Nautilus is one of the most annoying interfaces ever. I generally like a lot of the other gnome apps I use, and find gnome in general to be pretty usable, but I don't rely (knowingly) on nautilus for anything, and I don't go to it as a tool to do anything.
My apologies if this is incorrect, but I believe nautilus is responsible for the disgustingly *bad* interface that pops up when you run firefox under gnome and want to choose an application to open something with. I can't just type in a command and hit enter... that would be too easy. Instead, you have to wait for nautilus to load the entire freakin'/usr/bin directory and then click on the thing you want and click "open" or something. C'mon. That's horrid.
I guess it doesn't fit my brain (what little matter there is of it). But OTOH, doesn't an article showing you the hidden features of nautilus kind of speak to its usability? By the way, aren't these features documented in the Nautilus manual?
"The player will sell for 110,000 yen (US$936) in Japan, which is less than the $800 price tag it will carry in North America."
Can someone explain that to me?
My general feeling toward recruitment is that the model is pretty thoroughly broken, and designed to fail far more than it succeeds. My sister was a tech recruiter, and hasn't the foggiest about anything technical. I get calls from recruiters about jobs that have nothing to do with my skill set on a fairly regular basis. This is a waste of time for recruiters, and annoying to job seekers.
The problem with recruiting is the same as it is for tech support: you need a crapload of recruiters, and they generally don't get paid a whole heckuva lot of money. This pretty much guarantees that the only people becoming tech recruiters are people who can't get a technical job, because they probably have no technical background. So now you have a situation in which all you can really do is compare a req. with a resume, and pair jobs with applicants that way. Unfortunately, that's not an effective way to judge whether an applicant is right for a job (or vise versa).
What would be great is if you could hire people with a technical background, perhaps on a freelance basis, to review the pairings you come up with before you contact an applicant about a job. For example, you could use your current pairing system as a first filter, then send me the job description and resume, and I could tell you, for the low price of $25 per review, whether or not it's really a match. Set up a website where I could have a "freelance reviewer" account, and I'll go there, list my skillset, and you can dump pairings there for me to review online. At the end of the month, send me a check for my work, and everyone is happy.
...this makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Dell goes with AMD, and Apple is left to rot with Intel. Ten years from now, Apple moves to AMD, and the rest of the world will take note that it is now time to move on to something else.
> Like most historically UNIX shops, they don't allow users even low-level SUDO access, to do silly > things like change file permissions or ownerships, in a tracked environment.
This has nothing to do with "history". While I would agree that there are things that admins do for "legacy reasons" that don't really hold up anymore, I believe that this particular rule is in place to insure the security and availability of a particular system or service. If you can tell me how root or sudo access for non-admin users lends itself to said security or availability, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, the rule stands in my environment, and every other environment I've been in where there are more than four machines considered "production".
> I am an ex-*NIX admin myself,so I understand their perspective and wish to keep control over the > environment, but as a user, I'm frustrated by having to frequently call the help-desk just to get a > file ownership changed or a specific package installed.
Those are, I'm afraid, the proverbial brakes. Furthermore, if you truly did understand their perspective, you wouldn't want to be handing out root/sudo access to whoever says they need it. Any admin with any experience knows that when a user says "I must have root", it's usually the last thing they need. Rather than maintaining an environment where root and sudo are standard issue, it's far easier to control an environment where root is a tightly held privelege given out only to those in charge of maintaining the systems and infrastructure.
> If you're an admin, do you allow your users basic SUDO rights like chmod, cp, mv, etc (assuming all > SUDO commands are logged to a remote system)?
Absolutely not. If I were tied to a pole and placed in front of a firing squad and told to give non-admin folks root/sudo access, I'd still, at the very least, request that they draw up a waiver for me to sign saying I've performed this sin against my better judgment, under severe duress.
> If no, why don't you? If you allow root access to your knowledgeable users (ie developers with > Linux experience), what do you do to keep them 'in line'?
