I should add that I have heard that the new Asus Zenbook 505 laptops are very Linux friendly, but I have personally never used one and they ship only with Windows.
I can second this. My Dell XPS 13 "Developer Edition" that came preinstalled with Ubuntu is the best Linux laptop I have ever owned. I hate the crap Broadcom WiFi card in it, but it does work fine out of the box with Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I did have to replace the preinstalled Dell version of Ubuntu as it was horribly corrupted somehow (if you ran anything other than trivial programs, they would crash).
I also own a System76 Linux laptop, but I think the Dell "Developer Edition" XPS 13 model and the M3800 model are better built machines. Check http://www.dell.com/ubuntu or http://www.system76.com/ as both options do ship with Ubuntu preinstalled.
Honestly both should be involved. Anyone proposing a solution should be prepared to back that solution up when presenting it to others. I have seen Management make some really absolutely stupid decisions relating to software and platforms, but I have seen the Techie side do the same.
When I worked at a relatively small ISP, we had a backdoor (locked down by IP) into the DSL modems we handed out, but we only ever used it to make config changes on behalf of our customers. Honestly it cut down on support time quite a bit. We were more than happy for a customer to use their own DSL modem, but those people were in the minority compared to customers who wanted us to help them change the SSID and password on their wifi. Ours had all settings exposed for the customer if they wanted to change them, although almost none ever did on their own.
Obviously your company's experiences differ quite a bit from ours. Our experiences with Cisco's support for IOS bugs has left a rather bad taste in our mouths for any Cisco branded hardware. So bad that we switched all of our core routers over to another vendor and haven't looked back.
We use a barracuda and quite frankly arent very impressed. It used to work great but the spammers have gotten better while the technology powering the barracuda hasnt. I get tons of spam in my personal inbox and i have trained the byasian(sp?) filter for my account and for the box as a whole extensively.
now dont get me wrong, we love their outgoing filter product as for the load it handles and the email it handles, it works great.
the incomming product has to be babysat far too much, and the company itself tells you that you need to blow away the byasian db every 3 months and build it again. not acceptable. as it is right now a tech spends half a day every day training the damned thing to make it better at keeping our customers happy.
We are close to migrating to postini. postini costs more but they have techs their who do the spam classification for you and they stay on top of filtering techniques. personally i dont like the idea of having a 3rd party be the first stop for all of our incoming mail, but if it helps keep the customers happy then it is fine by me.
it will hit it in theory, in practice with about 200 ft of copper between myself and the dslam i am only getting about 14 Mbit/s in my testing of some adsl 2+ equip. might be the modem though, i am synced up at 23Mbit/1Mbit and i am getting all of my upstream most definately.
still damned fast, and can go further distance than normal adsl
i agree completely. i will NEVER buy anything from valve EVER as long as steam is required. what really pissed me off was the fact that the original HL2 retail box didnt mention an internet connection being a game requirement.
steam is forbidden from ever being installed on any system i own period. i loved halflife single player and was looking forward to its sequal. i almost bought it. i played it briefly at a friends house and was about to walk out the door to go buy it when he mentioned that he had had to validate with steam for playing the first time. this was with a store bought retail copy.
i hated steam since its inception, unstable buggy POS software originally. i am sure they have taken care of any stability issues since then but i refuse to have a game developer tell me that i have to be online to play a single player game. i refuse to have a game developer tell me that he can install and do anything with my computer that he wants to at any time and i just have to suck it up. screw that.
i voted with my wallet. valve will NEVER have me as a customer as long as steam is a requirement.
what in the heck are you doing buying any off the shelf board to use with expensive scsi cards? if you arent buying a pro workstation/server grade board then dont expect it to act like one. expensive scsi needs pcix, something you dont find on a board down at compusa/bestbuy/etc....
your arguement has to be the most assinine thing i have seen on slashdot in a while, which is saying something.
she accuses the gnome group of the VERY SAME THING she herself does with osnews.com, completely ignore user requests.
users of osnews.com have been requesting minor and major improvements in the site's comment system and it has fallen on deaf ears. she actually goes out of her way to moderate down any such requests sometimes and gets pissy if you point out her own hypocrisy(sp?) hiding behind the mantra of osnews being a free service blah blah blah.
