"It did not fail for me"
Hmmm...you must've missed the point where I said those who want to flame with "works for me" should go to bed.
"If you don't like it then go use something else"
I believe that was the whole point of my post. It doesn't work, so I went with something that did.
"You only say that because you're a geek and therebefore not GNOME's target group.
"
Then, Gnome has failed. About two months ago, I decided to see for myself if Linux could be used as a full-time desktop. I've used Linux off and on for about 9-10 years now, and it never satisified my needs enough to switch. (For those who are going to flame me with "I'VE BEEN USING LINUX AS MY ONLY DESKTOP FOR YEARS!!!", please, go back to bed. Great, it works for you, was never enough for me. We do different things, have different needs. Get over it.)
So, being a big fan of LFS (www.linuxfromscratch.org), I got to work. Within a week, I had a fresh, shiny Gnome desktop to use. And, I have to say, I struggled for a month to use it. Oddness with Mozilla and Evolution being my two biggest issues, and no Galeon only made things worse.
I was about to give up entirely when LFS 4.1 came out, so off I went again. This time, however, I decided to use KDE 3.1. Within two days I was up an running (notice the time difference there).
Uh, WOW!
What a difference! It was night and day. With Gnome, I had to dig deep to do anything I really wanted. If I added a new Gnome app, sometimes it got added to the menu bad, sometimes it didn't (for users, it's got to be 100% like it was for KDE). There were other issues which since this is a spur of the moment post I can't immediately come up with...
Suffice it to say, with Gnome, I always felt I was working hard, with KDE, stuff I needed to do "just worked" and if it didn't, it wasn't a huge effort to get it to.
Now, there are those that are going to say, "well, it's a scratch-built system, try a distro!" I have. I had the same issues. KDE just worked better there, too. Oh, and the fact that I had to install Gnome 1.4 AND 2.0 just to get the all the Gnome apps work was annoying as hell.
Anyway, I know this wasn't a very cogent post, but hopefully my point came across. For new users to Linux, KDE is the way to go all the way!
And, since some will ask, I still switched back to Windows. Linux still didn't meet 100% of MY needs, but I'd say for a normal user, it's there. I may even consider switching some of my users over to see how it goes.
>> Average users don't read Slashdot
>I consider myself an desktop user, albeit an advanced one
Then, you're not average!:) The "average user", IMO, is someone who knows exactly as much about the software and systems they use as what they were taught. They're the kind of people who don't even know there's a "Help" option on the menubar, or what it's for. Really, they don't. I was surprised when I finally realized just how many people have never used help. Anyway, they don't poke, they don't prod, and they just chug along doing "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, my task is complete". Change that in anyway, and they can't adapt. You have to retrain them, all the while listening to them complaining about how "the old system was so much better! Why would we do it this way?"
Oh, and they only know how to get to MSN, 'cause that's the default homepage when they first turn on their computers, so no, they don't read Slashdot.:)
Now, do you fit the description of an average user?
Since sales of the LS633 Digital camera with OLED display weren't what was expected for the first two days of it's avaliability, Kodak has decided to discontinue the model and cancel any future support for the product.
I've worked there, and bought their products. This isn't too far off the mark for them. They've come out with some great products, but overpriced them at release, then discontinued within 6 months because sales weren't as expected. (Their sales expectations are usually very high.)
Agreed, but not for what he wants. On my 1Gig machine with 256M of RAM, Knoppix is useable, but does drag at times. Mostly this is due to lack of swap, but having worked with Linux for a long time, I don't see that making enough of a difference to have it useable on a 486, or even a PII.
A better option would be to look at Linux from Scratch. He could build his own distribution that'll work on every one of those machines. A small, floppy-based distro might be a lot of work, but it can be done. Building LFS with no locale support and using ucLibc I was able to get a distro that was under 70M. Keep in mind, however, that it was fully-functional (albeit sans X), so with some work, it could be pared down a bit more.
Honestly, I've never seen that. However, if it occured on NT, just choose the last known good. If it's 9x, it's a bit harder as you have to boot into DOS to rebuild the registry from the command line, but still, not a huge issue.
The problem I have with the argument of using text config files over a registry is...the registry is a database. The argument, to me, is the same thing as saying, "all data should be stored in text files so you can edit it easier. Binary formats of any kind should be avoided."
