AIX looks like it was designed by a space alien who had had Unix described to him by another space alien. But their universal translators were broken, and they had to gesture a lot.
(it's a quote but I don't know where the original is from)
The keyboard. Do their workstations also have no DEL-key? This drove me insane on my MacBook. Moreover the whole apple-layout doesn't sit well with me. I could probably get over their wierd META-Keys (who cares whether it's called "ALT" or "APPLE" after all..) but having all the frequently used brackets and meta-characters in a different location from the rest of the world is a non-starter. Apple+Q anyone?
The window manager. Yeah shiney. Expos`e and all. Really nice when you're photoshopping some pictures, working with a few Excel sheets or shagging away in PhotoBooth. Absolutely useless when you're trying to deal with 10+ terminal windows (yes, I have heard of tabs). The distinction between "app"-tabbing and "window"-tabbing is hilarious at best (what were they smoking) and the primitive, not changeable focus-model (Click-To-Raise) is a showstopper, no less.
Finder Even linux has a half-decent filemanager these days (konqueror), there is no excuse for putting up with this mess in a commercial OS.
So, in summary, yes, OSX may be nice when you spend your day inside of eclipse, generally don't have more than 3 windows showing at a time and type slow enough so that the wierd keyboard-layout and focus-issues are not driving you insane. For someone coming from unix-land who basically spends his life inside of terminal windows OSX is not a serious option.
And yes I *have* tried. Anyone wanna buy a MacBook?
Why is it that stupid people always put the blame on the vendor. There must be a pattern in there... We have over 50 xfires (4100s, 4200s, 4600s) in production, so I feel an obligation to comment on this drivel.
If you really have mouthbreathers on your team that manage to break a server with the pen switch (of all things!) then you have much bigger problems to worry about. I see no difference between the pen-switch design that Sun uses and the stuff that you find on Supermicro or Dell Chassis everywhere. So better keep your "people" far away from those, too...
I don't buy your "front panels falling off" story either. I have no idea what the hell you guys are doing to your servers (curling them through the datacenter?) but anyone who has worked with xfire hardware can attest that design and build are generally stellar, no less. Just by looking at the picture I can only wonder what part of the panel is coming off on your xfires, and how?
I cannot comment on the video hardware problems that you were having, other than that we never had a problem with that. Our xfires are generally dead-on-arrival (yes, that happens with sun, too) or work flawlessly. So far we had only two 4200s make it through the burn-in but fail later on (flakey PSU, flimsy backplane respectively) which is a pretty good ratio when compared to our expiriences with supermicro hardware.
Yes, PXE booting can be disabled for each individual NIC. Read the manual sometime?
You're saying you have "over 50" xfires, yet you keep buying a raid controller that sucks? Honestly, if I were your boss...
Sorry, either you're just making up shit here or you're the wrong guy for the job.
That's all fine and dandy but 1&1 is not in the "service business". They're in the mass market webhosting business. I don't exactly need a key account manager on the line to pitch their $9.99 "premium" package to me when all I want is cancel my damn account or get 2MB more diskspace.
A simple web- or PBX-based dialog-system works wonders in that setting, as some of the competitors have realized long ago. The callcenter agents serve merely as fallback for mouthbreathers who fail on the PBX and grandma's who really need a human voice (even if it has a foreign accent) to understand anything.
It's obviously an entirely different story when you're selling premium products for $1000+ a shot...
I disagree. Providing good or excellent service is primarily a one-time investment and, more importantly, a conscious effort. Sane processes (billing, inquiries, product-changes, etc.) need to be designed and implemented only once. Ideally most of them don't even need human interaction but can be solved through web forms especially for a virtual product like this.
Then maintaining these processes is rather cheap. Callcenter agents don't cost much in the big picture.
Seconded, same expirience here, in germany. Apparently the business model of selling crappy products without any support is kinda successful all around the world...
And how would a duress pin help anything? As if the cops could jump onto the scene during the short time that an ATM transaction takes...
If the bad guys stand next to you, pointing a gun to your head while you make the transaction then the ATM camera will capture that anyways and provide good evidence later on. But if they don't (which, I guess is more likely) then entering a duress pin changes exactly nothing. Sure, the bank now knows that you may be in trouble - but what can they do, hand out marked money?
I would think that robbers in the business of kidnapping people already have ways to launder marked bills.
