Background: I am a sysadmin for a 300+ node Linux shop, and have fairly lengthy experience in Solaris, Windows, and AIX as well.
I still run Windows XP as my desktop of choice. I only run it because it came with the laptop that was provided to me by IT, or I would probably still be running Windows 2000. Very simply, I use the OS as a tool to get my job done, and Windows 2000 was doing the trick. Windows XP is now doing the trick. When there is something I want to do that Windows XP can no longer do, I will look beyond. If Linux starts to pioneer in new features and areas that Windows and the Mac OS cannot answer, then I will certainly consider it for my desktop OS. Meanwhile, I deal enough headaches from users at the server level that I don't feel like battling with my Linux wifi drivers, sound card strangeness, or having to jump through other hurdles to just stay productive. Of course there are patches and ways around most/all of the issues I have seen, but that doesn't mean its acceptable to me.
Now, cue over to the server arena, and Linux is certainly replacing Windows boxes for all standard day-to-day servers. It does what I need, it does it well, and even offers features and ease of use that the Windows boxes simply cannot match. That was a compelling reason, with cost also being a close secondary, that we now run so many nodes.
Meanwhile, who really cares. If _XXXX_ does what you want, use it.
So you are making 80 grand a year on salary. Before I critique, I just want to mention that I was in your exact same shoes and was putting in 60-70 hours a week for a few years until I realized I had enough. I understand the frustration. If you are not happy with it or find it is compromising your ethics as you mention - you should seriously consider finding another job. Your work output is probably already starting to suffer, and eventually your employer will start to notice this. It may take you a week, a month, maybe even a year, so you should start as soon as you can. If you are worth your salt, then you will certainly find what you want. If you are unhappy with the hours and can't find a position demanding your skills, then you should consider refining your skills or educating yourself into a career that is more compatible with the hours you would like to have.
Now, back to the 80 grand a year - have you considered that perhaps you make that much because they are factoring in the amount of extra hours that are already expected in the position? Think about this answer and compare to a position of someone who was required to attend at minimum 4 years of college, assume debt, and probably are making less.
Why change your ticker symbol from your company name to one particular product? This is akin to Apple (AAPL) changing their symbol to IPOD. As an admin who still maintains a number of Sun servers, this now raises some question as to how committed Sun is to the hardware market in the future, or whether they will go to a software model. This is starting to sound more and more like a company without a strong vision of its future, and right now some exec found that Java is one of the last jewels of hope, so software development is the current trend to see if it sticks (Borland?).
Of course it doesn't help with the Apple-like secrecy the company seems to be putting around the product (an attempt to try and drum up interest?). I work with their products everyday, and this is the first I have even heard of this. Their own web site only seems to have a single press release from back in May (http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/g lobal_desktop.html). For an open source company, no alphas, no betas, no hints as to what sets it apart from their new Red Hat 5 Linux Desktop (http://www.redhat.com/rhel/desktop/)? I suspect it includes Mugshot and a few other consumer'ish goodies, but with so little info, who really knows.
As many other posters have suggested, when it comes to federal audit compliance, commercial reliability should be a serious consideration i.e. EMC Centera.
That being said, you did ask to see if any open source solutions. The only thing I can think of is coming up with some combined use of dnotify (http://linux.die.net/man/1/dnotify), or one of its more modern incarnations such as inotify or I think there is even an lnotify now, and then use that to launch a script to strip user write permissions from a file after it has been created/written in the directory. This would of course be tricky as you would need to be confident the user was done writing to the file before you removed their write permissions, but it is open source and gives you something easy to play with as you evaluate your options.
Best of luck!
And why would a family starting out need 1.5 acre tract of land in an urban area of 260k people (http://anchorage.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm)? I don't claim to know anything about the geography of the area, but a quick search of realtor.com shows that anyone can buy a.25 acre piece of land for an average of $25k, or half an acre for $22k-$50k. As a middle income family, you can apparently get yourself a starter home of 1200sq feet for around $180k ($100k for a starter condo). If you want to consider moving to the 'burbs, just like any other city, it of course gets much cheaper.
Now lets compare this to say, many other American cities. Anchorage has an "Owner-occupied housing units" rate of 60%, which is among the highest in the country (again, areaconnect.com/statistics.htm says that Tucson is 53%, Oklahoma City is close at 59%, Las Vegas is also 59%, Orlando is 40.7%, Boston is 32%, Syracuse is 40%, Dallas is 43%, Los Angeles is 38%, Manchester NH is 46%). So this tells me that people are having less of a hard time achieving home ownership in Anchorage than just about any other part of the country.
I'm not trying to flame you as I am sure many people there go through the same struggles as elsewhere, but just trying to put everything into a bit of perspective. Anchorage isn't the $40k housing market some people in the lower 48 might expect, but it seems easier to achieve personal home ownership there than most other urban cities in the country. I suspect if you start to consider suburbs, just like any other city, the numbers skew much differently.
