If 1.1.3 adds just a fix for this, I'd skip it. I have a site, ipodtouchmods.com, which I'll post any deltas of the forthcoming 1.1.3 update to. I suspect it's just trivial BS and maybe a block to those of us who unjail our iPods/iPhones so we can add third party apps. No good reason to install 1.1.3 unless it adds some killer app (FLASH PLEASE). Even so, even with Flash, I'd probably wait for the unjail process to be solidified, or for the flash stuff to be backported to 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 by the mods community.
Well, you seem mostly reasonable. Good that you're still trying to hire that guy. But I still disagree with a good bit of what you're saying. However, I'll keep it to just one thing I want to pick on you for:
Aha! The requirements aren't there because the employee has to have those exact skills, they're there so you don't waste time on people who clearly can't do the job! And, is it really that clear?
Requirements: Solaris 10, Veritas Cluster Server, etc
Nice to have: E25K experience, Linux (various), HPUX 10 and/or 11
Pretty clear to me, anyway.
Sure you didn't miss lots who really could do it? I'm thinking it's not as bad as you see it. Well, Solaris10 added a significant amount of change to Solaris. Not a trivial upgrade by any means, and we use its new features extensively. Sure, we could spend 2 months of OJT training to get someone up to speed on it, or, we could wait for the next resume to come along that lets us skip that part. Also, yes, I agree, a strong Unix guy could learn it. But, the requirement wasn't written by me, but by the hiring manager. He has heard and understood my points about "if you can drive a Ford, you can drive a Chevy", but still prefers to skip that OJT part. He wants someone who already knows the technology, so the training can be about the particulars of our environment. With 1700+ unix boxes to support, it gets a bit intense at times. His department, his budget, his decision to make. My role is to find someone with the skills he wants for people in his department.
You wish 80% of the people you see could do the job? Well, how bad does it seem to you? But in other words, your requirements have been padded to make up for the inadequacies in your selection and interview processes, one of those being that the whole thing is just too much effort and too time consuming. Well, I realize it's difficult, and you're far from the only employer who has a hard time telling who would make a good hire, but still, all could do better. Getting picky about the exact version of a specific flavor of a family of OSes doesn't seem to me to be much help with your real problems.
Solaris 10 really is a dramatic change from anything previous, so it's a steep learning curve to make that step. And if the biggest Sun gear someone has dealt with is a V440, putting them on call to support a couple of 4-node E25K clusters is a bit of a large step as well.
Some people don't value a sense of humor but, for me, it's important to know that the people I hire not only can do the job, but they're someone I want to hang out with 40-50 hours a week..
Careful on that slope buddy. I've been there, it's slippery. As long as all the people you interview are the same, in terms of discrimination, you're in good shape. But if some are older, or different genders, or different religions, or different ethnicities, you could set yourself and your company up for an employment discrimination lawsuit.
I probably didn't say that as clearly as I could have. "fit" means, I can get along with someone. Haven't really thought about it but, our team is pretty diverse in cultural/ratial/gender terms, doesn't enter into it at all though. Not saying I'd hang out with everyone _after_ work, but that's not what the interview is about. Just trying to find someone who, let's be clear, isn't some sort of a jerk that would be a negative change to the team. Our team works VERY well together, we don't have that one "that guy" who causes friction, and I hope to keep it that way.
"But no," you say, "I'm just filtering for best fit." And that might work, more or less, but you pretty quickly come across people who are different from you, and if you turn them away because, let's say, they don't get your jokes, or they're not funny, and they happen to be a woman/Muslim/Asian/person-over-50... Well, what's the difference between discriminating based on personality (highly subjective) and discriminating based on race (also highly subjective)?
Good points, but looking at the last handful of folks added to our team, they also are a good mix if that was the sort of thing someone was worried about.
Now, age/sex/religious discrimination lawsuits don't happen that often in hiring situations, but if you're considering candidates for internal promotion, it gets pretty sticky.
Of course, fundamentally, the problem I see with your approach is that it boils down to hiring people you like. And in that pool of interviewees, people you've just met, the ones you like are the ones most like you. So you end up hiring people like you, turning away people who are different, and this hurts your organization. You need diversity of opinions, ideas, and personal experience to solve problems. Does your company want you to be comfortable, or productive? OK, team cohesion is important, but only because it helps performance - it's a means, not an end. Sure, you can get by with an army of clones, but you'll be doing yourself and your company a disservice.
Yup, I'm clearly not doing a good job of making my point, if that's what you saw from the above. First, can they do the job. Second, do they have the social skills to participate with the group positively, to have good judgement, and to not cause problems due to inexperience or abrasive people skills?
Somewhat off-topic for this, but on the topic of Best Buy. I recently needed a molex y-cable on short notice, so I drove out looking for one. I looked in (based mostly on the order I passed them) Radio Shack, Office Depot, Circuit City, Staples, and finally Best Buy before I found any Molex connectors let alone a y-cable. I was somewhat surprised that only Best Buy out of all those stores carried them.
Actually, I just bought some Molex connectors at Radio Shack - they didn't know what they were, though, but they connectors were in the sliding-drawer-tacklebox area in the components area. Which used to be half the store and is now a closet, ah well. But the kid had NO idea what a Molex was.
Maybe because the headhunters aren't being told those as the skill set that is needed. They're asking for SAGE II (fairly junior) folks and not too many of those know VCS. Solaris 10? Wasn't on the list of requirements, just "Solaris".
Maybe in some cases, but not this one. We're specific about Level 3, and list Solaris10 and VCS explicitly. At least, _to_ the headhunters. What they're telling the techs, I have no idea. I'm not sure it's appropriate to ask the interviewee "So, what exactly did the headhunter say this job was?"
I can't tell you how many times I've passed up the option to interview there because I won't submit my resume unless I think I actually have the skills and it is for my level rather than some junior position. (And yes, I talked to a few of them about those positions that were advertised there. I passed on it for some reason or another, can't recall which, but it certainly wasn't Solaris or VCS.) Seems to me the two of us were having conversations back in the execpc days. About half of the guys here are from there at one time or another. Lots of overlap in this market, everyone knows someone who knows everybody.
This brings up the standard series of rants about lousy headhunters and lousy HR folks giving headhunters bad information. Not too many junior folks know enough to force the headhunter to get more information.
He was great except for no recent Solaris experience? And that was enough to decide against him?? That you can afford that luxury shows the IT job market is too much in favor of employers.