or just pick any of them that you want to use (such as knoppix) and tell it not to load a gui on the boot command line. with knoppix this is as simple as adding a "cheatcode" of 2
ie at the boot prompt something like this:
knoppix26 noscsi 2
i did just as you state at the end of your post, at the point steam was required i no longer will play/own/purchase/etc... any game which requires it. i was really looking forward to halflife 2 until i found out that you couldnt play it in single player mode without first registering through steam (which would require steam being installed on my box, something i will NEVER allow)
i saw one about every other day last semester. a girl had one because it was difficult for her to walk because of an accident she had when she was around 15 or so (actually it wasnt expected that she would be capable of taking care of herself after the accident at all, but somehow she recovered enough to return to school, albeit now she isnt as intelligent nor as quick learning as she was before)
up until that point i thought the segway pointless, but now i have seen a use for them for someone who gets around better than needing a wheelchair but still cant walk accross the room without tremendous pain and difficulty (and the segway seems to have little trouble navigating the rather hilly terrain of the college i was going to)
this appears to be using the vlc and vc-1 source code to give vlc wmv support. no dlls needed and it should compile and work just peachy on your platform (might require some #ifdef work to take care of the endian differences, but should be a relatively trivial operation)
the remake of ET by speilberg(however you spell it) had the guns of the cops in a couple of scenes replaced with walkie talkies because he didnt like the idea of guns being used against children in his movie or some other bs.
mp3s: yes by default fc cannot play mp3s. this is due to patent issues and those same issues are the reason that fc doesnt include ntfs support either. honestly fc isnt for the normal home user, never was. if you want mp3 playback you can use the apt/yum repositories from either rpm.livna.org or freshrpms.net, your pick (they may not be fully populated yet, but if not they will be soon).
mplayer: mplayer can be downloaded from both of the repositories mentioned above so you dont have to compile it if you dont want to.
java: so install java rpms?
ide/scsi issue: dont know what to tell you on this one, i dont have a scsi cdrom drive to test with to see if i can come up with a work around.
network: set a static ip on eth0 and see if it works that way, horrid work around i know, but it should speed up boot time as it wont be looking for a dhcp server.
cant help you with rezound nor audacity, i can try them later and see what happens for me, but offhand the only thing i can think of is that they might have build dependencies you dont have installed or they might not like the version of gcc on fc3. what sort of errors do you get?
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I went in expecting a terrible movie and was pleasantly surprised to find it was a mediocre movie. I still think it deserves the poor RT rating though
I should add that I have heard that the new Asus Zenbook 505 laptops are very Linux friendly, but I have personally never used one and they ship only with Windows.
I can second this. My Dell XPS 13 "Developer Edition" that came preinstalled with Ubuntu is the best Linux laptop I have ever owned. I hate the crap Broadcom WiFi card in it, but it does work fine out of the box with Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I did have to replace the preinstalled Dell version of Ubuntu as it was horribly corrupted somehow (if you ran anything other than trivial programs, they would crash). I also own a System76 Linux laptop, but I think the Dell "Developer Edition" XPS 13 model and the M3800 model are better built machines. Check http://www.dell.com/ubuntu or http://www.system76.com/ as both options do ship with Ubuntu preinstalled.
Honestly both should be involved. Anyone proposing a solution should be prepared to back that solution up when presenting it to others. I have seen Management make some really absolutely stupid decisions relating to software and platforms, but I have seen the Techie side do the same.
When I worked at a relatively small ISP, we had a backdoor (locked down by IP) into the DSL modems we handed out, but we only ever used it to make config changes on behalf of our customers. Honestly it cut down on support time quite a bit. We were more than happy for a customer to use their own DSL modem, but those people were in the minority compared to customers who wanted us to help them change the SSID and password on their wifi. Ours had all settings exposed for the customer if they wanted to change them, although almost none ever did on their own.
Obviously your company's experiences differ quite a bit from ours. Our experiences with Cisco's support for IOS bugs has left a rather bad taste in our mouths for any Cisco branded hardware. So bad that we switched all of our core routers over to another vendor and haven't looked back.
Actually, no, on second thought, it wouldn't, because people would panic when they saw the blinking lights and call in the bomb squad.
So you live in Boston?
I use an arc welder. Probably one of the most enjoyable ways of destroying old hard drives that guarantees a lack of data recovery.
.... literally. My employer lets me use an acetylene torch to burn them.
;}
Old backup tapes get torched
Hammers are overrated
Arc welders and acetylene torches are where it's at
We use a barracuda and quite frankly arent very impressed. It used to work great but the spammers have gotten better while the technology powering the barracuda hasnt. I get tons of spam in my personal inbox and i have trained the byasian(sp?) filter for my account and for the box as a whole extensively.
now dont get me wrong, we love their outgoing filter product as for the load it handles and the email it handles, it works great.
the incomming product has to be babysat far too much, and the company itself tells you that you need to blow away the byasian db every 3 months and build it again. not acceptable. as it is right now a tech spends half a day every day training the damned thing to make it better at keeping our customers happy.
