Why would you specify people use SSID masking and MAC filtering from home? Just an FYI, hiding an SSID and turning on MAC filtering is literally useless. Useless. Virtually any sniffing or snorting program out there (even the windows ones) can easily detect SSIDs and MAC addresses, which can obviously be easily spoofed. The only real thing hiding an SSID actually does is prevents the network from showing up in Windows - big deal. For end users, this just adds inconvenience without adding any security. For would be crackers, only type of person this stops is the type that will instantly be turned away by WPA anyway. It's a screen door and a lawn sign in front of fort-knox.
No offense, but it's catch-22 security, and it's a waste of everyone's time, even yours.
IMO, some small testing is appropriate in some areas of IT. I don't think you need a big long qualifying exam, just a couple qualifying questions to weed out the Bullshi**ers. If done properly, no problem. You can't judge one's job fit terribly well in a technical exam in most areas of IT, but you can judge whether or not you should even be interviewing them.
For example, if I'm looking to hire an intermediate Network Administrator / Technician who's supposed to have 5-8 years experience and decent working knowledge of SANs, VMWare ESX, and general Microsoft networking technologies, I would think it's perfectly reasonable to ask a few, very basic questions, such as:
1. What is a LUN? What is its purpose? 2. What is VMotion? 3. Describe RAID 0, 1, 5, and describe 1 example of a nested RAID level. 4. Suppose the network 172.17.0.1/16 -- What class of network is this? What would its subnet mask be? 5. What is DNS, and what does it do? 6. Describe 1:1 NAT. 7. What is an FSMO Role, and how many are there?
Quite Frankly, if someone doesn't doesn't get at least 6/7 correct answers for these qualilfying questions, they either didn't read the job description, or they just don't have the level of experience they purport - bottom line, something doesn't add up. I've been through staffing agencies for positions very similar to this and the agency doesn't even consider them for the position if they don't get a certain score (at the request of the company hiring), and I think this is reasonable. Obviously it doesn't fit in a lot of scenarios, but a few fairly basic questions are good to weed out the crap. If someone scored 3 or 4 out of 7 on that exam, like it or not, they're probably not going to be a fit in my network. IF someone's supposed to have basic, rudamentary knowledge of a SAN environment and they don't know what a LUN is, we have a problem.
Hmmm, I hate to break it to you, but such a thing already exists. Tablets have been around in the mainstream for half a decade now. Granted, Apple hasn't done one, but I used to use a tablet PC in university, and Microsoft did an excellent job integrating tablet controls into XP. I'm sure Mac could do it a bit better and more thought out (Multitouch on steroids), but the XP/Vista tablet experience isn't bad itself. Very functional, easy to use. Personally, I think they're a great thing for students - I really enjoyed mine.
I say they're doing a good job.
on
Google Turns 10
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· Score: 1
I still have the best search results, by far, on google. Yahoo would come in 2nd, and MS Live in a very distant 3rd. I know I can find what I need on Google, so whatever magic search mojo algorithims they're using, are working.
They've also offered a host of relatively good, free, albeit always-in-beta services. They were offering 1GB of storage when almost all the other guys were offeing 2 or 3 MB's.
No, I didn't. Respecting one's right to an opinion doesn't equate to agreeing with it. I respect one's rights to have an opinion, but that doesn't mean I agree with it, and further to that - think someone can be out to lunch.
Respecting someone's right to an opinion and respecting their opinion are two completely different things. I respect other peoples right to an opinion, but that doesn't mean I have to respect the opinion itself. Quite frankly, I think that people who seriously believe in creationism need to be checked into the loonie bin.
But I guess the whole study of paleontology is an ignorant falsehood. My bad. I'm probably the one off the mark here.
I don't remember any specific articles just off hand, but I've read several books and articles over the years that all point to the same idea - Chevy/GM's brand is significantly damaged. If you did want to read more, I would recomend a book called 'The end of Detroit' - which partly covers this and may of the mistakes that detroit has made.
But it's interesting the power that a brand holds, or doesn't hold for that matter. I remember in one of the articles (I think it was on MSN Auto's a few years back) where they were interviewing some marketing guy from Saturn. The first car they would show would be some prototype [GM/Saturn], it would score fairly low amongst the focus group. The last car they would show would be exactly the same car, even the same picture, but a Toyota badge photochopped on it and remarkably it would get a higher score. Brand image takes a long time to turn around. GM's now starting to release some half-compitent cars, but they're still percieved as unreliable junk.