Wasn't my decision to make; I'm the team leader, I liked the guy and am working to find him a place in our company, with the intent of getting him trained up for our intense environment on another team and maybe moving him in when he's ready. The point is, the requirements are from the hiring manager, who I report to. It's a staff addition so it's seen with less intensity than it would be if it was to replace someone who left. As it turns out, I hired someone internal, and this guy is interviewing to replace the guy I hired, on my suggestion.
Same as this article about some poor employee losing a job over something posted online, outside of work.
Not at all the same thing. Far as I'm concerned, it's (a) can the guy do the work, and (b) can you get along with them to work with every day. the (a) includes "And, do we have time to train them in their gaps or not".
You've got it just too fat and easy that you can sit there with 100s of candidates, 80% of whom could do the job and you know it,
Wow. I wish that was true. Yeah to me, as a techie, I know that Unix is Unix is Unix, and if someone _gets it_, it doesn't matter which flavor they're most recent on. Yet, the hiring manager owns the job description, which has specifics which are our environment. It's a case of "can figure it out" vs. "been there, done that".
and you moan that not one has all of HP-UX 11.11 and Solaris 9 and RHEL 5 and AIX 5L 5.3 on a 64 bit platform, and experience with even narrower specialties such as Veritas Cluster and Reiser4 and ZFS, and scripting languages, and nothing "irresponsible" posted on the Internet.
Sorry, but you're putting words into my mouth now, so I hope you don't mind that I don't address this point that I never made.
Hope you're not wondering why college freshmen aren't choosing IT related degrees. Training him would not have cost much, I think you overestimate that expense and time. He'd learn most of it on the job anyway, but your manager is just too cheap to allow a measly 2 weeks to get up to speed, while spending, what, 3 weeks waiting for a "better" person to show up. And you know what? It's quite possible that "better" person might have read the job description, downloaded Solaris (since it's open source now) and given himself a crash course on it with the version he downloaded and whatever info he can find on the web about the actual version required, so he can say he has experience and demonstrate just enough to wing the interview successfully.
If a person shows that initiative in the interview and can pass the tech screen, hell yeah, I want to talk to him.
Then please don't be so picky over skills. You throw a lot of babies out with the bathwater when you do that. Ability is what counts. Skills are trivial, they really are. You're zeroing in on a particular version of a particular OS, and overlooking that the important thing is that a candidate know a few OSes, and that it doesn't much matter which ones. If he knows HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Windows Server 2003, he's not going to have any problem figuring out Solaris.
Yeah, they can figure it out. My point is, if the reqs say "required", then I want them to already _have_ figured it out. Look at it this way - if someone (usually headhunters, by the way) ignores specs on _this_ project, what specs will they ignore on other projects?
Like I say, the guy who isn't quite ready skill-wise, I'm trying to place in what basically works as a training position. The thing is, the job requirements were specified because we've wasted too much time interviewing people who were clearly NOT able to "learn it in a few weeks". So you
No chance you're looking for people in New York City is there? ^_^ Afraid not, sorry. Milwaukee area, strong Unix admins with Veritas Cluster and Solaris 10 for a very very very very big company whose name has two letters and rhymes with "GE". We've got tons of fun toys to play with but the manager is pretty set on only hiring people we can drop in pretty easily. Amazing what the headhunters send in, and amazing what people lie about on their resumes just to waste my time in an interview. (Free hint: If you don't have one of the "required" skills, please just don't. Don't.) Somehow though, headhunters see "Solaris" on a resume and pretend to themselves that their random guy off the street, without the requirements, will suddenly stun us into just hiring them or something. Had one guy, great guy, nice presentation, well spoken, good judgement, and decades of experience, but no recent Solaris experience. I would love to hire and train him if I had time to do the training but, I don't. If I did I wouldn't need to hire more people. Great guy, I'd love to hire him, but just not quite right skillset. But anyway. If you're not on linkedin.com, set up an account there, and make your profile be your resume. Mention "job seeker" as your current title, and participate in the question/answer forums. Can't hurt.
No, but you should find an employer that's willing to let you chase your dream without having to hide it from them. Next time you change jobs, I'd be up front about being a comedian, and about some of your work being offensive, and let them know that it won't come into your work life. If they don't hire you, keep trying till you find someone that will. You may lose some good opportunities, but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job. I've interviewed way too many people in the last year. If someone shows up with "other interests" listed as "professional comedian" on their resume, hell yeah, I'd want to talk to them. And I don't care, even a little, if they work "blue" or not at that job. We're all professionals, and I'd rather work with someone who I can have an interesting conversation with than some guy who is pure work with no outside interests. If a prospective employer passes you by because of something like this, they, are doing YOU, the favor.
I have a profile on linkedin.com which includes a highly fictional Bio (I invented rope and television, and taught myself how to hover, for instance). Since I added that 2 or 3 months ago, I've had more direct emails from linkedin members asking me if I'm looking for work than I had in several years previously. Some people don't value a sense of humor but, for me, it's important to know that the people I hire not only can do the job, but they're someone I want to hang out with 40-50 hours a week.
Again, so what? It hasn't made sense to upgrade a CPU on an existing motherboard for 10, maybe 15 years now. And video card, OK, yeah, I can't install this week's newest WhateverTheFark2000, but, to me, that adds no value. If you want to be able to do that, though, buy a tower system rather than a compact one. It's no different than, say, nearly every laptop in the world, is it? That's not what it's _for_.
Just because you don't want to do it, doesn't mean other people don't. Let's see, 15 years... so you still run an original Pentium Pro or something? How well do Photoshop and 3DStudio run on that?
You misunderstand me, probably intentionally. Tell me...when have you REALLY found it cost-effective to put a newer, faster CPU on an existing motherboard? Because, for the last 15 years, replacing the motherboard _and_ CPU has been more bang for the buck. And, can you honestly claim that any reasonable person could read what I wrote as me saying I haven't upgraded _anything_ in 10-15 years? Give me a break. Buy a new CPU on a new mobo and be done with it. Anything else is false economy.
As for buying a tower, have you looked at the prices recently? £1700 for the basic model, about 4x the price of a similar spec PC.
Yeah, I know your type. You're comparing solid hardware, all validated with all the other components, vs. the cheapest case, cheapest power supply, cheapest mouse, cheapest keyboard, and a whole lot of hope. There's nothing low-end about Mac hardware; you get what you pay for.
To be fair though, Mac laptops are very nice. You missed the point though - if I wanted a laptop I'd buy... a laptop.
