I left the company in march 06. Not long before I left, though, sometime in February, management pulled everyone together to yell and scream because that windows based factory had already gone over it's allotted downtime for the entire year.
And nobody had the balls to say "Well, maybe if we'd gone with a known-good system rather than building a new one around a platform which we all know is susceptible to all sorts of issues like this and then not taking sufficient steps to guard against them happening - maybe you wouldn't be yelling at us now"?
Another non-Microsoft example of why software should be treated with a bit more care was the Boeing 767 that "landed" at Heathrow after all onboard computers shut down in flight. The pilots were damn good and damn lucky, but luck aside, why the hell were there no backup computer systems or failover strategies? Why did the pilots have to "fly" with no engines, no instrumentation and very nearly no controls?
Aeroplanes have so many failsafe systems for such things that I really don't think that was likely to be a fault with any of them. Far more likely that something went wrong with how they were all powered.
that's a pet peeve of mine. windows installations for some reason never have an Ethernet driver. always have to download it using magic or another computer.
To be fair, that probably has more to do with an average Windows release having a longer life-on-the-market expectancy than a given ethernet chipset than anything else.
It's just a bit of a shame that unlike almost everything else there doesn't seem to be any such thing as a generic driver which could give basic functionality - at least until such time as you can download the proper one. Strange, because with modern PXE ethernet cards I'm sure that would be possible.
I guess I should have been more clear; the BIOS reference was just to show the age of the system. In fact, the BIOS has an option to boot from CD, not that it did me much good. Since it's a laptop, finding a replacement drive may be non-trivial but I haven't done any research (like removing the current drive). My other option would be to use a boot floppy. Those were well documented ten years ago, I just need to go Google it.
I can tell you from bitter experience that regardless of what boot order the BIOS offers, booting from CD was very hit-or-miss at the time.
I can also tell you that a number of Linux distros (though I don't know about Ubuntu) have in the last few years changed the CD booting mechanism such that it's no longer compatible with early "Boot from CD" BIOSes.
What? Ubuntu is a money sink and they don't expect to make a profit in the foreseeable future.
Yes, but Canonical is also a corporation. You don't make donations to a corporation you want to support, you buy their products and encourage others to do so.
They've been issued for far longer than Blackberries and haven't spurned lawsuits so far.
Basically, it's not a question of the technology: if you have hourly employees working unreported time, you're asking for trouble. The labor laws are fairly clear in this matter. Whether it's on a Blackberry, laptop, or otherwise is beside the point.
Not and yes.
The laptop doesn't automatically bleep at you every time you get an email and isn't designed to be left on running purely on battery power for days at a time.
Mainly because the idea of setting it up so you only get email on it if it comes from a specific address probably never even occurred - in fact, I daresay a lot of blackberry users aren't even aware it's possible.
As soon as words gets back that this has been done it could go one of two ways:
1. Everyone starts doing it. (Not necessarily a bad thing)
2. Manager starts jumping up and down for someone "subverting" the system.
"Photos" in many cases includes the operation of a flatbed scanner. A scanner received as a hand-me-down, birthday present, or Christmas present may not work in SANE even if it works in TWAIN.
OT, but that's because TWAIN defines how the photo app talks to the scanner app. Not how the scanner app talks to the scanner.
Thing is, Windows includes all the tools needed to make troubleshooting just as easy as it is in Linux.
There's a logging facility, a means of searching through and browsing the logs, performance profiling tools akin to top (albeit significantly more awkward). There's a perfectly good API to display readable error messages.
But for some reason very few third-party applications (and, for that matter, first-party applications) bother to write to the log or generate useful errors.
I'm going to single out for particular criticism wireless networking: it is programmatically possible to determine with a fair degree of accuracy exactly why one can't connect to a wireless network and thus explain in clear English exactly what the problem is. So why are so many error messages written as "Something went wrong. Could be A, B or C"? Even worse is when it's actually D.
Note to all the clueless idiots out there: Google got popular quick because they had a search page that would load in under a minute back when most of us were still on dial-up. Having search rankings that worked as well as anybody else's was just icing on the cake. The hardcore techies might have gone nuts over their algorithms, but the rest of us were just happy to get our search results quickly and not wait for ages for a bunch of cruft and advertising to load first.
