In London, it's pretty common to have a mandatory Drink At The Pub seminar followed by a voluntary after-hours powerpoint presentation that's kept going as long as the company credit card holds out.
Be warned that too much powerpoint often makes people do embarrassing things, throw up and be late for work the next day.
Seriously, don't try and "enforce" any socialising; it rubs most people up the wrong way (unless you're trying a good cop/bad cop approach in which you wish to unite the workforce against the common enemy of management). Get the floor/team manager or whoever to announce a spontaneous "anyone fancy going to the $place for $refreshments, all on me?", especially if it's preceded by "Hey, we're all really busy right now...". If people take you up on it, you'll have something of a social platform where people might say stuff.
However, most people don't want to be friends with people at work, myself included. Sure, have a drink or two after work some days, have some food, be cordial, know your team-mates, know your floor, know people above and below you and treat them all equally. But don't force friendship; I don't want to be friends (in the sense of people I want to hang out with in my spare time) with my workmates, my private life is my private life and the less the company intrudes into that the better.
Similarly, if you organise (let alone enforce) anything outside of hours, take any talk on the chin. If someone calls me an idiotic twat in the pub, it either means I'm an idiotic twat, they're drunk or there's probably a discussion I should be having about something. Giving people the freedom to speak freely is a) one of the easiest ways to convince people to join a social event and b) one of the best ways to build a team (given intelligent/non-sociopathic team members). If your skin is thicker than that of a balloon you'll also learn some valuable lessons - even if not about your own personal mistakes, then about your cow-orkers.
The power of self-delusion is actually infinite and everlasting; I can sell you blueprints to make your own generator powered by the idiocy of the perpetual motion club for the low low price of only $50,000!
I prefer Foobuntu, which defaults to any search engine, past, present or future, real or imaginary, that you care to mention.
Not to be confused with Fu-bunt-u, a distro dedicated to highly skilled fighting techniques against fungal grass diseases; and F.U.-buntu, which is just a pain to use.
For reasons my attorney advises me not to go into, both getting into and leaving the apartment was a tad tricky - if anyone of you has ever tried to negotiate one of these staircases (mine was steeper and darker than that) after a couple of beers then imagine what it's like after a couple of... err... hours of watching computer games that have made your eyes go all funny;)
Suffice to say it was three in the morning after a visit to a rather moreish chocolate shop and for reasons unknown I was quite enjoying watching hundreds of little daemons running around spitting fire. And watching DoW.
I bought a physical copy of Bioshock about a year ago, it didn't have any GFWL integration at all (not sure about SecuROM.
I don't have any problems with games being released with Zeus syndrome, as long as those protections are removed/relaxed over time so I can buy it... but when they're integrated into the way the game is run there's no escape.
I loved the original - I met a guy playing it in an apartment I rented in Amsterdam's red light district after Expedia failed to book my hotel - thought "wow, someone made an awesome looking 40k game!" and thus my foray into RTS' began. Didn't play a great deal online, mostly over the LAN with friends and beer, had a great time, and this served as a nice intro to Relic's superb WW2 RTS Company of Heroes, which I also love.
I was looking forward to the DoW sequel... until I found out that it would not only require Steam but also the obnoxious Games for Windows bullshit; not one but two annoying programs wanting to run and check up on me every time I want to boot into a game just to watch a 20 minute replay. Bioshock 2 was going to be a sure fire purchase until I found out it was getting Games for Windows as well - for a single player game?!
Fuck this whole "we'll dictate the terms in which we'll allow you to get value for the money you give us from now until the end of time!" attitude, games publishes seem to have contracted an acute case of Zeus syndrome; they think they're gods, they love playing absurd little mind games with all their paeons, they expect worship and sacrifice and they'll fuck you in the arse if they don't get it.
Console gaming is getting just as bad; my the next gen of consoles everything will be "rental" only, whether it's delivered on physical media or not.
The corollary is that I buy almost all my music online, mostly through bleep.com. But half the time I find myself pulling down the same.torrent a week later as it'll unfailingly come with more artwork, higher resolution scans and a plethora of other gumpf that almost never makes it into most MP3 stores. Some are better than others, but it's only the fans that seem to be able to consistently put together really comprehensive album "packs".