"The registry is an awful thing for the simple reason it sticks all your eggs in one basket"
In all my years working with Windows, and we're talking THOUSANDS of machines, I have only ONCE seen a corrupted registry. (If I was trolling, I'd have posted anonymously). And, that one machine was a Windows 95 machine that they had installed a 3.1 screensaver on. I don't know why, but as soon as I got rid of that, the problem went away.
I'm completely serious, I really don't grok these corrupted registry issues I hear about. Every version of Windows has made a backup of the registry when the machine boots, just put it back into place if something happens.
AvantBrowser (www.avantbrowser.com). Has all the features of CrazyBrowser, and a couple more: first of all, scroll mice work properly all throughout (the scroll doesn't work in CB's history list). It also allows you to selectively deleted auto-complete entries, for example, mine deletes all the URLS except those I specifically type. It also works at Mazda.:)
Ahh, the universe....As I'm sitting here waiting for this page to come up, I get a call from a telemarketer. The best part is, he was the WORST telemarketer I've ever heard. He took about 10 seconds before he started talking. The funniest part was that he spoke each word very fast, but took a second between each, so not only couldn't I understand him, I had to wait for it!:) I actually laughed at him and told him he should find a new profession as this one wasn't working out for him.
manufacturers hope to take a significant share of the $1.6 billion dollar PDA market, the $50 billion dollar desk workstation market and the $23 billion dollar (by 2004) smart cellular phone market.
Um, that little squiggly thing in front of the numbers? That tells us that the number is representative of dollars.
That's not funny. This poor guy comes up with might be a great little hack, and/. kills it. Constantly, we read on/. about how certain big companies should take responsiblity for their actions. Well, I say it's time for/. to stop being a hypocrite and start doing it itself. Ask these site ops if they'll be able to handle a/.ing, if not, offer to mirror the site for a day or two. If/. has no problem with the load, great, then help out those that can't.
It only blocks LEGITIMATE e-mail from servers that may, at some time in the future possibly, be used by spammers as a relay. It does block from machines that have sent spam, but also those that have never done it, just the potential is there. It does not, however, block spam! At least, not effectively.
And, that's where the problems lie. Administrators are putting these things in, assuming they'll stop spam, and then getting pissy when you tell them legitimate mail isn't getting through.
I used to be the e-mail admin for my company. We somehow ended up on the worst of these lists, osirusoft. This, despite the fact that we used SMTP AUTH; YOU COULDN'T SEND MAIL WITHOUT A PASSWORD! And, once you get on one of the lists, you're on them all.
So, I spent the better part of a couple of days going through them all and having to prove I wasn't an open relay. They all but one removed us within a week, but that was a week we couldn't send mail to a few customers.
And, the one that didn't remove us in a week...osirusoft...they took over a month. Every day I went to their site and ran the "autotest". Every day I watched it say, "Relaying Denied, deleting from list". Every day, I watched another "proof" of our spamminess posted onto their list.
And, the idiot admins of the ISPs? "Well, you're obviously an open relay. I see dozens of spams being sent from your site on the osirusoft list!"
BTW, the osirusoft rbl is run by some loser in his basement. Great plan, basing your company's e-mail on some unemployed idiot with a chip on his shoulder.
Look at your spam, where does the majority come from? That's right, AOL & Hotmail. But, your company would NEVER allow you to block from them, they'd lose too many customers. Install an active filter, you'll see better results and less spam.
Yup, I third them. I've run a few networks with Exchange as the collaborative backend, there's something wrong with your setup. When I've sent test mails from my home, they were ALWAYS in my Inbox within 5 seconds. If you're doing a "check mail", then you might be setup as Internet Mail, but with the Corporate setup. That IS a slow way to be setup, not to mention completely wrong in an Exchange environment.
As to the article iteself...if this guy is from Lotus, MS has nothing to worry about. Notes is the worst piece of shit client ever written. It mangles e-mail (my wife's forced to use it, every time I send her a plain text mail, it shows up to her as an attachment), it's got the worst interface which completely violates every interface standard, and it's flaky at best.