I'd add another thing to that. This is my experience, your mileage may have varied etc etc.
Way back before then - circa 1997 - AltaVista was king of search. However, around 1999 or so the results from AltaVista started to go down the tubes - most of the hits were either spam or totally irrelevant.
Out of practically nowhere comes Google - with results which were actually useful and little or no spam. Doesn't take a superbrain to decide to stick to using Google. But the Internet is a fickle place, and it's a lot easier to visit an alternate website than it is to take your bricks & mortar business elsewhere. (For one thing, "there's only one shop in this town that sells N" is not a valid argument). The mighty can fall, and I don't doubt it will happen again.
As this isn't an official announcement, I'm not holding my breath. Sure Mercedes have been at the forefront of vehicle technology for quite some time, but do you really see their entire truck line going non-petroleum in 7 years? Maybe the passenger cars, but not the trucks.
Diesel? Anyone?
Seriously, I'm in the UK and over here there is, to my knowledge, no such thing as a petrol-driven lorry. They're all diesel. I suspect the same is true in most of continental Europe.
Don't get too excited. It will be difficult to make a "biofuel" engine that won't run just fine on petroleum. And they won't try. As soon as they have biofuel capability across their product lines they will declare themselves "green" regardless of what the customers are actually putting in the tanks.
Depends entirely on the biofuel in question.
Ethanol, you're probably right.
Vegetable oil, however - well, a diesel engine will (under some circumstances I won't dive into) run just fine on that, but I wouldn't recommend you put petrol in it.
Now, I don't doubt it. Before, though, there wasn't even any definitive proof anyone had died. I thought that was kind of a prerequisite for charging someone with murder.
Not been true, and wasn't true 150 years ago in the UK at least - though I can't speak for the US.
A serial killer in 19th century England (I forget who, now) thought something similar - he'd heard that you couldn't convict someone of murder without a body of evidence.
He misinterpreted this to mean "evidence of a body" and dissolved his victims in a bath of acid. He was caught, convicted and sentenced to death.
I find it bizarre that the financial folks out there considered Yahoo's possible buyout by Microsoft an absolute boon to both companies and thought Jerry Yang was an absolute moron for standing in the way - do they have their heads completely up their asses?
Most insurance companies, banks etc. are basically selling a similar product to similar people with a fairly similar corporate culture. Mergers between them generally make sense - the resulting business gets both sets of customers (as long as the customers don't all run a mile - and even if they do it won't happen overnight), the companies combined require significantly fewer staff in many roles than the two companies separately did so there's scope to cut costs.
This is quite different to most tech companies - there's often a noticeable difference between products, there's practically zero customer loyalty and what little there is will be immediately re-evaluated in the case of a merger and the costs involved in moving to an alternate supplier are not so bad unless you're tied to something which is somehow nailed to one of the companies involved in the merger (eg. if you were tied to OpenVMS before Compaq/HP merged, you didn't really have the option to go elsewhere without migrating to an alternate platform). So tech mergers are quite likely to go wrong in all sorts of horrible ways.
HOWEVER, if you look at it from the perspective of an outsider who knows nothing about the industry, there's not much difference between the two. In the case of Microsoft/Yahoo, you've got MSN search/Hotmail from Microsoft and Yahoo search/mail from Yahoo. Perfect match. Put the two together and you've got a larger company with all the customers the two smaller ones had, with the scope to cut costs.
Disclaimer: I don't administrate Windows machines.
This is exactly why you use a WSUS server. We use one where I work.
I know all about that. WSUS depends on Active Directory (and, if memory serves, an AD domain because you can't easily deploy it except through group policy).
Fortunately my current employer is small enough that I don't really need to do that, but I do resent the Redmond approach of "Now you've bought a whole bunch of workstations you must now buy at least two Windows servers (can't sensibly manage a domain with just one, what if it fails?) to do a job which any other OS could solve with a cron job and a mirror taken with a common tool like rsync". The whole lot is basically set up to force you into going Windows-everything.
