In other words, what really bugs Tom's Hardware is that nobody cares about Tom's Hardware any more.
Yeah, and guess why- every time you went and looked at Tom's Hardware, the information and reviews were months old, or worse. I was continually frustrated, while shopping for PC components, at how out-of-date THG was- so I simply stopped bothering to look at their site.
THG should have stuck to what they were most useful for- a place to learn about PC technology. Not a lets-run-some-benchmark-scripts-with-different-vid eo-cards. THG has turned into what I call "two guys in a dorm room who have a hardware review site". Unfortunately, that market is a dime-a-dozen; every stupid moron who knows how to use Front Page has one.
Open source can, and has, done a lot for server-side hardware. But it just doesn't sell enough iron on the desktop to matter. Look what happened to VA Linux.
Open source sells plenty of iron- it's just that there's no point in going with some boutique rackmount company with absurd sales policies(see below), when you've got better support, better hardware, better access to parts, etc from IBM, Gateway, HP, Compaq...all of whom have supported Linux on a lot of their hardware for years.
VA filled a niche that disappeared the second the Big Boys supported Linux; none of the big corporations really knew who VA was, and nobody cared; they just called their IBM/HP/Gateway/Compaq rep and ordered up systems from them. What made it worse was that VA didn't have stock on 'accessory' items, and you couldn't get parts. For example, this is an almost word-for-word phone conversation between VA and myself, trying to get carriers for adding new drives to our one VA Linux DB server(we needed the drives within 2 days.)
Operator:"Thank you for calling VA blah blah"
Me:"Sales please."
Sales:"VA sales, this is ____, how can I help you?"
Me: "I need two SCSI drive carriers for my VA ____."
Sales:"Ah, you'll need to talk to someone in our parts department, they handle those requests. Let me transfer you."
Parts:"VA Parts, how can I help you?"
Me: "Yes, Hi, I need two SCSI drive carriers for my VA ____."
Parts:"Okay, hmm, one sec..[click click click click]...I'm sorry sir, they're not available."
Me:"Oh, backordered? When will they be in?"
Parts:"We have them in stock. I'm not authorized to sell you this part."
(very long pause while I censor myself)
Me:"Okkkkaaaaaay. Do you have any 36GB 10,000 RPM drives?"
Parts:"Yes."
Me:"How much?"
Parts:"$800 each"
Me(I actually laughed):"I can get those drives from any of a dozen vendors for half that. Alright, fine. How soon can you have them shipped to me?"
Parts:"We don't have any in stock. Maybe two weeks."
So you know what we did? We swore never to buy another VA Linux system, ordered two drives from a vendor who had them there by 10am the next morning, and jury-rigged them in the drive slots. VA sunk themselves with stupid bullshit that kept customers from meeting critical deadlines. Many IT departments work on a "we needed this two days ago" schedule, not a "we might need this in two weeks" schedule. There are those that recognize this, and those that try to force you into buying product they don't even have in stock, by not selling you parts like empty drive carriers- and consequently go out of business when suddenly they're the dinky little hole-in-the-wall company nobody cares about in a market full of Big Boys. We bought over two dozen rackmount servers within a year of that incident, and they came from Gateway- not VA.
Got a few facts wrong, I just realized. Here's a good article with the facts of the case; it was a combination of throttle malfunction at low altitude, and improper altitude display. http://www.airdisaster.com/investigations/af296/af 296.shtml
Even if this process is hack-proof (yet to be seen), anything that forcibly takes control away from the pilot is going to be dangerous.
Ding ding ding! Thank you. One need look only as far as the Airbus A-320 that crashed at an airshow while doing a low fly-by; the computer prevented the pilot from increasing power to the engines, and the plane mowed a 200 foot wide swath through the forest and exploded in flames.
Several people were killed,and the pilot was scapegoated by Airbus; they claimed he was flying at 30 feet, not 70- that he had switched off the computer systems, etc. The flight recorder was removed by an AIRBUS EMPLOYEE from the crash scene(there's news footage of him carrying the box away!) and the box disappeared for a day or two. It was then mysteriously returned to the French police...and guess what? There was a large gap in the flight recorder's data, and it showed rather incriminating evidence(for the pilot.)
method of controlling things like your cell phone and stereo while keeping your eyes on the road
First off- my stereo in my car displays the FM frequency info in the gauge cluster, at the top, and I know all the controls by feel; the button groups are shaped with surfaces to let you recognize which button group you're on. This feature was introduced in 1989 by Audi, and continues in every single model they make- so this is solving a problem that doesn't exist, frankly. If one manufacturer can do it, any can- it's just smart design and a little bit of extra electronics.
Regardless, The problem is NOT the "taking your eyes off the road" bit. The problem, time after time, is your mental focus.
Researchers found that when a driver is talking on the cell phone, it's almost like they enter a tunnel of sorts- they loose their situational awareness(ie, "where are the other cars around me?" "what is my speed?" etc.) and sort of blankly stare ahead. You can recognize anyone in this "mode"; they look like some kind of automaton.
Of course, the phone companies say "that's absurd, people in cars talk to the driver". That's right(even right to the extent that many states limit passengers for young drivers, who haven't enough experience)- but when you're talking to the driver (studies have shown that) you stop talking to them if the situation the driver is in gets complicated- ie, a merge, someone starts to cut them off, an exit is coming up, or they're looking for a turn to make- or even if the driver suddenly changes their body language- and even that act of stopping talking to them can give the driver a wakeup call. People on the other end of the phone can't do any of this, of course.