The only people who think "Marketing" is the reason Exchange is so prevalent have never actually seen Notes in action. The only people who like it are those who made the mistake of recommending it, and now can't admit they were wrong.
Re:*gasp* the hippocricy here is unbelievable
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 1
It's always the Anonymous Cowards...okay, first of all, I did include all the facts. I didn't hide the nature of the website.
Second of all, I loved my job, that's why I did it. I hated the politics and stupidity that haunted me every day, and leaving that place to go to another wouldn't have alleviated that. Which, I guess is the point of the site...all jobs suck.
Thirdly, take a closer look at the site, those posts are from other people. Only a few are from us.
Finally, I only blame my boss and the CEO. The CEO for unilateraly firing us for no valid reason. And, my boss for not standing by us. He was a spinless, back-stabbing, weasel who caved at the slightest pressure.
Yeah, but I always WAS busy!
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I know exactly what he's writing about. I was just fired from my job of two and a half years. The reason? Check my sig. That's right, we started a personal website in our own time, with our own reasources, and because the CEO didn't like it, we were out. "Decreasing company morale" was the reason we were given. They fired me, who was the Sysadmin, the webmaster, and the only PC technician.
Forget the fact that for the last two and a half years, I haven't had a real vacation, because I got a call EVERY FREAKIN' DAY about some minor issue.
Forget the fact that I worked a minimum of 2-3 hours every night on company stuff, 'cause I wasn't allowed to make ANY changes during the day. (The night before I was fired, I spent 3 hours writing a script to fix a problem that was affecting only 1% of the users. No real problem, but I didn't want them to have to deal with ANY issues.)
Forget all of that, just get the fuck out. I take some solace in the fact that two days after they fired us they sent out a global e-mail of "Please bear with us, it'll take up to five days for your calls to be answered." And, e-mail was down for almost a week because no one but us knew how it was setup!
IT needs to get the respect it deserves. In this era of decreasing budgets, the only way companies will be able to make any money is to increase efficiency, and that means automation.
Slashdot Mirror
"It did not fail for me" Hmmm...you must've missed the point where I said those who want to flame with "works for me" should go to bed. "If you don't like it then go use something else" I believe that was the whole point of my post. It doesn't work, so I went with something that did.
"You only say that because you're a geek and therebefore not GNOME's target group. "
Then, Gnome has failed. About two months ago, I decided to see for myself if Linux could be used as a full-time desktop. I've used Linux off and on for about 9-10 years now, and it never satisified my needs enough to switch. (For those who are going to flame me with "I'VE BEEN USING LINUX AS MY ONLY DESKTOP FOR YEARS!!!", please, go back to bed. Great, it works for you, was never enough for me. We do different things, have different needs. Get over it.)
So, being a big fan of LFS (www.linuxfromscratch.org), I got to work. Within a week, I had a fresh, shiny Gnome desktop to use. And, I have to say, I struggled for a month to use it. Oddness with Mozilla and Evolution being my two biggest issues, and no Galeon only made things worse. I was about to give up entirely when LFS 4.1 came out, so off I went again. This time, however, I decided to use KDE 3.1. Within two days I was up an running (notice the time difference there).Uh, WOW!
What a difference! It was night and day. With Gnome, I had to dig deep to do anything I really wanted. If I added a new Gnome app, sometimes it got added to the menu bad, sometimes it didn't (for users, it's got to be 100% like it was for KDE). There were other issues which since this is a spur of the moment post I can't immediately come up with...
Suffice it to say, with Gnome, I always felt I was working hard, with KDE, stuff I needed to do "just worked" and if it didn't, it wasn't a huge effort to get it to.
Now, there are those that are going to say, "well, it's a scratch-built system, try a distro!" I have. I had the same issues. KDE just worked better there, too. Oh, and the fact that I had to install Gnome 1.4 AND 2.0 just to get the all the Gnome apps work was annoying as hell.
Anyway, I know this wasn't a very cogent post, but hopefully my point came across. For new users to Linux, KDE is the way to go all the way!
And, since some will ask, I still switched back to Windows. Linux still didn't meet 100% of MY needs, but I'd say for a normal user, it's there. I may even consider switching some of my users over to see how it goes.