This probably isn't too bad if you start with something like Small Business Server and work your way slowly up, but if you've already built a reasonable infrastructure without any Windows products it's astonishingly expensive because you suddenly discover that you've got so many workstations and so many things to manage that you have to dive straight into the "Enterprise with lots of CALs" version.
Microsoft is a big company, and there's no way they would have promoted a bunch of free-software (or even interoperability) zealots to a senior management role.
Gates would have employed people who were broadly-speaking like minded to senior roles. Once the company became big enough that he didn't really need to be involved in every senior person the company employed, the job would have been delegated - to others who Gates employed in the first place.
The only way we'll see major changes is if there's enough demand (probably from shareholders) for a major change - which I would expect to see culminate in new people with radically different ideas installed at board level. Think Lou Gerstner and IBM. Unless Bill Gates has single-handedly been sailing the ship on a course which most of his staff disagreed with (which I doubt), it certainly won't come from within.
and discovered other people were upset, at least one had lost interest in a guy because he appeared to be a member,
Well, specifically, he found a blog entry from someone else, saying:
I went back, caught his name and cyberstalked him. I found out he was an investor. I found out that he was a runner. And soon enough, I found him on a singles page called "Jlove.com," a website for Jewish singles.
So she believes everything she reads online, she assumes that just because the name matches it's the right person and she makes no effort to speak to him face to face. Yeah. Just the kind of woman I'm interested in getting to know.
I think the guy she was cyberstalking had a lucky escape.
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I left the company in march 06. Not long before I left, though, sometime in February, management pulled everyone together to yell and scream because that windows based factory had already gone over it's allotted downtime for the entire year.
And nobody had the balls to say "Well, maybe if we'd gone with a known-good system rather than building a new one around a platform which we all know is susceptible to all sorts of issues like this and then not taking sufficient steps to guard against them happening - maybe you wouldn't be yelling at us now"?
Another non-Microsoft example of why software should be treated with a bit more care was the Boeing 767 that "landed" at Heathrow after all onboard computers shut down in flight. The pilots were damn good and damn lucky, but luck aside, why the hell were there no backup computer systems or failover strategies? Why did the pilots have to "fly" with no engines, no instrumentation and very nearly no controls?
Aeroplanes have so many failsafe systems for such things that I really don't think that was likely to be a fault with any of them. Far more likely that something went wrong with how they were all powered.
that's a pet peeve of mine. windows installations for some reason never have an Ethernet driver. always have to download it using magic or another computer.
To be fair, that probably has more to do with an average Windows release having a longer life-on-the-market expectancy than a given ethernet chipset than anything else.
It's just a bit of a shame that unlike almost everything else there doesn't seem to be any such thing as a generic driver which could give basic functionality - at least until such time as you can download the proper one. Strange, because with modern PXE ethernet cards I'm sure that would be possible.
Rubbish there was a free TCP/IP stack for WfWg 3.11 as a download from Microsoft. I still have a copy on disk.
A TCP/IP stack available as a download, eh? Amazing.
It's fun to compare specs... Vista Home Premium SP1:
Hmm. I can't think of anything I should like less than to run Vista on a system with those specs.
I guess I should have been more clear; the BIOS reference was just to show the age of the system. In fact, the BIOS has an option to boot from CD, not that it did me much good. Since it's a laptop, finding a replacement drive may be non-trivial but I haven't done any research (like removing the current drive). My other option would be to use a boot floppy. Those were well documented ten years ago, I just need to go Google it.
I can tell you from bitter experience that regardless of what boot order the BIOS offers, booting from CD was very hit-or-miss at the time.
I can also tell you that a number of Linux distros (though I don't know about Ubuntu) have in the last few years changed the CD booting mechanism such that it's no longer compatible with early "Boot from CD" BIOSes.
Don't get your hopes up yet.
I don't know what laptop you have but on my brand new Lenovo T61 everything worked out of the box, which on Windows was unheard of...
IIRC, Lenovo made a commitment some time ago that all their hardware would support Linux out of the box.
What? Ubuntu is a money sink and they don't expect to make a profit in the foreseeable future.
Yes, but Canonical is also a corporation. You don't make donations to a corporation you want to support, you buy their products and encourage others to do so.
someone has to step up to the plate at Crazy Bastard Memorial Field.
