As an autodidact who dropped out of college to go work in a recording studio and thence fell happily sideways into IT, I would offer that it is entirely possible to build a great IT career sans degree, but you're going to have to accept that most of the Corporate World won't hire you.
This is not a bad thing.
You probably don't want to work in corporate IT anyway. It often sucks, and that right hard. Why else would everyone bitch so mightily and with such frequency? Who wants to work for a bunch of shifty-eyed suits? Yeech, no thanks.
SMB consulting will be wide open to you, so long as you have skills. Small development shops won't care a whit about your creds, so long as you've got a sweet portfolio of work and a hunger to excel. Security firms are interested in your l33tness and whether they can trust you not to rob the joint. All of them will require you to simultaneously bust your ass and enjoy it, which is good.
Point being: if you've a modicum of talent and drive, you can do fine without the degree. Don't misunderstand: a degree is a fine thing and not to be discarded lightly, but you can have a great career with zero formal training so long as you really, really, really give a damn and will work very very hard.
PRIME DIRECTIVE: Regarding some of the above posts, If you are having to strategically "leave gaps" or otherwise write bad documentation for the purposes of monkey wrenching your replacement or making yourself indispensable, you suck to the 10th power. I have dealt with this sort of fuckery more times than I can count over the years, and every time I clearly see the signs of a small mind at work. Don't be that guy.
I've have to do this routine a gazillion times in my role as an small/midsize biz consultant. Here's the formula as I see it:
Find the keys to the kingdom, and document these. Don't worry about getting to the nitty-gritty yet: just find the info that will let you find everything else. Be extra careful to track down any crypto-related stuff (keys, passphrases) that can't be replaced or cracked. The further the old IT person recedes into the past, the harder this crap is to track down. Identify the scariest bits of the network as quickly as you can after you get hired and trumpet to the hills about how fragile, dangerous, and not your fault they are:-) Document all of this in plain-old-textfiles or something stupid simple, with bonus points if you keep it in version control.
Set up some bug-tracking/ticketing software and use that to track all of your day-to-day documentation and troubleshooting. Redmine is my personal favorite, but RT and Trac are also good choices. They have simple, built-in wikis that are perfectly sufficient for this purpose. Use the time-tracking and project management features in the software: when the boss asks you where all of your time is going, you run a report and show him. Track every minute of your day: this time is excellent leverage for you when dealing with management.
Examine the backups of the system (or implement them, worse) from ground zero. Use the backup audit as the trail of breadcrumbs that your documentation follows.
Beg, borrow, or steal a chunk of hardware that you can stick Xen/HyperV/VmWare/AcmeHypervisor on and start test restoring various systems/apps/environments. Document the hell out of the test restore process. That's the most precious documentation that you can possibly have.
Don't document things that document themselves. You're much better off paying $299 for a copy of LanSweeper or the like to reach out across your networks and document all of the mundane details in real-time so that you can focus on making shit work right. I've seen a million cases where the IT guy spent a month making a beautiful set of Visio network maps that became useless a month after they were created. That's a waste of your otherwise precious time.
Now, start making recommendations about how to fix the fragile/scary/dangerous systems. Use your ticketing/project management app to track your recommendations and leave a paper trail of your process. There will be a fair amount of CYA involved here - you're going to recommend that the boss spend a bunch of money on $x, so you had better document the reasons for it with care.
Whenever you make a recommendation that the company buy product $x to resolve problem $y, document it very very clearly in your system, and if the bosses nix your recommendation, document that in writing too. Yes, more CYA, but as the IT guy you're often the staked goat when something goes wrong. You need to be able to PROVE that you had recommended a sane course of action.
Last: Try not to stress. IT is fun if you do it right.
- avoid blacklisting input where ever possible. Accept known good, reject everything else.
- Encoding is going to be a problem. Be extra careful about how you handle encoding and decoding. An attacker will encode malicious input to get it past filters. Never assume that because you have obfuscated data with, say, base64 encoding, that an attacker won't be smart enough to decode it.