I think that 'Mojave Experiment' thing is pretty much spot on, from the perspective that MS knows the Vista name is pretty badly tarnished. Add to that some crafty, well places Mac ads that exploit this and you have a very damaged OS. I have tons of friends and co-workers that 'hate vista' but have never even used it. All I ever hear is '...oh but vista supposed to be so bad...'.
There's only so much you can do when people hate your product before trying it. Chevy's been battling this for a couple years now. They hold focus groups to look at new/prototype designs and the ones with the Chevy 'bowtie' logo consistently score lower. They even show the same model twice slightly modified in some way (different angle, different color) and adding a Honda or Toyota logo drastically improves its score. Consumers dont want to buy the same re-hashed crap over and over. You eventually have to release quality products.
I dont think Vista's all that bad, but reputation is powerful.
Each UPS is plugged into it's own dedicated electrical circuit - no UPS is plugged into another one. Our building's property managers have also done a pretty good job with redundancy in the building's ciruits.
And yes, in a controlled environment, this saved us a lot of potential headaches. Even the particular servers and UPS's I was personally responsible had a couple minor issues. Some benign configuration change I made in PowerChute caused the UPS to stop communicating with the servers.
In my company, everything is behind UPSs. Our SAN is even behind 2 separate UPSs. We thought everything was configured properly, but you'd be surprised what comes to roost when you test everything.
We recently had a test night where all we did was test the UPS system and shutdown procedures, and there was a couple gotchas. Interestingly, by default the APC powerchute app we were using defaulted to shutting down the UPS completely after the [first] server went down - not good. This was buried fairly deeply in the configuration.
Equally important to any protection measure, be it RAID, Power Protection, whatever - is testing!
I'm not into the whole Wifi hacking thing, but I got talking with my neighbor once a while back and he was thinking "It doesn't matter much anyway, I don't have any shares set up. Maybe some high-level hacker can get in, but I'm not too worried..."
Windows, ever since SP2, does not just automatically connect to any old network out there it deems fit. It will automatically connect if you've connected to it before, but by default it doesn't just connect to random open networks without even asking you and telling you that networks are available. You would have to do one of 2 things - 1) Specifically enable joining networks without asking', and/or B) Join the network manually at least once.
The key here, since it's all based on how the judge interprets the law, is it just play ignorant. 'Geez, the interweb told me there were networks available, so I connected. It just said Linksys, and my interweb box says linksys too'.
But does this really need to be debated on/.? Anyone with a wide open linksys will not even have a clue, and by no reasonable means will you be able to be tracked anyway.
This reminds me of that old NASA joke. 'NASA spent several years and millions of dollars developing a pen for use in space - one that could write in temperatures ranging from -200 to +200 degrees, could write underwater, upside down, and in all gravitational situations. The Russians just used a pencil'.
Then there's the poor bastards who will pay several grand for a simple 'audiophile' networking setup using ultra-premium Denon Cat5 cables, where the rest of us will just use Cat6, GigE, and some pfsense pixy-dust.
Hilarious. Even Sony sells $50 6' Cat5 cables that are PS3 'approved'. I never knew 1's and 0's had such a hard time travelling a couple feet.
You could also use them in a public area like a library is a Kiosk machine. Lots of ways to do this. Opera has a built in kiosk mode (where it basically disables windows hotkeys and locks the browser full-screen). There's also a good Kiosk tool for KDE, which allows you to lock down the desktop environment.
Gee, tons of other options. A good hardened router/firewall, with an external hard drive in hand a NAS, a simple LAMP server for a blog, any number of things.
"A $400 notebook? for anything beyond runnign XP home, cheap antivirus, and e-mail, there's no way. A Celeron notebook in that price range can barely handle Java apps without stuttering, faulters on You Tube, and runs out of resources scanning documents. I can't even imaging trying to open 8MP images and try even simple editing tasks on one, even under XP..."
Gee, my grand-parents do literally all of the above on 7 year old Celeron 2.4 w/ 1GB of RAM, cheap onboard graphics, and it runs just fine. Only an extra 512 of RAM put in it over the years. My old Celeron 667 laptop with 256 RAM handles all of that fine. It's 7 years old. Both machines are well below what a new "$400 Celeron" laptop could do.