But, have you ever wondered why the cellphone industry is happily embracing the hands-free stuff? They get to sell extra accessories at an absurd profit margin compared to the phone unit itself- and it distracts everyone from the much more "dangerous"(to them) truth- that people can't talk to other people safely unless they're in the car, ie, cell phone calls by drivers should be illegal PERIOD.
I've run Exchange servers since Exch 4.0. If you have solid hardware (you mentioned some quad Xeon box.. did you build it yourself or was it on Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List?)
The system was a huge HP rackmount server. Three entirely different sets of hardware were tried- we performed countless diagnostics on the first two systems. The Exchange admins kept screaming "it's a memory problem, a memory problem!", except that we ran memtest86 for a week on one of the systems, with no problems- and it was all ECC ram. HP techs couldn't find anything wrong, even after swapping out the daughtercards the ram was on, etc. etc. Futhermore, one of the systems HAD been a Linux box with uptime records of MONTHS.
As far as the database being corrupt, sounds like faulty hardware to me.
THREE sets of hardware were tried- two HP's, and then out of desperation they pulled a desktop P4, threw a shitload of ram in it, and gave up.
Also, your client issues could be you didn't size your hardware properly for your user count (but with the hardware you describe, you should be able to handle 1500+ users easily, since you didn't specify your user count i'll guess its below 1500).
Whoa. That's a new one. TOO fast a system for the user base(150 people)? We(unix admins) told them it was gross overkill, but they kept insisting they needed gigs of ram, multiple processors, and huge raid arrays...
Why must people resort to lies to promote their holy cause? ANYONE who's really used Exchange (and has even half a brain) knows that this story is complete horseshit.
Sorry, but it's a completely honest accounting of the problems the windows admins had keeping that box running. And no, it was not a "built it ourselves" box, it was a huge HP rackmount system, with an HP raid controller, etc.
Initially they were using a dual processor box, but it kept corrupting its DB, which they insisted was a hardware problem- specifically memory. So we swapped it with a quad processor box we had, swapping drives etc. Problem didn't go away, and funny thing- the old box passed a week's worth of testing with memtest86.
"Let's see, 12 inches in a foot, pint's a pound the world around, 2 weeks in a fortnight...so to view 36 comics over 6 weeks I'd need to pay him...ah crap, does anyone remember how many pints in in a gallon?"
There's an old PA comic where they mock Scott's love of micropayments here [penny-arcade.com].
(from PA's webserver) Warning: Host '192.168.50.65' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in/data/users/penny-arcade/www/php_admin_header.php3 on line 11
Perhaps Scott can mock them back for having their backend database server automatically block their frontend webserver, which is pretty piss-poor of whoever their admin is...not to mention, crappy error handling(programmer's fault) and insecure PHP configuration options(sysadmin again- detailed PHP errors shouldn't go to the user, only the logs, and yes, PHP has an option for this. For example, I now know that php_admin_header.php3 is probably an include- and includes sometimes do fun/exciting/revealing things when executed standalone.)
Complaints will be handled by people too slow to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
I repeat the following story every time I hear someone insult a postal worker.
One day I needed to get something in the mail THAT day, and I wasn't able to get down to the post office. I caught the mailman as he was driving up to the mailbox, and handed him the letter. Except I didn't have enough postage- I had forgotten about the rate increase that had happened recently.
Now, if the guy had wanted to be an asshole, he could have refused it- but he said "you got any change? I'll put the extra postage on it when I get in" I had a quarter on me, gave it to him, and was happy that I had probably still spent less money than the gas it would have taken to get to the post office and back.
What bowled me over was that the next day, he parked, came to the door, and handed me change. I was blown away that he bothered for such a small amount, and had expected him to (rightfully, far as I was concerned) pocket the 15-20 cents for the trouble of having to 'buy' and slap on an extra stamp for me.
NOW, if you want to see how patient postal employees are, see what these guys did. It is incredibly funny(the part about the sender trying to argue they should get money BACK for shipping a balloon is hilarious), but there's a serious message in their absurd little experiment(which involved shipping bricks, hammers, dead fish+seaweed, etc), and I'll include their conclusion here:
First, this experiment yielded a 64% delivery rate (18/28), an almost two-thirds success rate. (For our purposes, "delivery" constituted some type of independent handling by the USPS and subsequent contact regarding the object, regardless of whether we got to see or keep the object or whether it arrived whole.) This is astounding, considering the nature of some of the items sent. This compares with a 0% rate of receipt of fully wrapped packages from certain countries of the developing world, such as Peru, Turkey, and Egypt. Admittedly, those were international mailings, and thus not totally comparable; nevertheless, the disparity is striking.
Second, the delivery involved the collusion of sequences of postal workers, not simply lone operatives. The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.
Finally, our investigation team felt remorse for some of its experimental efforts, most particularly the category "Disgusting," after the good faith of the USPS in its delivery efforts. We sought out as many of the USPS employees who had (involuntarily) been involved in the experiment as we could identify, and gave them each a small box of chocolate.
We, and all scientists, owe a debt of gratitude to these civil servants. Without them, we would have had but little success in pushing the envelope.
Is speech recognition so good now that sound would have to be played back from inside a '73 Pinto at the bottom of a swimming pool to keep a computer from parsing it?
Years ago, I told my Powermac 660AV "Computer, open window", and it shut down instead.
Granted, it was the only computer on the market that could do speech recognition thanks to a builtin DSP, and the integration with the Macintosh environment was superb- but it still would do the most amusing things.