And when it comes to rarities, B-sides, live albums and the rest... well, it's not really a question that needs answering (although bleep are pretty good in that regard). I'd love there to be some magical way for $label to option some scene release but there's always some indeterminable rights issue in the way so nothing cool ever happens. Don't get me wrong, I support my chosen artists with money whenever I can, but I'm sure alot of those same artists would acknowledge themselves that the quality and thoroughness of some scene releases are frankly awesome.
There's a cap on the amount of wealth tax; I'm not Norwegian (Brit), but IIRC it's pretty low. Norway may have what looks like a "OMG! The evil state has all my moneys!" to some people, especially Americans who are used to much lower taxes than are prevalent throughout europe, but the benefits it's brought the country are evident from a mile off - especially in the current "OMG! The evil bank has all my moneys!" economic climate.
And I suggest you go live there for a bit before you diss it. Not only is the scenery mind bogglingly beautiful it's also one of the most pleasant, laid back countries in europe and almost everyone speaks flawless english. Although I never experienced binge drinking like I did on a saturday night in Bergen, and coming from a brit that's saying something.
Re:I really want XBMC-HD for PS3
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PS3 Hacked?
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Mods on crack, parent is not offtopic.
I too was saddened when I found out that the supposedly Linux-friendly PS3 was going to be hypervisored up to the wazoo - I've been a Sony boycotter for years but I was seriously considering forgiving them if I got a reasonably flexible machine that would run my beloved Myth.
Alas, it didn't and when XBMC ported itself to everything and became seven kinds of awesome the disparity between the various "multimedia frontend" attempts on current-gen consoles and your plain jane x86 box running XBMC, XBMC wins on every front. Including, IMHO, setting the thing up in the first place.
Hopefully some enterprising hardware hackers will endeavour to get XBMC and friends running on PS3 (although how well it'll run on PPC remains to be seen), but probably not before all those Boxee units start appearing. Way to miss the bandwagon again Sony!
Life imitating art imitating stupid-ass design decisions from a bunch of amazingly primitive simians descended from telephone sanitisers and marketing executives.
For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
Hell yes. I've spent 3 years at my company, a windows shop, as "the Linux guy" - not that we used Linux, I came over to the company in an acquisition from a company that did use Linux. I've set up a couple of boxes, mostly Debian, for a few boring housekeeping tasks; team-specific wiki's (people *love* it compared to the fustercluck sharepoint that was previously used), SVN for version control of config files and firewall rules, caching DNS servers for bits of our DMZ. All fine and dandy, and meanwhile I learned the hell out of every windows problem I faced as well as becoming the de facto VMware guy.
Fast forward to now and we're migrating a load of old Oracle databases from AIX to RHEL; advanced in hardware now allow us to get the same performance from a cluster of x86 hardware and 24 SSD's as we do out of some POWER5's and 36U full of 15k fibre channel discs at a tenth of the hardware and support costs. 60% and rising of the rest of our wintel boxes are now happy running off a SAN on an ESX cluster.
RHEL hasn't made any significant inroads into the desktops of any company I know of, but it's cleaning up on the heavy lifting backend. Note we're not even a big company, 2000-ish people, and we've classically been quite Linux-hostile... mainly due to it being too cheap:)
I've never understood the logic of viewing PDF's inside the browser via plugin; I can understand it for flash or java, where they provide certain functionalities and integrate within the web page, but don't see why you'd want to use a PDF in-browser, which doesn't integrate with the rest of the site. Even worse is when the notoriously corpulent Acrobat plugin starts to load, your browser tends to either freeze (thanks IE6) or act like it's just snorted a gram of ketamine.
I intentionally disable PDF plugins everywhere; my own personal preference on windows is $browser_of_choice and SumatraPDF. It makes even Foxit look bloated (no vulns that I know of either whilst even foxit has had some), and has bitchin' fast rendering and startup. For people that mostly only read PDF documents it's an utter godsend.
Yup, it's the completely-abstracted-away filesystem of UNIX that I love about it the most; a mount is a mount is any mount the same as any other mount, the only difference being their relative performance, that and the fact that all the "advanced" filesystem functions have been standard forever. Soft/hard links on windows are even more poorly supported that NTFS mount point, so no one uses them, but I don't know a single app or Linux distro that doesn't make use of links somewhere along the line. Heck, a smart rsync script with some hard links and you've got yourself a Linux version of Time Machine.