- Assume that an attacker will be able to breach your defenses, so make it difficult for him to do damage once he has compromised the system. if you have a particular function that accesses 'crown jewel' data, spend extra time making that function extra awesome. Minimize the privileges of the SQL accounts you issue queries with. That is easier said than done, of course. Layer your defenses, harass, annoy, and otherwise dispirit the enemy in a hundred small ways and make him move on to a softer target.
- Use frameworks. Don't try to roll your own if someone else has already don't the tough stuff for you. Writing a good login management system is hard to do right. Stand on the shoulders of giants if you can. This makes updates easier to manage too.
- Do all of the other stuff that I didn't mention here:-)
You haven't understood what I said. Read it again, please.
Your reply is a mirror image of the sort of apologia we hear from Biblical literalists who endlessly claim that all the evidence is in, there is no doubt, the translations are perfect, of course there is a God and the Bible is a perfect transcription of his will.
I think we can agree that this sort of fundamentalist literalism is wrongheaded - it presupposes perfect knowledge where there is in fact none. So too it is with the mirror-image, fundamentalist Atheism.
I repeat, isn't "there is no hard scientific evidence for the existence of an all-powerful creator" a more appropriate statement?
That's a very aggressive ontological argument. You're certain? Really? Totally, 100%, zero doubt?
Isn't "there is no hard scientific evidence for the existence of an all-powerful creator" a more appropriate statement?
Good scientists are always aware that there is a *possibility* that they haven't figured out everything. Absolute statements like "there is NO GOD" are the province of those who are deluded into thinking that they know everything.
David Brin hits another one....
on
Life Recorder
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· Score: 1
The real trouble with extracting usable petroleum from oil shale is that given the processes now employed, you actually wind up putting more raw energy into the process than you get out. The current process requires huge inputs of natural gas--these processes were invented at a time when North American natural gas was cheap. If you intend for oil shale to be a replacement for crude oil, you have to have a way of getting it out of the ground that uses less energy than is embodied in the oil shale to begin with; otherwise you're ignoring the second law of thermodynamics. At this point we're better off just burning the natural gas on its own rather than waste it on cracking oil shale.
Secondly, you have to examine the environmental impact of oil shale production. The process that is currently employed leaves behind absolutely massive quantities of polluted water and slag that must be disposed of. You're talking several barrels of toxic waste water for every barrel of oil equivalent produced. Ugh.
Conservation is the only viable alternative that we have right now. If we Americans could just take the simple steps of driving fuel-efficient cars, insulating our houses properly, investing in public transportation, and converting our shipping systems from inefficient trucks back to a rail system, we could vastly increase the energy-efficiency of our economy with very little pain. At what price will my countrymen wake up and begin to take these simple steps? Only when prices have become unbearable, and not likely before.
This has got to be one of the silliest, most insane, and totally pointless Rube Goldberg contraptions that I have ever heard of. The mere fact that it is being considered when much simpler, less expensive, and very effective options, like maybe USING FEWER FOSSIL FUELS are available is indicative of our current state of complete bloody-mindedness.
No question. I've set up loads of CentOS/Postfix/Mailscanner/ClamAV/spamassassin servers as relays for Exchange servers, and in EVERY case I've seen ClamAV's virus protection make the Symantec Exchange Plugin superfluous. If this was difficult to set up, I might take some issue with it, but when setting up ClamAV is as stupidly simple as installing an RPM and making one change to MailScanner.conf, you just can't complain. Hell, it even sets up freshclam to run as a cron job for you.
If more corportations would 'trust' open source, it would be very easy to put a virus/spam/dcc/greylist/mailscanner solution; even in front of their precious exchange server!
Absolutely. The clients that I have installed MailScanner for love it--spam just goes away, and I sleep better at night knowing that thier Exchange servers aren't naked to the net on 25.
ClamAV is an outstanding piece of work, and I love it.
To claim that one lifestyle is superior is hypocritical, egotistical, and superficial.
That is a nonsensical statement, and exemplary of the sort of moral relativism that is prevalent among many people today. Of course some lifestyles are superior to others: how could you possibly claim that the "lifestyle" of someone like Mother Teresa was not superior that of Hermann Goering? It doesn't make a bit of sense, unless you're willing to assert that morality is irrelevant to quality, which makes this argument even more silly.
