I worked for a health clinic for a few years that had the most ridiculous setup I have ever seen:
On a 533mhz server with 1gb memory and two raid 1 disk arrays we have: a windows 2000 server acting as a domain controller for a little over 50 users, running SQL server, also as an application server for the finance department software (peachtree, then MAS) also serving a proprietary data analytics program which ran a SQL scrub operation nightly on about 2.5 GB data; exchange 2000 server with a third party POP collector (I still don't get what those are for); as a file server and to top it off it was licensed as a small business and back office server, so it was also limited to 50 users (yeah, I needed to learn to count my users... duh) I had a routine that had me going into work at least two hours before anyone else was there in order to do a system reset because one of the applications that interacted with SQL had a flaw that would not release the memory it took up in its night operation without a reboot. This system lived in a closet with an NT server running a single program that operated in a DOS shell and ran velocis database software and a SQL server to provide data to the application server. Also in the closet was a little remote service box (a networked computer running PC anywhere over a modem). The server closet had a slotted door for ventilation, and a small fan to draw air into it. Needless to say that the ambient room temperature was always above 80F.
So I show up, the only man on staff, and on a $50,000 grant I completely renovate their small little network into an innovative gigabit modern data crunching machine complete with money saving devices like managed switches, thin clients, open source network service management (nessus, squid, mail gateway, firewall/port forwards, spam assasin)... and then I got outsourced to a 'consulting firm' for the expressed intent of saving money... and has no *nix support, experience or knowledge. I'm sure they'll figure out that was not a wise move.
Disgruntled? Maybe a little, but I took the high road and gave them explicit instructions to change all their passwords upon my exit.
They never did
At the risk of being flamed I really have to just say it: rather than have one provided to you why not just write it yourself? You know your audience, their level of expertise and what they will respond to. It's just a matter of putting in the work, and even that could measure up to a series of cut and paste references that you could interpret down to to anything you wish. Make if fun, witty, enjoyable to your reader. Tech manuals are for techs, everyone loves comedy.
Once I wrote a 'how-to print tables in Excel' in the style of King James old testament style.
Open thee to the list of Files found next to the list of edit and view. Visit not ye unto the list of edit and view, for there a foul stench longs and sight not meant for thee. Yea you shall find the list of files to reveal the secret of the 'Print Area'
...and so on
It would really be worth your time to spend a day reading up on your style as you go into it; Douglas Adams would be an inspiration to a great non-tech manual, but he's done that already. I'm just saying it would be best to write your own, choose a style amicable to your audience and sock it to em.
Speculation? No really... shouldn't this be posted on Hack-a-day? It could probably be put along with those wireless hacks (you know, same place you can find plans for tx/rx antenna mods)
perhaps if it had been something like : Two new bots are awaiting your approval and then in that good ol RoboCop voice you have twenty seconds to comply! I would have allowed... but delete just feels good, don't it?-
If (like me) you work in a hospital or healthcare clinic you had better get your stuff locked down, before the feds find out! HIPAA law became part of all heathcare IT workers standing policy which REQUIRES access controls and restrictions to equipment and records.
...so I put a lock on the server closet, locked and documented it. Got me a raise (-:
Point: there really could be some legal workplace precedent you could argue with, but if you have no clout beyond getting your "Q:" posted up on/. then you might as well find some other subversion. 'Cause this ain't gonna get your chair turned around.
Try this:
1. Stand up
2. Pick up chair
3. Turn seat of chair to face vast expansive window which allows you to look upon the masses with contempt (we all know your motivations by now)
4. Sit down in said chair
5. say fifty times "hail tux"
No matter how fast they make them, there's still going to be someone who has to sit on the phone listening to some poor soul drone their way through menu after menu seeking out an answer as to why they are havening problems connecting to the internet.
Did anyone look at iBrowse or aWeb for the Amiga? (google) Guess not. My advice... go Obscure-ware; I just read slashdot on my A1200, with dialup going through a 19.2 modem... I think the only danger there is getting sidetracked in a game of lemmings while you wait for the page source to load. Alien file structures always thwart
...all of a sudden I am flashing back on the days of the Sysop... Racks of modems, ASCII BBS's, and TradeWars 2000.
To start an article out in self-reference sets the tone for a dissertation in rhetoric, and the overall content ends up becoming invalid. Not to nit pick, but this was something an english prof warned me about and Dvorak gives us a classic example. Still, it IS under the opinion section.