And you're right, windows does appear to treat every type of mount differently; network drives are different to NTFS are different to FAT32 and a bunch of apps seem to rely on having different codepaths for each... which leads to all the half-supported features (essentially turning them into non-features) we currently have to endure on windows filesystems.
Windows does have alot of good things going for it in the hands of a competent admin, but it's disc subsystem certainly isn't one of them.
Yes they exist and they work in a similar fashion to UNIX mounts... but they're not universally supported, unlike every UNIX filesystem I've ever used. Most people using mount points won't run into the flaws, but there are a whole bunch of utilities that have had a spotted history with them; for instance in NT 5.x, the recycle bin is completely unaware of mount points, so host soft-delete files on a mounted NTFS volume and they become hard deleted. Similarly, before we switched to a SAN we used DAS on a bunch of windows 2000 file servers, and cacls would completely refuse to work on mount points. Microsoft's solution? Assign the volume a temporary drive letter. We also had problems (now fixed) with enterprise vault not obeying policy when running off mount points.
So whilst the capability is technically there, it's been far from universally supported in the past, with the upshot that conservative IT policies mean that volume mount points won't be used again in the next decade, and alot of the people we do business with won't support anything involving something that doesn't fit into the blinkered "one partition, one alphabetic character" worldview. At least with UNIX you *know* that everything mounted at/some/random/path/wot_was_generated_from_a_script will behave exactly the same as/home, because there's only one way to mount filesystems and it's been that way since forever, and didn't have >26 support tacked on as an afterthought when it became a "serious" OS.
(As an aside, what happens in *nix when you have more than 26 logical discs in a single server?/dev/sdx, sdy, sdz, sd...?)
...or has been repeatedly told by their bosses that it's a "never going to happen" risk and that "antivirus and perimeter security will stop all malware".
Yeah, I don't work there any more, but there are plenty of people who are all too aware of the twatworthy shitness of acrobat that have absolutely no means of a) switching to an alternative (I love SumatraPDF for windows) or b) turning off the more idiotic default settings "in case it breaks something". Ah, status quo is god... how can you be a "pro-active" engineer/sysadmin when every attempt to do something different is blocked at every turn?
What you *should* be saying is that Adobe, in realising they have a horribly insecure app, should be turning off things like JavaScript off *by default* and requiring users to turn them on manually. But malware is usually less visible to the user than "this PDF form doesn't work!" so we're stuck with our swiss cheese.
Thankfully, I'm not in a job where I have to re-image machines after the latest 0-day outbreak... but I know people who do.
Have to echo this, especially since my TV habits have moved away from watching most of the crap I taped off TV and instead watching stuff I've ripped from my DVD's.
Been using Myth since 2002/2003 so I'm no novice (still using the same DB I had in late 2004 - certainly been fun keeping that in sync with upgrades!) and it's a really nice recording platform once you've spent a year or two of hair loss exploring it's foibles. But the frontend is poor; very little in the way of swish or eye candy... yet still painfully slow. Both those aspects have improved massively with 0.22, but the XBMC frontend is bling on toast. And the default skin, PM3, is much nicer than anything I've run into for Myth (flashy bit minimalist at the same time, YMMV), you don't even need a decent graphics card - my bedroom unit runs off an Intel G31 and drives a 1920x1200 screen, and even 1080p H.264 isn't a problem.
But BY FAR the biggest clincher for me was the automated movie/TV lookups in XBMC. I have about 900 movies and 3000 or so TV episodes, and if you want metadata lookups in MythTV be prepared to spend an eternity bringing up a sub-menu and searching for metadata (after adding the series and episode numbers manually which it somehow can't figure out automatically). In XBMC you add a movie or TV show, and every time it starts (or is triggered manually) it'll walk down your tree and pick up metadata, including pretty pictures, automatically from themoviedb or thetvdb (or any of the other grabbers you'd like to use). This alone saved me DAYS importing collections; the only caveats are that a) I had to write a custom regexp for XBMC to recognise my filename convention and b) it sometimes picks the wrong film/show, but that's easy enough to fix manually.
XBMC's biggest failing in my book is remote support. There's built in stuff, but if you have a non-standard remote you need to write your own config files (yes, multiple files) - and to me this was one of the most counter-intuitive and badly documented procedures I've ever done in my history with computers. Thankfully most of the rest of the doco for XBMC is much clearer, and IMHO much more informative than similar stuff for Myth.