Need I remind you that in most home-user tasks, the processor typically sits idle 99% of the time, even old +/- 1Ghz procs. Last time I checked, casual photo editing, the odd scan, the odd email, and internet browsing doesn't push most processors beyond even 25%. With the exception of perhaps the odd render of a home movie into DVD format, or gaming, a cheap PC can do pretty average home user tasks substantially as well as machine with a bigger hard drive and a faster proc.
Remember, Celeron's are the same as their big-brother P3, P4, C2D brethern minus some cache and a slower FSB. Unless you're running apps that take advantage of Cache and Bus speed like games or heavier photo/video rendering, a Celeron will do the trick just as well. A $1500 C2D based laptop isn't going to run Office, IE7, all that much better than a cheapo $500 celeron based machine ($50 RAM upgrade aside). No Aero maybe, but that's just eye candy.
YouTube stuttering? Wow. My old PII-266 w/ 256RAM runs YouTube videos, DVD's, and most multi-media content flawlessly. If you're buying a new, albeit cheap computer that causes YouTube to stutter, you've got issues my friend.
A casual yum update has broken various Linux servers of mine over the years. I'm usually a lot more careful doing yum updates than I am with Windows updates - not because one is inherently more destructive than the other, but because there's almost always a variety of one-off packages that it can break. Microsoft's casual [security] updates are usually fine, but even their service packs don't seem to break too much.
As usual, a couple XP installations get broken and there's mass histeria.
The general vision and direction of Ubuntu is where it has to go to start getting mass support. And who cares? Even if Ubuntu starts to do evil things, all would never be lost in the open-source community.
Like anything else, and what others have already mentioned, the key is not to be satisfied in mediocrity and not let yourself staff. Personally, I used to work in a helpdesk job, but my experiences and attitude spoke to better roads. I personally never stay satisfied with mediocrity and as such, keep myself moving career-wise.
But like the burger king comment, it really depends on the person. I know lots of people who've started in helpdesk positions and have gone on to bigger and better things.
Many users here seem to think (and argue) that any aspect of Ubuntu that mirrors windows is inherently bad or evil. Take for example, the automatic creation of 'Music' and 'Pictures' folders in the users home directory. Sorry, but this isn't a bad idea just because Microsoft does it. Although everyone's organization scheme varies, having these kinds of folders in your home directory makes perfect sense.
We have to remember that Microsoft is the elephant in the room, and the vast majority of home users are accustomed to how MS does things. At least to a certain extent, it's not a bad thing to emulate MS Windows in certain ways. I know of a few people who haven't been able to get online with PC's I've set up, simply because they don't recognize the Firefox icon. Yes, we all hate at, but it's the reality.
Tests like these are great for the community. I've always said the absolutely best way to test usability is to get non-technical users to try and program and give feedback. As much as the open-source community dislikes Microsoft, they do gets things right by holding focus groups upon focus groups to get feed back.
I'm a windows system admin, although I run Ubuntu at home personally (only 6.10). I agree it's getting there, but there's still a few dark and nasty corners which we just shouldn't talk about.
I have yet to install Ubuntu on a majority of laptops where there wasn't a fairly significant amount of rigamoral involved in getting something *basic* running, such as wireless with WPA. It was never really hard to get it running, but it usually involved no less than 7 or 8 CLI entries, downloading a few custom packages, etc. Yes, I know Wireless drivers aren't always installed by Windows, but at least there I can point a family member to the Manufacturer's website, where most now are pretty easy to navigate, look up model, download EXE, run, next, next, next, reboot. But even then, that's a rarity as the drivers will alwats come pre-loaded, or if I'm custom building them a machine, I do it as part of the build anyhow.
Getting a second external display running is also usually a pain.
I think Ubuntu is getting there, but there's still a little polishing to be had. I recommend Ubuntu to family and friends often, as it's the first Linux distro I can actually say with confidence (without smirking or laughing) they can install themselves. It's still a bit of a hard sell in most cases, because XP does the job pretty well for mundane browsing, email, word-pro, etc. Even, gasp, Vista isn't that bad if you're running it on a new PC.
Length of the run... For 95% of consumers who have their components sitting 5-10 feet away from each other, monster is useless. Test after test has shown that in distances less that about 20 feet, there is no difference.
It all really biols down to the company, its history, the type of industry it's in, its size, its management, etc.
There are companies and situations where superusers can be a great value, and others not so much.