We are close to migrating to postini. postini costs more but they have techs their who do the spam classification for you and they stay on top of filtering techniques. personally i dont like the idea of having a 3rd party be the first stop for all of our incoming mail, but if it helps keep the customers happy then it is fine by me.
i would play a b5 game, offline, online, or mm online, i have been waiting a long time for one
umm ... actually yes you can.. its called passive os fingerprinting. check out p0f.
also nmap is pretty good about identifying a remote OS
it will hit it in theory, in practice with about 200 ft of copper between myself and the dslam i am only getting about 14 Mbit/s in my testing of some adsl 2+ equip. might be the modem though, i am synced up at 23Mbit/1Mbit and i am getting all of my upstream most definately.
still damned fast, and can go further distance than normal adsl
i dont download nor buy RIAA music. fuck the RIAA.
i agree completely. i will NEVER buy anything from valve EVER as long as steam is required. what really pissed me off was the fact that the original HL2 retail box didnt mention an internet connection being a game requirement.
steam is forbidden from ever being installed on any system i own period. i loved halflife single player and was looking forward to its sequal. i almost bought it. i played it briefly at a friends house and was about to walk out the door to go buy it when he mentioned that he had had to validate with steam for playing the first time. this was with a store bought retail copy.
i hated steam since its inception, unstable buggy POS software originally. i am sure they have taken care of any stability issues since then but i refuse to have a game developer tell me that i have to be online to play a single player game. i refuse to have a game developer tell me that he can install and do anything with my computer that he wants to at any time and i just have to suck it up. screw that.
i voted with my wallet. valve will NEVER have me as a customer as long as steam is a requirement.
what in the heck are you doing buying any off the shelf board to use with expensive scsi cards? if you arent buying a pro workstation/server grade board then dont expect it to act like one. expensive scsi needs pcix, something you dont find on a board down at compusa/bestbuy/etc....
your arguement has to be the most assinine thing i have seen on slashdot in a while, which is saying something.
she accuses the gnome group of the VERY SAME THING she herself does with osnews.com, completely ignore user requests.
users of osnews.com have been requesting minor and major improvements in the site's comment system and it has fallen on deaf ears. she actually goes out of her way to moderate down any such requests sometimes and gets pissy if you point out her own hypocrisy(sp?) hiding behind the mantra of osnews being a free service blah blah blah.
worst. analogy. ever.
or just pick any of them that you want to use (such as knoppix) and tell it not to load a gui on the boot command line. with knoppix this is as simple as adding a "cheatcode" of 2 ie at the boot prompt something like this: knoppix26 noscsi 2
i did just as you state at the end of your post, at the point steam was required i no longer will play/own/purchase/etc... any game which requires it. i was really looking forward to halflife 2 until i found out that you couldnt play it in single player mode without first registering through steam (which would require steam being installed on my box, something i will NEVER allow)
i saw one about every other day last semester. a girl had one because it was difficult for her to walk because of an accident she had when she was around 15 or so (actually it wasnt expected that she would be capable of taking care of herself after the accident at all, but somehow she recovered enough to return to school, albeit now she isnt as intelligent nor as quick learning as she was before) up until that point i thought the segway pointless, but now i have seen a use for them for someone who gets around better than needing a wheelchair but still cant walk accross the room without tremendous pain and difficulty (and the segway seems to have little trouble navigating the rather hilly terrain of the college i was going to)
... its called zipping, most webservers have it as an option to zip the data up as it streams to the client browser
i fail to see the need to have a "binary xml" file format when there are already facilities in place to compress text streams
this appears to be using the vlc and vc-1 source code to give vlc wmv support. no dlls needed and it should compile and work just peachy on your platform (might require some #ifdef work to take care of the endian differences, but should be a relatively trivial operation)
the remake of ET by speilberg(however you spell it) had the guns of the cops in a couple of scenes replaced with walkie talkies because he didnt like the idea of guns being used against children in his movie or some other bs.
out of curiosity, why did you get an SCO license prior to the court proceedings saying yay or nay to SCO's claims having merit?
i will attempt to address some of your gripes.
mp3s: yes by default fc cannot play mp3s. this is due to patent issues and those same issues are the reason that fc doesnt include ntfs support either. honestly fc isnt for the normal home user, never was. if you want mp3 playback you can use the apt/yum repositories from either rpm.livna.org or freshrpms.net, your pick (they may not be fully populated yet, but if not they will be soon).
mplayer: mplayer can be downloaded from both of the repositories mentioned above so you dont have to compile it if you dont want to.
java: so install java rpms?
ide/scsi issue: dont know what to tell you on this one, i dont have a scsi cdrom drive to test with to see if i can come up with a work around.
network: set a static ip on eth0 and see if it works that way, horrid work around i know, but it should speed up boot time as it wont be looking for a dhcp server.
cant help you with rezound nor audacity, i can try them later and see what happens for me, but offhand the only thing i can think of is that they might have build dependencies you dont have installed or they might not like the version of gcc on fc3. what sort of errors do you get?