accessable. I'd rather have to hunt for that IP address or login to a web site than to not have it at all.
And remember, it's not your job to provide TRAINING materials to people in the form of this documentation. (unless it IS your job, but it doesn't sound like it.) Your job is to make sure that the systems stay running and if something should happen to you, the company isn't screwed because the systems are documented. Perhaps more importantly, if a server you worked on a year ago crashes, you'll have all the information you need to fix it.
Anyone that thinks Documentation might lead to their dismissal because "We don't need him anymore" is dead wrong. If you write documentation, you'll be the most loved person in all of IT in your company.
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That's not true. All smart phones use them. At least, any one that uses Windows Mobile or most of the Linux variants.
People write software like crazy for those things.
It's not like it's hard to port apps these days. Unless you're relying on special hardware-specific things, it's many times just a matter of cross-compiling the code and running it.
ARM machines aren't very powerful but I have an HTC Touch Pro and that little device is amazing. It has a 640x480 display and the video performance is decent. They could beef up that hardware just a little bit and it would be able to run at higher resolutions and it could run a NetBook no sweat. It practically is one already.
I did read it. I didn't pay attention to who wrote it. Sue me.
I didn't have to read every detail because I'm already familiar with most of that software.
You obviously have a predisposition against open sourced software solutions because of your derogatory statements like "duct-taped baby."
It's semantics. Okay, so under the hood it works differently. But the net result is similar with a full solution (not just the SSL accelerator part) - load balancing, offloading, caching.. If you wanted to, you could even put together a DNS failover system in it too. (I always hated the 3DNS though..)
Personally, I'd go with a more simple solution based on Squid if I needed something to do many of these things and I couldn't afford a BigIP (which most organizations can not) but Squid won't do everything either.
Besides, what do you think F5 does? The operating system is Linux and they use a lot of open source code in their systems. They just "duct tape" things together better.
Wow, you miss the point too. The point of the original article was "because you might not be able to afford a BigIP doesn't mean you can't get a lot of the functionality with Open Source software."
Not "You should use this always." Not "BigIP sucks." You filled in your own blanks - why? There were no blanks to fill in.
Sure, the open source solution isn't perfect, but it's a decent one if you can't afford a pair of fifty thousand dollar boxes but you want offloading, caching, and load balancing.
The guy from F5 is a jackass. He basically turned what was a reasonable article that did no bashing of their products into a big deal. He rehashed all the tired old arguments against open source software "Single vendor" "support" "Admin overhead" .... blah blah blah. We know! We've heard it all before..
F5 makes great devices but not everyone can afford them, so this article showed how you could achieve most of the same results with open source software. I've used the BigIP and I liked working with it. Very cool, very flexible devices. Unfortunately, only one out of the last 5 companies I've worked for were able to actually buy one.
SO, you can put together a solution that doesn't MIMIC the BigIP. It can actually do the same things. Might not be as pretty, but it will work.
There's going to be some people that think twice about F5 because of this nonsense. I mean, what kind of company lashes out like this for no reason? It makes them sound like crybabies.
Lower your prices or shut up about it. If you charge $50,000 for a server that can be had for $5000 minus the F5 software and people are buying, then they really don't have anything to complain about. The people the original article was targeted at were not likely to be potential F5 customers.
Quick question: What's disturbing about a picture of a crane on the ground?
First of all, you were so cheap you wouldn't just buy a little space heater? You can get a reasonable one for like $40.
And no, an LCD screen will never "lag 15 seconds." That's retarded. A few seconds, or it won't work at all; the crystals won't move. I've had LCD screens in very very cold temps and they either work or not. If they work there's a feeling of an old passive matrix LCD.
You had no idea this would have been taken as an anti-CFL rant? How about the quote:
"Until they fix these issues, I'll hold on to my incandescents"
So, because CFL's aren't absolutely perfect, and might potentially use TWICE the (ridiculously low) wattage, you'll keep on burning low efficiency traditional bulbs?
