Not what Micros~1 needed. Then again they've always had big problems with adoption.
A dollar's worth of free advice -- Stick to Xbox, mobile, and your business segments.
Dell and Walmart's E-machines offer machines WITHOUT OS's (Well FreeDOS), or with a Linux or something that doesn't include a tax to Micros~1.
It's most definitely not meaningless.
Your micro channel point -- weak, it was never REALLY really standard (think ISA)
CRLF CR LF -- Who cares, character sets are more of a challenge. Should everyone just speak and write English so you don't have to think/code so hard?
And lastly, you're like 2% of the world computer users that use a Mac. When you call up for tech support on something that "no one" uses, you're going to find someone who is clueless when you demand support on your Mac.
There is no question in my mind. I had to make a similar choice and if I had to do it all over again I'd choose Computer Science. I'm currently a Sys Admin (heavy in the IT arena, not so much a coder) and probably will remain so for my career. But from my experience it's a LOT easier to be trained as a Computer Scientist and apply all that powerful knowledge to very practical problems. I would imagine it's MUCH harder to be trained in practical IT stuff then attempt to be a Computer Scientist after the fact. In fact I've observed a few folks who fall into this category, and they just don't have the "depth" of knowledge that Computer Science folks have.
Unless you know you just want to be an "IT Guy", declare Computer Science.
I don't like to think of myself as a douchebag:-). I'm a BIND guy, I just am. I actually picked up the NEWEST edition of O'Reilly's "DNS & BIND" (5th edition now just in case you were curious), and read about just how hard it is to maintain a LARGE number of dynamically updateable host records. You've got key-pairs for each records, and you've got no other way than port 53 to update records.
Roll my own, yeah I know, but remember, I'm not a developer and I'm currently using DynDNS.org which has HTTP updates (required in my case) and a nice web gui that non-nerds can manage. I need a (shudder) "turnkey" solution.
We use HTTP for dynamic updates now (courtesy of DynDNS.org) and a large percentage of the gear we have in the field (attached to scientific equipment) is embedded equipment that is unable to run "nsupdate" or other types of executables. We're limited to the web GUI presented to us. I really regret not explicitly stating that in my submission to Slashdot.
As far as BIND "not being scalable", I meant that in the context of DDNS only. BIND requires a key-pair for each Dynamically update-able host record. Further, there's no nice web GUI which some of our folks have gotten to a la DynDNS.org -- doable, but is it easy? Not really, is it "scalable" then? Doubtful.
So sure we could "roll our own" w/ bind, supplying a GUI and a HTTP-based auth/update facility, but I was posting because I thought perhaps ISP's or large organizations such as ours had solved this problem already. Don't wanna re-invent the wheel and all the rest.
How many hosts do you manage in your zone? Like I said we're in the "thousands". DynDNS.org might have offlined the biggest users of the service in favor of keeping the much larger number of "smaller" users online. Believe me, they were offline for at least 2 days from our perspective, and I got to speak with their phone support guys a LOT. It didn't help they didn't have an ETA for when threats and outages would be mitigated.
-Steve
Thanks for the response and this looks like it would address at least some of my concerns (User directories), but it might not cover Applications and system settings that they've configured (each user is administrator of their own box, yes it's really required).
I also read the PDF on "System Imaging" but was sad to see that the literature only covered system imaging for installing/configuring new boxes. I'm looking at duping live boxes, this may be possible, just wasn't covered in the PDF.
In addition, in the "User Management" PDF it looked like you had to setup a domain, which requires an XServe (or something running Mac OS X Server) and a domain which is a bit more overhead than I would like. Doesn't mean I won't do it, but if I told you that "Sure you can do this fairly simple thing in Windows, you just need a domain", I'd probably laugh at you. Nothing personal, I know a Windows domain can't be the same thing as a Mac one, etc. etc. I'll read about Mac domains etc. etc. and make the right choice.
"Portable Home Directories" sound a bit like "roaming profiles" (Windows-land) and isn't doable in my case. All I have are laptops and they're almost never in the building -- they're out "in the field" for long stretches of time. Am I missing something? Thanks for the suggestions
I know all about Target-Disk mode, but on the destination machine, how do I copy the image over? I mean, I'd have to be booted off a CD correct? You've gotta be running some kind of software on the destination mac to make the copy, otherwise you'd be overwriting the OS you're running, etc.
I mean, that's a real piece of shit article. I was actually interested in this topic, as I'm facing some challenges integrating macs into the workflow here. And really the hardest thing I've found is dealing with the hardware.
Anyone got a solution for me on this problem?
We don't actually have any Mac desktops, just about 10 MacBook Pro's (of which the majority are 17"). We seem to have had a run of bad luck with our laptops and are sending one in around once every couple of weeks or so for various hardware problems.