He's not dead yet, why would you have a field dedicated to his memory?
Phase 3 will begin when most judges have become aware of the RIAA's lies. Phase 3 won't be pretty for the RIAA.
Presumably phase 4 is when they get a new law passed which sets up a federal bureau of copyright investigation?
They've been issued for far longer than Blackberries and haven't spurned lawsuits so far.
Basically, it's not a question of the technology: if you have hourly employees working unreported time, you're asking for trouble. The labor laws are fairly clear in this matter. Whether it's on a Blackberry, laptop, or otherwise is beside the point.
Not and yes.
The laptop doesn't automatically bleep at you every time you get an email and isn't designed to be left on running purely on battery power for days at a time.
Mainly because the idea of setting it up so you only get email on it if it comes from a specific address probably never even occurred - in fact, I daresay a lot of blackberry users aren't even aware it's possible.
As soon as words gets back that this has been done it could go one of two ways:
1. Everyone starts doing it. (Not necessarily a bad thing)
2. Manager starts jumping up and down for someone "subverting" the system.
I don't fancy risking option 2 myself.
So how do I get a "scanner app" that works in Linux without buying a new scanner?
Assuming SANE doesn't support it, your options are probably Vuescan (http://www.hamrick.com/) or seeing if you can get it to work with Wine.
No one says we have to keep making more people if the ones we have stop breaking.
This won't stop the menopause from happening, and the urge to reproduce is one of the most basic animal urges that exists.
"Photos" in many cases includes the operation of a flatbed scanner. A scanner received as a hand-me-down, birthday present, or Christmas present may not work in SANE even if it works in TWAIN.
OT, but that's because TWAIN defines how the photo app talks to the scanner app. Not how the scanner app talks to the scanner.
There's a logging facility, a means of searching through and browsing the logs, performance profiling tools akin to top (albeit significantly more awkward). There's a perfectly good API to display readable error messages.
But for some reason very few third-party applications (and, for that matter, first-party applications) bother to write to the log or generate useful errors.
I'm going to single out for particular criticism wireless networking: it is programmatically possible to determine with a fair degree of accuracy exactly why one can't connect to a wireless network and thus explain in clear English exactly what the problem is. So why are so many error messages written as "Something went wrong. Could be A, B or C"? Even worse is when it's actually D.
Note to all the clueless idiots out there: Google got popular quick because they had a search page that would load in under a minute back when most of us were still on dial-up. Having search rankings that worked as well as anybody else's was just icing on the cake. The hardcore techies might have gone nuts over their algorithms, but the rest of us were just happy to get our search results quickly and not wait for ages for a bunch of cruft and advertising to load first.
I'd add another thing to that. This is my experience, your mileage may have varied etc etc.
Way back before then - circa 1997 - AltaVista was king of search. However, around 1999 or so the results from AltaVista started to go down the tubes - most of the hits were either spam or totally irrelevant.
Out of practically nowhere comes Google - with results which were actually useful and little or no spam. Doesn't take a superbrain to decide to stick to using Google. But the Internet is a fickle place, and it's a lot easier to visit an alternate website than it is to take your bricks & mortar business elsewhere. (For one thing, "there's only one shop in this town that sells N" is not a valid argument). The mighty can fall, and I don't doubt it will happen again.
Life doesn't offer you a great many opportunities. It does, however, throw a great deal of crap your way.
If you see a chance to turn the crap into an opportunity, go for it.
As this isn't an official announcement, I'm not holding my breath. Sure Mercedes have been at the forefront of vehicle technology for quite some time, but do you really see their entire truck line going non-petroleum in 7 years? Maybe the passenger cars, but not the trucks.
Diesel? Anyone?
Seriously, I'm in the UK and over here there is, to my knowledge, no such thing as a petrol-driven lorry. They're all diesel. I suspect the same is true in most of continental Europe.
Don't get too excited. It will be difficult to make a "biofuel" engine that won't run just fine on petroleum. And they won't try. As soon as they have biofuel capability across their product lines they will declare themselves "green" regardless of what the customers are actually putting in the tanks.