That sounds smart.
Look, I'd love if LED bulbs were practical for a lot of things now, but they aren't. CFL's have been in use for many years and now all you hear about is the mercury in them and how they're bad. There's such a small amount of mercury that you'd have to suck on a dozen of them to potentially have any ill effects from it. And I don't know about you, but I don't suck on florecent bulbs.
So let's say a big box of them is dropped from a crane. OMG THE MERCURYS! Treat it like any other hazmat spill. Problem solved.
So you say CFL's aren't perfect for everything? Sure, fine. They're good enough, though. Seriously; you say that a light which turns on for brief periods is a bad idea, because it can suck a little extra power turning a CFL bulb on. True, but is it really worth worrying about in that situation? How many times have you left the hallway light turned on? Wouldn't just a few hours of that, at less than half the wattage of an eq. incandecent bulb make up for any problems in that area?
I wouldn't use a CFL on a Ferris wheel where the lights are blinking all night, but I would use them in most household and workplace areas.
Until something else comes along that can actually provide better, more reliable light than CFL's, I'll consider it "good enough" for everything in my house.
Yea, you're right about that. Never use words like illegal. It will only serve to make the whole report get the wrong kind of attention.
It's not that hard to just report the facts.
We are licensed for: 2000 copies of MS Office
We are running: 2300 copies of MS Office
We can get a licensing plan that will extend the existing licenses and updates for 5 years and allow for 2500 copies for: $120,000.
Pretty easy. But definately get your numbers and facts together first.
You can include software running without any licenses at all, too, but you just word it as fact:
Copies of Adobe Photoshop licensed: 0
Copies of Adobe Photoshop in use: 15
We can shore up these licenses for $2500 or we can remove/replace these copies of Photoshop on the PC's.
This is nothing new to businesses. Software licensing is always a point of contention and there WILL be spill over and use above licensed head count in any company from time to time. It happens. If you do nothing about it eventually, it could be a problem down the line. As long as you are making moves to license, you'll never have a problem.
That's my take on that. I've written these types of reports in the past and they've always been well received.
I've never had any problems with Microsoft, Adobe, or any other company when you're trying to get properly licensed.
I've told my MS reps that I think we're running too many copies of Windows Server on our network, so we need to get current and is there a deal we can work out to get that done?
These companies are all very responsive when you are trying to make good.
License audit? By who? There's no IRS for computer software, and all the BSA can really do is ask. The BSA can sue you but they'd never do that when you're in the process of purchasing licenses..
No software company in their right minds is going to try to sue you if you tell them you want to shore up your licenses for Software X, so how much will it cost you to license for 100 copies of Software X?
You don't need to tell them you're running a thousand unlicensed copies. Just tell them you've outgrown your existing license count and you'll need to get them all properly licensed.
Use your head.
That's the perfect answer and exactly what needs to be done.
You can even go a step further and contact some of these companies to let them know your situation ahead of time.
Call Microsoft sales/licensing and tell them your situation and tell them you're working to resolve the licensing issues. Same with Adobe and the others. Get quotes and stuff. That way, if anything bad ever did happen, you have documentation that you're in the process of shoring up the licensing.
No company is going to sue you if you're in the process of correcting the issue because that means you're going to be a future paying customer.
Oh oh oh so you were actually agreeing with me. Hah, sorry. I didn't understand.
Yea, that's what I think too. And actually, you don't need to be root to mount a filesystem that doesn't require kernel access. So yea, I totally wish they would drop the Gnome virtual crap, and KDE drop the KDE virtual crap, and just create a mounted filesystem for the share. Everything would work with it, no matter what kind of app.
Even though we've gone a little off topic here, this is a prime example of just getting it wrong when the right way is obvious and totally doable. There's a lot of missing links in Linux on the Desktop like this. It's unfortunate.
But, I do love Linux and I remain optimistic for the future.