*** Joined #ChineseUnderground <SecureWorks> Can I have a copy of your super secret automated tool? *** Mao set mode +b *!*@secureworks.com *** Kicked from #ChineseUnderground by Mao (No.)
*** Joined #ChineseUnderground
Can I have a copy of your super secret automated tool? *** Mao set mode +b *!*@secureworks.com *** Kicked from #ChineseUnderground by Mao (No.)
Yes, you are right. I mis-translated the terms. Ofcourse the first 2 years is "unemployent insurance", then comes wellfare - which is cut down hard or even frozen when you refuse to take an 1 EUR job.
We have exactly this discussion here in germany right now. Germany is one of the last countries in europe that doesn't have a minimum wage and the slave labor lobby is trying hard to keep it that way.
I agree that a minimum wage should alleviate a large part of the immediate problem. But the bigger problem remains unchanged: We have more people than we have jobs. The government can (and does) create artificial jobs by making people clean up parks or even repair bridges that would otherwise not be repaired - but that will always be a losing game. If these jobs would provide enough value to justify the cost then they'd already exist as regular jobs and there was no need to create them. Such "created" jobs are really just subventions in disguise and a tool to keep people busy so they don't start thinking.
The question is: For how much longer can the (steadily shrinking) productive portion of the population drag the (rapidly growing) non-productive part of the population along? It doesn't matter much whether a non-productive worker is collecting welfare or is kept busy in a pseudo-job. The cost to society is almost the same.
I think therein lies the real crux that we're facing these days. Maybe the new messiah (err, obama) will finally at least acknowledge the problem so we can start looking for solutions.
what would you have them do? Force patches on people with no disable option? That'd go over real well with the/. crowd.
I wouldn't even expect them to correct their past mistakes. But I would expect them to make the next windows release (or heck, the next vista-patch) finally immune to at least the most obvious of attacks.
The old and vulnerable windows versions will inevitably phase out over the next years - there, problem solved.
The whole point is that microsoft makes no visible effort to finally fix the problems that they are causing for everyone. Probably 90% of all malicious traffic on the internet (SPAM and DoS-attacks) originates from compromised windows hosts. It has been that way for years, all the while microsoft keeps making profits in the billions.
No matter what you call it, it's still a problematic idea as countries that already follow that model can attest. In germany, for example, you can go roughly 2 years on welfare (if you have been in a job for at least 2 years before) before they start sticking you into "1 EUR jobs". An 1 EUR job, as the name tells, pays 1 EUR per hour. And you have to take whatever job they give you.
The idea is that people who are forced to work for low wage will quickly become very interested in finding a *real* job (why work your ass off for 1 EUR when can you make more for the same work in a real job?).
The problems are manyfold:
1. Many people are simply underqualified and won't find a job no matter how hard they try. The 1-EUR-model basically turns into slave labor for them.
2. Many people *are* reasonably qualified but still don't find a job in their profession.
3. 1-EUR jobs now seriously compete with normal low-wage jobs such as cleaning, callcenters etc. Why should a company pay minimum wage when it can request workers for almost free from the government?
4. At least in germany this has opened the gates for a lot of shady companies (really borderline slave-labor there) that abuse the system in various "funny" ways, squeezing the last bit of profit out of them poor souls at the bottom of the food chain.
IMHO we have a totally unsolved problem here that nobody has dared tackling so far. The demand for low-skilled workers is declining to critical levels in the western world (because of automation and because outsourcing is cheaper for the rest) and high-skill work can never nearly cover the whole population.
It has become a fact of life that any larger western country simply can not offer productive work to a significant part of the population. No matter how you spin it, we'll continue to subsidize these people in one way or another - unless we decide to let them die. Now while it is a legitimate desire to "want something back" from them for their subvention money I don't think *forcing* them can be the way to go. It's not their fault that the society doesn't need them and I find it highly problematic to force someone to "work on a bridge" (completely outside their learned profession) for minimum wage while somebody else, possibly with similar qualifications but a better family name, makes millions on wall-street.
The current system kinda works (and has suppressed any tendencies towards civial war so far) because of the elevator effect. Once you start forcing people into minimum wage jobs on a large scale scale without offering any alternatives or escape routes you'll soon get just that: a revolution.
