It's still surprisingly big in retail - it runs a crapton of local back-end stock keeping applications at the major retailer that I worked for awhile back, and I've since heard that they've virtualized it to deploy on their "next generation" in-store platform.
20 years ago, it was really the only game in town for Enterprise UNIX(tm) on Intel, and given how much it costs to design, buy, and deploy ANYTHING that's going in to 2000+ remote locations, it's going to stick around for quite a while more.
Distracting for the easily distracted, maybe.
on
The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
I dunno. I've been using the hell out of my Nook Tablet since my wife got it for me for Christmas, and it's provided a nice middle ground for me.
The web browser is good enough to check Facebook or read a few newspaper articles, but not good enough to provide a fully interactive experience beyond typing a couple of one sentence emails or hitting a "like" button.
On the other hand, I've probably dropped two hundred bucks on ebooks in the last three months. Instant gratification has its merits. Instead of hoofing it to the book store (which most likely won't have what I'm looking for) or ordering something from Amazon (in which case I'll have to wait a couple of days), I can get buy something new right then and there. I spend more of my free time reading instead of idly browsing the web.
Oddly enough, I'm still buying hard copies of stuff - like reference books, cook books, and substantive non-fiction and literature. The Nook is my platform of choice for the brain candy SF that I'd be embarrassed to display on the shelves in my living room.
I'm thinking about getting one, but since I've purchased not one, but two Happy Hacking KBs over the past couple of years, I can't really justify it. What I really want is a three button, standalone trackpoint that'll sit right below the space bar on my HHKB. Trackballs just aren't cutting it.
Apparently, nobody makes a standalone pointing stick.
I'm desperate enough that I'm considering scooping up a few keyboards from trashed Thinkpads and figuring out how to solder them up to a USB controller.
> Presumably apart from server load it wouldn't be a big deal assuming the users are working on a read-only login?
Server load can be a big deal. All it takes is a couple of bad joins and some dirty math (can you tell I'm not a DBA?) to start thumping disk or processors in new and interesting ways. That's bad enough when your own DBA does it, and indescribably worse when a customer does it. Read-only access does nothing to solve this problem.
Personally, I wouldn't be letting non-developer-types write queries, period. If they're paying you for data processing and reporting, then provide them with data processing a reporting. If they just want you to host their instances, then charge them accordingly.
sqlnet-level access arrangements have a tendency to both snowball and become entrenched. Five years ago, my employer (a data processing a reporting shop) gave sql access to a single user at a large customer of long standing to our otherwise web-only application. Five years later, every last user at that customer expects access, and the security requirements are having a severe negative impact on our ability to build out a more robust and flexible network infrastructure.
Your shop may be able to support query access for your current customer base, but will you be able to do it in five years when you have ten times the customers? What about when you want to, say, start collocating your servers? What happens when a new customer comes on - do you give them their own instance and eat that overhead, or do you give the SQL customer access to a potential competitor's data? Your sales or customer support folks should have to answer all of those questions before they give a green light to the customer.
Word. I've had more of a management role lately, and it's amazing what bullshit some IT folks sling when they assume the suit on the other end of the conversation is clueless. It seems to be most prevalent when the IT guy in question is relatively young, and while brilliant in some areas, he thinks he has something to prove in the areas he's weak in.
Listen, chief, you're an ace programmer. That's awesome. I don't expect you to also be a senior Unix admin, SAN engineer, and a CCIE. So when I ask you a question that's beyond your area of expertise, don't lie to me. Wasting my time is a far more career limiting move than telling me "I dunno. Let's get some research and/or outside consulting."
And FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, don't start a scorched earth, fur flying argument when a mere manager dares question your judgment. Unlike you, I've been in the industry for many years. Unlike you, I've worked at all kinds of organizations, large and small. Unlike you, our employer has seen fit to make me responsible for the livelihoods of you and your coworkers. What I'm saying is: YOU DON'T KNOW ME.
I know that these kinds of IT folks are few and far between, but it's the ones who conform to the stereotypes that give the rest of us a bad name.
Word.
First thing I do on a new install is enable bitmap fonts, and change my app font to Adobe Helvetica and my terminal font to either DEC Terminal or X Fixed, depending on resolution.
I really wish Truetype fonts were rendered better. They need so much antialiasing that it makes me think one of my contacts has fallen out.
How similar are your systems? I help manage several thousand distributed boxes that are reasonably identical, and we keep everything in a central CVS server: management scripts, config files, crontabs, what have you. There's no reason it couldn't be used for more heterogeneous systems, other than having to be more careful with file naming conventions.