This does happen (albeit at much less frequency) with our Dell Latitude laptops. Nevertheless, when it happens to a Dell, I pop out the hard drive (2 screws), pop in a drive with a base OS on it, stick the user's disk in another identical laptop and they're on their way. Then I send in the broken laptop with base OS hard disk into Dell. It comes back and goes in the "spares" pile, everyone's happy. I've tried to do that with the MBP's and I don't have to tell you (wait, yeah I do, it's 26 screws each way) what a pain that is.
The only way I can think to do this is to make an image of the user's hard drive over the network somewhere. Then restore it back to another laptop (that's in a spare MBP, that I do have), and ensure the user's data, etc is all there. Then nuke the broken laptop's hard drive, reinstall with a base OS and send off to Apple.
Is there a better way? It can even cost money, I don't care. Thanks.
We definitely have the Applecare on all the machines and we're up to two spares now (for a total pool of about 10 laptops). We started with one spare and it just wasn't enough, so we got another. Their support is pretty spotty though. No on-site service and I've gotten a very non-consistent experience with their folks. Case in point. We had a powerbrick for one of the users (we had a spare) go bad. I went to the Apple store to simply exchange it. The employee (wtf are they called anyway? They're not geniuses) swore up and down he couldn't simply exchange it. He had to get me an appointment at the Genius Bar ("it's just four hours sir, can you do that?") to replace the brick. I went round and round with him and his manager to no avail, they said there was troubleshooting and paperwork, etc. I drove my ass across town to the other Apple store and the guy looked at me for a second, walked right over to the shelf and handed me a box. He took my old one, I walked out. Grr.
What I hear about the PowerPC hardware is all good! But we don't have any, we just switched when the Intel stuff came out.
I'm not claiming a damn thing about Macs and other computers, I'm just claiming that me and my users are having a hell of a time using this seemingly decent OS due to the fact we're always having hardware problems.
Slashdot Mirror
This is great! All academics should do this!
Fried Ice Cream Fried Snickers Bars Fried Bacon Fried Pickles Fried Avocado Fried Coca Cola Fried Key Lime Pie it doesn't really end....
Seriously. If we're a society that values equality, why do $authors continue to write this way?????
Not what Micros~1 needed. Then again they've always had big problems with adoption. A dollar's worth of free advice -- Stick to Xbox, mobile, and your business segments.
Nukes your phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_7
Just because something is a government policy, DEFINITELY doesn't mean there's a good reason for it existing...
Except for the fact they are one of many many many many devices in the category of devices described by the article.
Dell and Walmart's E-machines offer machines WITHOUT OS's (Well FreeDOS), or with a Linux or something that doesn't include a tax to Micros~1. It's most definitely not meaningless.
Dude, you're in the minority... deal with it...
Your micro channel point -- weak, it was never REALLY really standard (think ISA)
CRLF CR LF -- Who cares, character sets are more of a challenge. Should everyone just speak and write English so you don't have to think/code so hard?
And lastly, you're like 2% of the world computer users that use a Mac. When you call up for tech support on something that "no one" uses, you're going to find someone who is clueless when you demand support on your Mac.
Get a life...
(Typed on a MacBook Pro)
-Steve
There is no question in my mind. I had to make a similar choice and if I had to do it all over again I'd choose Computer Science. I'm currently a Sys Admin (heavy in the IT arena, not so much a coder) and probably will remain so for my career. But from my experience it's a LOT easier to be trained as a Computer Scientist and apply all that powerful knowledge to very practical problems. I would imagine it's MUCH harder to be trained in practical IT stuff then attempt to be a Computer Scientist after the fact. In fact I've observed a few folks who fall into this category, and they just don't have the "depth" of knowledge that Computer Science folks have. Unless you know you just want to be an "IT Guy", declare Computer Science.
In fact, if I put my statistics hat on just right, I can prove to you with very high confidence that at least one motor has failed.
I don't like to think of myself as a douchebag :-). I'm a BIND guy, I just am. I actually picked up the NEWEST edition of O'Reilly's "DNS & BIND" (5th edition now just in case you were curious), and read about just how hard it is to maintain a LARGE number of dynamically updateable host records. You've got key-pairs for each records, and you've got no other way than port 53 to update records.
Roll my own, yeah I know, but remember, I'm not a developer and I'm currently using DynDNS.org which has HTTP updates (required in my case) and a nice web gui that non-nerds can manage. I need a (shudder) "turnkey" solution.
-Steve
We use HTTP for dynamic updates now (courtesy of DynDNS.org) and a large percentage of the gear we have in the field (attached to scientific equipment) is embedded equipment that is unable to run "nsupdate" or other types of executables. We're limited to the web GUI presented to us. I really regret not explicitly stating that in my submission to Slashdot.