I'll vouch for that. Conversation between me and lady tech at speakeasy:
tech:"how do you know your connection is down 30% of the time?"
me: "I use Big Brother to monitor it."
tech:"Oh cool, we use that here too. Is there a URL you can give me to look at it?"
me: "Hmm, no, it's on a server inside my network, and I don't have a hole punched in the firewall for it."
tech:"How about emailing me a screen shot?"
me: "Hmm, hang on- I don't remember which program it is that does screen shots in Linux."
tech(sounds of her standing up):"hey guys, anyone remember how to do a screenshot in X?"
Spam is another form of Speech. Yes, it is grossly abused and outright annoying, but it is still protected here in the U.S. (except for pending anti-spam legislation).
Actually, the US supreme court recently made it exceptionally clear that nobody has the right to force their speech upon you, and in fact, at worst, YOU have an expectation of privacy. Telemarketers do not have the "right" to call you. Postal spammers don't have the "right" to flood your mailbox with junk mail. Junk faxers don't have the "right"...etc.
Free speech means the government can't tell you what you can/cannot publish, broadcast, or say. It doesn't mean you have the god-given right to force whatever it is you want to say onto people.
As the saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends right before my nose; your rights end where mine begin.
Better use plenum cable in the walls. It's in the building code in a lot of places
Actually, no- it's not required in-wall. The only cases where plenum is required is in air ducts, hence the name, plenum cable. Want to guess why? PVC gives off extremely toxic fumes when it burns. Plenum is a little more fire resistant, and a little less toxic.
Try googling around, you'll find what I found:
"Plenum Cable: A cable with flammability and smoke characteristics that meet the safety requirements of the National Electrical Code® (NEC®) that allow it to be routed in a plenum area without being enclosed in a conduit. See plenum."
Regular CAT in a fire can act like a fuse, moving the fire from one part of the house to another inside the walls.
This is bullshit. It's not a "fuse", but regardless- plenum would eventually do the same thing- it's a little more fire-resistant than PVC, but it'll still burn.
Right off the bat, I see one very evil problem with the article- they show cables with those $@#!ing boots.
I'm gonna make this as clear as possible: NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER BUY ETHERNET CABLES WITH BOOTS.
Why? Because you can't plug them into switches/hubs/routers unless the device has spacing to allow for the boot. Many, many devices don't! The boots also do a great job of interfering with the case of many systems with builtin ethernet.
Oh, and here's another tip for the readers, a VERY common myth- I didn't see if they mentioned this, but you CANNOT just do "same color order on both ends". The whole point behind twisted pair is that the twisted pairs reduce loss from magnetics. In order to take advantage of that, you have to use the pairs properly- ie, you need to put the pairs on the rx and tx pairs on the connector, or you've got a signal flowing over different pairs, and that's WRONG. I had to correct several coworkers at two different jobs, who were wiring cables any old way, just making the ends the same. Surprise, the cables worked like shit. Folks- 100BaseT spec only allows for ONE INCH of untwisted wire on the entire cable, so don't go making really long untwisted leaders into the connectors. It's a pain to get the hang of it and getting 'em all lined up right, but it needs to be done properly!
The current range of IBM R40 centrino notebooks can provide you with 4 hours [basoncomputer.com] of battery life.Laptop makers are looking for the high profit margins that ink jet printer manufacturers enjoy. How much will these full cell cartrages cost?
Guess what? Nobody ever talks about it, but Lithium Ion batteries have a VERY finite lifetime; a FEW(very few) hundred discharge-recharge cycles; every time you discharge the battery, and the more you discharge it- the more of the battery you permanently destroy.
Companies that make these Lithium Ion cells(no foolin', that square battery contains a whole bunch of cells that are almost exactly AA size) won't sell them to you, of course- why? Because if you overload them, they catch on fire pretty handily, so you have to be a "certified" "solution provider" lest you blow yourself up. Mind you, the battery companies could install thermal/current fuses in the batteries, but they don't want to, because it conveniently lets them control the market, and gives them an avenue of escape if a pack for some camcorder or digicam has serious problems- they can point the finger at that company.
So, even though Panasonic still makes the cell used by my Powerbook Lombard, and even though you cannot buy new Lombard/Pismo batteries(they're no longer made, period), I can't fix my lombard's battery.
I worked at a company which sustained most of the raw network services(DNS, mail) we needed on a single ancient Sun pizza-box single-processor system, maybe 200MB of ram, and one or two rather old SCSI disks. Clients used POP or IMAP to get their mail, and all was good. It almost never crashed(maybe once every 6 months), people liked the speed, etc. This was with 50 employees. All was good.
About a year after I joined the company, we got bought by a company which was thoroughly impressed with itself IT-wise; they were geniuses, we didn't know shit, supposedly.
They DEMANDED we switch to Exchange, because goddammit, we needed to be able to click the "Yes, I'll be there" button when they sent a meeting announcement. So we threw a Quad 500mhz Xeon box with 2 or 4GB(I forget which) of ram, 6+ SCSI drives with a high-end raid controller, etc. at the 'problem' and hoped for the best.
It crashed constantly. It corrupted its database incessantly. It had to be rebooted every week, sometimes more often. People were always having problems with the Exchange client; disconnects from the server, crashes, weird error messages, hosed mailboxes(which meant you lost all your mail). It took forever for the client to launch in the morning when you first opened it. All in all, we went from having to spend maybe an hour or two a month supporting mail services, to a full-time employee spending several hours a week feeding the damn thing. Rarely did people use the meeting scheduling stuff, or any of Exchange's other groupware features. The whole thing was collosally stupid.
