You laugh, but I've actually seen developers do that in the real world. Not to kiss up to their boss, but to be able to tell the customer that they made the application faster.
I dunno, I like my Storm2 (the 8550 model I think) from a few years ago. It's a full-device display, without a physical keyboard, but the screen physically "clicks" when it registers a keystroke. Turn it to landscape mode and it's not terribly difficult to type on.
It's a bit long in the tooth now, but still works well enough. Was my lifeline during Sandy because all we had that worked was SMS service (voice was really patchy and often overloaded).
Drives without TLER will take way too long to decide that a sector is bad before reporting that error back up the chain. This basically causes the controller host to freak out and drop the entire drive out of the array.
So unless the Blue/Green/Black drives have TLER, you really don't want to be using them in a RAID array. Especially not a RAID 5/6/1+0 array where it's far more critical.
Irene wasn't a lot of fun last August. Mostly because of downed trees and power outages. The first 2 days are different, as you do clean up and figure out if the office has power.
After that it gets to be a grind as you go day after day without power.
That's pretty sad if you're upgrading every 3-4 years still.
We built our own dual-core desktops back in 06-09 time period. Two of them have failed in that time, but due to bad caps on the motherboard (which a simple MB swap took care of).
All of them were dual-core, 2GB RAM, WinXP, around 2GHz. This year, we're upgrading them all to 4GB RAM, Win7 and putting SSDs in.
Which, barring more capacitor plague, means the next physical upgrade for them will be in 2016 or later.
(The "power" users get newer, quad-core CPUs and 8GB+ of RAM.)
Vista was a disaster (lack of drivers, new security restrictions), but Win7 is pretty nice. There's enough new stuff in the Win7 UI plus improved security that it's actually a nice upgrade over WinXP.
Win8, OTOH, is looking like garbage with its entirely new UI approach that is confusing as hell.
I will say this. Putting SSDs in every computer I own makes them MUCH more responsive.
Which is exactly why I put a SSD into my 2007 Thinkpad T61p laptop about 20 months ago. It turned an aging dual-core laptop that was slow and sluggish into something that was a pleasure to use again. Now my major bottlenecks are the CPU speed and the video card.
Assuming nothing goes wrong with the machine (just put Win7 and 8GB of RAM in), I suspect I won't buy a new laptop until 2014.
We're in the process of putting $75 SSDs, 2GB more RAM and Win7 into all of the desktop machines at the office to get another few years out of dual-core machines that we bought back in 2006-2009. Our hope is that we can stretch them out into the 2014-2016 timeframe.
If you work in a quiet office, they can sound like a firecracker going off and are good at startling everyone. I had a bunch of NVIDIA GeForce 8400 fanless cards installed in various servers, almost all of them have defective capacitors.
Nice, I hadn't seen the Nissan Versa. I have a soft spot for the 2/4 door hatchbacks as they're large enough to be comfortable, but also small enough for town/city traffic while being flexible at carrying cargo. Very useful if you only own a single car. Downside is that you have basically no trunk space for things like jumper cables, safety blanket, first aid kit.
It was only in the last year or two that ext4 got to the point where it was considered reliable enough for production use. That was released in 2008 and we didn't switch any production stuff over until 2010 or 2011.
I expect btrfs to have a similar roll-out period which means you won't see it heavily used in production until late-2013 or 2014. Especially since it's still being actively hacked upon and doesn't seem to be feature complete yet.
Pessimistic view says 2015 before it's a safe choice for production, but I'd expect early adopters to start shifting next year in earnest.
Talk to the customer about installing the free MS filters that allow them to read and write docx, pptx, and xslx files.
And pray that the filters work, without having to run in admin mode all the time.
The "free" filter is only free if your support time is worthless. About half the time we couldn't get it to work reliably out of the box on limited right users.
Microsoft know Windows 8 will be a flop, but it's deliberate. They've finally realized that the second iteration (ME, Vista) has been a failure with corporate uptake especially low. This gives them space to experiment because it can't have much affect on low sales anyway.
Well, back in the 70s, they solved the "do they want to enter" problem by putting a sensor pad down on the floor. It was the width of the door and extended out about a meter or so.
Mostly used in grocery stores in the USA.
Replaced by infrared / infrasound sensors in the 80s/90s because those had less wear and tear issues. The rubber mats of the sensor pads could be gouged / torn by careless or malicious shoppers. Or just heavy loads.
Yeah, 7.x was no picnic. Especially if you came from a Windows background and needed to install it on a Windows server.
We didn't switch until 8.0 or 8.1, after we were able to install as a native Windows application and play with it. The pgsql database servers are actually Linux, but we were still feeling our way there as well.
