This story does sound a bit over the top. Sure, the "Corporation X" that I work of has tons of bureaucratic nonsense associated with it as well, but that still doesn't stop me from getting my work done for a whole month! In situations like the one above, my manager would have just told me to just find another system with the JDK already installed on it. That way, I could at least get something accomplished while the lawyers battled it out.
Face it... Firefox is never going to be a marketshare leader until it starts being bundled with new PC's. Most folks aren't going to bother switching if they need to do the install on it's own.
Will it work with the new dual core P4 CPU's? It doesn't make much sense to buy a high-end motherboard if you can't get the high-end CPU to go with it.
Viewing Slashdot on a PDA works great if you login with an account that has the display set to "light" display mode. With that mode turned on, even Pocket IE can render the pages correctly. And that's saying a LOT, too, because Pocket IE doesn't render most web sites correctly.
Yeah, exactly. What was that BS in the article about Windows 2000 having weak WiFi support and no support for newer software versions? Windows 2000 is still the Gold standard for Enterprise software that uses Windows, and I've been using WiFi with Windows 2000 for four YEARS now with no problems.
The whole thing read like a Microsoft commercial. Pathetic.
The point is that they don't even seem to by TRYING to do it right now. Hell, it has been years since IBM started supporting Linux on servers, and they STILL don't have a decent Lotus Notes client for Linux yet.
Shouldn't they release the dual core Xeon before the dual core "Extreme Edition" P4? Business and server apps are better designed to handle multi-processing than Half Life 2 would.
Small town living has it's advantages, trust me! I work for a huge mega-corporation near a big city, who's IT department is so under-staffed that we don't have time to make necessary system improvements or update our skills. Anything more than emergency security patches and software upgrades is a luxury right now. At last count, I was administering a mix of over 60 Windows, Linux, and AIX servers. I get paid a lot better than you, fortunately, but the cost of living is so high that do litle more than break even at the end of the year. Not that I have any free time to spend it, anyway.
This is a really cool solution... until something goes wrong with your VMWare server. Now instead of having ONE server down, you have a server and up to a dozen virtual systems down as well.
Believe it or not, Lego blocks were kind of an "open standard" once upon a time. You could buy generic blocks from companies like Tyco toys that were compatible with Legos, which made it easy to build big projects cheaply.
I have no idea what happened to those Tyco blocks, I had a blast with them when I was a kid. Their little spacemen weren't as cool as the Lego spacemen, but it made for a better variety in parts.
The Redbook is a nice sentiment, but I'd be MORE impressed if IBM "put their money where their mouth was" and did an internal rollout of Linux to all of their own corporate desktops and laptops. Sure, they're trying hard to migrate from Windows and AIX on the server side, but they seem to be ignoring the advice of their own RedBooks on the client side.
Hell, I remember requesting a Linux client for Notes a LONG time ago back when the hottest new desktop Linux distribution was Red Hat 7. They were dragging their feet with the client-side applications back then, and they STILL seem to be doing it now.
You don't REALLY don't think that the average American gives a shit about how the FCC allocates radio frequencies, do you?
The dump smucks that are going to vote to reelect Bush in 2004 probably don't even use WiFi, let alone know how it works. They just want lower taxes, so they can buy more cheaply made Chinese crap at Walmart while complaining that all of their friends' manufacturing jobs are going overseas:(
It sounds like your biggest mistake is that you care more about your customers problems than you do about your own. You must still be a rookie in the IT business!
Sooner or later, you'll hopefully figure out that the deadlines set by your customers and managers are more or less arbitary, and that the world will not end if the boss doesn't get his password reset right away, or if one of the web servers goes down overnight. Even if that annoying loudmouth customer with no social life (every company has one!) is screaming that their problem needs to be fixed ASAP, odds are that most people won't even notice if you wait until tomorrow morning to fix it.
Don't get me wrong, I used to be just like you. I carried my pager with me all the time on weekends, and I would check my e-mail after I came home from work to make sure that everything was working correctly. Then, one fine day, I just realized that my job really isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. So what if Joe Blow can't get his TPS reports at 11:30 PM on a Friday, or if a hard drive crashed on the database server on Christmas Eve. By the time people start complaining to management about it the next day, I'll probably already have it fixed.
Rigggght.... Get real. Windows XP has to be rebooted at least once a month or two for security patches! Most of the patches that deal with base OS functionality won't take effect until you reboot, and Windows usually won't let you install a second set of patches until the first set has been "activated" with a reboot.
Yeah, something tells me that this guy's girlfriend isn't going to be into to shoot 'em ups like CounterStrike or Rainbow Six. Not only is she probably going to suck at them, but they aren't exactly good for striking up a conversation between rounds.
If he is serious about this idea, he should really be looking into RPG games. Women seem to like games EverQuest and The Sims Online, where conversation aspect of the game is often more important than the gameplay itself.
Hell, even a game of Yahoo Hearts or Spades is a more social experience than first person shooters are.