What he says in his article could be said about the Hollywood mechanism, almost verbatim. I wonder when that industry will go belly up. The one thing that was curiously missing from Dvorak's analysis was his authority. I checked the bio, nothing... oh he has kids and buys their games for them, riiight. So read this as if a restaurant critic is writing about how bad the food is...which he might have never tasted.
When I was working for nintendo as a game counselor (late 1980s) there was a broad range of ages in the demographic of our call base. Of course most were teen and pre-teenage, but the fact that we had parents and grandparents call for tips on how to defeat Ganon spoke volumes to me which can be summed up as a reponse to Dvorak: everyone loves to play a game at some point; be it cards, chess or pong etc. It's all in individual preference, so it would take a good deal of social engineering analysis to really make this sort of "prediction"
My routine today: login, update, restart... 335 times. It's not like I had BETTER THINGS TO DO! heh, even our management staff is bent out of shape over this.
The plus side: sysadmin day comes but once a year, and if I can thank the manufacturer of windows OS for anything it would be the highly visible justification they provide for our management to kick down some goods and buy us some chocolate cake...
Consulting the rulebook on thermodynamics: rule #2= there is always loss. Bearing that in mind the idea of grass as biomass makes a certain amount of sense when you have monstrous lawns to clip. This would take a lot of grass to get a little useable fuel. The idea is to get a high output for a minimal input, and most any biomass will give some amount of gas when heated in a pyrolysis chamber.
Think of all those endeavours ILM has going on...They're about to move to the SF Presidio into a giant new facility where the game company and the film company are going to be rooming in together; Episode III is about to be released (oooh, maybe a PG13 Star Wars flick!) and all those digital film techniques (i.e.: Camera GUI) they have invented. It's a wonder that ILM is no match for a guy that just wants to make a good movie about human depravity.
I wonder how George will take the news? I predict he'll spend a few million (bah! billion) bucks on some cluster racks to console his staff for the loss.
Not that it's anything new - we've been active in celebrating sysadmin day for four years now, not that we do anything different really. After the business hours wind down our managment duo comes down and hangs out for a bit of kidding with the staff, notably a new dirty lymerick about sysadmin has been appearing annually which makes itself known when the staff head out for beer and 'zza.
this years submission...
Sysadmin day has come back
and ours is considering the days of your slack
when you watched porn on their sys
our bandwidth went into the abyss
so he took away your windows and brought linux back.
I've got the job of wiring up a community of 2 locations to broadband internet and TV services. The cable company wants something to the tune of $20,000 to wire us up so the trick is to find a solution for less. Decentralizing is most certainly the key, but I found this RuralConnect technology and am seriously looking into it as my best option for getting those services out to some pretty remote locations.
I'm still digging through the specs since I just came across this yesterday, so any feedback would be handy for me too.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for a health clinic for a few years that had the most ridiculous setup I have ever seen: On a 533mhz server with 1gb memory and two raid 1 disk arrays we have: a windows 2000 server acting as a domain controller for a little over 50 users, running SQL server, also as an application server for the finance department software (peachtree, then MAS) also serving a proprietary data analytics program which ran a SQL scrub operation nightly on about 2.5 GB data; exchange 2000 server with a third party POP collector (I still don't get what those are for); as a file server and to top it off it was licensed as a small business and back office server, so it was also limited to 50 users (yeah, I needed to learn to count my users... duh) I had a routine that had me going into work at least two hours before anyone else was there in order to do a system reset because one of the applications that interacted with SQL had a flaw that would not release the memory it took up in its night operation without a reboot. This system lived in a closet with an NT server running a single program that operated in a DOS shell and ran velocis database software and a SQL server to provide data to the application server. Also in the closet was a little remote service box (a networked computer running PC anywhere over a modem). The server closet had a slotted door for ventilation, and a small fan to draw air into it. Needless to say that the ambient room temperature was always above 80F. So I show up, the only man on staff, and on a $50,000 grant I completely renovate their small little network into an innovative gigabit modern data crunching machine complete with money saving devices like managed switches, thin clients, open source network service management (nessus, squid, mail gateway, firewall/port forwards, spam assasin)... and then I got outsourced to a 'consulting firm' for the expressed intent of saving money... and has no *nix support, experience or knowledge. I'm sure they'll figure out that was not a wise move. Disgruntled? Maybe a little, but I took the high road and gave them explicit instructions to change all their passwords upon my exit. They never did
Once I wrote a 'how-to print tables in Excel' in the style of King James old testament style.