If we apply the generalization to the librarian's statements, it begins to make more sense, however. Apart from that, he makes it seem as though they're "inferior" for not having read "complex texts". Inferior in education, perhaps, but in the grand scheme of things education is a good indicator of a person's worth as a librarian, physicist, or dinner guest, but not a great indicator of a person's intrinsic qualities. This Librarian is behaving as many academics do when faced with "competition from the great unwashed:" with disdain and snobbery.
That being said, I think that the blogosphere is a good and vital part of the datasphere as a whole, and I'm glad it's there, if for no other reason than it serves as an audit for the fourth estate: if enough people cry "bullshit!" simultaneously, they'll eventually be heard.
Yep, no question. The Win 2000 box that I use for audio production has been up and running for almost three years now, and I never have trouble with it. I don't use it for anything but my audio stuff, occasional web browsing, and a few games, and the thing hums along nicely.
If the user knows what the hell they are doing, a Win32 box can be a good machine for a long time. I think the fundamental problem is that most users expect that they will never have to think about anything when they are using thier machines. They don't read dialog boxes when they pop up. They don't question when a web site tells them to install an ActiveX control. They click on the links in thier spam. They do all sorts of things that will trash a Win32 box in no time flat, almost all of which could be avoided with a little education and vigilance on thier part.
Problem with this is that few of these people have any desire to learn the things they need to know and do the things they need to do in order to keep thier machines running along. Run Ad-Aware once a week? Run Windows Update whenever the little icon harrasses me? Stop browsing to all of those porn sites that I like so much? Whatever.You can't win if the user isn't willing to do what they have to to keep themselves safe.
Right there with you on that one. The whole reason that I got in to working with computers was so that I could do MIDI sequencing. 15 years later I'm making a living working with the things, as opposed to with my guitars and keyboards, but that's just fine. Being a musician is a crappy way to make a living unless you're on the top of the muckheap anyway.
Linux Pro Audio has come a long way in the last few years, especially with the advent of astounding projects like ALSA, JACK, and Ardour. If only we could get one of the biggies (i.e. Digidesign, MOTU) to make the leap of faith needed to build upon the incredible audio platform that Linux can offer, life would be better for musicians everywhere. I wouldn't even insist that they GPL thier core software; just the driver development and plugin architecture work would provide Linux Pro Audio with immeasurable benefits.
The posts above are dead on when they say "get a good graphic designer on your team!" By the same token, that also means that you have to develop the entire site with this graphic designer in mind, who no doubt is NOT a programmer.
My wife and I have done a number of collaborative projects with her on design and me on programming. The first time we did this, it was an unmitigated disaster because I had not taken into account the necessities of "plugging in" the design after the plumbing was done; think of this like putting down a lathe for all of the plaster to stick to after you have run the plumbing and electrical--without the lathe, the plaster won't stay up, and consequently everything looks like crap.
The next time around, we based ALL of the pages' formatting on CSS. By sitting down and spending an hour laying out what elements were going to use which tag, we saved ourselves a lot of trouble. That way, I got to completely ignore the design, and she was able to set up the look without us screwing each other up, and if a change needed to be made, it took a minute or two as opposed to an hour of fiddling.
Have a look at CSSZenGarden for some great examples of how this kind of design approach can really make life more beautiful.
Back in my day, sonny, we compiled everything from source or ran slackware as our desktop os! And we liked it! You kids with yer newfangled installers, yer thrice damned GUI configuration tools, and yer sinful ignorance of the command line, you don't know nothin! I'll bet you lot have never even had to use Pine as a mailreader! Ever had to use a text browser? I didn't think so! Quit yer whinin' and get to compiling, ya buck of lazy, no-good, shiftless brats!"
Concur...studying the piano and classical guitar did wonders for me as a child/teen, both from a discipline standpoint as well as from a social standpoint.
Never underestimate the effect of an instrument well played on a young girl's loins....
No Doubt--having Dreamweaver tie into Apache/Postgre/MySql would send me running to CompUSSR to pick up a copy. Flash? I couldn't care less--.swf is one of the more evil file extensions out there.
Fireworks would be nice too--it's great for doing quick mockups of navbars, etc. Fireworks doesn't write the cleanest code ever, but when you can do a prototype navbar in about 10 minutes, who cares? Not I, at least.