This is really kind of a ridiculous question, I must say. "Developers with linux experience" != "*nix admin". Developers are well known in every environment I've ever worked in for writing algorithms that make your head spin and then five minutes later emailing the help desk to say "Yahoo is down, can you please fix it". They aren't admins. I wouldn't care if they were. They're not admins in *my* environment, familiar with *my* environment's systems management policies, they have no clue what sort of compliance procedures we need to follow, what other users on the system are doing and the resources *they* need, etc etc, the list goes on and on and on forever. The answer is no. No means no. No is always no. When I say no it means a thousand times no.
I've even had C-level types force me to give them root. That's when the old "create-a-fake-root-account-with-uid-501" comes into play. Look it up.
I found MoneyDance too, and like it a lot. If you've used quicken or MS Money before, it's going to be about 50 times more intuitive to use MoneyDance rather than GNUCash. The logic and model that gnucash uses to manage accounts makes my brain hurt.
You might want to check out Fedora (or Red Hat) Directory Server, which I've had some success with. It's not absolute perfection, but it saved me from dealing with OpenLDAP, which is a bit harder to deal with, especially if you're used to easy-to-use GUIs and the like.
Novell's eDirectory is also a great solution, and it runs under Linux as well. Truthfully, I'm not using their stuff, but I eval'd some of it, and their groupwise stuff with eDirectory might be just what you need.
There have been lots of other good suggestions here, so I'll just throw a "me too" in there for things like Bynari and OpenXchange.
I can't imagine that even the PHB's still think of any of these "think tanks" or "research houses" as reliable sources of information.
Are you gonna tell me that somewhere there's a guy with a tie on saying that he made his decision based on a Ken Brown article out of ADtI? Gimme a break. That guy would be so fired.
I hereby declare any entity that puts out "research" which is backed by corporate funds a "FUD Factory".
If anyone catches their boss looking at this drivel, please commence to beating them about the head and neck area, preferably using a club with a nail in it.
Carry on.
I love the publisher, but I HATE this book.
This book covers nothing new, and covers what has been covered ad nauseum poorly, and in such a way as to do a disservice to the reader.
The book makes assertions that are completely incorrect, misleading, false, and many other very negative words. For just one highly simplistic example: Tom, LDAP is NOT a database.
Gerald Carter's "LDAP System Administration" is a better intro to OpenLDAP, though not a great primer on higher-level LDAP concepts. For that, you need "Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directories": the bible of LDAP.
Novell keeps lots of good docs on LDAP lying around, and if you need more on OpenLDAP, there are also some docs on my website.
I REPEAT: STAY AWAY FROM THIS "book".
It is a strange statement to make, especially considering that you still can't buy music from Real's music store with the player that allegedly makes us "first class citizens".
I blogged it
The reason 5GB isn't enough for the OSS web site developers is that they have no flipping clue how to design and use a database, and what features of an application to put in a database, and how to minimize front-end code by using a real-life database, and how to lay out data such that there are no inconsistencies, no duplication of data, no update anomalies, etc.
Please, I beg you, show me a PostNuke site that runs with a backend database of larger than 5GB. Truth is, most open source web applications are unusable from a DBAs perspective. Probably not for the little bitty community sites and web logs, but by the time a Nuke-like site gets to 5GB on the backend, it'll probably be too slow to use anyway because they write the 30-40% of the data processing that would otherwise be done in the backend... in the front end.
I used to be a Sybase DBA, and I now maintain a couple of PostgreSQL and MySQL installations. Postgres is far less mature than Sybase ASE, but not bad for a free solution. MySQL is, IMHO, nearly useless unless you just need an addressbook or something.
Flame away, zealots.
I don't see why we should care that the phone runs linux. It's not like you can do anything with it unless you have windoze anyway. Gimme a PDA/phone/whatever that actually COMES with tools for Linux, and I don't give a crap what runs on the unit itself.
Ugh.
Usually I wait until things near the bottom of the homepage before clicking a link. Otherwise, you can click and go for coffee.
I hope the article is good.
OOH! There's the Galeon tab turning blue now - Later!
Good Luck.