Isn't it really fucking sad when a software package barely running on a $30,000 system is worse than a software package running nicely on a system you could buy off ebay for $100, and you did it all to give people features they never used anyway?
A friend worked at a company where someone suggested they move to Exchange off of POP/IMAP services. The CTO intervened VERY quickly and shot the whole idea down, saying it would be a terrible idea.
If someone at your company makes a similar suggestion and tries to get Exchange through the door, tell the execs to find another company that switched to Exchange, and ask them about reliability, TCO, and whether anyone is actually using the few things Exchange gets you over "just a mail client".
And you know what? All of the stuff you listed sounds pretty damn funny, and certainly original.
That's two qualities the American media seems to find desperately hard to achieve, probably because they spend too much time trying to spit out something that will appeal to absolutely everyone, which of course is impossible.
So as a result, we have 5 billion sitcoms about a middle-age couple with 2.5 kids, a dog, and an SUV. The husband is a passive-aggressive jerk always getting into trouble with the missus because he's a moron, the wife is a no-bullshit woman, and the kids are very young, quiet and never say a word(very realistic). The other half of the primetime lineup are murder crime shows convincing the american public that they're going to get murdered or blown up by the zillions of terrorists running around(as a side note, anyone else notice that crime shows seem to be the place to break the public in on more and more invasive "crimefighting" technologies? Joe Q. Public sees all that wonderful technology at work- it's instant, always catching the bad guy, etc...it's like Ashcroft's personal heaven.)
It's a humbling gesture that keeps sys admins in their place and makes them come up with functional miracles with existing equipment purchases (think of Scotty from Star Trek).
Yeah, but did you notice the Enterprise was always getting the stuffing knocked out of it? Well, okay, in TNG that was mostly because Worf couldn't hit the fucking broadside of a barn, but in TOS, Scotty didn't seem to do a very good job of keeping that thing from blowing a gasket every time some alien or space anomaly popped out of the woodwork.
Then again, if Scotty got dilithium crystals instead of dilithium duct tape, the Enterprise woulda opened a can 'o whoop ass on those pesky aliens that kept popping out of nowhere, and the series/movies would have ended sooner. Oh wait, that's a Good Thing...
Don't count Chipzilla to just roll over and play dead. They have already warned MoBo manufacturers not to turn the i865 into the i875. I wonder how many will heed the warning? Its not as if there are major alternatives out there (note, I said "major").
Don't count mObO manufacturers to just roll over and play dead. They have already warned Chipzilla not to be pissy about them turning the i865 into the i875. It's not as if there isn't another processor out there(note, I said "AMD").
There are so many good marketing specs thrown into 875P that make the hardware enthusiasts to go after it and even prepare to pay a premium for it.
I take back all those nasty comments about hole-in-the-wall-2-guys-in-a-dorm-room-'review' sites. Well, okay, not all of them- even this guy has some SERIOUS grammar problems:-)
My musician husband has been lusting after the ability to record music for years, and the big trouble has been that the right software has been proprietary, often requiring expensive hardware to make it work, and EXPENSIVE on its own.
Aww, poo baby, having to spend a couple grand on equipment to make money. What IS the world coming to? Oh wait, let's leave Musician Reality and enter Real World Reality.
Tools for automotive mechanics can cost thousands of dollars, and that's not including the computerized tools now practically required for most vehicles made since 1995 or so.
IT people spend housands of dollars on equipment, references like the Nutshell books, training, education, certification, and software.
Carpenters need vehicles, labourers, lots of tools, state license...don't forget the good ones have spend considerable time in an apprenticeship...then there's laying down the money for materials not knowing if you'll get paid...not to mention all the overhead of starting a new business...
Doctors spend HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars on education- then there's the intern period where you make shit $ for unbelievable hours. Then there's joining a practice, all THAT equipment(you think YOUR equipment is expensive?), malpractice insurance...oh, and your student loans.
Fact is that any profession requires money to aquire the knowledge, experience, and tools necessary to do the job; that's why those professionals make MONEY using those TOOLS, why their SERVICES are VALUED and people PAY what we real world people like to call MONEY for those SERVICES.
While I agree this free software package is great, you need to get your(or your husband's) artist-head out of the proverbial socialist-poet-filled coffeeshop and into reality- because one free software package is not going to turn your home office into a recording studio. You're forgetting about sound deadening, a nice recording microphone, mixers, wiring, maybe even electrical work(helloooo ground loop hum!)...
Will Linux do to OS X what it already has done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?
First off, Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris were never even MINOR players in the "desktop" market- at best, they only had the workstation market. Irix probably topped that market, followed by Solaris, I'm guessing.
Second, most stats put MacOS between 3 and 5 percent of the market, and growing. Linux has around a half a percent, and growing. Trends will continue- people will buy Macintoshes before they install Linux.
The difference between MacOS and Linux is that with Linux, the "I can't buy any software for it" argument is actually RIGHT. First- reality. Very few commercial applications run on Linux, and people don't want open-source counterparts; they want the real honest to god Microsoft Office or Quicken. Also, quite frankly, much of the stuff that ships with the various distros and pose as useful applications are, quite simply, feature-poor, unreliable garbage. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, even comes close to holding a candle to software like Illustrator and inDesign/Quark. Gnumeric SUCKS compared to Excel(and I say that having just having made a chart in Gnumeric from some very simple data, then trying to set options for tic spacing, background color, ranges, etc.)