OTOH, I doubt that the developers of NVU are terribly pleased. There will be those out there that are all about a free WSIWYG tool, but they're going to lose a lot of pro designers and others who could potentially contribute to its development. I'm going to keep my eye on Nvu, but until it's stable and will do 95% of what I ask of Dreamweaver, I'm still going to have keep that damn VMWare Win2000 install around.
Just grabbed it and had a preliminary look: I'm really liking what I see, with one caveat.
In the course of my daily work, I have to deal with many hundreds of small audio files simultaneously. When I tried to open up 85 individual files in Audacity, well, it wasn't pretty.
If this one issue is resolved, I can ditch Sound Forge (and thus my need to constantly reboot into Win2000) for day to day chopping and cleaning tasks. I can't wait.
Yup, sounds like an OSS user. Rudely suggesting the wrong program for the wrong task.
Rudely? Don't be an ass. An introduction does not in any way imply that I was attempting to get her to suddenly drop all of the subtle, powerful, and eminently suitable tools that she uses in the course of her design work. I was more interested in her reaction to the interface, as you would have plainly seen had you read my comment sans preconceived notions.
Since you missed it, my point is that unless a piece of open source software does a better job of making the UI learning curve easier and begins to provide complete feature replacement, it ain't ready for prime time.
When I tried to introduce my wife (graphic designer/QuarkXPress/Photoshop/Illustator ninja) to The Gimp 1.2, the first thing that happened was this:
Where's the shape drawing tool? Whaddya mean I have to use the selection tool to draw a circle? That's stupid. Weeellllllll, let's make a little text instead. One line? I can't auto-kern? Where the hell's the preview? Ok, there we go.....dammit, maybe not. Where in the fuc.....oh, there it is. Hey, how do I select multiple layers--the damn shift key doesn't work. The hell with this...what good is this thing, anyway?
There's a lot to be said for standardized user interface elements if you want to get the professionals on board..........
I actually knew of a guy in Murfreesboro, TN that had the misfortune of having this as his phone number. He got all sorts of calls from people who were just dialing the number for kicks, and wound up putting "No, Jenny's not here," on his answering machine.
I think that you raise some interesting points here, particularly that the need to install software is a handicap. However, considering that most of these live CD distributions require a fair amount of fiddling to get them working properly on many machines (XFree86 setup, sometimes passing along peculiar kernel params, etc.) I also think that this paradigm has a way to go, rather like desktop linux itself. By the same token, on a standardized platform this sort of distribution method could be wickedly easy to use, particularly for Grandma and her need for Internet/Email/Word Processor/Minesweeper/Solitaire (plus GNUchess for Grandpa,) or for a dedicated Game/Internet station for the living room. The possibilities are limitless.
Guess it's time to get to hackin and get those install routines up to snuff.
I've found that a multimonitor rig is the only way to fly when you're dealing with heavy-duty Audio and Video Editing. In the case of the former, I stick Sound Forge 6's editing window on the main monitor, and the plug-in window on the second, along with a copy of Total Commander for file mangement. Same thing goes for Nuendo: stick your mixer and plugins on the secondary, and your editing window on the first--extreme goodness.
For video editing and DVD authoring work, this is even more of a lifesaver. I'll stick Final Cut on the main monitor, and then either DVD Studio Pro or Photoshop (or both) on the secondary. Add in a Video Monitor for checks, and it fills up your desktop pretty fast, but the benefits are worth the space used. The extra 300-700 bucks you spend on a second monitor are made back on the first job you do with them, even if only in saved frustration as you no longer have to burrow through the 5 open apps on your monitor to figure out what the hell you need to be looking at.
....now if only I can come up with the $$$ for a new cinema display I'll really be ready to kick some multidisplay ass;-).......
The same thing goes for my developement environment: Bluefish or XEmacs on the main window and Mozilla on the secondary, along with a couple of terminals for file management and a MySQL monitor. It's the only way to fly.....
Slashdot Mirror
As an autodidact who dropped out of college to go work in a recording studio and thence fell happily sideways into IT, I would offer that it is entirely possible to build a great IT career sans degree, but you're going to have to accept that most of the Corporate World won't hire you.