Open thee to the list of Files found next to the list of edit and view. Visit not ye unto the list of edit and view, for there a foul stench longs and sight not meant for thee. Yea you shall find the list of files to reveal the secret of the 'Print Area'
It would really be worth your time to spend a day reading up on your style as you go into it; Douglas Adams would be an inspiration to a great non-tech manual, but he's done that already. I'm just saying it would be best to write your own, choose a style amicable to your audience and sock it to em.
Speculation? No really... shouldn't this be posted on Hack-a-day? It could probably be put along with those wireless hacks (you know, same place you can find plans for tx/rx antenna mods)
perhaps if it had been something like : Two new bots are awaiting your approval and then in that good ol RoboCop voice you have twenty seconds to comply! I would have allowed... but delete just feels good, don't it?-
Point: there really could be some legal workplace precedent you could argue with, but if you have no clout beyond getting your "Q:" posted up on /. then you might as well find some other subversion. 'Cause this ain't gonna get your chair turned around.
Try this:
1. Stand up
2. Pick up chair
3. Turn seat of chair to face vast expansive window which allows you to look upon the masses with contempt (we all know your motivations by now) 4. Sit down in said chair
5. say fifty times "hail tux"
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Run run run!!!
Oh, wait! Nevermind
No matter how fast they make them, there's still going to be someone who has to sit on the phone listening to some poor soul drone their way through menu after menu seeking out an answer as to why they are havening problems connecting to the internet.
What he says in his article could be said about the Hollywood mechanism, almost verbatim. I wonder when that industry will go belly up. The one thing that was curiously missing from Dvorak's analysis was his authority. I checked the bio, nothing... oh he has kids and buys their games for them, riiight. So read this as if a restaurant critic is writing about how bad the food is ...which he might have never tasted.
When I was working for nintendo as a game counselor (late 1980s) there was a broad range of ages in the demographic of our call base. Of course most were teen and pre-teenage, but the fact that we had parents and grandparents call for tips on how to defeat Ganon spoke volumes to me which can be summed up as a reponse to Dvorak: everyone loves to play a game at some point; be it cards, chess or pong etc. It's all in individual preference, so it would take a good deal of social engineering analysis to really make this sort of "prediction"
The plus side: sysadmin day comes but once a year, and if I can thank the manufacturer of windows OS for anything it would be the highly visible justification they provide for our management to kick down some goods and buy us some chocolate cake...
Hemp (yes, cannabis) is absolutely the best plant for this application, and without peer in the overall output of biomass gasses. Jack Herer wrote the book on hemp as a source of biomass fuel and offers a $100,000 chllenge to prove him wrong!
Grass for fuel! yeah, but not that kind, man!
Think of all those endeavours ILM has going on...They're about to move to the SF Presidio into a giant new facility where the game company and the film company are going to be rooming in together; Episode III is about to be released (oooh, maybe a PG13 Star Wars flick!) and all those digital film techniques (i.e.: Camera GUI) they have invented. It's a wonder that ILM is no match for a guy that just wants to make a good movie about human depravity.
I wonder how George will take the news? I predict he'll spend a few million (bah! billion) bucks on some cluster racks to console his staff for the loss.
Not that it's anything new - we've been active in celebrating sysadmin day for four years now, not that we do anything different really. After the business hours wind down our managment duo comes down and hangs out for a bit of kidding with the staff, notably a new dirty lymerick about sysadmin has been appearing annually which makes itself known when the staff head out for beer and 'zza. this years submission... Sysadmin day has come back and ours is considering the days of your slack when you watched porn on their sys our bandwidth went into the abyss so he took away your windows and brought linux back.
As Thomas Jefferson put it (I Think)..
the welfare of humanity has always been the alibi of tyrants.
I've got the job of wiring up a community of 2 locations to broadband internet and TV services. The cable company wants something to the tune of $20,000 to wire us up so the trick is to find a solution for less. Decentralizing is most certainly the key, but I found this RuralConnect technology and am seriously looking into it as my best option for getting those services out to some pretty remote locations. I'm still digging through the specs since I just came across this yesterday, so any feedback would be handy for me too.