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Nautilus is one of the most annoying interfaces ever. I generally like a lot of the other gnome apps I use, and find gnome in general to be pretty usable, but I don't rely (knowingly) on nautilus for anything, and I don't go to it as a tool to do anything.
/usr/bin directory and then click on the thing you want and click "open" or something. C'mon. That's horrid.
My apologies if this is incorrect, but I believe nautilus is responsible for the disgustingly *bad* interface that pops up when you run firefox under gnome and want to choose an application to open something with. I can't just type in a command and hit enter... that would be too easy. Instead, you have to wait for nautilus to load the entire freakin'
I guess it doesn't fit my brain (what little matter there is of it). But OTOH, doesn't an article showing you the hidden features of nautilus kind of speak to its usability? By the way, aren't these features documented in the Nautilus manual?
Sorry. No such thing.
"The player will sell for 110,000 yen (US$936) in Japan, which is less than the $800 price tag it will carry in North America." Can someone explain that to me?
My general feeling toward recruitment is that the model is pretty thoroughly broken, and designed to fail far more than it succeeds. My sister was a tech recruiter, and hasn't the foggiest about anything technical. I get calls from recruiters about jobs that have nothing to do with my skill set on a fairly regular basis. This is a waste of time for recruiters, and annoying to job seekers.
The problem with recruiting is the same as it is for tech support: you need a crapload of recruiters, and they generally don't get paid a whole heckuva lot of money. This pretty much guarantees that the only people becoming tech recruiters are people who can't get a technical job, because they probably have no technical background. So now you have a situation in which all you can really do is compare a req. with a resume, and pair jobs with applicants that way. Unfortunately, that's not an effective way to judge whether an applicant is right for a job (or vise versa).
What would be great is if you could hire people with a technical background, perhaps on a freelance basis, to review the pairings you come up with before you contact an applicant about a job. For example, you could use your current pairing system as a first filter, then send me the job description and resume, and I could tell you, for the low price of $25 per review, whether or not it's really a match. Set up a website where I could have a "freelance reviewer" account, and I'll go there, list my skillset, and you can dump pairings there for me to review online. At the end of the month, send me a check for my work, and everyone is happy.
...this makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Dell goes with AMD, and Apple is left to rot with Intel. Ten years from now, Apple moves to AMD, and the rest of the world will take note that it is now time to move on to something else.
> Like most historically UNIX shops, they don't allow users even low-level SUDO access, to do silly
,so I understand their perspective and wish to keep control over the
> things like change file permissions or ownerships, in a tracked environment.
This has nothing to do with "history". While I would agree that there are things that admins do for "legacy reasons" that don't really hold up anymore, I believe that this particular rule is in place to insure the security and availability of a particular system or service. If you can tell me how root or sudo access for non-admin users lends itself to said security or availability, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, the rule stands in my environment, and every other environment I've been in where there are more than four machines considered "production".
> I am an ex-*NIX admin myself
> environment, but as a user, I'm frustrated by having to frequently call the help-desk just to get a
> file ownership changed or a specific package installed.
Those are, I'm afraid, the proverbial brakes. Furthermore, if you truly did understand their perspective, you wouldn't want to be handing out root/sudo access to whoever says they need it. Any admin with any experience knows that when a user says "I must have root", it's usually the last thing they need. Rather than maintaining an environment where root and sudo are standard issue, it's far easier to control an environment where root is a tightly held privelege given out only to those in charge of maintaining the systems and infrastructure.
> If you're an admin, do you allow your users basic SUDO rights like chmod, cp, mv, etc (assuming all
> SUDO commands are logged to a remote system)?
Absolutely not. If I were tied to a pole and placed in front of a firing squad and told to give non-admin folks root/sudo access, I'd still, at the very least, request that they draw up a waiver for me to sign saying I've performed this sin against my better judgment, under severe duress.
> If no, why don't you? If you allow root access to your knowledgeable users (ie developers with
> Linux experience), what do you do to keep them 'in line'?