XBMC getting ported to Linux was the best thing that happened to my media centre. Faster than mythfrontend and, to me and my techie and non-techie flatmates, much more intuitive in use - even setting up 5.1 over SPDIF was a snap compared to Myth.
I'd recommend anyone looking into a good PVR mashup on Linux to investigate mythbackend + XBMC as a possible combo.
Because if you give it 1+n SATA controllers, you're essentially handing the "RAID" part of the setup to some software drivers - either host-based RAID (which is notoriously slow with SSD's) or some SSD-specific code that does... host based RAID, although hopefully more reliably. This is the only way you can get more bandwidth out of SATA2 connections - by glomming them together. SAS is a different beast (we have a bunch of 6Gbps SAS caddies at work) but I didn't see anywhere that the SSD supports both SAS and SATA connections, so I suspect it doesn't.
Personally, I've got two OCZ SSD's - a 30GB Vertex and a 120GB Agility - and I love them... (boot time on my HTPC is now 5s... with a BIOS preamble of 25s:rolleyes:) but I'm not buying any more until 6Gbps chips are plentiful and bug free, as even these SSD's are read-limited solely by the bus speed. AT's benches of the upcoming Marvell chipset put it slower than the Intel one, so looks like I'll be waiting for Intel or AMD to bring out a chipset and get the kinks ironed out.
What I said was meant as a joke... but surely if you say Brits should never have let th egov take their guns away... surely you're advocating shooting someone with them? Or is the mere fact that that populace have guns meant to deter the government from running roughshod over the voters?
Well, ideally the notwerks team would have fixed whatever issue there is between Opera and the proxy thus preventing this entire rant... but as it is I take out my browser frustration on t'internet;)
Don't really need special software... but I do rely on a fair few apps to get windows' crappy window manager behaving in a nice way... I'm really looking forward to the KDE4 port to windows, once a) KDE4 is relatively bug-free and feature-rich and b) it's reliable on windows. Having a decent WM on windows would be awesome on toast.
I'm using 10.01 at the moment - IIRC there was a security vuln in 9.x that was only fixed in 10 (argh - hate it when companies do that) - whilst I don't think much of the UI changes I've not run into any performance issues with it, even with my above-average workloads. Fast opening of tabs is another one of the things that's endeared me to opera for all these years too.
Have you tried setting up a new/alternate profile to see if the problem exists there?
I do have a problem with it taking an age to save certain settings, but I've never had any complaints about the speed of the browser itself.
Being slowly shredded by the irked fingernails of a million disgruntled voters is far more appropriate than just a plain bullet. With shooting, it's over too quickly and far too impersonal;)
The lack of an "official" 64bit version of FF for windows is pretty annoying though. Not sure if the one I use on 64bit linux is 64bit itself though as I don't really use it much at home.
And yes, 64bit can't become commonplace soon enough (was very pleased to see the Toshiba T110 I got for the gf had "only" 3GB of RAM but still came with win64), I've been using 64bit on windows as a workstation platform (2003 64bit) since it was released (and x86_64 on linux since before it was even usable;))... but even when you have memory to burn, you'll still always end up with those bloaty 32bit apps crapping out at 4GB instead of 2GB (or, IME, somewhere between 2 and 3GB) of vmem usage.
I'm a sysadmin; as well as doing day-to-day checks and whatnot I'm also one of those project-implementer-person-people. Most project rollouts mean reading lots and lots of paper, be it dead tree or electronic, and myself and other members of my team are typically enrolled on three to four different projects at once. So once a PDF, web page or whatever is stumbled upon that one could consider relevant, it stays there, and if it demonstrates its worth in testing the information is condensed out to the official documentation. My current main project on which I'm the lead, a VMware cluster rollout over 64 nodes over three data centres with shared storage, requires a *lot* of documentation, not to mention the networking - which thankfully is mostly handled by the networks team, but we still need to be aware of the same facts when dealing with manufacturer limitations.
You don't wanna see how many apps I have open at a time;) My windows taskbar is four "units" high over one monitor of my 3840x1200 desktop, and I have three virtual desktops...
"Neccessiate" is a bit of a leading term, but this is the setup in which I'm most productive. It's just annoying when an otherwise-good software product can't keep up with you.
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In London, it's pretty common to have a mandatory Drink At The Pub seminar followed by a voluntary after-hours powerpoint presentation that's kept going as long as the company credit card holds out.