Then, there's perception. I tried to 'sell' someone on OpenOffice for his new iMac, and he just wasn't interested. "I need the real thing" were his exact words. Before anyone preaches to me about how wrong he is- you have to understand that PERCEPTION and REALITY are two entirely different things- and one drives the commercial world, the other doesn't:-)
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, what really bugs Tom's Hardware is that nobody cares about Tom's Hardware any more.
Yeah, and guess why- every time you went and looked at Tom's Hardware, the information and reviews were months old, or worse. I was continually frustrated, while shopping for PC components, at how out-of-date THG was- so I simply stopped bothering to look at their site.
THG should have stuck to what they were most useful for- a place to learn about PC technology. Not a lets-run-some-benchmark-scripts-with-different-vid eo-cards. THG has turned into what I call "two guys in a dorm room who have a hardware review site". Unfortunately, that market is a dime-a-dozen; every stupid moron who knows how to use Front Page has one.
Open source can, and has, done a lot for server-side hardware. But it just doesn't sell enough iron on the desktop to matter. Look what happened to VA Linux.
Open source sells plenty of iron- it's just that there's no point in going with some boutique rackmount company with absurd sales policies(see below), when you've got better support, better hardware, better access to parts, etc from IBM, Gateway, HP, Compaq...all of whom have supported Linux on a lot of their hardware for years.
VA filled a niche that disappeared the second the Big Boys supported Linux; none of the big corporations really knew who VA was, and nobody cared; they just called their IBM/HP/Gateway/Compaq rep and ordered up systems from them. What made it worse was that VA didn't have stock on 'accessory' items, and you couldn't get parts. For example, this is an almost word-for-word phone conversation between VA and myself, trying to get carriers for adding new drives to our one VA Linux DB server(we needed the drives within 2 days.)
Operator:"Thank you for calling VA blah blah"
Me:"Sales please."
Sales:"VA sales, this is ____, how can I help you?"
Me: "I need two SCSI drive carriers for my VA ____."
Sales:"Ah, you'll need to talk to someone in our parts department, they handle those requests. Let me transfer you."
Parts:"VA Parts, how can I help you?"
Me: "Yes, Hi, I need two SCSI drive carriers for my VA ____."
Parts:"Okay, hmm, one sec..[click click click click]...I'm sorry sir, they're not available."
Me:"Oh, backordered? When will they be in?"
Parts:"We have them in stock. I'm not authorized to sell you this part."
(very long pause while I censor myself)
Me:"Okkkkaaaaaay. Do you have any 36GB 10,000 RPM drives?"
Parts:"Yes."
Me:"How much?"
Parts:"$800 each"
Me(I actually laughed):"I can get those drives from any of a dozen vendors for half that. Alright, fine. How soon can you have them shipped to me?"
Parts:"We don't have any in stock. Maybe two weeks."
So you know what we did? We swore never to buy another VA Linux system, ordered two drives from a vendor who had them there by 10am the next morning, and jury-rigged them in the drive slots. VA sunk themselves with stupid bullshit that kept customers from meeting critical deadlines. Many IT departments work on a "we needed this two days ago" schedule, not a "we might need this in two weeks" schedule. There are those that recognize this, and those that try to force you into buying product they don't even have in stock, by not selling you parts like empty drive carriers- and consequently go out of business when suddenly they're the dinky little hole-in-the-wall company nobody cares about in a market full of Big Boys. We bought over two dozen rackmount servers within a year of that incident, and they came from Gateway- not VA.
Got a few facts wrong, I just realized. Here's a good article with the facts of the case; it was a combination of throttle malfunction at low altitude, and improper altitude display. http://www.airdisaster.com/investigations/af296/af 296.shtml
Ding ding ding! Thank you. One need look only as far as the Airbus A-320 that crashed at an airshow while doing a low fly-by; the computer prevented the pilot from increasing power to the engines, and the plane mowed a 200 foot wide swath through the forest and exploded in flames.
Several people were killed,and the pilot was scapegoated by Airbus; they claimed he was flying at 30 feet, not 70- that he had switched off the computer systems, etc. The flight recorder was removed by an AIRBUS EMPLOYEE from the crash scene(there's news footage of him carrying the box away!) and the box disappeared for a day or two. It was then mysteriously returned to the French police...and guess what? There was a large gap in the flight recorder's data, and it showed rather incriminating evidence(for the pilot.)
method of controlling things like your cell phone and stereo while keeping your eyes on the road
First off- my stereo in my car displays the FM frequency info in the gauge cluster, at the top, and I know all the controls by feel; the button groups are shaped with surfaces to let you recognize which button group you're on. This feature was introduced in 1989 by Audi, and continues in every single model they make- so this is solving a problem that doesn't exist, frankly. If one manufacturer can do it, any can- it's just smart design and a little bit of extra electronics.
Regardless, The problem is NOT the "taking your eyes off the road" bit. The problem, time after time, is your mental focus.
Researchers found that when a driver is talking on the cell phone, it's almost like they enter a tunnel of sorts- they loose their situational awareness(ie, "where are the other cars around me?" "what is my speed?" etc.) and sort of blankly stare ahead. You can recognize anyone in this "mode"; they look like some kind of automaton.
Of course, the phone companies say "that's absurd, people in cars talk to the driver". That's right(even right to the extent that many states limit passengers for young drivers, who haven't enough experience)- but when you're talking to the driver (studies have shown that) you stop talking to them if the situation the driver is in gets complicated- ie, a merge, someone starts to cut them off, an exit is coming up, or they're looking for a turn to make- or even if the driver suddenly changes their body language- and even that act of stopping talking to them can give the driver a wakeup call. People on the other end of the phone can't do any of this, of course.