And will still be a distant finisher in that space. iPad/iPhone/Android have the dominant market share and given Microsoft's past proven abilities to fuck it up, I don't see them changing that.
Not even with Microsoft Surface, which makes the OEMs even more likely to go Android then before.
We gave up on Gentoo sometime around then as well. The package maintainers just didn't give a rat's arse about package quality, so every week something else would break when you went to update.
The main problem is that nothing in the Linux space comes close to how user-friendly and easy a simple Active Directory setup is for allowing users to login to any machine in the office. Or how easy it is to assign users to groups and have everything work properly.
I've been looking at various directory servers for the past 2-3 years in the Linux land and *all* of them are either non-free, or require a lot of tweaking, or you have to play with alpha software (such as Samba4). Or you have to roll your own LDAP schema. Or you run into some other corner case.
Samba4 probably comes the closest of all of them at giving you a way to manage users/groups, hook PCs to a domain controller for authentication, etc. But it's still not done yet after years of work.
The time to crack a 128-bit hash is not the same as 128-bit of symmetrical ciphers which is not the same as 128-bits of public/private key encryption. They are very different beasts (although a lot of modern hash algorithms are derived from symmetrical ciphers).
Symmetrical ciphers like AES are secure at short key lengths like 128-256 bits. For asymmetric ciphers like public/private key encryption, you need to go up to 1024 or 2048 bits in order to get the same level of protection (same approximate resistance to various attacks).
Emphasis on "get a better keyboard". Properly designed keyboards offer some sort of different texture / bump / ridge on the F and J keys to help you get back to the home row.
The pointer nubby on a Thinkpad laptop is also useful, although I have yet to find a keyboard that replicates the feel properly. On the laptop, I never have to take my hands off the home row in order to move the mouse slightly in order to hit a dialog button. (The Unicomp Model M has a nubby, but feels too much like a joystick.)
Slashdot Mirror
Zahn's Cobra trilogy comes to mind.
(They laminated the skeleton or something, or at least the long bones.)
You laugh, but I've actually seen developers do that in the real world. Not to kiss up to their boss, but to be able to tell the customer that they made the application faster.
I dunno, I like my Storm2 (the 8550 model I think) from a few years ago. It's a full-device display, without a physical keyboard, but the screen physically "clicks" when it registers a keystroke. Turn it to landscape mode and it's not terribly difficult to type on.
It's a bit long in the tooth now, but still works well enough. Was my lifeline during Sandy because all we had that worked was SMS service (voice was really patchy and often overloaded).
The word you are looking for is "TLER" (Time-Limited Error Recovery).
Drives without TLER will take way too long to decide that a sector is bad before reporting that error back up the chain. This basically causes the controller host to freak out and drop the entire drive out of the array.
So unless the Blue/Green/Black drives have TLER, you really don't want to be using them in a RAID array. Especially not a RAID 5/6/1+0 array where it's far more critical.
Well, the fact that it's finally in release-candidate status is a good sign. I'm hoping we can retire our windows file server next year with this.
Irene wasn't a lot of fun last August. Mostly because of downed trees and power outages. The first 2 days are different, as you do clean up and figure out if the office has power.
After that it gets to be a grind as you go day after day without power.
Note: the bug was introduced this October 8th.
Probably one of the more informative comments here.
That's pretty sad if you're upgrading every 3-4 years still.
We built our own dual-core desktops back in 06-09 time period. Two of them have failed in that time, but due to bad caps on the motherboard (which a simple MB swap took care of).
All of them were dual-core, 2GB RAM, WinXP, around 2GHz. This year, we're upgrading them all to 4GB RAM, Win7 and putting SSDs in.
Which, barring more capacitor plague, means the next physical upgrade for them will be in 2016 or later.
(The "power" users get newer, quad-core CPUs and 8GB+ of RAM.)
Vista was a disaster (lack of drivers, new security restrictions), but Win7 is pretty nice. There's enough new stuff in the Win7 UI plus improved security that it's actually a nice upgrade over WinXP.
Win8, OTOH, is looking like garbage with its entirely new UI approach that is confusing as hell.
I will say this. Putting SSDs in every computer I own makes them MUCH more responsive.
Which is exactly why I put a SSD into my 2007 Thinkpad T61p laptop about 20 months ago. It turned an aging dual-core laptop that was slow and sluggish into something that was a pleasure to use again. Now my major bottlenecks are the CPU speed and the video card.
Assuming nothing goes wrong with the machine (just put Win7 and 8GB of RAM in), I suspect I won't buy a new laptop until 2014.
We're in the process of putting $75 SSDs, 2GB more RAM and Win7 into all of the desktop machines at the office to get another few years out of dual-core machines that we bought back in 2006-2009. Our hope is that we can stretch them out into the 2014-2016 timeframe.