Be warned that too much powerpoint often makes people do embarrassing things, throw up and be late for work the next day.
Seriously, don't try and "enforce" any socialising; it rubs most people up the wrong way (unless you're trying a good cop/bad cop approach in which you wish to unite the workforce against the common enemy of management). Get the floor/team manager or whoever to announce a spontaneous "anyone fancy going to the $place for $refreshments, all on me?", especially if it's preceded by "Hey, we're all really busy right now...". If people take you up on it, you'll have something of a social platform where people might say stuff.
However, most people don't want to be friends with people at work, myself included. Sure, have a drink or two after work some days, have some food, be cordial, know your team-mates, know your floor, know people above and below you and treat them all equally. But don't force friendship; I don't want to be friends (in the sense of people I want to hang out with in my spare time) with my workmates, my private life is my private life and the less the company intrudes into that the better.
Similarly, if you organise (let alone enforce) anything outside of hours, take any talk on the chin. If someone calls me an idiotic twat in the pub, it either means I'm an idiotic twat, they're drunk or there's probably a discussion I should be having about something. Giving people the freedom to speak freely is a) one of the easiest ways to convince people to join a social event and b) one of the best ways to build a team (given intelligent/non-sociopathic team members). If your skin is thicker than that of a balloon you'll also learn some valuable lessons - even if not about your own personal mistakes, then about your cow-orkers.
The power of self-delusion is actually infinite and everlasting; I can sell you blueprints to make your own generator powered by the idiocy of the perpetual motion club for the low low price of only $50,000!
I prefer Foobuntu, which defaults to any search engine, past, present or future, real or imaginary, that you care to mention.
Not to be confused with Fu-bunt-u, a distro dedicated to highly skilled fighting techniques against fungal grass diseases; and F.U.-buntu, which is just a pain to use.
For reasons my attorney advises me not to go into, both getting into and leaving the apartment was a tad tricky - if anyone of you has ever tried to negotiate one of these staircases (mine was steeper and darker than that) after a couple of beers then imagine what it's like after a couple of... err... hours of watching computer games that have made your eyes go all funny ;)
Suffice to say it was three in the morning after a visit to a rather moreish chocolate shop and for reasons unknown I was quite enjoying watching hundreds of little daemons running around spitting fire. And watching DoW.
I bought a physical copy of Bioshock about a year ago, it didn't have any GFWL integration at all (not sure about SecuROM.
I don't have any problems with games being released with Zeus syndrome, as long as those protections are removed/relaxed over time so I can buy it... but when they're integrated into the way the game is run there's no escape.
I loved the original - I met a guy playing it in an apartment I rented in Amsterdam's red light district after Expedia failed to book my hotel - thought "wow, someone made an awesome looking 40k game!" and thus my foray into RTS' began. Didn't play a great deal online, mostly over the LAN with friends and beer, had a great time, and this served as a nice intro to Relic's superb WW2 RTS Company of Heroes, which I also love.
I was looking forward to the DoW sequel... until I found out that it would not only require Steam but also the obnoxious Games for Windows bullshit; not one but two annoying programs wanting to run and check up on me every time I want to boot into a game just to watch a 20 minute replay. Bioshock 2 was going to be a sure fire purchase until I found out it was getting Games for Windows as well - for a single player game?!
Fuck this whole "we'll dictate the terms in which we'll allow you to get value for the money you give us from now until the end of time!" attitude, games publishes seem to have contracted an acute case of Zeus syndrome; they think they're gods, they love playing absurd little mind games with all their paeons, they expect worship and sacrifice and they'll fuck you in the arse if they don't get it.
Console gaming is getting just as bad; my the next gen of consoles everything will be "rental" only, whether it's delivered on physical media or not.
The corollary is that I buy almost all my music online, mostly through bleep.com. But half the time I find myself pulling down the same .torrent a week later as it'll unfailingly come with more artwork, higher resolution scans and a plethora of other gumpf that almost never makes it into most MP3 stores. Some are better than others, but it's only the fans that seem to be able to consistently put together really comprehensive album "packs".