You also missed my point about laptops. Ah well. Maybe it's a language thing. Let's try again. Just like a laptop, the compact Mac options limit your upgrade choices, yes. This isn't anything hidden or secret. For my needs, upgrading video cards, is useless. I just don't have a need for it. So what you see as a problem, to me, is a non-issue that makes it possible for the system to be more compact.
I have no idea what you mean by "gapless playback support", or how or what it would matter to me.
You know how on a lot of albums the songs run into each other? There is no silence between them. Or on live albums, there is no silence between each song, just background noise at the gig. That's gapless. The older iPod's can't do that, they put a short but of silence between each song no matter what. It's very annoying.
If you say so. My first iPod was a third-generation so maybe it predates that. Never found it annoying on the Floyd or other albums that gapless would involve so I'm guessing it wasn't there, and that's 5 years ago or so. No idea how or why you're tying this into Mac hardware, those are iPods, not Macs (although now, the line is blurring. Then, it wasn't.)
So, let me get this straight - Apple is the bad guy because they keep improving the product line? How does _that_ thinking work?
Please read the next sentence in my original post. I'm all for updates and new versions, what I object to is people who bought the old one being screwed out of new features. The gapless playback, as an example, was a pure software issue. A software update could have given it to every iPod owner, but Apple just fucked us instead.
If gapless playback was so important to you, then maybe you should have researched your purchases more carefully. And no, sorry, they didn't "fuck you", they choose, rightly, to put their development efforts into their next customers, rather than someone who hasn't given them money in 5 years. I can't say I disagree.
You're completely wrong, of course. At some point, of course, your old hardware just won't run the newest stuff.
Many devices don't like hubs, e.g. printers. Odd, I'm using a powered hub on my iMac for my printer, an Epson. Works fine, worked fine with my last one too.
My original point holds - you cannot fit a PCI USB card.
Right, that's fine. I don't have any reason to do so, so not really an issue for me. Hard to understand how it's an issue at all.
You cannot upgrade the graphics card. You cannot upgrade the CPU.
Again, so what? It hasn't made sense to upgrade a CPU on an existing motherboard for 10, maybe 15 years now. And video card, OK, yeah, I can't install this week's newest WhateverTheFark2000, but, to me, that adds no value. If you want to be able to do that, though, buy a tower system rather than a compact one. It's no different than, say, nearly every laptop in the world, is it? That's not what it's _for_.
Also, where is gapless playback support for my iPod, or in fact any iPod before (IIRC) the iPod Video when it was introduced?
I have no idea what you mean by "gapless playback support", or how or what it would matter to me.
Apple's philosophy seems to be planned obsolescence. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the iPod - the average lifetime of an iPod seems to be a little under a year before new models replace it. So, let me get this straight - Apple is the bad guy because they keep improving the product line? How does _that_ thinking work?
It wouldn't hurt so much if they continued to support old models with updates, but they don't.
You're completely wrong, of course. At some point, of course, your old hardware just won't run the newest stuff. So you can decide if you want to keep the old stuff, or upgrade to new. Just like every other computer, cellphone, MP3 player, car, or any other consumer product. I'll ask you this, though - how much effort should Apple, or any other vendor, put into supporting a 3 or 5 year old device? Wouldn't you rather they take that effort to making _new_ things that can do more, instead of supporting some guy's second-gen iPod to make sure he can have gapless playback or whatever?
Exactly the same thing will happen with the iPhone. Here in the UK, EDGE is rubbish and everyone is using towards 3G for data. They will release a 3G iPhone, Of course they will. And somehow you will see this product improvement as a _bad_ thing, right?
and everyone who already bought one will be screwed. The same will happen when they improve the touch interface for text entry. How will I be "screwed", exactly? Will my iPhone magically stop working? Will the edge performance, which is acceptable, suddenly get worse? Nope, of course not. I tried it before i bought it, it's good enough. Besides, 90% of the places I use it, have wifi available, so I'm not using edge the vast majority of the time anyway. Again, you're making a distinction on something that _just_ _doesn't_ _matter_. And as far as the text entry - I'm not sure how it could be improved, it's quite good. You do know that it does auto-correct based on proximity and adaptive dictionary lookups, right? And, you know that if it's software, they can add it to the firmware & push it out just like any other OS upgrade? Why would you think that it wouldn't work on the current ones (if it was even needed)?
It's one thing to not like a product or vendor based on real issues, it's an entirely different one to make distinctions that don't exist out of issues that aren't problems.
If you buy an iMac, apart from RAM it's pretty much impossible to upgrade. Apple's solution is to buy a new computer if you need, say, a better graphics card or more USB ports.
FUD much? If you have an iMac and want more USB ports, you can (gasp!) buy this wonderful thing called a "USB Hub". Available anywhere for 10 or 20 bucks. But if 20 bux is a dealbreaker for you, stay with windows and enjoy Vista. Those of us who understand reality will be happier. Some of us will gleefully point and laugh at you, others of us will merely ignore you for your ill-advised decisions. Your choice. But, when you have to stoop to lying about Apple to futilely steer people away from it, you have poorly represented your point of view. Just so you know.
Putting it differently, if the only consequence of being caught in fraud were having to give the money back, fraud would be consistently profitable. Cheat ten people out of $100 apiece, get caught twice, and you're $800 ahead...so we have punitive damages to discourage that.
You've just rediscovered Circuit City's M.O.
Sorry, but you seem to have mis-spelled "Best Buy".
And there will be no shortage of uranium... the supply needs to last only for 30 to 40 years. Fusion power plants are expected to replace current fission nuclear plants in that time and they require no uranium to run (well, maybe for starting them up) and they run on clean fuel - hydrogen (afaik it also requires lithium catalyst), and 'waste' product is helium. Where can I read more about this working fusion technology, please? Because I was of the impression that it doesn't work yet, so your 30-40 year statement is somewhat at odds with that. Much as I'd love it to be true, can you show me some facts on this?
And a message to you environmentalists, especially greenpeace which is a front for coal (they stop all nuclear options in the 70s/80s) and the result?
Doubling of coal usage.... bloody morons greenpeace are, they are Pro Coal, pollute the earth idiots with zero brains.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to believe that Greenpeace is a front group for the coal industry, but I'm sure that "big coal" (if there is such a term?) sees them as "useful idiots". Personally, I think it's criminal that nuke plant production hasn't happened here in way too long. Not sure which is the bigger problem, people scared of things they aren't qualified to understand (such as, why a Chernobyl-type event could not happen with our reactor designs), or if it's because people understand but want to leverage FUD to keep nuke plants from being built.