If you work in a quiet office, they can sound like a firecracker going off and are good at startling everyone. I had a bunch of NVIDIA GeForce 8400 fanless cards installed in various servers, almost all of them have defective capacitors.
Nice, I hadn't seen the Nissan Versa. I have a soft spot for the 2/4 door hatchbacks as they're large enough to be comfortable, but also small enough for town/city traffic while being flexible at carrying cargo. Very useful if you only own a single car. Downside is that you have basically no trunk space for things like jumper cables, safety blanket, first aid kit.
(Current car is a 2001 Focus ZX3.)
Bulk USB drives can be had for as low as $1-$2 each. Which is about what 1.44MB floppy disks used to cost.
SD and micro SD cards can be had for below $1 each.
Win7/WinXP install is more like 30-40GB after a few months of usage (as all of the old patch files are kept).
120GB is still generally big enough for most people. As long as you have a 2nd old-style big slow HD for the data hogs.
It was only in the last year or two that ext4 got to the point where it was considered reliable enough for production use. That was released in 2008 and we didn't switch any production stuff over until 2010 or 2011.
I expect btrfs to have a similar roll-out period which means you won't see it heavily used in production until late-2013 or 2014. Especially since it's still being actively hacked upon and doesn't seem to be feature complete yet.
Pessimistic view says 2015 before it's a safe choice for production, but I'd expect early adopters to start shifting next year in earnest.
Talk to the customer about installing the free MS filters that allow them to read and write docx, pptx, and xslx files.
And pray that the filters work, without having to run in admin mode all the time.
The "free" filter is only free if your support time is worthless. About half the time we couldn't get it to work reliably out of the box on limited right users.
Microsoft know Windows 8 will be a flop, but it's deliberate. They've finally realized that the second iteration (ME, Vista) has been a failure with corporate uptake especially low. This gives them space to experiment because it can't have much affect on low sales anyway.
Hahahahahah.
No.
There's a far simpler explanation: Incompetence.
And hubris, lots and lots of hubris.
Well, back in the 70s, they solved the "do they want to enter" problem by putting a sensor pad down on the floor. It was the width of the door and extended out about a meter or so.
Mostly used in grocery stores in the USA.
Replaced by infrared / infrasound sensors in the 80s/90s because those had less wear and tear issues. The rubber mats of the sensor pads could be gouged / torn by careless or malicious shoppers. Or just heavy loads.
Yeah, 7.x was no picnic. Especially if you came from a Windows background and needed to install it on a Windows server.
We didn't switch until 8.0 or 8.1, after we were able to install as a native Windows application and play with it. The pgsql database servers are actually Linux, but we were still feeling our way there as well.
Warranty / Liability.
Windows 8 will be great on tablets and phones.
And will still be a distant finisher in that space. iPad/iPhone/Android have the dominant market share and given Microsoft's past proven abilities to fuck it up, I don't see them changing that.
Not even with Microsoft Surface, which makes the OEMs even more likely to go Android then before.
We gave up on Gentoo sometime around then as well. The package maintainers just didn't give a rat's arse about package quality, so every week something else would break when you went to update.
Desktops? Linux Mint.
Servers are now all RHEL / CentOS / SciLinux.
The main problem is that nothing in the Linux space comes close to how user-friendly and easy a simple Active Directory setup is for allowing users to login to any machine in the office. Or how easy it is to assign users to groups and have everything work properly.
I've been looking at various directory servers for the past 2-3 years in the Linux land and *all* of them are either non-free, or require a lot of tweaking, or you have to play with alpha software (such as Samba4). Or you have to roll your own LDAP schema. Or you run into some other corner case.
Samba4 probably comes the closest of all of them at giving you a way to manage users/groups, hook PCs to a domain controller for authentication, etc. But it's still not done yet after years of work.
The time to crack a 128-bit hash is not the same as 128-bit of symmetrical ciphers which is not the same as 128-bits of public/private key encryption. They are very different beasts (although a lot of modern hash algorithms are derived from symmetrical ciphers).
Symmetrical ciphers like AES are secure at short key lengths like 128-256 bits. For asymmetric ciphers like public/private key encryption, you need to go up to 1024 or 2048 bits in order to get the same level of protection (same approximate resistance to various attacks).
Emphasis on "get a better keyboard". Properly designed keyboards offer some sort of different texture / bump / ridge on the F and J keys to help you get back to the home row.
The pointer nubby on a Thinkpad laptop is also useful, although I have yet to find a keyboard that replicates the feel properly. On the laptop, I never have to take my hands off the home row in order to move the mouse slightly in order to hit a dialog button. (The Unicomp Model M has a nubby, but feels too much like a joystick.)