Ah, yes. Fine, upstanding Norge, home to TURBONEGRO, performers of "The Midnight NAMBLA," "I Got Erection," "Just Flesh," "Screwed and Tattooed," "Rock Against Ass," "Rendezvous With Anus," and "Good Head."
Let's not forget Mayhem, who used photos of the corpse of their singer, who had offed himself via a shotgun to the head, as an album cover. In 1993.
So he's tried for ten years to get a Linux workstation to seamlessly integrate in an MS-only shop, and he's run into problems?
Well, duh.
The problems he ran in to are well known and well documented. The article makes about as much sense as the periodic Linux fanboi who bitches about not being able to play Ogg Vorbis on his iPod. Why'd you buy it then, bozo?
Not an X-based desktop, a GTK (or Qt)-based desktop. You don't need X. There are GTK+ and Qt for windows.
I know about ports of various F/OSS apps that use GTK/Qt libraries, but I thought for the full blown environment, you need to run X (via Cygwin or whatever.) If I'm wrong, that would be awesome - because I'm stuck with a Windows box at work for the time being.
On the other hand, it does seem that a majority of GNU developers do their work on Linux.
No argument there, based on my competely non-scientific and relatively uninformed opinion. If you've got thousands of individual developers working on thousands of individual projects in a "movement" that works more like an ecosystem than a corporation, I don't see how the AC who posed the original question really has much room to bitch if those individuals mostly end up settling on a de-facto "standard" that works best for everybody involved. Natural selection, baby.
What about Solaris? What about OS X? Can anybody share why they do or do not prefer one of these over GNU/Linux?
Yes, it really is a mystery why a GNU developer, sitting in their office at the Free Software Foundation lair, just down the hall from Richard M. Stallman, would eschew working on Solaris or OSX in favor of an open source OS. I'll get back to you when I figure it out, right here in this Slasdot article about Free operating systems.
As far as I'm aware, neither the GNOME nor the KDE devs explicitly promote Linux as the sole underlying OS. The whole point of having an X-based desktop environment is to make it portable to different systems.
The question might as well be "Why do the GNU people spend all their time developing the Linux userland tools?" The answer is they don't - Linux distributors use the GNU/GNOME/KDE stuff, not the other way around.
Duh.
The reason you find the Linux kernel in most free desktop systems should be pretty obvious - it's currently better at handling the random hardware that desktop users throw at it than anything else out there.
Same here. We've got a management track and a technical expert track. The technical expert side generally involves a lot of project management, but they do quite often get up to their elbows in code or gear or whatever. The highest-level guy on that side reports directly to the CIO.
Slashdot Mirror
It's still surprisingly big in retail - it runs a crapton of local back-end stock keeping applications at the major retailer that I worked for awhile back, and I've since heard that they've virtualized it to deploy on their "next generation" in-store platform.
20 years ago, it was really the only game in town for Enterprise UNIX(tm) on Intel, and given how much it costs to design, buy, and deploy ANYTHING that's going in to 2000+ remote locations, it's going to stick around for quite a while more.
I dunno. I've been using the hell out of my Nook Tablet since my wife got it for me for Christmas, and it's provided a nice middle ground for me. The web browser is good enough to check Facebook or read a few newspaper articles, but not good enough to provide a fully interactive experience beyond typing a couple of one sentence emails or hitting a "like" button. On the other hand, I've probably dropped two hundred bucks on ebooks in the last three months. Instant gratification has its merits. Instead of hoofing it to the book store (which most likely won't have what I'm looking for) or ordering something from Amazon (in which case I'll have to wait a couple of days), I can get buy something new right then and there. I spend more of my free time reading instead of idly browsing the web. Oddly enough, I'm still buying hard copies of stuff - like reference books, cook books, and substantive non-fiction and literature. The Nook is my platform of choice for the brain candy SF that I'd be embarrassed to display on the shelves in my living room.
I'd love to pay $10,000 per processor for Oracle. List price for Oracle DB, Enterprise Edition, is something like $47,000 per CORE.
* The parent post was devoid of line feeds to save on VAN charges.
> I can tell you never had to support EDI or X.25. :)
"You're charging me by the kilocharacter? Ok. Wait... what?"
Apparently, nobody makes a standalone pointing stick.
I'm desperate enough that I'm considering scooping up a few keyboards from trashed Thinkpads and figuring out how to solder them up to a USB controller.
> Presumably apart from server load it wouldn't be a big deal assuming the users are working on a read-only login?
Server load can be a big deal. All it takes is a couple of bad joins and some dirty math (can you tell I'm not a DBA?) to start thumping disk or processors in new and interesting ways. That's bad enough when your own DBA does it, and indescribably worse when a customer does it. Read-only access does nothing to solve this problem.