Depends entirely on the biofuel in question.
Ethanol, you're probably right.
Vegetable oil, however - well, a diesel engine will (under some circumstances I won't dive into) run just fine on that, but I wouldn't recommend you put petrol in it.
Now, I don't doubt it. Before, though, there wasn't even any definitive proof anyone had died. I thought that was kind of a prerequisite for charging someone with murder.
Not been true, and wasn't true 150 years ago in the UK at least - though I can't speak for the US.
A serial killer in 19th century England (I forget who, now) thought something similar - he'd heard that you couldn't convict someone of murder without a body of evidence.
He misinterpreted this to mean "evidence of a body" and dissolved his victims in a bath of acid. He was caught, convicted and sentenced to death.
I find it bizarre that the financial folks out there considered Yahoo's possible buyout by Microsoft an absolute boon to both companies and thought Jerry Yang was an absolute moron for standing in the way - do they have their heads completely up their asses?
Most insurance companies, banks etc. are basically selling a similar product to similar people with a fairly similar corporate culture. Mergers between them generally make sense - the resulting business gets both sets of customers (as long as the customers don't all run a mile - and even if they do it won't happen overnight), the companies combined require significantly fewer staff in many roles than the two companies separately did so there's scope to cut costs.
This is quite different to most tech companies - there's often a noticeable difference between products, there's practically zero customer loyalty and what little there is will be immediately re-evaluated in the case of a merger and the costs involved in moving to an alternate supplier are not so bad unless you're tied to something which is somehow nailed to one of the companies involved in the merger (eg. if you were tied to OpenVMS before Compaq/HP merged, you didn't really have the option to go elsewhere without migrating to an alternate platform). So tech mergers are quite likely to go wrong in all sorts of horrible ways.
HOWEVER, if you look at it from the perspective of an outsider who knows nothing about the industry, there's not much difference between the two. In the case of Microsoft/Yahoo, you've got MSN search/Hotmail from Microsoft and Yahoo search/mail from Yahoo. Perfect match. Put the two together and you've got a larger company with all the customers the two smaller ones had, with the scope to cut costs.
Disclaimer: I don't administrate Windows machines.
This is exactly why you use a WSUS server. We use one where I work.
I know all about that. WSUS depends on Active Directory (and, if memory serves, an AD domain because you can't easily deploy it except through group policy).
Fortunately my current employer is small enough that I don't really need to do that, but I do resent the Redmond approach of "Now you've bought a whole bunch of workstations you must now buy at least two Windows servers (can't sensibly manage a domain with just one, what if it fails?) to do a job which any other OS could solve with a cron job and a mirror taken with a common tool like rsync". The whole lot is basically set up to force you into going Windows-everything.
This probably isn't too bad if you start with something like Small Business Server and work your way slowly up, but if you've already built a reasonable infrastructure without any Windows products it's astonishingly expensive because you suddenly discover that you've got so many workstations and so many things to manage that you have to dive straight into the "Enterprise with lots of CALs" version.
Microsoft is a big company, and there's no way they would have promoted a bunch of free-software (or even interoperability) zealots to a senior management role.
Gates would have employed people who were broadly-speaking like minded to senior roles. Once the company became big enough that he didn't really need to be involved in every senior person the company employed, the job would have been delegated - to others who Gates employed in the first place.
The only way we'll see major changes is if there's enough demand (probably from shareholders) for a major change - which I would expect to see culminate in new people with radically different ideas installed at board level. Think Lou Gerstner and IBM. Unless Bill Gates has single-handedly been sailing the ship on a course which most of his staff disagreed with (which I doubt), it certainly won't come from within.
and discovered other people were upset, at least one had lost interest in a guy because he appeared to be a member,
Well, specifically, he found a blog entry from someone else, saying:
I went back, caught his name and cyberstalked him. I found out he was an investor. I found out that he was a runner. And soon enough, I found him on a singles page called "Jlove.com," a website for Jewish singles.
So she believes everything she reads online, she assumes that just because the name matches it's the right person and she makes no effort to speak to him face to face. Yeah. Just the kind of woman I'm interested in getting to know.
I think the guy she was cyberstalking had a lucky escape.