I used to be like you, until my family started taking advantage of the situation. After being the "family computer repair guy" for a few years, I know what a pain it can become.
I've found that if you successfully fix their computer once, friends and relatives will start bugging you more often with their computer problems. And if you KEEP helping them out, some of them will start to refer THEIR friends and relatives to you. After awhile, you'll find yourself working a new tech support job without getting paid for it:)
Besides, I work as a sys-admin for a living, so fixing annoying OS, security, and driver glitches is something I do every day. When I'm on vacation, the LAST thing I want to do is something that resembles my day job.
Anyway, here's my advice... When a friend or relative starts complaining about their computer problems, say something like "Gee, that's terrible. I hate it when that happens." and CHANGE THE SUBJECT. I've used this method to get out of at least a dozen late nights fixing someone spyware and virus infected POS.
Let's see... AMD missed the original launch date of their Barton core CPU's by at least 3 months, missed the launch date of the Opteron by over 6 months, and the original launch date of the Athlon 64 by almost a year.
If they're saying now that the chip will be 4Q 2005, when should we REALLY be expecting it to show up on store shelves? 3Q 2006? 1Q 2007, maybe?:)
Yes, and was I the only one who thought that the boot times for the G5 were pathetic? That article was practically gloating about the G5's 55 second boot time from chime to desktop, which really isn't all that good. Sure, its a decent improvement over the G4, but it still falls far short of the 35 seconds that it takes my 2.5Ghz homebrew PC to boot Windows XP. And I only paid $1,100 for that system 6 months ago.
This article was comparing Apples to Apples (both literally and methorpically!), but Timothy seems to think that it also somehow proves that the G5 is better than Oranges, too.
Anyway, please show me some reputible benchmarks comparing a $4,000 Mac to a $4,000 PC if you want to convince me to switch. Otherwise, please don't waste my time with biased advertising.
Funny, I would have thought that robots would be GREAT at drinking games! All you need to do is build a robot with a bigger "storage tank" than us, and you have a guaranteed winner for beer chugging competitions!
I'm suprised that someone at MIT hasn't already built one of these!
Slashdot Mirror
This story does sound a bit over the top. Sure, the "Corporation X" that I work of has tons of bureaucratic nonsense associated with it as well, but that still doesn't stop me from getting my work done for a whole month! In situations like the one above, my manager would have just told me to just find another system with the JDK already installed on it. That way, I could at least get something accomplished while the lawyers battled it out.
Adobe Reader was a bad call as well. The Foxit Reader is a much faster and more stable PDF viewer for Windows.
Face it... Firefox is never going to be a marketshare leader until it starts being bundled with new PC's. Most folks aren't going to bother switching if they need to do the install on it's own.
Will it work with the new dual core P4 CPU's? It doesn't make much sense to buy a high-end motherboard if you can't get the high-end CPU to go with it.
Viewing Slashdot on a PDA works great if you login with an account that has the display set to "light" display mode. With that mode turned on, even Pocket IE can render the pages correctly. And that's saying a LOT, too, because Pocket IE doesn't render most web sites correctly.
Yeah, exactly. What was that BS in the article about Windows 2000 having weak WiFi support and no support for newer software versions? Windows 2000 is still the Gold standard for Enterprise software that uses Windows, and I've been using WiFi with Windows 2000 for four YEARS now with no problems.
The whole thing read like a Microsoft commercial. Pathetic.
The point is that they don't even seem to by TRYING to do it right now. Hell, it has been years since IBM started supporting Linux on servers, and they STILL don't have a decent Lotus Notes client for Linux yet.
Shouldn't they release the dual core Xeon before the dual core "Extreme Edition" P4? Business and server apps are better designed to handle multi-processing than Half Life 2 would.
Small town living has it's advantages, trust me! I work for a huge mega-corporation near a big city, who's IT department is so under-staffed that we don't have time to make necessary system improvements or update our skills. Anything more than emergency security patches and software upgrades is a luxury right now. At last count, I was administering a mix of over 60 Windows, Linux, and AIX servers. I get paid a lot better than you, fortunately, but the cost of living is so high that do litle more than break even at the end of the year. Not that I have any free time to spend it, anyway.
This is a really cool solution... until something goes wrong with your VMWare server. Now instead of having ONE server down, you have a server and up to a dozen virtual systems down as well.
Believe it or not, Lego blocks were kind of an "open standard" once upon a time. You could buy generic blocks from companies like Tyco toys that were compatible with Legos, which made it easy to build big projects cheaply.
I have no idea what happened to those Tyco blocks, I had a blast with them when I was a kid. Their little spacemen weren't as cool as the Lego spacemen, but it made for a better variety in parts.
The Redbook is a nice sentiment, but I'd be MORE impressed if IBM "put their money where their mouth was" and did an internal rollout of Linux to all of their own corporate desktops and laptops. Sure, they're trying hard to migrate from Windows and AIX on the server side, but they seem to be ignoring the advice of their own RedBooks on the client side.