Personally, I wouldn't be letting non-developer-types write queries, period. If they're paying you for data processing and reporting, then provide them with data processing a reporting. If they just want you to host their instances, then charge them accordingly.
sqlnet-level access arrangements have a tendency to both snowball and become entrenched. Five years ago, my employer (a data processing a reporting shop) gave sql access to a single user at a large customer of long standing to our otherwise web-only application. Five years later, every last user at that customer expects access, and the security requirements are having a severe negative impact on our ability to build out a more robust and flexible network infrastructure.
Your shop may be able to support query access for your current customer base, but will you be able to do it in five years when you have ten times the customers? What about when you want to, say, start collocating your servers? What happens when a new customer comes on - do you give them their own instance and eat that overhead, or do you give the SQL customer access to a potential competitor's data? Your sales or customer support folks should have to answer all of those questions before they give a green light to the customer.
Really?
> tar -cvf XXX-9yo-boys-blowjobs-and-crystal-meth.tar dovecot-1.0-stable/
I was thinking something more along the lines of:
cp never_gonna_give_you_up.avi XXX-9yo-boys-blowjobs-and-crystal-meth.avi
Word. I've had more of a management role lately, and it's amazing what bullshit some IT folks sling when they assume the suit on the other end of the conversation is clueless. It seems to be most prevalent when the IT guy in question is relatively young, and while brilliant in some areas, he thinks he has something to prove in the areas he's weak in. Listen, chief, you're an ace programmer. That's awesome. I don't expect you to also be a senior Unix admin, SAN engineer, and a CCIE. So when I ask you a question that's beyond your area of expertise, don't lie to me. Wasting my time is a far more career limiting move than telling me "I dunno. Let's get some research and/or outside consulting." And FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, don't start a scorched earth, fur flying argument when a mere manager dares question your judgment. Unlike you, I've been in the industry for many years. Unlike you, I've worked at all kinds of organizations, large and small. Unlike you, our employer has seen fit to make me responsible for the livelihoods of you and your coworkers. What I'm saying is: YOU DON'T KNOW ME. I know that these kinds of IT folks are few and far between, but it's the ones who conform to the stereotypes that give the rest of us a bad name.
Word.
On the rare occasion that I go out to get hammered at a bar that isn't within walking distance of my house, I keep a spare twenty for cab fare.
I'm amazed at the number of people who will happily spend fifty to a hundred bucks on booze and then drive home to save a few bucks on the taxi.
Pussy.
I've got one sitting right here on my desk, and I can shine it in to my eyes with absolutely no problems. Allow me to demonstrate...
Srr?
Sbao;utelu ni orpbkens,
Word. First thing I do on a new install is enable bitmap fonts, and change my app font to Adobe Helvetica and my terminal font to either DEC Terminal or X Fixed, depending on resolution. I really wish Truetype fonts were rendered better. They need so much antialiasing that it makes me think one of my contacts has fallen out.
How similar are your systems? I help manage several thousand distributed boxes that are reasonably identical, and we keep everything in a central CVS server: management scripts, config files, crontabs, what have you. There's no reason it couldn't be used for more heterogeneous systems, other than having to be more careful with file naming conventions.
Ah, yes. Fine, upstanding Norge, home to TURBONEGRO, performers of "The Midnight NAMBLA," "I Got Erection," "Just Flesh," "Screwed and Tattooed," "Rock Against Ass," "Rendezvous With Anus," and "Good Head."
Let's not forget Mayhem, who used photos of the corpse of their singer, who had offed himself via a shotgun to the head, as an album cover. In 1993.
Yeah, blocking that porn will solve everything.
> Oh my god, zip files can contain *anything*! I'm so l33t, I converted all of my oggs to cpio.
Well, duh.
The problems he ran in to are well known and well documented. The article makes about as much sense as the periodic Linux fanboi who bitches about not being able to play Ogg Vorbis on his iPod. Why'd you buy it then, bozo?
++
As far as I'm aware, neither the GNOME nor the KDE devs explicitly promote Linux as the sole underlying OS. The whole point of having an X-based desktop environment is to make it portable to different systems.
The question might as well be "Why do the GNU people spend all their time developing the Linux userland tools?" The answer is they don't - Linux distributors use the GNU/GNOME/KDE stuff, not the other way around.
Duh.
The reason you find the Linux kernel in most free desktop systems should be pretty obvious - it's currently better at handling the random hardware that desktop users throw at it than anything else out there.
Now I have to wait for the boner this gave me to go away before I can get up and walk around the office.
Maybe Apple could have put off the Switch after all...
Forizzle.
Same here. We've got a management track and a technical expert track. The technical expert side generally involves a lot of project management, but they do quite often get up to their elbows in code or gear or whatever. The highest-level guy on that side reports directly to the CIO.