This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to take people seriously when they tell me I should change my lifefstyle in this way or that in regards to power. If we had been building nuke plants all along for the last couple decades, we'd be in a VERY much different carbon situation right now. The anti-nuke people are partly to blame for this.
In that case, if he paid $100 for a 4.5 GB disk last year he really got ripped. That's something you put up for $10 and hope you get one bid. He must be sandbagging his hidden "labor cost" just in case the customer reads Slashdot. What part of "It wasn't my money", and "downtime for real applications is expensive" are you having a hard time undrestanding? To them 100 bux was nothing. Yeah, abusive and all that for old hardware but, they reimbursed me for my credit card payment, and the tech for his hours and mileage, so, nobody who does real work lost out. Not seeing a downside here. Hardware whore made out, I broke even, and the tech got out of the lab for a while. What's not to love?
There is really nothing wrong with riding an old computer into the ground. Just make sure you plan an escape path. I.e. Test your software and configuration on new hardware. If you have multiple ancient boxes in your data centre and the testing is a routine matter then keeping just a few spares around to swap out whichever old box keels over is a cost saving measure. Actually, I disagree. We've got almost 2000 Unix servers in our environment. The oldest 10% of them give us maybe 50% of our problems. In the case of a sparcstation 10, it has gone well past end of life, end of service life, and is into the "You're joking, right" phase of support from the vendor. So when something like this dies, someone on my team has to spend a day or two doing heroics to compensate for something that shouldn't have been in the data center in the first place.
I should know we. We just replaced an old monstrosity with 4 CPUs and dedicated external storage with a bare bones PE1950 and internal 250 GB SATA RAID1.
Not because the new box was faster or more reliable. But simply to save on electricity.
In addition to heat and power savings (same thing, really), another consideration is licensing cost. If you're running an app that is priced by CPU, then keeping that old 16 CPU Sun E4500, at 350MHz, is a pretty expensive cost savings. The license savings alone can pay for the hardware upgrade, because of processor improvements. I had a project a couple of years ago to "migrate" a business that we had acquired into our infrastructure. E3500s and similar stuff, really old big heavy servers, half a country away. Turned out to be considerably cheaper to scrap those and buy new here, mostly financed by license savings due to fewer processors.
Sometimes, saving money by keeping the old stuff around is _very_ expensive.
What I find exasperating about this is that they spend thousands, millions on getting this robot to play the violin, then they neglect to code the song correctly. The robot may be actually doing a pretty good job, it just doesn't sound musical! It's like spending millions to train an athlete then only letting him do Morris dancing. Yup. Cheap guitars are a perfect example. Not a one of 'em is playable, and it's ALWAYS for the same reason - the bridge is in the wrong place so the intonation is horrible. Yet, the effort make a cheap guitar with the bridge in the right place, is exactly the same as it is to do it poorly. So you end up with a kid who wanted to learn guitar, with something that has the strings too high so it hurts, and the bridge too close so it gets sharper the higher up the neck they go. Not so much a guitar, as a "guitar-shaped-object". Hardly a way to encourage a beginning player. Like your song chips you mention, this is a case of something that's being made to be sold, rather than to be used. (And, it's probably got lead paint on it...)
As for personal data disasters. There was a Dell Laptop model (can't remember which one) that has a short screw directly over the hard drives circuit board. I put in a slightly longer screw by mistake and killed the drive.
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to an external drive. Then a brand new replacement drive was installed for regular use.
That Blunder cost around $150 and 5 days of downtime on a laptop but I (and all the other geeks in the office) learned a lot about being meticulous.
I got to do something very similar to that about a year ago. One of the engineering departments here has their own webserver, running on a SparcStation 10. Think 1989, 1990, something like that. It was working great until the hard drive's circuit board caught fire. Well OK, caught fire might be a BIT of an overstatement but there were charred components on the board and smoke-trails inside the enclosure, so, close enough. I've done the drive-board-swap thing a few times in the past and it works if you get the right type of drive, but this was an oddball (4.5GB SCSI) drive type that we didn't have any others of in the building. So, I presented the options to the engineering manager. 1. It's dead, and boy don't you wish your people had listened to the backup team when they told you backups had failed long ago, 2. send the drive off to ontrack.com or whatever, assuming the platters are good and the data is intact, or 3. let me get creative.
So, as you say, eBay looking for "seagate st15xomething". Found one with a "buy it now", 1.5 hours away by car. 100 bucks or something. Annoying but cheaper than downtime for that particular group. I bought it, we sent one of his techs out to drive out and get it, and later in the day, swapped the board & up and running. Got it onto mirrored drives at least now but, they're still running on the old box. (shrug) OK, good luck with that, seeya next time.
(1) BOFH tells bosses they really should pay up for legal licences.
(2) BOFH bosses agree and cut a cheqeue
(3) BOFH and PFY book junket to Las Vegas trade show to look into problem, fudge purchasing system to make it look like bosses bought new company cars, hookers and ski trips
Well done Sir. You have truly captured the essence of the BOFH. Now if only I could convince our new guys that it's a parody, a cathartic release of what we wish we could get away with, rather than a guidebook. Ah well.
At this point, I'm just going to rip the drives out and put 'em in a commodity PC running Linux and share it out that way. Annoying; that was the part I was trying to avoid. I've got 1600 unix boxes to deal with during the day, didn't feel like going through all that when I go home, wanted something that'd work out of the box. That's the whole point of buying an appliance. But their tech support is useless, the product doesn't do NFS in any usable way, and at least I've got (2) 500GB mini-sata drives to work with. Ah well.
Dave
Wouldn't work for me. A namesake of mine was the captain of a national football team a while back, so "firstname lastname" isn't going to find me at all (at least, not until 99% of people are bored looking). "Firstname Lastname" -football
Honestly...is the concept of booleans lost to people?
Nobody ever claimed that not-firearm police arms aren't able to kill people. This is used as "less lethal", meaning, probably less likely to kill the bad guy if the situation warrants it. Sometimes, yeah, they're gonna die anyway. But, if this less-lethal option didn't exist, they'd get shot with a chunk of lead at about 1000 feet per second. So, you know what? You're damn lucky the cops have less-lethal weapons as an option (lead beanbags, tasers, paintball pepper spray, etc etc etc), rather than just "do I shoot this guy or not". Sometimes they die. (shrug) so, don't be a criminal and you don't have to worry about it. But, point remains that 10 years ago, you would've been shot with a gun instead of 10K volts for a few seconds.