Hell, I remember requesting a Linux client for Notes a LONG time ago back when the hottest new desktop Linux distribution was Red Hat 7. They were dragging their feet with the client-side applications back then, and they STILL seem to be doing it now.
Not to mention:
Average cost of new car: $28,000
Average cost of new PC: $1,100
You don't REALLY don't think that the average American gives a shit about how the FCC allocates radio frequencies, do you?
:(
The dump smucks that are going to vote to reelect Bush in 2004 probably don't even use WiFi, let alone know how it works. They just want lower taxes, so they can buy more cheaply made Chinese crap at Walmart while complaining that all of their friends' manufacturing jobs are going overseas
It sounds like your biggest mistake is that you care more about your customers problems than you do about your own. You must still be a rookie in the IT business!
Sooner or later, you'll hopefully figure out that the deadlines set by your customers and managers are more or less arbitary, and that the world will not end if the boss doesn't get his password reset right away, or if one of the web servers goes down overnight. Even if that annoying loudmouth customer with no social life (every company has one!) is screaming that their problem needs to be fixed ASAP, odds are that most people won't even notice if you wait until tomorrow morning to fix it.
Don't get me wrong, I used to be just like you. I carried my pager with me all the time on weekends, and I would check my e-mail after I came home from work to make sure that everything was working correctly. Then, one fine day, I just realized that my job really isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. So what if Joe Blow can't get his TPS reports at 11:30 PM on a Friday, or if a hard drive crashed on the database server on Christmas Eve. By the time people start complaining to management about it the next day, I'll probably already have it fixed.
Maybe if IBM released it 3 years ago. Lotus SmartSuite is so outdated now that must people prefer OpenOffice.org over it.
Rigggght.... Get real. Windows XP has to be rebooted at least once a month or two for security patches! Most of the patches that deal with base OS functionality won't take effect until you reboot, and Windows usually won't let you install a second set of patches until the first set has been "activated" with a reboot.
You gotta love how this story ended up being placed against a story describing how Open Source Code is subject to foul play.
Well, Mr. "W. Russell Jones", we're all about to get a lesson on how closed source code can be a dozen times moreso.
Yeah, something tells me that this guy's girlfriend isn't going to be into to shoot 'em ups like CounterStrike or Rainbow Six. Not only is she probably going to suck at them, but they aren't exactly good for striking up a conversation between rounds.
If he is serious about this idea, he should really be looking into RPG games. Women seem to like games EverQuest and The Sims Online, where conversation aspect of the game is often more important than the gameplay itself.
Hell, even a game of Yahoo Hearts or Spades is a more social experience than first person shooters are.
I used to be like you, until my family started taking advantage of the situation. After being the "family computer repair guy" for a few years, I know what a pain it can become.
:)
I've found that if you successfully fix their computer once, friends and relatives will start bugging you more often with their computer problems. And if you KEEP helping them out, some of them will start to refer THEIR friends and relatives to you. After awhile, you'll find yourself working a new tech support job without getting paid for it
Besides, I work as a sys-admin for a living, so fixing annoying OS, security, and driver glitches is something I do every day. When I'm on vacation, the LAST thing I want to do is something that resembles my day job.
Anyway, here's my advice... When a friend or relative starts complaining about their computer problems, say something like "Gee, that's terrible. I hate it when that happens." and CHANGE THE SUBJECT. I've used this method to get out of at least a dozen late nights fixing someone spyware and virus infected POS.
It's relatively cheap, and your local coffee shop won't need a geek on-site to set up and maintain it.
So, in other words, you CAN imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! :)
Let's see... AMD missed the original launch date of their Barton core CPU's by at least 3 months, missed the launch date of the Opteron by over 6 months, and the original launch date of the Athlon 64 by almost a year.
:)
If they're saying now that the chip will be 4Q 2005, when should we REALLY be expecting it to show up on store shelves? 3Q 2006? 1Q 2007, maybe?
Yes, and was I the only one who thought that the boot times for the G5 were pathetic? That article was practically gloating about the G5's 55 second boot time from chime to desktop, which really isn't all that good. Sure, its a decent improvement over the G4, but it still falls far short of the 35 seconds that it takes my 2.5Ghz homebrew PC to boot Windows XP. And I only paid $1,100 for that system 6 months ago.
This article was comparing Apples to Apples (both literally and methorpically!), but Timothy seems to think that it also somehow proves that the G5 is better than Oranges, too.
Anyway, please show me some reputible benchmarks comparing a $4,000 Mac to a $4,000 PC if you want to convince me to switch. Otherwise, please don't waste my time with biased advertising.
Funny, I would have thought that robots would be GREAT at drinking games! All you need to do is build a robot with a bigger "storage tank" than us, and you have a guaranteed winner for beer chugging competitions!
I'm suprised that someone at MIT hasn't already built one of these!