This is not a bad thing.
You probably don't want to work in corporate IT anyway. It often sucks, and that right hard. Why else would everyone bitch so mightily and with such frequency? Who wants to work for a bunch of shifty-eyed suits? Yeech, no thanks.
SMB consulting will be wide open to you, so long as you have skills. Small development shops won't care a whit about your creds, so long as you've got a sweet portfolio of work and a hunger to excel. Security firms are interested in your l33tness and whether they can trust you not to rob the joint. All of them will require you to simultaneously bust your ass and enjoy it, which is good.
Point being: if you've a modicum of talent and drive, you can do fine without the degree. Don't misunderstand: a degree is a fine thing and not to be discarded lightly, but you can have a great career with zero formal training so long as you really, really, really give a damn and will work very very hard.
mod parent +1 essential. It is awfully easy to set up a painfully insecure documentation system, and rather more difficult to do correctly.
PRIME DIRECTIVE: Regarding some of the above posts, If you are having to strategically "leave gaps" or otherwise write bad documentation for the purposes of monkey wrenching your replacement or making yourself indispensable, you suck to the 10th power. I have dealt with this sort of fuckery more times than I can count over the years, and every time I clearly see the signs of a small mind at work. Don't be that guy.
I've have to do this routine a gazillion times in my role as an small/midsize biz consultant. Here's the formula as I see it:
Find the keys to the kingdom, and document these. Don't worry about getting to the nitty-gritty yet: just find the info that will let you find everything else. Be extra careful to track down any crypto-related stuff (keys, passphrases) that can't be replaced or cracked. The further the old IT person recedes into the past, the harder this crap is to track down. Identify the scariest bits of the network as quickly as you can after you get hired and trumpet to the hills about how fragile, dangerous, and not your fault they are :-) Document all of this in plain-old-textfiles or something stupid simple, with bonus points if you keep it in version control.
Set up some bug-tracking/ticketing software and use that to track all of your day-to-day documentation and troubleshooting. Redmine is my personal favorite, but RT and Trac are also good choices. They have simple, built-in wikis that are perfectly sufficient for this purpose. Use the time-tracking and project management features in the software: when the boss asks you where all of your time is going, you run a report and show him. Track every minute of your day: this time is excellent leverage for you when dealing with management.
Examine the backups of the system (or implement them, worse) from ground zero. Use the backup audit as the trail of breadcrumbs that your documentation follows.
Beg, borrow, or steal a chunk of hardware that you can stick Xen/HyperV/VmWare/AcmeHypervisor on and start test restoring various systems/apps/environments. Document the hell out of the test restore process. That's the most precious documentation that you can possibly have.
Don't document things that document themselves. You're much better off paying $299 for a copy of LanSweeper or the like to reach out across your networks and document all of the mundane details in real-time so that you can focus on making shit work right. I've seen a million cases where the IT guy spent a month making a beautiful set of Visio network maps that became useless a month after they were created. That's a waste of your otherwise precious time.
Now, start making recommendations about how to fix the fragile/scary/dangerous systems. Use your ticketing/project management app to track your recommendations and leave a paper trail of your process. There will be a fair amount of CYA involved here - you're going to recommend that the boss spend a bunch of money on $x, so you had better document the reasons for it with care.
Whenever you make a recommendation that the company buy product $x to resolve problem $y, document it very very clearly in your system, and if the bosses nix your recommendation, document that in writing too. Yes, more CYA, but as the IT guy you're often the staked goat when something goes wrong. You need to be able to PROVE that you had recommended a sane course of action.
Last: Try not to stress. IT is fun if you do it right.
- avoid blacklisting input where ever possible. Accept known good, reject everything else.
- Encoding is going to be a problem. Be extra careful about how you handle encoding and decoding. An attacker will encode malicious input to get it past filters. Never assume that because you have obfuscated data with, say, base64 encoding, that an attacker won't be smart enough to decode it.
- Assume that an attacker will be able to breach your defenses, so make it difficult for him to do damage once he has compromised the system. if you have a particular function that accesses 'crown jewel' data, spend extra time making that function extra awesome. Minimize the privileges of the SQL accounts you issue queries with. That is easier said than done, of course. Layer your defenses, harass, annoy, and otherwise dispirit the enemy in a hundred small ways and make him move on to a softer target.