But, have you ever wondered why the cellphone industry is happily embracing the hands-free stuff? They get to sell extra accessories at an absurd profit margin compared to the phone unit itself- and it distracts everyone from the much more "dangerous"(to them) truth- that people can't talk to other people safely unless they're in the car, ie, cell phone calls by drivers should be illegal PERIOD.
Please don't post usless comments.
Please don't assume people are incompetent.
I've run Exchange servers since Exch 4.0. If you have solid hardware (you mentioned some quad Xeon box.. did you build it yourself or was it on Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List?)
The system was a huge HP rackmount server. Three entirely different sets of hardware were tried- we performed countless diagnostics on the first two systems. The Exchange admins kept screaming "it's a memory problem, a memory problem!", except that we ran memtest86 for a week on one of the systems, with no problems- and it was all ECC ram. HP techs couldn't find anything wrong, even after swapping out the daughtercards the ram was on, etc. etc. Futhermore, one of the systems HAD been a Linux box with uptime records of MONTHS.
As far as the database being corrupt, sounds like faulty hardware to me.
THREE sets of hardware were tried- two HP's, and then out of desperation they pulled a desktop P4, threw a shitload of ram in it, and gave up.
Also, your client issues could be you didn't size your hardware properly for your user count (but with the hardware you describe, you should be able to handle 1500+ users easily, since you didn't specify your user count i'll guess its below 1500).
Whoa. That's a new one. TOO fast a system for the user base(150 people)? We(unix admins) told them it was gross overkill, but they kept insisting they needed gigs of ram, multiple processors, and huge raid arrays...
Sorry, but it's a completely honest accounting of the problems the windows admins had keeping that box running. And no, it was not a "built it ourselves" box, it was a huge HP rackmount system, with an HP raid controller, etc.
Initially they were using a dual processor box, but it kept corrupting its DB, which they insisted was a hardware problem- specifically memory. So we swapped it with a quad processor box we had, swapping drives etc. Problem didn't go away, and funny thing- the old box passed a week's worth of testing with memtest86.
Could be worse. I could be pintpayments.
"Let's see, 12 inches in a foot, pint's a pound the world around, 2 weeks in a fortnight...so to view 36 comics over 6 weeks I'd need to pay him...ah crap, does anyone remember how many pints in in a gallon?"
There's an old PA comic where they mock Scott's love of micropayments here [penny-arcade.com].
(from PA's webserver) Warning: Host '192.168.50.65' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /data/users/penny-arcade/www/php_admin_header.php3 on line 11
Perhaps Scott can mock them back for having their backend database server automatically block their frontend webserver, which is pretty piss-poor of whoever their admin is...not to mention, crappy error handling(programmer's fault) and insecure PHP configuration options(sysadmin again- detailed PHP errors shouldn't go to the user, only the logs, and yes, PHP has an option for this. For example, I now know that php_admin_header.php3 is probably an include- and includes sometimes do fun/exciting/revealing things when executed standalone.)
available preloaded with Windows or Mandrake 9.1.
Ah, but I bet you only have one choice as to whether the Windows license fee is (does Dr. Evil quote thing) "pre-loaded" to your bill :-)
Complaints will be handled by people too slow to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
I repeat the following story every time I hear someone insult a postal worker.
One day I needed to get something in the mail THAT day, and I wasn't able to get down to the post office. I caught the mailman as he was driving up to the mailbox, and handed him the letter. Except I didn't have enough postage- I had forgotten about the rate increase that had happened recently.
Now, if the guy had wanted to be an asshole, he could have refused it- but he said "you got any change? I'll put the extra postage on it when I get in" I had a quarter on me, gave it to him, and was happy that I had probably still spent less money than the gas it would have taken to get to the post office and back.
What bowled me over was that the next day, he parked, came to the door, and handed me change. I was blown away that he bothered for such a small amount, and had expected him to (rightfully, far as I was concerned) pocket the 15-20 cents for the trouble of having to 'buy' and slap on an extra stamp for me.
NOW, if you want to see how patient postal employees are, see what these guys did. It is incredibly funny(the part about the sender trying to argue they should get money BACK for shipping a balloon is hilarious), but there's a serious message in their absurd little experiment(which involved shipping bricks, hammers, dead fish+seaweed, etc), and I'll include their conclusion here:
First, this experiment yielded a 64% delivery rate (18/28), an almost two-thirds success rate. (For our purposes, "delivery" constituted some type of independent handling by the USPS and subsequent contact regarding the object, regardless of whether we got to see or keep the object or whether it arrived whole.) This is astounding, considering the nature of some of the items sent. This compares with a 0% rate of receipt of fully wrapped packages from certain countries of the developing world, such as Peru, Turkey, and Egypt. Admittedly, those were international mailings, and thus not totally comparable; nevertheless, the disparity is striking.
Second, the delivery involved the collusion of sequences of postal workers, not simply lone operatives. The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.
Finally, our investigation team felt remorse for some of its experimental efforts, most particularly the category "Disgusting," after the good faith of the USPS in its delivery efforts. We sought out as many of the USPS employees who had (involuntarily) been involved in the experiment as we could identify, and gave them each a small box of chocolate.
We, and all scientists, owe a debt of gratitude to these civil servants. Without them, we would have had but little success in pushing the envelope.
Is speech recognition so good now that sound would have to be played back from inside a '73 Pinto at the bottom of a swimming pool to keep a computer from parsing it?