If you don't wanna be tazered by the cops, um, let's see, how can you avoid it? Maybe, not be a problem when the cops show up? Just an idea.
But on a more serious note, wouldn't it be great if one of the search engines finally did the firstname, lastname thing correctly? It can't be that difficult to figure that one out in a way that it is correct most of the time. You mean, like searching for "Firstname Lastname" (with the quotes)? Works for me... There's nothing magic about that phrase being a name, it's just two words that you want to look for in a specific order but together. Works just like "SCSI bus adapter" or anything else.
Just tested with my dad's name, someone with limited web presence. Just with Firstname Lastname, 295,000 hits. With quotes, 90, most of them him, mostly webpages and newsletters from groups he belongs to. So it seems to work pretty well that way. Very useful in genealogy searches, by the way.
It supports SMB the best, but is supposed to have support for FTP and NFS as well.
I have one of these. RUN AWAY. Their support for NFS is non-standard and inherently broken. I've been through 8 rounds of back-n-forth with their tech support trying to get it straightened out but here's a summary:
1. All users are mapped to "nobody". There's no way to use UID-based access. And it's clear from talking to their support people that they don't see this as a problem. It's fundamental to how NFS works, that the file has an owner.
2. You can create users on it, but they're all assigned a UID by the system, and you can't tell it "No, this user has to be UID 1024" or whatever. So even trying to manually fix the file ownership thing can't be done.
3. Their support folks apparently don't speak Unix of any variety. That's OK I guess, but they gave me syntax on how to mount the device that doesn't work. Can't work. Has the wrong number of parameters to work. When I pointed that out and asked to talk to someone there who knows Unix they just pasted the same unworkable syntaxt to me. (to be precise, I have Linux, Mac, and Solaris, any Unix syntax would do).
4. The documentation doesn't list what the share name is, anywhere. One would think that it's hostname:/share , both of which you can set, but nope. it's hostname:/myshare/share which isn't mentioned anywhere in the docs that I could find, even after I found that out on my own (google or whatever).
So, for NFS, it's somewhere between completely worthless and boat anchor. I've stopped using it entirely, although I suppose I could find something it's capable of doing where access controls don't matter. CD and DVD images maybe.
I use the 500GB version, which has 2x250GB HD's in RAID level 1 (mirror). This enables me to have two hard drives that have copies of all of my backup data.
There is a good review of this product at smallnetbuilder (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30056/75/).
It is also quite inexpensive, as it runs about $260 on newegg (link above). Just my $.02 Glad you're happy with yours but, anyone looking for an NFS NAS solution, this ain't it.
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If 1.1.3 adds just a fix for this, I'd skip it. I have a site, ipodtouchmods.com, which I'll post any deltas of the forthcoming 1.1.3 update to. I suspect it's just trivial BS and maybe a block to those of us who unjail our iPods/iPhones so we can add third party apps. No good reason to install 1.1.3 unless it adds some killer app (FLASH PLEASE). Even so, even with Flash, I'd probably wait for the unjail process to be solidified, or for the flash stuff to be backported to 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 by the mods community.
Well, you seem mostly reasonable. Good that you're still trying to hire that guy. But I still disagree with a good bit of what you're saying. However, I'll keep it to just one thing I want to pick on you for:
Aha! The requirements aren't there because the employee has to have those exact skills, they're there so you don't waste time on people who clearly can't do the job! And, is it really that clear?
Requirements: Solaris 10, Veritas Cluster Server, etc
Nice to have: E25K experience, Linux (various), HPUX 10 and/or 11
Pretty clear to me, anyway.
Sure you didn't miss lots who really could do it? I'm thinking it's not as bad as you see it. Well, Solaris10 added a significant amount of change to Solaris. Not a trivial upgrade by any means, and we use its new features extensively. Sure, we could spend 2 months of OJT training to get someone up to speed on it, or, we could wait for the next resume to come along that lets us skip that part. Also, yes, I agree, a strong Unix guy could learn it. But, the requirement wasn't written by me, but by the hiring manager. He has heard and understood my points about "if you can drive a Ford, you can drive a Chevy", but still prefers to skip that OJT part. He wants someone who already knows the technology, so the training can be about the particulars of our environment. With 1700+ unix boxes to support, it gets a bit intense at times. His department, his budget, his decision to make. My role is to find someone with the skills he wants for people in his department.
You wish 80% of the people you see could do the job? Well, how bad does it seem to you? But in other words, your requirements have been padded to make up for the inadequacies in your selection and interview processes, one of those being that the whole thing is just too much effort and too time consuming. Well, I realize it's difficult, and you're far from the only employer who has a hard time telling who would make a good hire, but still, all could do better. Getting picky about the exact version of a specific flavor of a family of OSes doesn't seem to me to be much help with your real problems.
Solaris 10 really is a dramatic change from anything previous, so it's a steep learning curve to make that step. And if the biggest Sun gear someone has dealt with is a V440, putting them on call to support a couple of 4-node E25K clusters is a bit of a large step as well.
Careful on that slope buddy. I've been there, it's slippery. As long as all the people you interview are the same, in terms of discrimination, you're in good shape. But if some are older, or different genders, or different religions, or different ethnicities, you could set yourself and your company up for an employment discrimination lawsuit.
I probably didn't say that as clearly as I could have. "fit" means, I can get along with someone. Haven't really thought about it but, our team is pretty diverse in cultural/ratial/gender terms, doesn't enter into it at all though. Not saying I'd hang out with everyone _after_ work, but that's not what the interview is about. Just trying to find someone who, let's be clear, isn't some sort of a jerk that would be a negative change to the team. Our team works VERY well together, we don't have that one "that guy" who causes friction, and I hope to keep it that way.
"But no," you say, "I'm just filtering for best fit." And that might work, more or less, but you pretty quickly come across people who are different from you, and if you turn them away because, let's say, they don't get your jokes, or they're not funny, and they happen to be a woman/Muslim/Asian/person-over-50... Well, what's the difference between discriminating based on personality (highly subjective) and discriminating based on race (also highly subjective)?