- Use frameworks. Don't try to roll your own if someone else has already don't the tough stuff for you. Writing a good login management system is hard to do right. Stand on the shoulders of giants if you can. This makes updates easier to manage too.
- Do all of the other stuff that I didn't mention here :-)
You haven't understood what I said. Read it again, please.
Your reply is a mirror image of the sort of apologia we hear from Biblical literalists who endlessly claim that all the evidence is in, there is no doubt, the translations are perfect, of course there is a God and the Bible is a perfect transcription of his will.
I think we can agree that this sort of fundamentalist literalism is wrongheaded - it presupposes perfect knowledge where there is in fact none. So too it is with the mirror-image, fundamentalist Atheism.
I repeat, isn't "there is no hard scientific evidence for the existence of an all-powerful creator" a more appropriate statement?
>>>Look, there is NO GOD, there is just nature.
That's a very aggressive ontological argument. You're certain? Really? Totally, 100%, zero doubt?
Isn't "there is no hard scientific evidence for the existence of an all-powerful creator" a more appropriate statement?
Good scientists are always aware that there is a *possibility* that they haven't figured out everything. Absolute statements like "there is NO GOD" are the province of those who are deluded into thinking that they know everything.
Well, there's another prediction from David Brin's Earth down. http://earthbydavidbrin.pbworks.com/Predictions
The real trouble with extracting usable petroleum from oil shale is that given the processes now employed, you actually wind up putting more raw energy into the process than you get out. The current process requires huge inputs of natural gas--these processes were invented at a time when North American natural gas was cheap. If you intend for oil shale to be a replacement for crude oil, you have to have a way of getting it out of the ground that uses less energy than is embodied in the oil shale to begin with; otherwise you're ignoring the second law of thermodynamics. At this point we're better off just burning the natural gas on its own rather than waste it on cracking oil shale.
Secondly, you have to examine the environmental impact of oil shale production. The process that is currently employed leaves behind absolutely massive quantities of polluted water and slag that must be disposed of. You're talking several barrels of toxic waste water for every barrel of oil equivalent produced. Ugh.
Conservation is the only viable alternative that we have right now. If we Americans could just take the simple steps of driving fuel-efficient cars, insulating our houses properly, investing in public transportation, and converting our shipping systems from inefficient trucks back to a rail system, we could vastly increase the energy-efficiency of our economy with very little pain. At what price will my countrymen wake up and begin to take these simple steps? Only when prices have become unbearable, and not likely before.
This has got to be one of the silliest, most insane, and totally pointless Rube Goldberg contraptions that I have ever heard of. The mere fact that it is being considered when much simpler, less expensive, and very effective options, like maybe USING FEWER FOSSIL FUELS are available is indicative of our current state of complete bloody-mindedness.
No question. I've set up loads of CentOS/Postfix/Mailscanner/ClamAV/spamassassin servers as relays for Exchange servers, and in EVERY case I've seen ClamAV's virus protection make the Symantec Exchange Plugin superfluous. If this was difficult to set up, I might take some issue with it, but when setting up ClamAV is as stupidly simple as installing an RPM and making one change to MailScanner.conf, you just can't complain. Hell, it even sets up freshclam to run as a cron job for you.
If more corportations would 'trust' open source, it would be very easy to put a virus/spam/dcc/greylist/mailscanner solution; even in front of their precious exchange server!
Absolutely. The clients that I have installed MailScanner for love it--spam just goes away, and I sleep better at night knowing that thier Exchange servers aren't naked to the net on 25.
ClamAV is an outstanding piece of work, and I love it.
To claim that one lifestyle is superior is hypocritical, egotistical, and superficial.
That is a nonsensical statement, and exemplary of the sort of moral relativism that is prevalent among many people today. Of course some lifestyles are superior to others: how could you possibly claim that the "lifestyle" of someone like Mother Teresa was not superior that of Hermann Goering? It doesn't make a bit of sense, unless you're willing to assert that morality is irrelevant to quality, which makes this argument even more silly.