And when it comes to rarities, B-sides, live albums and the rest... well, it's not really a question that needs answering (although bleep are pretty good in that regard). I'd love there to be some magical way for $label to option some scene release but there's always some indeterminable rights issue in the way so nothing cool ever happens. Don't get me wrong, I support my chosen artists with money whenever I can, but I'm sure alot of those same artists would acknowledge themselves that the quality and thoroughness of some scene releases are frankly awesome.
There's a cap on the amount of wealth tax; I'm not Norwegian (Brit), but IIRC it's pretty low. Norway may have what looks like a "OMG! The evil state has all my moneys!" to some people, especially Americans who are used to much lower taxes than are prevalent throughout europe, but the benefits it's brought the country are evident from a mile off - especially in the current "OMG! The evil bank has all my moneys!" economic climate.
And I suggest you go live there for a bit before you diss it. Not only is the scenery mind bogglingly beautiful it's also one of the most pleasant, laid back countries in europe and almost everyone speaks flawless english. Although I never experienced binge drinking like I did on a saturday night in Bergen, and coming from a brit that's saying something.
Mods on crack, parent is not offtopic.
I too was saddened when I found out that the supposedly Linux-friendly PS3 was going to be hypervisored up to the wazoo - I've been a Sony boycotter for years but I was seriously considering forgiving them if I got a reasonably flexible machine that would run my beloved Myth.
Alas, it didn't and when XBMC ported itself to everything and became seven kinds of awesome the disparity between the various "multimedia frontend" attempts on current-gen consoles and your plain jane x86 box running XBMC, XBMC wins on every front. Including, IMHO, setting the thing up in the first place.
Hopefully some enterprising hardware hackers will endeavour to get XBMC and friends running on PS3 (although how well it'll run on PPC remains to be seen), but probably not before all those Boxee units start appearing. Way to miss the bandwagon again Sony!
Lifted-hands interface.
Life imitating art imitating stupid-ass design decisions from a bunch of amazingly primitive simians descended from telephone sanitisers and marketing executives.
For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
Hell yes. I've spent 3 years at my company, a windows shop, as "the Linux guy" - not that we used Linux, I came over to the company in an acquisition from a company that did use Linux. I've set up a couple of boxes, mostly Debian, for a few boring housekeeping tasks; team-specific wiki's (people *love* it compared to the fustercluck sharepoint that was previously used), SVN for version control of config files and firewall rules, caching DNS servers for bits of our DMZ. All fine and dandy, and meanwhile I learned the hell out of every windows problem I faced as well as becoming the de facto VMware guy.
Fast forward to now and we're migrating a load of old Oracle databases from AIX to RHEL; advanced in hardware now allow us to get the same performance from a cluster of x86 hardware and 24 SSD's as we do out of some POWER5's and 36U full of 15k fibre channel discs at a tenth of the hardware and support costs. 60% and rising of the rest of our wintel boxes are now happy running off a SAN on an ESX cluster.
RHEL hasn't made any significant inroads into the desktops of any company I know of, but it's cleaning up on the heavy lifting backend. Note we're not even a big company, 2000-ish people, and we've classically been quite Linux-hostile... mainly due to it being too cheap :)
I've never understood the logic of viewing PDF's inside the browser via plugin; I can understand it for flash or java, where they provide certain functionalities and integrate within the web page, but don't see why you'd want to use a PDF in-browser, which doesn't integrate with the rest of the site. Even worse is when the notoriously corpulent Acrobat plugin starts to load, your browser tends to either freeze (thanks IE6) or act like it's just snorted a gram of ketamine.
I intentionally disable PDF plugins everywhere; my own personal preference on windows is $browser_of_choice and SumatraPDF. It makes even Foxit look bloated (no vulns that I know of either whilst even foxit has had some), and has bitchin' fast rendering and startup. For people that mostly only read PDF documents it's an utter godsend.
Yup, it's the completely-abstracted-away filesystem of UNIX that I love about it the most; a mount is a mount is any mount the same as any other mount, the only difference being their relative performance, that and the fact that all the "advanced" filesystem functions have been standard forever. Soft/hard links on windows are even more poorly supported that NTFS mount point, so no one uses them, but I don't know a single app or Linux distro that doesn't make use of links somewhere along the line. Heck, a smart rsync script with some hard links and you've got yourself a Linux version of Time Machine.
And you're right, windows does appear to treat every type of mount differently; network drives are different to NTFS are different to FAT32 and a bunch of apps seem to rely on having different codepaths for each... which leads to all the half-supported features (essentially turning them into non-features) we currently have to endure on windows filesystems.