>> Average users don't read Slashdot >I consider myself an desktop user, albeit an advanced one
Then, you're not average! :) The "average user", IMO, is someone who knows exactly as much about the software and systems they use as what they were taught. They're the kind of people who don't even know there's a "Help" option on the menubar, or what it's for. Really, they don't. I was surprised when I finally realized just how many people have never used help. Anyway, they don't poke, they don't prod, and they just chug along doing "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, my task is complete". Change that in anyway, and they can't adapt. You have to retrain them, all the while listening to them complaining about how "the old system was so much better! Why would we do it this way?"
Oh, and they only know how to get to MSN, 'cause that's the default homepage when they first turn on their computers, so no, they don't read Slashdot. :)
Now, do you fit the description of an average user?
That has to be the best sig I've seen in a loooong time!
Excellent point! Although, not all /. readers are anti-Microsoft. :)
Since sales of the LS633 Digital camera with OLED display weren't what was expected for the first two days of it's avaliability, Kodak has decided to discontinue the model and cancel any future support for the product.
I've worked there, and bought their products. This isn't too far off the mark for them. They've come out with some great products, but overpriced them at release, then discontinued within 6 months because sales weren't as expected. (Their sales expectations are usually very high.)
Agreed, but not for what he wants. On my 1Gig machine with 256M of RAM, Knoppix is useable, but does drag at times. Mostly this is due to lack of swap, but having worked with Linux for a long time, I don't see that making enough of a difference to have it useable on a 486, or even a PII.
A better option would be to look at Linux from Scratch. He could build his own distribution that'll work on every one of those machines. A small, floppy-based distro might be a lot of work, but it can be done. Building LFS with no locale support and using ucLibc I was able to get a distro that was under 70M. Keep in mind, however, that it was fully-functional (albeit sans X), so with some work, it could be pared down a bit more.
Honestly, I've never seen that. However, if it occured on NT, just choose the last known good. If it's 9x, it's a bit harder as you have to boot into DOS to rebuild the registry from the command line, but still, not a huge issue.
The problem I have with the argument of using text config files over a registry is...the registry is a database. The argument, to me, is the same thing as saying, "all data should be stored in text files so you can edit it easier. Binary formats of any kind should be avoided."
"The registry is an awful thing for the simple reason it sticks all your eggs in one basket"
In all my years working with Windows, and we're talking THOUSANDS of machines, I have only ONCE seen a corrupted registry. (If I was trolling, I'd have posted anonymously). And, that one machine was a Windows 95 machine that they had installed a 3.1 screensaver on. I don't know why, but as soon as I got rid of that, the problem went away.
I'm completely serious, I really don't grok these corrupted registry issues I hear about. Every version of Windows has made a backup of the registry when the machine boots, just put it back into place if something happens.
AvantBrowser (www.avantbrowser.com). Has all the features of CrazyBrowser, and a couple more: first of all, scroll mice work properly all throughout (the scroll doesn't work in CB's history list). It also allows you to selectively deleted auto-complete entries, for example, mine deletes all the URLS except those I specifically type. It also works at Mazda. :)
Ahh, the universe....As I'm sitting here waiting for this page to come up, I get a call from a telemarketer. The best part is, he was the WORST telemarketer I've ever heard. He took about 10 seconds before he started talking. The funniest part was that he spoke each word very fast, but took a second between each, so not only couldn't I understand him, I had to wait for it! :) I actually laughed at him and told him he should find a new profession as this one wasn't working out for him.
Telezapper? Screw that! Try the Tele-Fryer!
manufacturers hope to take a significant share of the $1.6 billion dollar PDA market, the $50 billion dollar desk workstation market and the $23 billion dollar (by 2004) smart cellular phone market.
Um, that little squiggly thing in front of the numbers? That tells us that the number is representative of dollars.
That's not funny. This poor guy comes up with might be a great little hack, and /. kills it. Constantly, we read on /. about how certain big companies should take responsiblity for their actions. Well, I say it's time for /. to stop being a hypocrite and start doing it itself. Ask these site ops if they'll be able to handle a /.ing, if not, offer to mirror the site for a day or two. If /. has no problem with the load, great, then help out those that can't.