As far as BIND "not being scalable", I meant that in the context of DDNS only. BIND requires a key-pair for each Dynamically update-able host record. Further, there's no nice web GUI which some of our folks have gotten to a la DynDNS.org -- doable, but is it easy? Not really, is it "scalable" then? Doubtful.
So sure we could "roll our own" w/ bind, supplying a GUI and a HTTP-based auth/update facility, but I was posting because I thought perhaps ISP's or large organizations such as ours had solved this problem already. Don't wanna re-invent the wheel and all the rest.
-Steve
How many hosts do you manage in your zone? Like I said we're in the "thousands". DynDNS.org might have offlined the biggest users of the service in favor of keeping the much larger number of "smaller" users online. Believe me, they were offline for at least 2 days from our perspective, and I got to speak with their phone support guys a LOT. It didn't help they didn't have an ETA for when threats and outages would be mitigated. -Steve
Thanks for the response and this looks like it would address at least some of my concerns (User directories), but it might not cover Applications and system settings that they've configured (each user is administrator of their own box, yes it's really required).
I also read the PDF on "System Imaging" but was sad to see that the literature only covered system imaging for installing/configuring new boxes. I'm looking at duping live boxes, this may be possible, just wasn't covered in the PDF.
In addition, in the "User Management" PDF it looked like you had to setup a domain, which requires an XServe (or something running Mac OS X Server) and a domain which is a bit more overhead than I would like. Doesn't mean I won't do it, but if I told you that "Sure you can do this fairly simple thing in Windows, you just need a domain", I'd probably laugh at you. Nothing personal, I know a Windows domain can't be the same thing as a Mac one, etc. etc. I'll read about Mac domains etc. etc. and make the right choice.
-Steve
"Portable Home Directories" sound a bit like "roaming profiles" (Windows-land) and isn't doable in my case. All I have are laptops and they're almost never in the building -- they're out "in the field" for long stretches of time. Am I missing something? Thanks for the suggestions
-Steve
I know all about Target-Disk mode, but on the destination machine, how do I copy the image over? I mean, I'd have to be booted off a CD correct? You've gotta be running some kind of software on the destination mac to make the copy, otherwise you'd be overwriting the OS you're running, etc.
-Steve
Err -- subject should have been "What a crappy article && a question for Mac folks"
I mean, that's a real piece of shit article. I was actually interested in this topic, as I'm facing some challenges integrating macs into the workflow here. And really the hardest thing I've found is dealing with the hardware.
Anyone got a solution for me on this problem?
We don't actually have any Mac desktops, just about 10 MacBook Pro's (of which the majority are 17"). We seem to have had a run of bad luck with our laptops and are sending one in around once every couple of weeks or so for various hardware problems.
This does happen (albeit at much less frequency) with our Dell Latitude laptops. Nevertheless, when it happens to a Dell, I pop out the hard drive (2 screws), pop in a drive with a base OS on it, stick the user's disk in another identical laptop and they're on their way. Then I send in the broken laptop with base OS hard disk into Dell. It comes back and goes in the "spares" pile, everyone's happy. I've tried to do that with the MBP's and I don't have to tell you (wait, yeah I do, it's 26 screws each way) what a pain that is.
The only way I can think to do this is to make an image of the user's hard drive over the network somewhere. Then restore it back to another laptop (that's in a spare MBP, that I do have), and ensure the user's data, etc is all there. Then nuke the broken laptop's hard drive, reinstall with a base OS and send off to Apple.
Is there a better way? It can even cost money, I don't care. Thanks.
-Steve
Right...
We don't know to a lot of precision the size & mass of the planet. The real point is that it's probably NOT 5 times Earth's gravity.
According to another article I read, gravity is only 1.6 times that of earth.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/ap_on_sc/habit able_planet
Do I have to purchase this on a per machine basis? At 10 laptops, the cost starts getting into the "ridiculous" realm.
We definitely have the Applecare on all the machines and we're up to two spares now (for a total pool of about 10 laptops). We started with one spare and it just wasn't enough, so we got another. Their support is pretty spotty though. No on-site service and I've gotten a very non-consistent experience with their folks. Case in point. We had a powerbrick for one of the users (we had a spare) go bad. I went to the Apple store to simply exchange it. The employee (wtf are they called anyway? They're not geniuses) swore up and down he couldn't simply exchange it. He had to get me an appointment at the Genius Bar ("it's just four hours sir, can you do that?") to replace the brick. I went round and round with him and his manager to no avail, they said there was troubleshooting and paperwork, etc. I drove my ass across town to the other Apple store and the guy looked at me for a second, walked right over to the shelf and handed me a box. He took my old one, I walked out. Grr.
What I hear about the PowerPC hardware is all good! But we don't have any, we just switched when the Intel stuff came out.
I'm not claiming a damn thing about Macs and other computers, I'm just claiming that me and my users are having a hell of a time using this seemingly decent OS due to the fact we're always having hardware problems.