Years ago, I told my Powermac 660AV "Computer, open window", and it shut down instead.
Granted, it was the only computer on the market that could do speech recognition thanks to a builtin DSP, and the integration with the Macintosh environment was superb- but it still would do the most amusing things.
I'll vouch for that. Conversation between me and lady tech at speakeasy:
tech:"how do you know your connection is down 30% of the time?"
me: "I use Big Brother to monitor it."
tech:"Oh cool, we use that here too. Is there a URL you can give me to look at it?"
me: "Hmm, no, it's on a server inside my network, and I don't have a hole punched in the firewall for it."
tech:"How about emailing me a screen shot?"
me: "Hmm, hang on- I don't remember which program it is that does screen shots in Linux."
tech(sounds of her standing up):"hey guys, anyone remember how to do a screenshot in X?"
I was speechless...
Actually, the US supreme court recently made it exceptionally clear that nobody has the right to force their speech upon you, and in fact, at worst, YOU have an expectation of privacy. Telemarketers do not have the "right" to call you. Postal spammers don't have the "right" to flood your mailbox with junk mail. Junk faxers don't have the "right"...etc.
Free speech means the government can't tell you what you can/cannot publish, broadcast, or say. It doesn't mean you have the god-given right to force whatever it is you want to say onto people.
As the saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends right before my nose; your rights end where mine begin.
Actually, no- it's not required in-wall. The only cases where plenum is required is in air ducts, hence the name, plenum cable. Want to guess why? PVC gives off extremely toxic fumes when it burns. Plenum is a little more fire resistant, and a little less toxic.
Try googling around, you'll find what I found:
"Plenum Cable: A cable with flammability and smoke characteristics that meet the safety requirements of the National Electrical Code® (NEC®) that allow it to be routed in a plenum area without being enclosed in a conduit. See plenum."
Regular CAT in a fire can act like a fuse, moving the fire from one part of the house to another inside the walls.
This is bullshit. It's not a "fuse", but regardless- plenum would eventually do the same thing- it's a little more fire-resistant than PVC, but it'll still burn.
Right off the bat, I see one very evil problem with the article- they show cables with those $@#!ing boots.
I'm gonna make this as clear as possible:
NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER BUY ETHERNET CABLES WITH BOOTS.
Why? Because you can't plug them into switches/hubs/routers unless the device has spacing to allow for the boot. Many, many devices don't! The boots also do a great job of interfering with the case of many systems with builtin ethernet.
Oh, and here's another tip for the readers, a VERY common myth- I didn't see if they mentioned this, but you CANNOT just do "same color order on both ends". The whole point behind twisted pair is that the twisted pairs reduce loss from magnetics. In order to take advantage of that, you have to use the pairs properly- ie, you need to put the pairs on the rx and tx pairs on the connector, or you've got a signal flowing over different pairs, and that's WRONG. I had to correct several coworkers at two different jobs, who were wiring cables any old way, just making the ends the same. Surprise, the cables worked like shit. Folks- 100BaseT spec only allows for ONE INCH of untwisted wire on the entire cable, so don't go making really long untwisted leaders into the connectors. It's a pain to get the hang of it and getting 'em all lined up right, but it needs to be done properly!
Then either it's not in the gaming industry, or they never signed NCA's(Non Competition Agreement)...
Guess what? Nobody ever talks about it, but Lithium Ion batteries have a VERY finite lifetime; a FEW(very few) hundred discharge-recharge cycles; every time you discharge the battery, and the more you discharge it- the more of the battery you permanently destroy.
Companies that make these Lithium Ion cells(no foolin', that square battery contains a whole bunch of cells that are almost exactly AA size) won't sell them to you, of course- why? Because if you overload them, they catch on fire pretty handily, so you have to be a "certified" "solution provider" lest you blow yourself up. Mind you, the battery companies could install thermal/current fuses in the batteries, but they don't want to, because it conveniently lets them control the market, and gives them an avenue of escape if a pack for some camcorder or digicam has serious problems- they can point the finger at that company.
So, even though Panasonic still makes the cell used by my Powerbook Lombard, and even though you cannot buy new Lombard/Pismo batteries(they're no longer made, period), I can't fix my lombard's battery.
I worked at a company which sustained most of the raw network services(DNS, mail) we needed on a single ancient Sun pizza-box single-processor system, maybe 200MB of ram, and one or two rather old SCSI disks. Clients used POP or IMAP to get their mail, and all was good. It almost never crashed(maybe once every 6 months), people liked the speed, etc. This was with 50 employees. All was good.
About a year after I joined the company, we got bought by a company which was thoroughly impressed with itself IT-wise; they were geniuses, we didn't know shit, supposedly.
They DEMANDED we switch to Exchange, because goddammit, we needed to be able to click the "Yes, I'll be there" button when they sent a meeting announcement. So we threw a Quad 500mhz Xeon box with 2 or 4GB(I forget which) of ram, 6+ SCSI drives with a high-end raid controller, etc. at the 'problem' and hoped for the best.
It crashed constantly. It corrupted its database incessantly. It had to be rebooted every week, sometimes more often. People were always having problems with the Exchange client; disconnects from the server, crashes, weird error messages, hosed mailboxes(which meant you lost all your mail). It took forever for the client to launch in the morning when you first opened it. All in all, we went from having to spend maybe an hour or two a month supporting mail services, to a full-time employee spending several hours a week feeding the damn thing. Rarely did people use the meeting scheduling stuff, or any of Exchange's other groupware features. The whole thing was collosally stupid.
