I've had to call them before, for Office XP. After upgrading my hard disk and video card and switching to Windows XP it got the funny idea that I might have moved it to a different computer. It didn't matter that the mac address and other hardware details hadn't changed. Their support just gave me the code without any harrassment but it was still an annoying and time consuming experience.
I've switched to Linux at home and haven't bought from them since, but there were a lot of other factors that went into the decision.
IIRC, there should be a lot of educational software in the repository. Just uncomment the universe lines in/etc/apt/sources.list and search for them in synaptic.
If it was the former, they could have found someone better. There are much more insidious spyware programs out there, and people with much better knowledge of them.
I'm guessing they saw the words "Chief Privacy Officer" on this guy's resume and hired him on the spot.
Web design - The current trend is away from flashy sites that slow or distract the user from what they're looking for and confuse search engines. Fluid layouts are good. Another trend is reducing the space between the top of the page and the content, and sometimes moving the navigation bar to the right to reduce mouse movement between the nav bar and the scroll bar and allow the content to be closer to the top left, drawing the user's eyes to the content and putting it higher up on the page for the search engines.
SEO - Search engine optimization. If they've researched it they should know the acronym. Most of the old techniques no longer work in Google. Some will get you penalties. No javascript based links that the search engines can't follow. Repetition is bad. Very similar pages are bad, often the case with product pages where a product has many similar configurations, each having its own page. Dynamic pages with long urls or a countless number of possible urls (like with session ids) are bad because search engines will only spider a small number of them to avoid getting thousands of really similar pages from one dynamic page. Aside from avoiding repetition and things that confuse the search engine, content is mostly king.
Security - They should at least know about sql injection.
Content organization - As a plus, they should be able to organize your site based on what your customers are most likely to be searching for, what you sell the most of. This decides things like front page links, what images best represent each category, and so on. It's not enough just to have an online catalog with every product having equal weight. It might help if they took microeconomics in college.
As for which language, php, java, or asp.net, it doesn't matter as much as the quality of the programmer. A lot of things seem to take much less effort in php though.
I'm sure he could have put a few idle loops in there and made it take several weeks to impress you, but really, faster is better, and it's not always obvious how long something will take until you try it.
The hope is that Red Hat is driven by the same blood curdling fear of disaster to thoroughly test every release that drives sysadmins to want to spend 4x as much and set up every server with dual redundant power supplies and battery backed hot swap scsi drives in a raid 1 or raid 5. If someone is badly bitten by an "enterprise" distribution they'd be more apt to let everyone know.
But for the most part, when it works it works, no matter what distribution. Always do your homework to make sure it'll survive a crash with minimal loss, and perform some benchmarks after setting it up. I've seen driver problems (on FC2 and CentOS, both RH based) cause significant slowdown and packet loss.
If you have a lot of apps that simply can't be migrated, or there's no way to safely and gradually perform the migration, it may be best to hold off or look into a partial migration. The ultimate goal is to solve problems and/or save money.
Samba for me has been a very good file server, performing seemingly much faster than I've seen with Windows servers, with the flexibility to do some very interesting and unusual setups.
Slashdot Mirror
With fewer choices, some potential customers will just look elsewhere (again).
That's been in their EULA's for years now. It's good to hear that I'm not the only one reading them.
I play Quake 2 and Quake 3 on my Linux PC, native without wine. But I just don't have the hardware to run Doom 3, even if I had Windows.
I've had to call them before, for Office XP. After upgrading my hard disk and video card and switching to Windows XP it got the funny idea that I might have moved it to a different computer. It didn't matter that the mac address and other hardware details hadn't changed. Their support just gave me the code without any harrassment but it was still an annoying and time consuming experience.
I've switched to Linux at home and haven't bought from them since, but there were a lot of other factors that went into the decision.
"We don't want you to use our operating system." - Microsoft
IIRC, there should be a lot of educational software in the repository. Just uncomment the universe lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and search for them in synaptic.
If it was the former, they could have found someone better. There are much more insidious spyware programs out there, and people with much better knowledge of them.
I'm guessing they saw the words "Chief Privacy Officer" on this guy's resume and hired him on the spot.
I never could beat that game.
Web design - The current trend is away from flashy sites that slow or distract the user from what they're looking for and confuse search engines. Fluid layouts are good. Another trend is reducing the space between the top of the page and the content, and sometimes moving the navigation bar to the right to reduce mouse movement between the nav bar and the scroll bar and allow the content to be closer to the top left, drawing the user's eyes to the content and putting it higher up on the page for the search engines.
SEO - Search engine optimization. If they've researched it they should know the acronym. Most of the old techniques no longer work in Google. Some will get you penalties. No javascript based links that the search engines can't follow. Repetition is bad. Very similar pages are bad, often the case with product pages where a product has many similar configurations, each having its own page. Dynamic pages with long urls or a countless number of possible urls (like with session ids) are bad because search engines will only spider a small number of them to avoid getting thousands of really similar pages from one dynamic page. Aside from avoiding repetition and things that confuse the search engine, content is mostly king.
Security - They should at least know about sql injection.
Content organization - As a plus, they should be able to organize your site based on what your customers are most likely to be searching for, what you sell the most of. This decides things like front page links, what images best represent each category, and so on. It's not enough just to have an online catalog with every product having equal weight. It might help if they took microeconomics in college.
As for which language, php, java, or asp.net, it doesn't matter as much as the quality of the programmer. A lot of things seem to take much less effort in php though.
I'm sure he could have put a few idle loops in there and made it take several weeks to impress you, but really, faster is better, and it's not always obvious how long something will take until you try it.
Dell will sell you one at only a 500% markup over cost.x ?c=us&cs=555&l=en&oc=PE7250PAD&s=biz
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp
If it mentioned mathematitions, you might have something.
Filezilla is my favorite.
In that same period, I've setup three nix servers (two Redhat, one Slackware) and had all three compromised at one point or another.
Details?
Nobody will break this:
a=SHA256(s)
b=MD5(a+s)
SHAM(s)=SHA1(b+a)
All nice distributions, but all lacking good QA.
Wherever there is a demand for paid support, you'll find plenty of people and businesses willing to provide it. http://www.debian.org/consultants/
Interpretation: All attacks on Red Hat go here.
The hope is that Red Hat is driven by the same blood curdling fear of disaster to thoroughly test every release that drives sysadmins to want to spend 4x as much and set up every server with dual redundant power supplies and battery backed hot swap scsi drives in a raid 1 or raid 5. If someone is badly bitten by an "enterprise" distribution they'd be more apt to let everyone know.
But for the most part, when it works it works, no matter what distribution. Always do your homework to make sure it'll survive a crash with minimal loss, and perform some benchmarks after setting it up. I've seen driver problems (on FC2 and CentOS, both RH based) cause significant slowdown and packet loss.
If you start judging by pronunciation, it comes down to either Debbie 'n Woody, Susie, or Our Hell.
If you have a lot of apps that simply can't be migrated, or there's no way to safely and gradually perform the migration, it may be best to hold off or look into a partial migration. The ultimate goal is to solve problems and/or save money.
Samba for me has been a very good file server, performing seemingly much faster than I've seen with Windows servers, with the flexibility to do some very interesting and unusual setups.
All occurances of "Red Hat" will be replaced with "Rat Hed".
They'll acquire PayPal first.
The UPX license expressly prohibits modifying exes after they've been compressed.
"No updates available for this product."
I've checked several versions, starting with the corporate edition which we use.
Our $5 billion lawsuit against IBM is progressing at an accelerated rate, so buy our licenses while you still can.
Smart people may be smarter than previously assumed.