Windows does have alot of good things going for it in the hands of a competent admin, but it's disc subsystem certainly isn't one of them.
Yes they exist and they work in a similar fashion to UNIX mounts... but they're not universally supported, unlike every UNIX filesystem I've ever used. Most people using mount points won't run into the flaws, but there are a whole bunch of utilities that have had a spotted history with them; for instance in NT 5.x, the recycle bin is completely unaware of mount points, so host soft-delete files on a mounted NTFS volume and they become hard deleted. Similarly, before we switched to a SAN we used DAS on a bunch of windows 2000 file servers, and cacls would completely refuse to work on mount points. Microsoft's solution? Assign the volume a temporary drive letter. We also had problems (now fixed) with enterprise vault not obeying policy when running off mount points.
So whilst the capability is technically there, it's been far from universally supported in the past, with the upshot that conservative IT policies mean that volume mount points won't be used again in the next decade, and alot of the people we do business with won't support anything involving something that doesn't fit into the blinkered "one partition, one alphabetic character" worldview. At least with UNIX you *know* that everything mounted at /some/random/path/wot_was_generated_from_a_script will behave exactly the same as /home, because there's only one way to mount filesystems and it's been that way since forever, and didn't have >26 support tacked on as an afterthought when it became a "serious" OS.
(As an aside, what happens in *nix when you have more than 26 logical discs in a single server? /dev/sdx, sdy, sdz, sd...?)
Whoops - comprehension failure on my part, apologies. Oh for an edit button...!
...or has been repeatedly told by their bosses that it's a "never going to happen" risk and that "antivirus and perimeter security will stop all malware".
Yeah, I don't work there any more, but there are plenty of people who are all too aware of the twatworthy shitness of acrobat that have absolutely no means of a) switching to an alternative (I love SumatraPDF for windows) or b) turning off the more idiotic default settings "in case it breaks something". Ah, status quo is god... how can you be a "pro-active" engineer/sysadmin when every attempt to do something different is blocked at every turn?
What you *should* be saying is that Adobe, in realising they have a horribly insecure app, should be turning off things like JavaScript off *by default* and requiring users to turn them on manually. But malware is usually less visible to the user than "this PDF form doesn't work!" so we're stuck with our swiss cheese.
Thankfully, I'm not in a job where I have to re-image machines after the latest 0-day outbreak... but I know people who do.
Have to echo this, especially since my TV habits have moved away from watching most of the crap I taped off TV and instead watching stuff I've ripped from my DVD's.
Been using Myth since 2002/2003 so I'm no novice (still using the same DB I had in late 2004 - certainly been fun keeping that in sync with upgrades!) and it's a really nice recording platform once you've spent a year or two of hair loss exploring it's foibles. But the frontend is poor; very little in the way of swish or eye candy... yet still painfully slow. Both those aspects have improved massively with 0.22, but the XBMC frontend is bling on toast. And the default skin, PM3, is much nicer than anything I've run into for Myth (flashy bit minimalist at the same time, YMMV), you don't even need a decent graphics card - my bedroom unit runs off an Intel G31 and drives a 1920x1200 screen, and even 1080p H.264 isn't a problem.
But BY FAR the biggest clincher for me was the automated movie/TV lookups in XBMC. I have about 900 movies and 3000 or so TV episodes, and if you want metadata lookups in MythTV be prepared to spend an eternity bringing up a sub-menu and searching for metadata (after adding the series and episode numbers manually which it somehow can't figure out automatically). In XBMC you add a movie or TV show, and every time it starts (or is triggered manually) it'll walk down your tree and pick up metadata, including pretty pictures, automatically from themoviedb or thetvdb (or any of the other grabbers you'd like to use). This alone saved me DAYS importing collections; the only caveats are that a) I had to write a custom regexp for XBMC to recognise my filename convention and b) it sometimes picks the wrong film/show, but that's easy enough to fix manually.
XBMC's biggest failing in my book is remote support. There's built in stuff, but if you have a non-standard remote you need to write your own config files (yes, multiple files) - and to me this was one of the most counter-intuitive and badly documented procedures I've ever done in my history with computers. Thankfully most of the rest of the doco for XBMC is much clearer, and IMHO much more informative than similar stuff for Myth.