Well, last time I checked this market did exist and wasn't small either. It's the market of small and medium sized businesses that simply can't afford to run mission critical stuff on commodity hardware. Building a near equal storage device from commodity parts may be cheaper (albeit not as cheap as you think), maintaining and supporting it is not. Especially when you're talking multiple boxes of the same or similar ilk - ever tried to re-buy *identical* commodity parts after half a year? Ever tried to debug subtile differences in failure modes of different RAID controller BIOS revisions? Ever tried to set up coherent monitoring, retention and backup on top of such a commodity mix?
Like it or not, a large part of SUN's business consists of cleaning up the mess that people with your mindset leave behind. They jump in when your cheap'n'easy commodity setup falls apart or just won't scale anymore.
Well, that's a nice little department file server that you specced out there. Sun targets a *slightly* different market with their device (think: databases, mission critical, pink slips).
Just to clarify for everyone who asked: No, I'm not Joel and I'm not affiliated with S.O. in any way. Heck, I'm not even a big fan of that site. I linked to them to make it clear, even to people that don't know S.O., what a blatant and poor attempt of "jumping on the fad" these "Useful Stupid"-articles on slashdot are.
It's painful to see such cheap traffic pushing tactics on what used to be the #1 "News for Nerds" site.
slashdot.org is not stackoverflow.com. The articles and discussions here are not searchable in a sane way. Your recent attempts to mimic stackoverflow are just a waste of everybody's time because all those little tidbits that people post get lost in the internet noise immediately.
We know you're bit desperate for traffic these days. But this is not the way to go.
Well, freshly mealed beans still taste better than whatever you can put in your hot-plated coffee. And in most hot-plate setups that I have seen during my student-times a sizable part of the coffee would inevitably go stale over the course of a day - the next person to want a coffee after the last "rush" would have to either pour the remains away or bite the bitter bullet...
Seems to me like those companies are just cheap and saving on the wrongest end. $2000 for a decent(!) coffee-maker that shoots the milk automagically shouldn't be something that a company with more than 5 employees hesitates about. It's probably the cheapest morale boost that you can get for such a small one-time investment. And, for the bean counters, it probably even saves work-time in the long run as "getting a cup" is a constant-time effort, whereas with a hot-plate you easily get a queue lined up when a new can has to be made.
Anyways, I'm not a espresso-machine lobbyist or something, just wondering "what they are thinking" here.
Do people still use those "hot plate" coffee machines in an office? Over here, in germany, pretty much every office has one of these espresso makers that meal the beans and brew exactly one cup (or up to four cups, depending on size) on the push of a button. They're probably even less energy effective than a "hot plate machine" because they have to power up for every cup - but at least their coffee is half-decent and drinkable whereas the "hot plate coffee" tastes like shit when it has been sitting there for an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
AIX looks like it was designed by a space alien who had had Unix described to
him by another space alien. But their universal translators were broken, and
they had to gesture a lot.
(it's a quote but I don't know where the original is from)
Do their workstations also have no DEL-key? This drove me insane on my MacBook. Moreover the whole apple-layout doesn't sit well with me. I could probably get over their wierd META-Keys (who cares whether it's called "ALT" or "APPLE" after all..) but having all the frequently used brackets and meta-characters in a different location from the rest of the world is a non-starter. Apple+Q anyone?
Yeah shiney. Expos`e and all. Really nice when you're photoshopping some pictures, working with a few Excel sheets or shagging away in PhotoBooth. Absolutely useless when you're trying to deal with 10+ terminal windows (yes, I have heard of tabs). The distinction between "app"-tabbing and "window"-tabbing is hilarious at best (what were they smoking) and the primitive, not changeable focus-model (Click-To-Raise) is a showstopper, no less.
Even linux has a half-decent filemanager these days (konqueror), there is no excuse for putting up with this mess in a commercial OS.
So, in summary, yes, OSX may be nice when you spend your day inside of eclipse, generally don't have more than 3 windows showing at a time and type slow enough so that the wierd keyboard-layout and focus-issues are not driving you insane. For someone coming from unix-land who basically spends his life inside of terminal windows OSX is not a serious option.
And yes I *have* tried. Anyone wanna buy a MacBook?
Yes.
You forgot the other 70%: Looking good.
Why is it that stupid people always put the blame on the vendor. There must be a pattern in there...
We have over 50 xfires (4100s, 4200s, 4600s) in production, so I feel an obligation to comment on this drivel.
Sorry, either you're just making up shit here or you're the wrong guy for the job.
That's all fine and dandy but 1&1 is not in the "service business". They're in the mass market webhosting business.