There is a spoon, you must not choose it! :)
It only blocks LEGITIMATE e-mail from servers that may, at some time in the future possibly, be used by spammers as a relay. It does block from machines that have sent spam, but also those that have never done it, just the potential is there. It does not, however, block spam! At least, not effectively.
And, that's where the problems lie. Administrators are putting these things in, assuming they'll stop spam, and then getting pissy when you tell them legitimate mail isn't getting through.
I used to be the e-mail admin for my company. We somehow ended up on the worst of these lists, osirusoft. This, despite the fact that we used SMTP AUTH; YOU COULDN'T SEND MAIL WITHOUT A PASSWORD! And, once you get on one of the lists, you're on them all.
So, I spent the better part of a couple of days going through them all and having to prove I wasn't an open relay. They all but one removed us within a week, but that was a week we couldn't send mail to a few customers.
And, the one that didn't remove us in a week...osirusoft...they took over a month. Every day I went to their site and ran the "autotest". Every day I watched it say, "Relaying Denied, deleting from list". Every day, I watched another "proof" of our spamminess posted onto their list.
And, the idiot admins of the ISPs? "Well, you're obviously an open relay. I see dozens of spams being sent from your site on the osirusoft list!"
BTW, the osirusoft rbl is run by some loser in his basement. Great plan, basing your company's e-mail on some unemployed idiot with a chip on his shoulder.
Look at your spam, where does the majority come from? That's right, AOL & Hotmail. But, your company would NEVER allow you to block from them, they'd lose too many customers. Install an active filter, you'll see better results and less spam.
Hey! I loved the Wumpus! It's the only reason I dug up one of the TI-994A emulators. :)
I agree. I've seen well-done Flash apps as well and was simply amazed. I thought it was limited solely to The Mystery of Britnet Spears Breasts
Yup, I third them. I've run a few networks with Exchange as the collaborative backend, there's something wrong with your setup. When I've sent test mails from my home, they were ALWAYS in my Inbox within 5 seconds. If you're doing a "check mail", then you might be setup as Internet Mail, but with the Corporate setup. That IS a slow way to be setup, not to mention completely wrong in an Exchange environment.
As to the article iteself...if this guy is from Lotus, MS has nothing to worry about. Notes is the worst piece of shit client ever written. It mangles e-mail (my wife's forced to use it, every time I send her a plain text mail, it shows up to her as an attachment), it's got the worst interface which completely violates every interface standard, and it's flaky at best.
The only people who think "Marketing" is the reason Exchange is so prevalent have never actually seen Notes in action. The only people who like it are those who made the mistake of recommending it, and now can't admit they were wrong.
It's always the Anonymous Cowards...okay, first of all, I did include all the facts. I didn't hide the nature of the website.
Second of all, I loved my job, that's why I did it. I hated the politics and stupidity that haunted me every day, and leaving that place to go to another wouldn't have alleviated that. Which, I guess is the point of the site...all jobs suck.
Thirdly, take a closer look at the site, those posts are from other people. Only a few are from us.
Finally, I only blame my boss and the CEO. The CEO for unilateraly firing us for no valid reason. And, my boss for not standing by us. He was a spinless, back-stabbing, weasel who caved at the slightest pressure.
I know exactly what he's writing about. I was just fired from my job of two and a half years. The reason? Check my sig. That's right, we started a personal website in our own time, with our own reasources, and because the CEO didn't like it, we were out. "Decreasing company morale" was the reason we were given. They fired me, who was the Sysadmin, the webmaster, and the only PC technician.
Forget the fact that for the last two and a half years, I haven't had a real vacation, because I got a call EVERY FREAKIN' DAY about some minor issue.
Forget the fact that I worked a minimum of 2-3 hours every night on company stuff, 'cause I wasn't allowed to make ANY changes during the day. (The night before I was fired, I spent 3 hours writing a script to fix a problem that was affecting only 1% of the users. No real problem, but I didn't want them to have to deal with ANY issues.)
Forget all of that, just get the fuck out. I take some solace in the fact that two days after they fired us they sent out a global e-mail of "Please bear with us, it'll take up to five days for your calls to be answered." And, e-mail was down for almost a week because no one but us knew how it was setup!
IT needs to get the respect it deserves. In this era of decreasing budgets, the only way companies will be able to make any money is to increase efficiency, and that means automation.