Good points, but looking at the last handful of folks added to our team, they also are a good mix if that was the sort of thing someone was worried about.Now, age/sex/religious discrimination lawsuits don't happen that often in hiring situations, but if you're considering candidates for internal promotion, it gets pretty sticky. Of course, fundamentally, the problem I see with your approach is that it boils down to hiring people you like. And in that pool of interviewees, people you've just met, the ones you like are the ones most like you. So you end up hiring people like you, turning away people who are different, and this hurts your organization. You need diversity of opinions, ideas, and personal experience to solve problems. Does your company want you to be comfortable, or productive? OK, team cohesion is important, but only because it helps performance - it's a means, not an end. Sure, you can get by with an army of clones, but you'll be doing yourself and your company a disservice.
Yup, I'm clearly not doing a good job of making my point, if that's what you saw from the above. First, can they do the job. Second, do they have the social skills to participate with the group positively, to have good judgement, and to not cause problems due to inexperience or abrasive people skills?Actually, I just bought some Molex connectors at Radio Shack - they didn't know what they were, though, but they connectors were in the sliding-drawer-tacklebox area in the components area. Which used to be half the store and is now a closet, ah well. But the kid had NO idea what a Molex was.
Maybe in some cases, but not this one. We're specific about Level 3, and list Solaris10 and VCS explicitly. At least, _to_ the headhunters. What they're telling the techs, I have no idea. I'm not sure it's appropriate to ask the interviewee "So, what exactly did the headhunter say this job was?"
I can't tell you how many times I've passed up the option to interview there because I won't submit my resume unless I think I actually have the skills and it is for my level rather than some junior position. (And yes, I talked to a few of them about those positions that were advertised there. I passed on it for some reason or another, can't recall which, but it certainly wasn't Solaris or VCS.)
Seems to me the two of us were having conversations back in the execpc days. About half of the guys here are from there at one time or another. Lots of overlap in this market, everyone knows someone who knows everybody.
This brings up the standard series of rants about lousy headhunters and lousy HR folks giving headhunters bad information. Not too many junior folks know enough to force the headhunter to get more information.
He was great except for no recent Solaris experience? And that was enough to decide against him?? That you can afford that luxury shows the IT job market is too much in favor of employers.
Wasn't my decision to make; I'm the team leader, I liked the guy and am working to find him a place in our company, with the intent of getting him trained up for our intense environment on another team and maybe moving him in when he's ready. The point is, the requirements are from the hiring manager, who I report to. It's a staff addition so it's seen with less intensity than it would be if it was to replace someone who left. As it turns out, I hired someone internal, and this guy is interviewing to replace the guy I hired, on my suggestion.
Same as this article about some poor employee losing a job over something posted online, outside of work.
Not at all the same thing. Far as I'm concerned, it's (a) can the guy do the work, and (b) can you get along with them to work with every day. the (a) includes "And, do we have time to train them in their gaps or not".
You've got it just too fat and easy that you can sit there with 100s of candidates, 80% of whom could do the job and you know it,
Wow. I wish that was true. Yeah to me, as a techie, I know that Unix is Unix is Unix, and if someone _gets it_, it doesn't matter which flavor they're most recent on. Yet, the hiring manager owns the job description, which has specifics which are our environment. It's a case of "can figure it out" vs. "been there, done that".
and you moan that not one has all of HP-UX 11.11 and Solaris 9 and RHEL 5 and AIX 5L 5.3 on a 64 bit platform, and experience with even narrower specialties such as Veritas Cluster and Reiser4 and ZFS, and scripting languages, and nothing "irresponsible" posted on the Internet.
Sorry, but you're putting words into my mouth now, so I hope you don't mind that I don't address this point that I never made.
Hope you're not wondering why college freshmen aren't choosing IT related degrees. Training him would not have cost much, I think you overestimate that expense and time. He'd learn most of it on the job anyway, but your manager is just too cheap to allow a measly 2 weeks to get up to speed, while spending, what, 3 weeks waiting for a "better" person to show up. And you know what? It's quite possible that "better" person might have read the job description, downloaded Solaris (since it's open source now) and given himself a crash course on it with the version he downloaded and whatever info he can find on the web about the actual version required, so he can say he has experience and demonstrate just enough to wing the interview successfully.
If a person shows that initiative in the interview and can pass the tech screen, hell yeah, I want to talk to him.
Then please don't be so picky over skills. You throw a lot of babies out with the bathwater when you do that. Ability is what counts. Skills are trivial, they really are. You're zeroing in on a particular version of a particular OS, and overlooking that the important thing is that a candidate know a few OSes, and that it doesn't much matter which ones. If he knows HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Windows Server 2003, he's not going to have any problem figuring out Solaris.
Yeah, they can figure it out. My point is, if the reqs say "required", then I want them to already _have_ figured it out. Look at it this way - if someone (usually headhunters, by the way) ignores specs on _this_ project, what specs will they ignore on other projects?
Like I say, the guy who isn't quite ready skill-wise, I'm trying to place in what basically works as a training position. The thing is, the job requirements were specified because we've wasted too much time interviewing people who were clearly NOT able to "learn it in a few weeks". So you
No, but you should find an employer that's willing to let you chase your dream without having to hide it from them. Next time you change jobs, I'd be up front about being a comedian, and about some of your work being offensive, and let them know that it won't come into your work life. If they don't hire you, keep trying till you find someone that will. You may lose some good opportunities, but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job.
I've interviewed way too many people in the last year. If someone shows up with "other interests" listed as "professional comedian" on their resume, hell yeah, I'd want to talk to them. And I don't care, even a little, if they work "blue" or not at that job. We're all professionals, and I'd rather work with someone who I can have an interesting conversation with than some guy who is pure work with no outside interests. If a prospective employer passes you by because of something like this, they, are doing YOU, the favor.
I have a profile on linkedin.com which includes a highly fictional Bio (I invented rope and television, and taught myself how to hover, for instance). Since I added that 2 or 3 months ago, I've had more direct emails from linkedin members asking me if I'm looking for work than I had in several years previously. Some people don't value a sense of humor but, for me, it's important to know that the people I hire not only can do the job, but they're someone I want to hang out with 40-50 hours a week.
Just because you don't want to do it, doesn't mean other people don't. Let's see, 15 years... so you still run an original Pentium Pro or something? How well do Photoshop and 3DStudio run on that?
You misunderstand me, probably intentionally. Tell me...when have you REALLY found it cost-effective to put a newer, faster CPU on an existing motherboard? Because, for the last 15 years, replacing the motherboard _and_ CPU has been more bang for the buck. And, can you honestly claim that any reasonable person could read what I wrote as me saying I haven't upgraded _anything_ in 10-15 years? Give me a break. Buy a new CPU on a new mobo and be done with it. Anything else is false economy.