If we apply the generalization to the librarian's statements, it begins to make more sense, however. Apart from that, he makes it seem as though they're "inferior" for not having read "complex texts". Inferior in education, perhaps, but in the grand scheme of things education is a good indicator of a person's worth as a librarian, physicist, or dinner guest, but not a great indicator of a person's intrinsic qualities. This Librarian is behaving as many academics do when faced with "competition from the great unwashed:" with disdain and snobbery.
That being said, I think that the blogosphere is a good and vital part of the datasphere as a whole, and I'm glad it's there, if for no other reason than it serves as an audit for the fourth estate: if enough people cry "bullshit!" simultaneously, they'll eventually be heard.
Yep, no question. The Win 2000 box that I use for audio production has been up and running for almost three years now, and I never have trouble with it. I don't use it for anything but my audio stuff, occasional web browsing, and a few games, and the thing hums along nicely.
If the user knows what the hell they are doing, a Win32 box can be a good machine for a long time. I think the fundamental problem is that most users expect that they will never have to think about anything when they are using thier machines. They don't read dialog boxes when they pop up. They don't question when a web site tells them to install an ActiveX control. They click on the links in thier spam. They do all sorts of things that will trash a Win32 box in no time flat, almost all of which could be avoided with a little education and vigilance on thier part.
Problem with this is that few of these people have any desire to learn the things they need to know and do the things they need to do in order to keep thier machines running along. Run Ad-Aware once a week? Run Windows Update whenever the little icon harrasses me? Stop browsing to all of those porn sites that I like so much? Whatever.You can't win if the user isn't willing to do what they have to to keep themselves safe.
hmmmmm. A DirectX to OpenGL translation layer. sounds simple. How about a simple relativity to quantam mechanics filter while we're at it?
Right there with you on that one. The whole reason that I got in to working with computers was so that I could do MIDI sequencing. 15 years later I'm making a living working with the things, as opposed to with my guitars and keyboards, but that's just fine. Being a musician is a crappy way to make a living unless you're on the top of the muckheap anyway.
Linux Pro Audio has come a long way in the last few years, especially with the advent of astounding projects like ALSA, JACK, and Ardour. If only we could get one of the biggies (i.e. Digidesign, MOTU) to make the leap of faith needed to build upon the incredible audio platform that Linux can offer, life would be better for musicians everywhere. I wouldn't even insist that they GPL thier core software; just the driver development and plugin architecture work would provide Linux Pro Audio with immeasurable benefits.
The posts above are dead on when they say "get a good graphic designer on your team!" By the same token, that also means that you have to develop the entire site with this graphic designer in mind, who no doubt is NOT a programmer.
My wife and I have done a number of collaborative projects with her on design and me on programming. The first time we did this, it was an unmitigated disaster because I had not taken into account the necessities of "plugging in" the design after the plumbing was done; think of this like putting down a lathe for all of the plaster to stick to after you have run the plumbing and electrical--without the lathe, the plaster won't stay up, and consequently everything looks like crap.
The next time around, we based ALL of the pages' formatting on CSS. By sitting down and spending an hour laying out what elements were going to use which tag, we saved ourselves a lot of trouble. That way, I got to completely ignore the design, and she was able to set up the look without us screwing each other up, and if a change needed to be made, it took a minute or two as opposed to an hour of fiddling.
Have a look at CSSZenGarden for some great examples of how this kind of design approach can really make life more beautiful.
$unixgeezer_flameon = "
Back in my day, sonny, we compiled everything from source or ran slackware as our desktop os! And we liked it! You kids with yer newfangled installers, yer thrice damned GUI configuration tools, and yer sinful ignorance of the command line, you don't know nothin! I'll bet you lot have never even had to use Pine as a mailreader! Ever had to use a text browser? I didn't think so! Quit yer whinin' and get to compiling, ya buck of lazy, no-good, shiftless brats!"
Concur...studying the piano and classical guitar did wonders for me as a child/teen, both from a discipline standpoint as well as from a social standpoint.
Never underestimate the effect of an instrument well played on a young girl's loins....
No Doubt--having Dreamweaver tie into Apache/Postgre/MySql would send me running to CompUSSR to pick up a copy. Flash? I couldn't care less--.swf is one of the more evil file extensions out there.