I don't exactly need a key account manager on the line to pitch their $9.99 "premium" package to me when all I want is cancel my damn account or get 2MB more diskspace.
A simple web- or PBX-based dialog-system works wonders in that setting, as some of the competitors have realized long ago.
The callcenter agents serve merely as fallback for mouthbreathers who fail on the PBX and grandma's who really need a human voice (even if it has a foreign accent) to understand anything.
It's obviously an entirely different story when you're selling premium products for $1000+ a shot...
Have you ever been to a sports event?
Okay, maybe I underestimated the value of such a duress code. I'll at least agree that it wouldn't hurt to have on either.
I disagree. Providing good or excellent service is primarily a one-time investment and, more importantly, a conscious effort.
Sane processes (billing, inquiries, product-changes, etc.) need to be designed and implemented only once. Ideally most of them don't even need human interaction but can be solved through web forms especially for a virtual product like this.
Then maintaining these processes is rather cheap. Callcenter agents don't cost much in the big picture.
Seconded, same expirience here, in germany.
Apparently the business model of selling crappy products without any support is kinda successful all around the world...
And how would a duress pin help anything?
As if the cops could jump onto the scene during the short time that an ATM transaction takes...
If the bad guys stand next to you, pointing a gun to your head while you make the transaction then the ATM camera will capture that anyways and provide good evidence later on.
But if they don't (which, I guess is more likely) then entering a duress pin changes exactly nothing. Sure, the bank now knows that you may be in trouble - but what can they do, hand out marked money?
I would think that robbers in the business of kidnapping people already have ways to launder marked bills.
*** Joined #ChineseUnderground
<SecureWorks> Can I have a copy of your super secret automated tool?
*** Mao set mode +b *!*@secureworks.com
*** Kicked from #ChineseUnderground by Mao (No.)
(sorry, crapdot ate the brackets)
Probably more like:
*** Joined #ChineseUnderground
Can I have a copy of your super secret automated tool?
*** Mao set mode +b *!*@secureworks.com
*** Kicked from #ChineseUnderground by Mao (No.)
Yes, you are right. I mis-translated the terms. Ofcourse the first 2 years is "unemployent insurance", then comes wellfare - which is cut down hard or even frozen when you refuse to take an 1 EUR job.
We have exactly this discussion here in germany right now.
Germany is one of the last countries in europe that doesn't have a minimum wage and the slave labor lobby is trying hard to keep it that way.
I agree that a minimum wage should alleviate a large part of the immediate problem. But the bigger problem remains unchanged: We have more people than we have jobs.
The government can (and does) create artificial jobs by making people clean up parks or even repair bridges that would otherwise not be repaired - but that will always be a losing game. If these jobs would provide enough value to justify the cost then they'd already exist as regular jobs and there was no need to create them. Such "created" jobs are really just subventions in disguise and a tool to keep people busy so they don't start thinking.
The question is: For how much longer can the (steadily shrinking) productive portion of the population drag the (rapidly growing) non-productive part of the population along?
It doesn't matter much whether a non-productive worker is collecting welfare or is kept busy in a pseudo-job. The cost to society is almost the same.
I think therein lies the real crux that we're facing these days. Maybe the new messiah (err, obama) will finally at least acknowledge the problem so we can start looking for solutions.
I wouldn't even expect them to correct their past mistakes. But I would expect them to make the next windows release (or heck, the next vista-patch) finally immune to at least the most obvious of attacks.
The old and vulnerable windows versions will inevitably phase out over the next years - there, problem solved.
The whole point is that microsoft makes no visible effort to finally fix the problems that they are causing for everyone.
Probably 90% of all malicious traffic on the internet (SPAM and DoS-attacks) originates from compromised windows hosts. It has been that way for years, all the while microsoft keeps making profits in the billions.
No matter what you call it, it's still a problematic idea as countries that already follow that model can attest.
In germany, for example, you can go roughly 2 years on welfare (if you have been in a job for at least 2 years before) before they start sticking you into "1 EUR jobs".
An 1 EUR job, as the name tells, pays 1 EUR per hour. And you have to take whatever job they give you.
The idea is that people who are forced to work for low wage will quickly become very interested in finding a *real* job (why work your ass off for 1 EUR when can you make more for the same work in a real job?).
The problems are manyfold:
1. Many people are simply underqualified and won't find a job no matter how hard they try. The 1-EUR-model basically turns into slave labor for them.