Personally, I'm in a company of about 200 people. We have a fairly defined and rigid set of IT policies. It's well communicated and well known that you don't install any apps or programs without IT's permission. If users have requests or need software, we'll install it for them after testing it first. That being said, there's very little deviance on behalf of the users, and overall, we have very few problems with rogue users or PCs.
It really just depends on the company. At minimum, you need to have a coherent, plain language IT acceptable use policy that all employees need to be familiar with.
Then, there's something to be said about why superusers deviate. From the sounds of alot of/.ers, they have to fill out forms in triplicate just to talk to someone in IT. In our company, you simply go talk to the guys in IT. If you need a printer or an app installed, we do it in a few minutes.
But again, there's so many factors that come into play, you have to take it piece by piece.
You make a good point, and are correct. Why has it taken the artist 25ish years to sue Lucas? Most facets of law say you can't acquiesce to a condition for an extended period of time, and then all of the sudden complain.
This is probably a case where he's counter-suing for such an agregious amount that it begs an out of court solution, which probably won't amount to much more than everyone dropping suit and the creator having to cease and desist.
If Lucas/Fox had their affairs in order for the original Star Wars, all IP and creations would be signed over to the studio/Lucas. The very fact he's counter-suiing might suggest such a contract was never signed. But in the 30 years of the highly successful franchise, you would have though someone would have sued by now if there was no IP agreement.
But I do agree, Microsoft is in an inherently precarious position. Although not impossible, it's very difficult for Microsoft to release a new, lightweight OS with innovative new features and a slimmed down code-base whilst maintaining smooth backwards compatibility that runs elegantly on existing or old hardware. It's the giant Elephant in the room for Microsoft's upcoming OS's. Always has been. Again, not impossible, but difficult.
Perhaps this will be what it takes to bring the phone into Canada? 2 of our 3 major providers are 3G (Telus, Bell), so it the 3G iPhone would make perfect sense as a starting point for a Canadian release.
It's almost cruel how little Apple has said about a Canadian release (nothing). They haven't even hinted, nor have Telus, Bell, or Rogers. Only recently have we gotten a sign a 'something' in that there's a "French - Canadian" language seeting in the new 2.0 software.
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Why would you specify people use SSID masking and MAC filtering from home? Just an FYI, hiding an SSID and turning on MAC filtering is literally useless. Useless. Virtually any sniffing or snorting program out there (even the windows ones) can easily detect SSIDs and MAC addresses, which can obviously be easily spoofed. The only real thing hiding an SSID actually does is prevents the network from showing up in Windows - big deal. For end users, this just adds inconvenience without adding any security. For would be crackers, only type of person this stops is the type that will instantly be turned away by WPA anyway. It's a screen door and a lawn sign in front of fort-knox.
No offense, but it's catch-22 security, and it's a waste of everyone's time, even yours.
IMO, some small testing is appropriate in some areas of IT. I don't think you need a big long qualifying exam, just a couple qualifying questions to weed out the Bullshi**ers. If done properly, no problem. You can't judge one's job fit terribly well in a technical exam in most areas of IT, but you can judge whether or not you should even be interviewing them.
For example, if I'm looking to hire an intermediate Network Administrator / Technician who's supposed to have 5-8 years experience and decent working knowledge of SANs, VMWare ESX, and general Microsoft networking technologies, I would think it's perfectly reasonable to ask a few, very basic questions, such as:
1. What is a LUN? What is its purpose?
2. What is VMotion?
3. Describe RAID 0, 1, 5, and describe 1 example of a nested RAID level.
4. Suppose the network 172.17.0.1/16 -- What class of network is this? What would its subnet mask be?
5. What is DNS, and what does it do?
6. Describe 1:1 NAT.
7. What is an FSMO Role, and how many are there?
Quite Frankly, if someone doesn't doesn't get at least 6/7 correct answers for these qualilfying questions, they either didn't read the job description, or they just don't have the level of experience they purport - bottom line, something doesn't add up. I've been through staffing agencies for positions very similar to this and the agency doesn't even consider them for the position if they don't get a certain score (at the request of the company hiring), and I think this is reasonable. Obviously it doesn't fit in a lot of scenarios, but a few fairly basic questions are good to weed out the crap. If someone scored 3 or 4 out of 7 on that exam, like it or not, they're probably not going to be a fit in my network. IF someone's supposed to have basic, rudamentary knowledge of a SAN environment and they don't know what a LUN is, we have a problem.