As for buying a tower, have you looked at the prices recently? £1700 for the basic model, about 4x the price of a similar spec PC.
Yeah, I know your type. You're comparing solid hardware, all validated with all the other components, vs. the cheapest case, cheapest power supply, cheapest mouse, cheapest keyboard, and a whole lot of hope. There's nothing low-end about Mac hardware; you get what you pay for.
To be fair though, Mac laptops are very nice. You missed the point though - if I wanted a laptop I'd buy... a laptop.
You also missed my point about laptops. Ah well. Maybe it's a language thing. Let's try again. Just like a laptop, the compact Mac options limit your upgrade choices, yes. This isn't anything hidden or secret. For my needs, upgrading video cards, is useless. I just don't have a need for it. So what you see as a problem, to me, is a non-issue that makes it possible for the system to be more compact.
You know how on a lot of albums the songs run into each other? There is no silence between them. Or on live albums, there is no silence between each song, just background noise at the gig. That's gapless. The older iPod's can't do that, they put a short but of silence between each song no matter what. It's very annoying.
If you say so. My first iPod was a third-generation so maybe it predates that. Never found it annoying on the Floyd or other albums that gapless would involve so I'm guessing it wasn't there, and that's 5 years ago or so. No idea how or why you're tying this into Mac hardware, those are iPods, not Macs (although now, the line is blurring. Then, it wasn't.)
Please read the next sentence in my original post. I'm all for updates and new versions, what I object to is people who bought the old one being screwed out of new features. The gapless playback, as an example, was a pure software issue. A software update could have given it to every iPod owner, but Apple just fucked us instead.
If gapless playback was so important to you, then maybe you should have researched your purchases more carefully. And no, sorry, they didn't "fuck you", they choose, rightly, to put their development efforts into their next customers, rather than someone who hasn't given them money in 5 years. I can't say I disagree.
Odd, I'm using a powered hub on my iMac for my printer, an Epson. Works fine, worked fine with my last one too.
My original point holds - you cannot fit a PCI USB card.
Right, that's fine. I don't have any reason to do so, so not really an issue for me. Hard to understand how it's an issue at all.
You cannot upgrade the graphics card. You cannot upgrade the CPU.
Again, so what? It hasn't made sense to upgrade a CPU on an existing motherboard for 10, maybe 15 years now. And video card, OK, yeah, I can't install this week's newest WhateverTheFark2000, but, to me, that adds no value. If you want to be able to do that, though, buy a tower system rather than a compact one. It's no different than, say, nearly every laptop in the world, is it? That's not what it's _for_. Also, where is gapless playback support for my iPod, or in fact any iPod before (IIRC) the iPod Video when it was introduced?
I have no idea what you mean by "gapless playback support", or how or what it would matter to me.
Apple's philosophy seems to be planned obsolescence. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the iPod - the average lifetime of an iPod seems to be a little under a year before new models replace it. So, let me get this straight - Apple is the bad guy because they keep improving the product line? How does _that_ thinking work?
It wouldn't hurt so much if they continued to support old models with updates, but they don't.
You're completely wrong, of course. At some point, of course, your old hardware just won't run the newest stuff. So you can decide if you want to keep the old stuff, or upgrade to new. Just like every other computer, cellphone, MP3 player, car, or any other consumer product. I'll ask you this, though - how much effort should Apple, or any other vendor, put into supporting a 3 or 5 year old device? Wouldn't you rather they take that effort to making _new_ things that can do more, instead of supporting some guy's second-gen iPod to make sure he can have gapless playback or whatever?
Exactly the same thing will happen with the iPhone. Here in the UK, EDGE is rubbish and everyone is using towards 3G for data. They will release a 3G iPhone,
Of course they will. And somehow you will see this product improvement as a _bad_ thing, right?
and everyone who already bought one will be screwed. The same will happen when they improve the touch interface for text entry.
How will I be "screwed", exactly? Will my iPhone magically stop working? Will the edge performance, which is acceptable, suddenly get worse? Nope, of course not. I tried it before i bought it, it's good enough. Besides, 90% of the places I use it, have wifi available, so I'm not using edge the vast majority of the time anyway. Again, you're making a distinction on something that _just_ _doesn't_ _matter_. And as far as the text entry - I'm not sure how it could be improved, it's quite good. You do know that it does auto-correct based on proximity and adaptive dictionary lookups, right? And, you know that if it's software, they can add it to the firmware & push it out just like any other OS upgrade? Why would you think that it wouldn't work on the current ones (if it was even needed)?
It's one thing to not like a product or vendor based on real issues, it's an entirely different one to make distinctions that don't exist out of issues that aren't problems.
FUD much? If you have an iMac and want more USB ports, you can (gasp!) buy this wonderful thing called a "USB Hub". Available anywhere for 10 or 20 bucks. But if 20 bux is a dealbreaker for you, stay with windows and enjoy Vista. Those of us who understand reality will be happier. Some of us will gleefully point and laugh at you, others of us will merely ignore you for your ill-advised decisions. Your choice. But, when you have to stoop to lying about Apple to futilely steer people away from it, you have poorly represented your point of view. Just so you know.
You've just rediscovered Circuit City's M.O.
Sorry, but you seem to have mis-spelled "Best Buy".
Where can I read more about this working fusion technology, please? Because I was of the impression that it doesn't work yet, so your 30-40 year statement is somewhat at odds with that. Much as I'd love it to be true, can you show me some facts on this?
Doubling of coal usage.... bloody morons greenpeace are, they are Pro Coal, pollute the earth idiots with zero brains.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to believe that Greenpeace is a front group for the coal industry, but I'm sure that "big coal" (if there is such a term?) sees them as "useful idiots". Personally, I think it's criminal that nuke plant production hasn't happened here in way too long. Not sure which is the bigger problem, people scared of things they aren't qualified to understand (such as, why a Chernobyl-type event could not happen with our reactor designs), or if it's because people understand but want to leverage FUD to keep nuke plants from being built.
This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to take people seriously when they tell me I should change my lifefstyle in this way or that in regards to power. If we had been building nuke plants all along for the last couple decades, we'd be in a VERY much different carbon situation right now. The anti-nuke people are partly to blame for this.
Actually, I disagree. We've got almost 2000 Unix servers in our environment. The oldest 10% of them give us maybe 50% of our problems. In the case of a sparcstation 10, it has gone well past end of life, end of service life, and is into the "You're joking, right" phase of support from the vendor. So when something like this dies, someone on my team has to spend a day or two doing heroics to compensate for something that shouldn't have been in the data center in the first place. I should know we. We just replaced an old monstrosity with 4 CPUs and dedicated external storage with a bare bones PE1950 and internal 250 GB SATA RAID1.