2. Many people *are* reasonably qualified but still don't find a job in their profession.
3. 1-EUR jobs now seriously compete with normal low-wage jobs such as cleaning, callcenters etc. Why should a company pay minimum wage when it can request workers for almost free from the government?
4. At least in germany this has opened the gates for a lot of shady companies (really borderline slave-labor there) that abuse the system in various "funny" ways, squeezing the last bit of profit out of them poor souls at the bottom of the food chain.
IMHO we have a totally unsolved problem here that nobody has dared tackling so far. The demand for low-skilled workers is declining to critical levels in the western world (because of automation and because outsourcing is cheaper for the rest) and high-skill work can never nearly cover the whole population.
It has become a fact of life that any larger western country simply can not offer productive work to a significant part of the population. No matter how you spin it, we'll continue to subsidize these people in one way or another - unless we decide to let them die. Now while it is a legitimate desire to "want something back" from them for their subvention money I don't think *forcing* them can be the way to go.
It's not their fault that the society doesn't need them and I find it highly problematic to force someone to "work on a bridge" (completely outside their learned profession) for minimum wage while somebody else, possibly with similar qualifications but a better family name, makes millions on wall-street.
The current system kinda works (and has suppressed any tendencies towards civial war so far) because of the elevator effect. Once you start forcing people into minimum wage jobs on a large scale scale without offering any alternatives or escape routes you'll soon get just that: a revolution.
Jesus Christ. You want to use BugZilla for *anything*? Masochists...
Well, last time I checked this market did exist and wasn't small either. It's the market of small and medium sized businesses that simply can't afford to run mission critical stuff on commodity hardware. Building a near equal storage device from commodity parts may be cheaper (albeit not as cheap as you think), maintaining and supporting it is not. Especially when you're talking multiple boxes of the same or similar ilk - ever tried to re-buy *identical* commodity parts after half a year? Ever tried to debug subtile differences in failure modes of different RAID controller BIOS revisions? Ever tried to set up coherent monitoring, retention and backup on top of such a commodity mix?
Like it or not, a large part of SUN's business consists of cleaning up the mess that people with your mindset leave behind. They jump in when your cheap'n'easy commodity setup falls apart or just won't scale anymore.
Well, that's a nice little department file server that you specced out there.
Sun targets a *slightly* different market with their device (think: databases, mission critical, pink slips).
Just to clarify for everyone who asked: No, I'm not Joel and I'm not affiliated with S.O. in any way. Heck, I'm not even a big fan of that site.
I linked to them to make it clear, even to people that don't know S.O., what a blatant and poor attempt of "jumping on the fad" these "Useful Stupid"-articles on slashdot are.
It's painful to see such cheap traffic pushing tactics on what used to be the #1 "News for Nerds" site.
Dear slashdot editors,
slashdot.org is not stackoverflow.com.
The articles and discussions here are not searchable in a sane way. Your recent attempts to mimic stackoverflow are just a waste of everybody's time because all those little tidbits that people post get lost in the internet noise immediately.
We know you're bit desperate for traffic these days. But this is not the way to go.
And, what did he say?
And why does it matter whether *he* drinks coffee?!
Well, freshly mealed beans still taste better than whatever you can put in your hot-plated coffee. And in most hot-plate setups that I have seen during my student-times a sizable part of the coffee would inevitably go stale over the course of a day - the next person to want a coffee after the last "rush" would have to either pour the remains away or bite the bitter bullet...
Seems to me like those companies are just cheap and saving on the wrongest end. $2000 for a decent(!) coffee-maker that shoots the milk automagically shouldn't be something that a company with more than 5 employees hesitates about. It's probably the cheapest morale boost that you can get for such a small one-time investment. And, for the bean counters, it probably even saves work-time in the long run as "getting a cup" is a constant-time effort, whereas with a hot-plate you easily get a queue lined up when a new can has to be made.
Anyways, I'm not a espresso-machine lobbyist or something, just wondering "what they are thinking" here.
Do people still use those "hot plate" coffee machines in an office? Over here, in germany, pretty much every office has one of these espresso makers that meal the beans and brew exactly one cup (or up to four cups, depending on size) on the push of a button. They're probably even less energy effective than a "hot plate machine" because they have to power up for every cup - but at least their coffee is half-decent and drinkable whereas the "hot plate coffee" tastes like shit when it has been sitting there for an hour.