XBMC getting ported to Linux was the best thing that happened to my media centre. Faster than mythfrontend and, to me and my techie and non-techie flatmates, much more intuitive in use - even setting up 5.1 over SPDIF was a snap compared to Myth.
I'd recommend anyone looking into a good PVR mashup on Linux to investigate mythbackend + XBMC as a possible combo.
Because if you give it 1+n SATA controllers, you're essentially handing the "RAID" part of the setup to some software drivers - either host-based RAID (which is notoriously slow with SSD's) or some SSD-specific code that does... host based RAID, although hopefully more reliably. This is the only way you can get more bandwidth out of SATA2 connections - by glomming them together. SAS is a different beast (we have a bunch of 6Gbps SAS caddies at work) but I didn't see anywhere that the SSD supports both SAS and SATA connections, so I suspect it doesn't.
Personally, I've got two OCZ SSD's - a 30GB Vertex and a 120GB Agility - and I love them... (boot time on my HTPC is now 5s... with a BIOS preamble of 25s :rolleyes:) but I'm not buying any more until 6Gbps chips are plentiful and bug free, as even these SSD's are read-limited solely by the bus speed. AT's benches of the upcoming Marvell chipset put it slower than the Intel one, so looks like I'll be waiting for Intel or AMD to bring out a chipset and get the kinks ironed out.
What I said was meant as a joke... but surely if you say Brits should never have let th egov take their guns away... surely you're advocating shooting someone with them? Or is the mere fact that that populace have guns meant to deter the government from running roughshod over the voters?
Well, ideally the notwerks team would have fixed whatever issue there is between Opera and the proxy thus preventing this entire rant... but as it is I take out my browser frustration on t'internet ;)
Don't really need special software... but I do rely on a fair few apps to get windows' crappy window manager behaving in a nice way... I'm really looking forward to the KDE4 port to windows, once a) KDE4 is relatively bug-free and feature-rich and b) it's reliable on windows. Having a decent WM on windows would be awesome on toast.
I'm using 10.01 at the moment - IIRC there was a security vuln in 9.x that was only fixed in 10 (argh - hate it when companies do that) - whilst I don't think much of the UI changes I've not run into any performance issues with it, even with my above-average workloads. Fast opening of tabs is another one of the things that's endeared me to opera for all these years too.
Have you tried setting up a new/alternate profile to see if the problem exists there?
I do have a problem with it taking an age to save certain settings, but I've never had any complaints about the speed of the browser itself.
Being slowly shredded by the irked fingernails of a million disgruntled voters is far more appropriate than just a plain bullet. With shooting, it's over too quickly and far too impersonal ;)
The lack of an "official" 64bit version of FF for windows is pretty annoying though. Not sure if the one I use on 64bit linux is 64bit itself though as I don't really use it much at home.
And yes, 64bit can't become commonplace soon enough (was very pleased to see the Toshiba T110 I got for the gf had "only" 3GB of RAM but still came with win64), I've been using 64bit on windows as a workstation platform (2003 64bit) since it was released (and x86_64 on linux since before it was even usable ;))... but even when you have memory to burn, you'll still always end up with those bloaty 32bit apps crapping out at 4GB instead of 2GB (or, IME, somewhere between 2 and 3GB) of vmem usage.
I'm not familiar with this air duster of which you speak but if it contains liquid nitrogen dioxide I'm sure it'll chill very well indeed!
I'm a sysadmin; as well as doing day-to-day checks and whatnot I'm also one of those project-implementer-person-people. Most project rollouts mean reading lots and lots of paper, be it dead tree or electronic, and myself and other members of my team are typically enrolled on three to four different projects at once. So once a PDF, web page or whatever is stumbled upon that one could consider relevant, it stays there, and if it demonstrates its worth in testing the information is condensed out to the official documentation. My current main project on which I'm the lead, a VMware cluster rollout over 64 nodes over three data centres with shared storage, requires a *lot* of documentation, not to mention the networking - which thankfully is mostly handled by the networks team, but we still need to be aware of the same facts when dealing with manufacturer limitations.
You don't wanna see how many apps I have open at a time ;) My windows taskbar is four "units" high over one monitor of my 3840x1200 desktop, and I have three virtual desktops...
"Neccessiate" is a bit of a leading term, but this is the setup in which I'm most productive. It's just annoying when an otherwise-good software product can't keep up with you.