Not because the new box was faster or more reliable. But simply to save on electricity.
In addition to heat and power savings (same thing, really), another consideration is licensing cost. If you're running an app that is priced by CPU, then keeping that old 16 CPU Sun E4500, at 350MHz, is a pretty expensive cost savings. The license savings alone can pay for the hardware upgrade, because of processor improvements. I had a project a couple of years ago to "migrate" a business that we had acquired into our infrastructure. E3500s and similar stuff, really old big heavy servers, half a country away. Turned out to be considerably cheaper to scrap those and buy new here, mostly financed by license savings due to fewer processors.
Sometimes, saving money by keeping the old stuff around is _very_ expensive.
Yup, as rot26 interpreted, this was a recent event, on ancient cobbled-together hardware.
Yup. Cheap guitars are a perfect example. Not a one of 'em is playable, and it's ALWAYS for the same reason - the bridge is in the wrong place so the intonation is horrible. Yet, the effort make a cheap guitar with the bridge in the right place, is exactly the same as it is to do it poorly. So you end up with a kid who wanted to learn guitar, with something that has the strings too high so it hurts, and the bridge too close so it gets sharper the higher up the neck they go. Not so much a guitar, as a "guitar-shaped-object". Hardly a way to encourage a beginning player. Like your song chips you mention, this is a case of something that's being made to be sold, rather than to be used. (And, it's probably got lead paint on it...)
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to an external drive. Then a brand new replacement drive was installed for regular use.
That Blunder cost around $150 and 5 days of downtime on a laptop but I (and all the other geeks in the office) learned a lot about being meticulous.
I got to do something very similar to that about a year ago. One of the engineering departments here has their own webserver, running on a SparcStation 10. Think 1989, 1990, something like that. It was working great until the hard drive's circuit board caught fire. Well OK, caught fire might be a BIT of an overstatement but there were charred components on the board and smoke-trails inside the enclosure, so, close enough. I've done the drive-board-swap thing a few times in the past and it works if you get the right type of drive, but this was an oddball (4.5GB SCSI) drive type that we didn't have any others of in the building. So, I presented the options to the engineering manager. 1. It's dead, and boy don't you wish your people had listened to the backup team when they told you backups had failed long ago, 2. send the drive off to ontrack.com or whatever, assuming the platters are good and the data is intact, or 3. let me get creative.
So, as you say, eBay looking for "seagate st15xomething". Found one with a "buy it now", 1.5 hours away by car. 100 bucks or something. Annoying but cheaper than downtime for that particular group. I bought it, we sent one of his techs out to drive out and get it, and later in the day, swapped the board & up and running. Got it onto mirrored drives at least now but, they're still running on the old box. (shrug) OK, good luck with that, seeya next time.
(1) BOFH tells bosses they really should pay up for legal licences.
(2) BOFH bosses agree and cut a cheqeue
(3) BOFH and PFY book junket to Las Vegas trade show to look into problem, fudge purchasing system to make it look like bosses bought new company cars, hookers and ski trips
Well done Sir. You have truly captured the essence of the BOFH. Now if only I could convince our new guys that it's a parody, a cathartic release of what we wish we could get away with, rather than a guidebook. Ah well.
At this point, I'm just going to rip the drives out and put 'em in a commodity PC running Linux and share it out that way. Annoying; that was the part I was trying to avoid. I've got 1600 unix boxes to deal with during the day, didn't feel like going through all that when I go home, wanted something that'd work out of the box. That's the whole point of buying an appliance. But their tech support is useless, the product doesn't do NFS in any usable way, and at least I've got (2) 500GB mini-sata drives to work with. Ah well. Dave
Honestly...is the concept of booleans lost to people?
Nobody ever claimed that not-firearm police arms aren't able to kill people. This is used as "less lethal", meaning, probably less likely to kill the bad guy if the situation warrants it. Sometimes, yeah, they're gonna die anyway. But, if this less-lethal option didn't exist, they'd get shot with a chunk of lead at about 1000 feet per second. So, you know what? You're damn lucky the cops have less-lethal weapons as an option (lead beanbags, tasers, paintball pepper spray, etc etc etc), rather than just "do I shoot this guy or not". Sometimes they die. (shrug) so, don't be a criminal and you don't have to worry about it. But, point remains that 10 years ago, you would've been shot with a gun instead of 10K volts for a few seconds.
If you don't wanna be tazered by the cops, um, let's see, how can you avoid it? Maybe, not be a problem when the cops show up? Just an idea.
It supports SMB the best, but is supposed to have support for FTP and NFS as well.
I have one of these. RUN AWAY. Their support for NFS is non-standard and inherently broken. I've been through 8 rounds of back-n-forth with their tech support trying to get it straightened out but here's a summary:
1. All users are mapped to "nobody". There's no way to use UID-based access. And it's clear from talking to their support people that they don't see this as a problem. It's fundamental to how NFS works, that the file has an owner.
2. You can create users on it, but they're all assigned a UID by the system, and you can't tell it "No, this user has to be UID 1024" or whatever. So even trying to manually fix the file ownership thing can't be done.
3. Their support folks apparently don't speak Unix of any variety. That's OK I guess, but they gave me syntax on how to mount the device that doesn't work. Can't work. Has the wrong number of parameters to work. When I pointed that out and asked to talk to someone there who knows Unix they just pasted the same unworkable syntaxt to me. (to be precise, I have Linux, Mac, and Solaris, any Unix syntax would do).
4. The documentation doesn't list what the share name is, anywhere. One would think that it's hostname:/share , both of which you can set, but nope. it's hostname:/myshare/share which isn't mentioned anywhere in the docs that I could find, even after I found that out on my own (google or whatever).
So, for NFS, it's somewhere between completely worthless and boat anchor. I've stopped using it entirely, although I suppose I could find something it's capable of doing where access controls don't matter. CD and DVD images maybe. I use the 500GB version, which has 2x250GB HD's in RAID level 1 (mirror). This enables me to have two hard drives that have copies of all of my backup data.
There is a good review of this product at smallnetbuilder (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30056/75/).
It is also quite inexpensive, as it runs about $260 on newegg (link above). Just my $.02 Glad you're happy with yours but, anyone looking for an NFS NAS solution, this ain't it.