Hmmm, I hate to break it to you, but such a thing already exists. Tablets have been around in the mainstream for half a decade now. Granted, Apple hasn't done one, but I used to use a tablet PC in university, and Microsoft did an excellent job integrating tablet controls into XP. I'm sure Mac could do it a bit better and more thought out (Multitouch on steroids), but the XP/Vista tablet experience isn't bad itself. Very functional, easy to use. Personally, I think they're a great thing for students - I really enjoyed mine.
I still have the best search results, by far, on google. Yahoo would come in 2nd, and MS Live in a very distant 3rd. I know I can find what I need on Google, so whatever magic search mojo algorithims they're using, are working.
They've also offered a host of relatively good, free, albeit always-in-beta services. They were offering 1GB of storage when almost all the other guys were offeing 2 or 3 MB's.
I think google should just keep on rockin.
No, I didn't. Respecting one's right to an opinion doesn't equate to agreeing with it. I respect one's rights to have an opinion, but that doesn't mean I agree with it, and further to that - think someone can be out to lunch.
Respecting someone's right to an opinion and respecting their opinion are two completely different things. I respect other peoples right to an opinion, but that doesn't mean I have to respect the opinion itself. Quite frankly, I think that people who seriously believe in creationism need to be checked into the loonie bin.
But I guess the whole study of paleontology is an ignorant falsehood. My bad. I'm probably the one off the mark here.
I don't remember any specific articles just off hand, but I've read several books and articles over the years that all point to the same idea - Chevy/GM's brand is significantly damaged. If you did want to read more, I would recomend a book called 'The end of Detroit' - which partly covers this and may of the mistakes that detroit has made.
But it's interesting the power that a brand holds, or doesn't hold for that matter. I remember in one of the articles (I think it was on MSN Auto's a few years back) where they were interviewing some marketing guy from Saturn. The first car they would show would be some prototype [GM/Saturn], it would score fairly low amongst the focus group. The last car they would show would be exactly the same car, even the same picture, but a Toyota badge photochopped on it and remarkably it would get a higher score. Brand image takes a long time to turn around. GM's now starting to release some half-compitent cars, but they're still percieved as unreliable junk.
I think that 'Mojave Experiment' thing is pretty much spot on, from the perspective that MS knows the Vista name is pretty badly tarnished. Add to that some crafty, well places Mac ads that exploit this and you have a very damaged OS. I have tons of friends and co-workers that 'hate vista' but have never even used it. All I ever hear is '...oh but vista supposed to be so bad...'.
There's only so much you can do when people hate your product before trying it. Chevy's been battling this for a couple years now. They hold focus groups to look at new/prototype designs and the ones with the Chevy 'bowtie' logo consistently score lower. They even show the same model twice slightly modified in some way (different angle, different color) and adding a Honda or Toyota logo drastically improves its score. Consumers dont want to buy the same re-hashed crap over and over. You eventually have to release quality products.
I dont think Vista's all that bad, but reputation is powerful.
No, they're not in a series.
Each UPS is plugged into it's own dedicated electrical circuit - no UPS is plugged into another one. Our building's property managers have also done a pretty good job with redundancy in the building's ciruits.
And yes, in a controlled environment, this saved us a lot of potential headaches. Even the particular servers and UPS's I was personally responsible had a couple minor issues. Some benign configuration change I made in PowerChute caused the UPS to stop communicating with the servers.
In my company, everything is behind UPSs. Our SAN is even behind 2 separate UPSs. We thought everything was configured properly, but you'd be surprised what comes to roost when you test everything.
We recently had a test night where all we did was test the UPS system and shutdown procedures, and there was a couple gotchas. Interestingly, by default the APC powerchute app we were using defaulted to shutting down the UPS completely after the [first] server went down - not good. This was buried fairly deeply in the configuration.
Equally important to any protection measure, be it RAID, Power Protection, whatever - is testing!
I'm not into the whole Wifi hacking thing, but I got talking with my neighbor once a while back and he was thinking "It doesn't matter much anyway, I don't have any shares set up. Maybe some high-level hacker can get in, but I'm not too worried..."
Let's see... Start - Run - \\192.168.1.100\c$ - Adminsitrator / ~blank~.
You have shares my friend, they're called administrative shares. Phail.
Agreed.
/.? Anyone with a wide open linksys will not even have a clue, and by no reasonable means will you be able to be tracked anyway.