Isn't it really fucking sad when a software package barely running on a $30,000 system is worse than a software package running nicely on a system you could buy off ebay for $100, and you did it all to give people features they never used anyway?
A friend worked at a company where someone suggested they move to Exchange off of POP/IMAP services. The CTO intervened VERY quickly and shot the whole idea down, saying it would be a terrible idea.
If someone at your company makes a similar suggestion and tries to get Exchange through the door, tell the execs to find another company that switched to Exchange, and ask them about reliability, TCO, and whether anyone is actually using the few things Exchange gets you over "just a mail client".
And you know what? All of the stuff you listed sounds pretty damn funny, and certainly original.
That's two qualities the American media seems to find desperately hard to achieve, probably because they spend too much time trying to spit out something that will appeal to absolutely everyone, which of course is impossible.
So as a result, we have 5 billion sitcoms about a middle-age couple with 2.5 kids, a dog, and an SUV. The husband is a passive-aggressive jerk always getting into trouble with the missus because he's a moron, the wife is a no-bullshit woman, and the kids are very young, quiet and never say a word(very realistic). The other half of the primetime lineup are murder crime shows convincing the american public that they're going to get murdered or blown up by the zillions of terrorists running around(as a side note, anyone else notice that crime shows seem to be the place to break the public in on more and more invasive "crimefighting" technologies? Joe Q. Public sees all that wonderful technology at work- it's instant, always catching the bad guy, etc...it's like Ashcroft's personal heaven.)
It's a humbling gesture that keeps sys admins in their place and makes them come up with functional miracles with existing equipment purchases (think of Scotty from Star Trek).
Yeah, but did you notice the Enterprise was always getting the stuffing knocked out of it? Well, okay, in TNG that was mostly because Worf couldn't hit the fucking broadside of a barn, but in TOS, Scotty didn't seem to do a very good job of keeping that thing from blowing a gasket every time some alien or space anomaly popped out of the woodwork.
Then again, if Scotty got dilithium crystals instead of dilithium duct tape, the Enterprise woulda opened a can 'o whoop ass on those pesky aliens that kept popping out of nowhere, and the series/movies would have ended sooner. Oh wait, that's a Good Thing...
Don't count mObO manufacturers to just roll over and play dead. They have already warned Chipzilla not to be pissy about them turning the i865 into the i875. It's not as if there isn't another processor out there(note, I said "AMD").
Funniest quote from the whole article:
There are so many good marketing specs thrown into 875P that make the hardware enthusiasts to go after it and even prepare to pay a premium for it.
I take back all those nasty comments about hole-in-the-wall-2-guys-in-a-dorm-room-'review' sites. Well, okay, not all of them- even this guy has some SERIOUS grammar problems :-)
Aww, poo baby, having to spend a couple grand on equipment to make money. What IS the world coming to? Oh wait, let's leave Musician Reality and enter Real World Reality.
Tools for automotive mechanics can cost thousands of dollars, and that's not including the computerized tools now practically required for most vehicles made since 1995 or so.
IT people spend housands of dollars on equipment, references like the Nutshell books, training, education, certification, and software.
Carpenters need vehicles, labourers, lots of tools, state license...don't forget the good ones have spend considerable time in an apprenticeship...then there's laying down the money for materials not knowing if you'll get paid...not to mention all the overhead of starting a new business...
Doctors spend HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars on education- then there's the intern period where you make shit $ for unbelievable hours. Then there's joining a practice, all THAT equipment(you think YOUR equipment is expensive?), malpractice insurance...oh, and your student loans.
Fact is that any profession requires money to aquire the knowledge, experience, and tools necessary to do the job; that's why those professionals make MONEY using those TOOLS, why their SERVICES are VALUED and people PAY what we real world people like to call MONEY for those SERVICES.
While I agree this free software package is great, you need to get your(or your husband's) artist-head out of the proverbial socialist-poet-filled coffeeshop and into reality- because one free software package is not going to turn your home office into a recording studio. You're forgetting about sound deadening, a nice recording microphone, mixers, wiring, maybe even electrical work(helloooo ground loop hum!)...
1980's, Sony: "You'll never notice those two 'faint' grey lines!" 2003, NEC: "You'll never notice those three 'small' spaces between sections!"
First off, Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris were never even MINOR players in the "desktop" market- at best, they only had the workstation market. Irix probably topped that market, followed by Solaris, I'm guessing.
Second, most stats put MacOS between 3 and 5 percent of the market, and growing. Linux has around a half a percent, and growing. Trends will continue- people will buy Macintoshes before they install Linux.
The difference between MacOS and Linux is that with Linux, the "I can't buy any software for it" argument is actually RIGHT. First- reality. Very few commercial applications run on Linux, and people don't want open-source counterparts; they want the real honest to god Microsoft Office or Quicken. Also, quite frankly, much of the stuff that ships with the various distros and pose as useful applications are, quite simply, feature-poor, unreliable garbage. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, even comes close to holding a candle to software like Illustrator and inDesign/Quark. Gnumeric SUCKS compared to Excel(and I say that having just having made a chart in Gnumeric from some very simple data, then trying to set options for tic spacing, background color, ranges, etc.)
Then, there's perception. I tried to 'sell' someone on OpenOffice for his new iMac, and he just wasn't interested. "I need the real thing" were his exact words. Before anyone preaches to me about how wrong he is- you have to understand that PERCEPTION and REALITY are two entirely different things- and one drives the commercial world, the other doesn't :-)