Sometimes I've had some trouble with multi-monitor setups on Windows but usually I stay away from the 3rd party apps from nVidia and such and use the built-in Windows applet. The only time I use the nVidia one is to set something special perhaps, like enable the display or set up custom resolutions. I use the Windows applet to select the primary screen and set positioning and such.
I haven't had much trouble setting up dual displays under Linux but that's because I'm good at working with such things. Generally speaking, built-in tools to perform those tasks are non-existent or broken. Partly because of crap binary drivers, partly because nobody seems to care that it's not user friendly.
You miss the point entirely..
When I browse a share on a network server, I should be able to double-click those files and open them without having to jump through hoops.
It works on Windows, MacOS, shit it even worked on OS/2. Yet for some reason I'm still expected to write a shell script on Linux and that's deemed as OK to you. Boggles my mind.
Wow, in a discussion about how shit doesn't work like it should without going geek on it, you tell me to use "sudo."
Wonderful.
Well, no, because there were hardly any UNIX deployments with hundreds or thousands of machines sitting under peoples' desks.
What tools on UNIX?
There's a difference between managing a set of UNIX servers and managing a thousand UNIX workstations. Any deployments of this type were surely using customized management software built in-house or outsourced. And none of it free, and none of it for Linux.
You name me a linux based set of management tools that even come close to what you can get with Windows out of the box and I'll listen. Otherwise you're just full of shit because before Windows existed, it was centralized computing with many users connecting with dumb terminals to a server or two in the computer center.
The only thing that comes close to anything like this is Novell's Xenworks, and it only works on their Linux distribution with their closed-source software. So what about something that can run on any Linux? Enlighten us all.
Don't I know it. Even Amarok, a KDE app, has all sorts of problems trying to play music from a Windows share. It sucks. You can't open office documents from a share because OpenOffice won't support KDE or Gnome's method of opening those locations either. It's nearly useless.
//blah/blah -o username=blah,password=blah,workgroup=blah /mnt/blah.
Gnome isn't any better.
When you mount the share, everything works fine, so I don't know why everyone doesn't just use that method. It works fine on MacOS so what's the problem? They use all the same software to make it work; samba, etc. They just have a user interface for it that's integrated into the rest of the system. It's a lot nicer than having to mount -t smbfs
If I could code more than a shell script, that's what I would focus on. Crap like that.
Maybe some day they'll get it right.
That's annoying. I've never run into the problem with trying to use two different video cards under Vista; I've always just used the one.
However, the Windows multiple monitor support has always just worked for me at least in the configurations I've used. Vista seems even better at it than XP - with my Notebook I would plug in the HDMI cable and Vista would automatically enable the monitor and let me use that screen for whatever.
Big time. Partly because of the fact that the cards you're likely to use require closed-source drivers, but also because none of the GUI tools are up to the challenge.
It's an afterthought.
Unfortunately, everyone that uses Linux knows of 100 ways it's way worse, too.
A huge gap in Linux desktop systems is management. There's almost nothing out there. While Windows systems have had central administration for a LONG time, neither Linux nor MacOS provide much in the way of that. MacOS has almost nothing, and Linux is even more sparce.
In a Windows environment, when all the machines are joined to a domain, you have nearly complete control over the entire infrastructure from one console. You can force thousands of policies and settings down to the desktops to manage everything from password policy to desktop backgrounds to security settings.
The playing field levels a bit when you're talking about home users but the big reason Microsoft got so big is because people used it at work and felt comfortable with it at home. I'd love to see more deployments of Linux systems - the workplace is a perfect place because you can better manage the user experience. But since there's hardly any way to centrally manage those desktops, we won't see it anytime soon.
The depressing thing is that all the pieces are there. Linux has all the things you'd expect from a modern operating system; speed, decent user interface, good hardware support. But it falls flat on the little things that SHOULD NOT BE A PROBLEM ANYMORE.