Windows, ever since SP2, does not just automatically connect to any old network out there it deems fit. It will automatically connect if you've connected to it before, but by default it doesn't just connect to random open networks without even asking you and telling you that networks are available. You would have to do one of 2 things - 1) Specifically enable joining networks without asking', and/or B) Join the network manually at least once.
The key here, since it's all based on how the judge interprets the law, is it just play ignorant. 'Geez, the interweb told me there were networks available, so I connected. It just said Linksys, and my interweb box says linksys too'.
But does this really need to be debated on
This reminds me of that old NASA joke. 'NASA spent several years and millions of dollars developing a pen for use in space - one that could write in temperatures ranging from -200 to +200 degrees, could write underwater, upside down, and in all gravitational situations. The Russians just used a pencil'. Then there's the poor bastards who will pay several grand for a simple 'audiophile' networking setup using ultra-premium Denon Cat5 cables, where the rest of us will just use Cat6, GigE, and some pfsense pixy-dust. Hilarious. Even Sony sells $50 6' Cat5 cables that are PS3 'approved'. I never knew 1's and 0's had such a hard time travelling a couple feet.
They would work great as a thin client.
You could also use them in a public area like a library is a Kiosk machine. Lots of ways to do this. Opera has a built in kiosk mode (where it basically disables windows hotkeys and locks the browser full-screen). There's also a good Kiosk tool for KDE, which allows you to lock down the desktop environment.
Gee, tons of other options. A good hardened router/firewall, with an external hard drive in hand a NAS, a simple LAMP server for a blog, any number of things.
"A $400 notebook? for anything beyond runnign XP home, cheap antivirus, and e-mail, there's no way. A Celeron notebook in that price range can barely handle Java apps without stuttering, faulters on You Tube, and runs out of resources scanning documents. I can't even imaging trying to open 8MP images and try even simple editing tasks on one, even under XP..."
Gee, my grand-parents do literally all of the above on 7 year old Celeron 2.4 w/ 1GB of RAM, cheap onboard graphics, and it runs just fine. Only an extra 512 of RAM put in it over the years. My old Celeron 667 laptop with 256 RAM handles all of that fine. It's 7 years old. Both machines are well below what a new "$400 Celeron" laptop could do.
Need I remind you that in most home-user tasks, the processor typically sits idle 99% of the time, even old +/- 1Ghz procs. Last time I checked, casual photo editing, the odd scan, the odd email, and internet browsing doesn't push most processors beyond even 25%. With the exception of perhaps the odd render of a home movie into DVD format, or gaming, a cheap PC can do pretty average home user tasks substantially as well as machine with a bigger hard drive and a faster proc.
Remember, Celeron's are the same as their big-brother P3, P4, C2D brethern minus some cache and a slower FSB. Unless you're running apps that take advantage of Cache and Bus speed like games or heavier photo/video rendering, a Celeron will do the trick just as well. A $1500 C2D based laptop isn't going to run Office, IE7, all that much better than a cheapo $500 celeron based machine ($50 RAM upgrade aside). No Aero maybe, but that's just eye candy.
YouTube stuttering? Wow. My old PII-266 w/ 256RAM runs YouTube videos, DVD's, and most multi-media content flawlessly. If you're buying a new, albeit cheap computer that causes YouTube to stutter, you've got issues my friend.
A casual yum update has broken various Linux servers of mine over the years. I'm usually a lot more careful doing yum updates than I am with Windows updates - not because one is inherently more destructive than the other, but because there's almost always a variety of one-off packages that it can break. Microsoft's casual [security] updates are usually fine, but even their service packs don't seem to break too much.
As usual, a couple XP installations get broken and there's mass histeria.
The general vision and direction of Ubuntu is where it has to go to start getting mass support. And who cares? Even if Ubuntu starts to do evil things, all would never be lost in the open-source community.
Like anything else, and what others have already mentioned, the key is not to be satisfied in mediocrity and not let yourself staff. Personally, I used to work in a helpdesk job, but my experiences and attitude spoke to better roads. I personally never stay satisfied with mediocrity and as such, keep myself moving career-wise.
But like the burger king comment, it really depends on the person. I know lots of people who've started in helpdesk positions and have gone on to bigger and better things.
Many users here seem to think (and argue) that any aspect of Ubuntu that mirrors windows is inherently bad or evil. Take for example, the automatic creation of 'Music' and 'Pictures' folders in the users home directory. Sorry, but this isn't a bad idea just because Microsoft does it. Although everyone's organization scheme varies, having these kinds of folders in your home directory makes perfect sense.