This is really kind of a ridiculous question, I must say. "Developers with linux experience" != "*nix admin". Developers are well known in every environment I've ever worked in for writing algorithms that make your head spin and then five minutes later emailing the help desk to say "Yahoo is down, can you please fix it". They aren't admins. I wouldn't care if they were. They're not admins in *my* environment, familiar with *my* environment's systems management policies, they have no clue what sort of compliance procedures we need to follow, what other users on the system are doing and the resources *they* need, etc etc, the list goes on and on and on forever. The answer is no. No means no. No is always no. When I say no it means a thousand times no.
I've even had C-level types force me to give them root. That's when the old "create-a-fake-root-account-with-uid-501" comes into play. Look it up.
Good luck.
I found MoneyDance too, and like it a lot. If you've used quicken or MS Money before, it's going to be about 50 times more intuitive to use MoneyDance rather than GNUCash. The logic and model that gnucash uses to manage accounts makes my brain hurt.
http://overat.blogspot.com/2004/09/desktop-pc-vend ors.html
You might want to check out Fedora (or Red Hat) Directory Server, which I've had some success with. It's not absolute perfection, but it saved me from dealing with OpenLDAP, which is a bit harder to deal with, especially if you're used to easy-to-use GUIs and the like. Novell's eDirectory is also a great solution, and it runs under Linux as well. Truthfully, I'm not using their stuff, but I eval'd some of it, and their groupwise stuff with eDirectory might be just what you need. There have been lots of other good suggestions here, so I'll just throw a "me too" in there for things like Bynari and OpenXchange.
I can't imagine that even the PHB's still think of any of these "think tanks" or "research houses" as reliable sources of information. Are you gonna tell me that somewhere there's a guy with a tie on saying that he made his decision based on a Ken Brown article out of ADtI? Gimme a break. That guy would be so fired. I hereby declare any entity that puts out "research" which is backed by corporate funds a "FUD Factory". If anyone catches their boss looking at this drivel, please commence to beating them about the head and neck area, preferably using a club with a nail in it. Carry on.
I love the publisher, but I HATE this book. This book covers nothing new, and covers what has been covered ad nauseum poorly, and in such a way as to do a disservice to the reader. The book makes assertions that are completely incorrect, misleading, false, and many other very negative words. For just one highly simplistic example: Tom, LDAP is NOT a database. Gerald Carter's "LDAP System Administration" is a better intro to OpenLDAP, though not a great primer on higher-level LDAP concepts. For that, you need "Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directories": the bible of LDAP. Novell keeps lots of good docs on LDAP lying around, and if you need more on OpenLDAP, there are also some docs on my website. I REPEAT: STAY AWAY FROM THIS "book".
It is a strange statement to make, especially considering that you still can't buy music from Real's music store with the player that allegedly makes us "first class citizens". I blogged it
The reason 5GB isn't enough for the OSS web site developers is that they have no flipping clue how to design and use a database, and what features of an application to put in a database, and how to minimize front-end code by using a real-life database, and how to lay out data such that there are no inconsistencies, no duplication of data, no update anomalies, etc. Please, I beg you, show me a PostNuke site that runs with a backend database of larger than 5GB. Truth is, most open source web applications are unusable from a DBAs perspective. Probably not for the little bitty community sites and web logs, but by the time a Nuke-like site gets to 5GB on the backend, it'll probably be too slow to use anyway because they write the 30-40% of the data processing that would otherwise be done in the backend... in the front end. I used to be a Sybase DBA, and I now maintain a couple of PostgreSQL and MySQL installations. Postgres is far less mature than Sybase ASE, but not bad for a free solution. MySQL is, IMHO, nearly useless unless you just need an addressbook or something. Flame away, zealots.
I don't see why we should care that the phone runs linux. It's not like you can do anything with it unless you have windoze anyway. Gimme a PDA/phone/whatever that actually COMES with tools for Linux, and I don't give a crap what runs on the unit itself.
Ugh. Usually I wait until things near the bottom of the homepage before clicking a link. Otherwise, you can click and go for coffee. I hope the article is good. OOH! There's the Galeon tab turning blue now - Later! Good Luck.