I mean, why is it still a hassle to access a Windows share? Sure, I can (usually) browse a Windows share from KDE, but almost no apps can actually DO anything with the files. You end up having to copy them locally first, which sometimes works. (Why isn't everyone taking the MacOS approach where it will mount the share, so everything can use it, rather than use all sorts of API bullshit that nothing will take advantage of?)
There's so many little things like this that just end it for so many people, including myself. Sure, I use Linux a lot, but only for the server end. I continue to keep up to date on the Desktop side of things; I always install new versions of this distribution or that. Things have improved, but not as much as they should be.
I never try to push Linux on anyone. It's not worth it because simple tasks are often not simple and they COULD BE simple if someone took the time to put the pieces together. I had high hopes for Ubuntu, but each distribution release from them is basically just the same exact thing as the last one with updated versions of the kernel and other software. Yay.
Don't worry. There's a lot of PS3 haters out there, and they love to be heard. The folks that like the PS3 don't care enough to post how much they enjoy the system.
I have a PS3 and I like it a lot. I don't play too many games on it, but I do play some. I play a lot of media with it - it's my main media head to my collecton of music, movies, etc. The uPNP media support is superb.
I have played around with Linux on it a lot and it's great being able to do so. Boots a little slow, but it works pretty well.
I like that I can attach any USB mouse, keyboard, drive, etc to it. I like that I can charge the controllers with my cell phone charger.
And I have about 40 bluray movies to play on it so far.
It's a great machine. Never a glitch or problem to speak of. It just works, and it's fun. I don't really care if 360 sales are higher. Why would anyone? Does that make the PS3 any less awesome to me?
Right? I sometimes don't think that people really appreciate Slashdot when it comes to that stuff. Overall, you'll get a better discussion and less bullshit on Slashdot than many other sites of this nature.
Some of it has to do with the fact that the readership for Slashdot has gotten older along with the site, and some of it is that sites like Digg.com have sprung up to pull away a lot of the kiddies.
It's not all roses here, but I continue to use Slashdot because you actually can get some decent discussions going here, and there's a lot of actually funny responses too.
Yea, it matters eventually, but it doesn't matter WHAT you use usually. I think the Wiki idea is a good one, but my point was that the most important part of a documentation library is the documentation itself. Don't let the fact that you have no great place to put documentation get in the way of generating it.
Most methods of storing documents also has the ability to text search so even if you begin with a dumping ground of random documents on a file server you should still be able to locate what you need until such time as you decide on a document management system.
It really doesn't matter what you decide to use. Wiki, Sharepoint, a file share with a bunch of Word docs. It doesn't matter. Just get things written down.
Now, that being said, I tend to mix procedure docs with configuration docs. You can try to keep those seperate but it's often easier to combine the two. So, say you have a thin client system set up, you can have one doc that documents how the system is configured and how to perform basic tasks.
You don't need to get too detailed, of course. The intended audience isn't a non-technical user. Each document should have a few basic sections; Revision history, purpose, intended audience, and a simple explaination of terms such as for certian acronyms used. It's also useful to include software versions so you know what version of the software the document was written for. As you upgrade the softwasre, update the doc and update the software version.
Create a document template and with pre-formatted styles. That way, you cab bust out organized documents that all look the same and every one will automatically get things like a TOC based on your styles. It's worth putting in effort here.
In the end, though, just get as much information as possible down on "paper" and then work on making it accessable. I'd rather have to hunt for that IP address or login to a web site than to not have it at all.
And remember, it's not your job to provide TRAINING materials to people in the form of this documentation. (unless it IS your job, but it doesn't sound like it.) Your job is to make sure that the systems stay running and if something should happen to you, the company isn't screwed because the systems are documented. Perhaps more importantly, if a server you worked on a year ago crashes, you'll have all the information you need to fix it.
Anyone that thinks Documentation might lead to their dismissal because "We don't need him anymore" is dead wrong. If you write documentation, you'll be the most loved person in all of IT in your company.