We have to remember that Microsoft is the elephant in the room, and the vast majority of home users are accustomed to how MS does things. At least to a certain extent, it's not a bad thing to emulate MS Windows in certain ways. I know of a few people who haven't been able to get online with PC's I've set up, simply because they don't recognize the Firefox icon. Yes, we all hate at, but it's the reality.
Tests like these are great for the community. I've always said the absolutely best way to test usability is to get non-technical users to try and program and give feedback. As much as the open-source community dislikes Microsoft, they do gets things right by holding focus groups upon focus groups to get feed back.
I'm a windows system admin, although I run Ubuntu at home personally (only 6.10). I agree it's getting there, but there's still a few dark and nasty corners which we just shouldn't talk about.
I have yet to install Ubuntu on a majority of laptops where there wasn't a fairly significant amount of rigamoral involved in getting something *basic* running, such as wireless with WPA. It was never really hard to get it running, but it usually involved no less than 7 or 8 CLI entries, downloading a few custom packages, etc. Yes, I know Wireless drivers aren't always installed by Windows, but at least there I can point a family member to the Manufacturer's website, where most now are pretty easy to navigate, look up model, download EXE, run, next, next, next, reboot. But even then, that's a rarity as the drivers will alwats come pre-loaded, or if I'm custom building them a machine, I do it as part of the build anyhow.
Getting a second external display running is also usually a pain.
I think Ubuntu is getting there, but there's still a little polishing to be had. I recommend Ubuntu to family and friends often, as it's the first Linux distro I can actually say with confidence (without smirking or laughing) they can install themselves. It's still a bit of a hard sell in most cases, because XP does the job pretty well for mundane browsing, email, word-pro, etc. Even, gasp, Vista isn't that bad if you're running it on a new PC.
Length of the run... For 95% of consumers who have their components sitting 5-10 feet away from each other, monster is useless. Test after test has shown that in distances less that about 20 feet, there is no difference.
It all really biols down to the company, its history, the type of industry it's in, its size, its management, etc.
/.ers, they have to fill out forms in triplicate just to talk to someone in IT. In our company, you simply go talk to the guys in IT. If you need a printer or an app installed, we do it in a few minutes.
There are companies and situations where superusers can be a great value, and others not so much.
Personally, I'm in a company of about 200 people. We have a fairly defined and rigid set of IT policies. It's well communicated and well known that you don't install any apps or programs without IT's permission. If users have requests or need software, we'll install it for them after testing it first. That being said, there's very little deviance on behalf of the users, and overall, we have very few problems with rogue users or PCs.
It really just depends on the company. At minimum, you need to have a coherent, plain language IT acceptable use policy that all employees need to be familiar with.
Then, there's something to be said about why superusers deviate. From the sounds of alot of
But again, there's so many factors that come into play, you have to take it piece by piece.
You make a good point, and are correct. Why has it taken the artist 25ish years to sue Lucas? Most facets of law say you can't acquiesce to a condition for an extended period of time, and then all of the sudden complain.
This is probably a case where he's counter-suing for such an agregious amount that it begs an out of court solution, which probably won't amount to much more than everyone dropping suit and the creator having to cease and desist.
If Lucas/Fox had their affairs in order for the original Star Wars, all IP and creations would be signed over to the studio/Lucas. The very fact he's counter-suiing might suggest such a contract was never signed. But in the 30 years of the highly successful franchise, you would have though someone would have sued by now if there was no IP agreement.
Welcome to /.
But I do agree, Microsoft is in an inherently precarious position. Although not impossible, it's very difficult for Microsoft to release a new, lightweight OS with innovative new features and a slimmed down code-base whilst maintaining smooth backwards compatibility that runs elegantly on existing or old hardware. It's the giant Elephant in the room for Microsoft's upcoming OS's. Always has been. Again, not impossible, but difficult.
Perhaps this will be what it takes to bring the phone into Canada? 2 of our 3 major providers are 3G (Telus, Bell), so it the 3G iPhone would make perfect sense as a starting point for a Canadian release.
It's almost cruel how little Apple has said about a Canadian release (nothing). They haven't even hinted, nor have Telus, Bell, or Rogers. Only recently have we gotten a sign a 'something' in that there's a "French - Canadian" language seeting in the new 2.0 software.
Sigh, I'll keep waiting.