Fireworks would be nice too--it's great for doing quick mockups of navbars, etc. Fireworks doesn't write the cleanest code ever, but when you can do a prototype navbar in about 10 minutes, who cares? Not I, at least.
OTOH, I doubt that the developers of NVU are terribly pleased. There will be those out there that are all about a free WSIWYG tool, but they're going to lose a lot of pro designers and others who could potentially contribute to its development. I'm going to keep my eye on Nvu, but until it's stable and will do 95% of what I ask of Dreamweaver, I'm still going to have keep that damn VMWare Win2000 install around.
Just grabbed it and had a preliminary look: I'm really liking what I see, with one caveat.
In the course of my daily work, I have to deal with many hundreds of small audio files simultaneously. When I tried to open up 85 individual files in Audacity, well, it wasn't pretty.
If this one issue is resolved, I can ditch Sound Forge (and thus my need to constantly reboot into Win2000) for day to day chopping and cleaning tasks. I can't wait.
DOH! Mea Culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Yup, sounds like an OSS user. Rudely suggesting the wrong program for the wrong task.
Rudely? Don't be an ass. An introduction does not in any way imply that I was attempting to get her to suddenly drop all of the subtle, powerful, and eminently suitable tools that she uses in the course of her design work. I was more interested in her reaction to the interface, as you would have plainly seen had you read my comment sans preconceived notions.
Since you missed it, my point is that unless a piece of open source software does a better job of making the UI learning curve easier and begins to provide complete feature replacement, it ain't ready for prime time.
When I tried to introduce my wife (graphic designer/QuarkXPress/Photoshop/Illustator ninja) to The Gimp 1.2, the first thing that happened was this:
Where's the shape drawing tool? Whaddya mean I have to use the selection tool to draw a circle? That's stupid. Weeellllllll, let's make a little text instead. One line? I can't auto-kern? Where the hell's the preview? Ok, there we go.....dammit, maybe not. Where in the fuc.....oh, there it is. Hey, how do I select multiple layers--the damn shift key doesn't work. The hell with this...what good is this thing, anyway?
There's a lot to be said for standardized user interface elements if you want to get the professionals on board..........
I actually knew of a guy in Murfreesboro, TN that had the misfortune of having this as his phone number. He got all sorts of calls from people who were just dialing the number for kicks, and wound up putting "No, Jenny's not here," on his answering machine.
I think that you raise some interesting points here, particularly that the need to install software is a handicap. However, considering that most of these live CD distributions require a fair amount of fiddling to get them working properly on many machines (XFree86 setup, sometimes passing along peculiar kernel params, etc.) I also think that this paradigm has a way to go, rather like desktop linux itself. By the same token, on a standardized platform this sort of distribution method could be wickedly easy to use, particularly for Grandma and her need for Internet/Email/Word Processor/Minesweeper/Solitaire (plus GNUchess for Grandpa,) or for a dedicated Game/Internet station for the living room. The possibilities are limitless.
Guess it's time to get to hackin and get those install routines up to snuff.
I've found that a multimonitor rig is the only way to fly when you're dealing with heavy-duty Audio and Video Editing. In the case of the former, I stick Sound Forge 6's editing window on the main monitor, and the plug-in window on the second, along with a copy of Total Commander for file mangement. Same thing goes for Nuendo: stick your mixer and plugins on the secondary, and your editing window on the first--extreme goodness.
For video editing and DVD authoring work, this is even more of a lifesaver. I'll stick Final Cut on the main monitor, and then either DVD Studio Pro or Photoshop (or both) on the secondary. Add in a Video Monitor for checks, and it fills up your desktop pretty fast, but the benefits are worth the space used. The extra 300-700 bucks you spend on a second monitor are made back on the first job you do with them, even if only in saved frustration as you no longer have to burrow through the 5 open apps on your monitor to figure out what the hell you need to be looking at.
....now if only I can come up with the $$$ for a new cinema display I'll really be ready to kick some multidisplay ass ;-).......
The same thing goes for my developement environment: Bluefish or XEmacs on the main window and Mozilla on the secondary, along with a couple of terminals for file management and a MySQL monitor. It's the only way to fly.....