I smiled when I read this question as to the viability of the lower cost storage solution and how it compares to an enterprise-level solution such as that offered by EMC, NetApp, Hitachi, etc. It reminded me of a sysadmin consulting gig I was introduced to a few years ago. An energy consulting company of approximately 50 employees had a small data center that they wanted to contract out for IT support. Up until this point, the CFO had been designing and building the systems for everyone. When I walked into the data closet, he had a stack of various Dell laptops in various precarious positions in a single 2-post telecom rack. This was his server farm that they were using to perform careful analytical data of power plants, as well as store business critical data. This was the server farm. They had found that they ran out of storage rather quickly on each "laptop server", so of course there were various USB hard drives hanging off all over the place. When I inquired as to the rationale of this type of setup, he demonstrated a sense of proud accomplishment that he had solved a server consolidation issue on the cheap by just using people's old laptops and re-deploying them as servers. He didn't want the burden of those large 2U+ servers. Sure, many of the laptops had cracked screens, keyboards that didn't work locally, or just looked severely depressed, but I quickly gained the sense that it was not worth arguing with this person as to why HP or hell, even cheap Dell servers might be better.
While I am sure the long term laptop "server" maintenance would have kept be quite busy, I passed on the consulting gig.
I am presently a financial customer of an enterprise speech recognition product that Nuance offers. For several years now, the speech recognition software industry has been under consolidation, with Nuance buying a few different competitors and technologies. Most recently, this dance has continued with Nuance being acquired by ScanSoft, a company known for specializing in type recognition.
Nuance support is marginal at best, and through all the consolidations, understanding even within their own company of how the product works is quite lacking. We have found our own developers often times educating the Nuance support folks in various aspects of how the product is working, and then inquiring as to whether this is intended behavior or not. Crickets can often be heard finishing these types of conversations. We normally would have moved to another product under these conditions, but simply put - Nuance acquired what little was left, and now has no competition in the market. Competition is what spurs innovation, and so with the continued consolidation, it is hard to see significant advances in the technology without free help from academia.
If you think the Microsoft monopoly is bad, imagine if they absorbed Apple and somehow took over Linux leaving you with a few "choices", but all under the Microsoft moniker. The technology is very neat and the enterprise level products do some basic things quite well, but there is still some glaring room for innovation that I don't expect anytime soon under present industry conditions.
Yet further proof that business ethics is an oxymoron, and one that business schools are at best one to pay lip service to? It would have been a more powerful statement had they considered him and refused to give him a degree based on how he has profited on his organization's unethical accomplishments. Not that I expect any other publicly traded company to be in it for the good will of the people, but Microsoft has certainly been rather flagrant about its practices. Apparently these are the values that Harvard holds up for all of its students to esteem to achieve.
My company was recently found guilty of anti-competitive behavior, and now Europe is currently, and has been, trying to impose penalties on my companies behavior. Oh, thanks for the honorary degree Harvard.
What is interesting is that apparently in this "spin-off", they are unloading debt, receiving roughly $2.7b or so, and Verizon will retain 60% ownership of this new company. It is actually a fairly strategic way to insulate yourself from any rulings that you suggest and yet still retain influential control of the market.
http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2007/01/veri zon_to_spin.html
I think the bigger news from this article is the fact that RedHat is now offering indemnification for its customers. They slipped this into their FAQ now as well (
http://www.redhat.com/promo/believe/). While I think their hand was forced a bit on this one in order to remain competitive with where the market seems to be going, its still welcome news. This has been a significant hurdle for many companies even considering whether to adopt open source. As it becomes more widespread and "the norm" that you do not need to worry about legal hassles for running Linux, more companies will consider the switch.
Time to write a polite letter explaining you will not be voting for your elected official come election time, and that you will be encouraging your friends and family to be doing the same thanks to them trampling on your rights.
In business, you can build a product, and ignore your user base, but then, will it really be successful?
The original poster is providing some personal insight into his own experience with Linux. While I do agree with you on many of your own points, I still think its somewhat short-sighted to simply dismiss the original poster.
Time and time again I see a posting about someone having a particular critism with Linux, and how it does not behave as they "normally expect" from Windows. And countless times again I will see Linux fans jump all over them that this is not true, in an attempt to help clarify the persons experience. For better or worse, most of the time these are attempts at helping the frustrated user understand that this in fact isn't Windows, and that no, it doesn't behave like Windows, but there are ways around it. That is all said and good, but for many people, spending a frustrating amount of time searching with Google to find obscure walkthrough's and patches to get certain hardware to work isn't acceptable.
Is this purely the fault of Linux? No, hardware vendors can, and have been, going a long way towards making many of their products work better or easier. If I am missing a driver for Windows for a sound card, a wireless network card, etc, I receive a convenient prompt that asks whether I want to search the Internet for the driver, or perhaps insert a vendor-provided CD to add the driver. This is a fairly simply process (I am ignoring your comment about the drivers being "dodgy at times", as while true, is not a fault in this overall fairly convenient process).
However, it is still important to recognize that these are indeed the frustrated comments of people who are genuienly trying to use, and move to, Linux. I have an HP DL380 G4 sitting here. To install the vendor specific network card drivers, I can simply Update the Driver within Windows GUI with a few simple mouse clicks, or I need to jump through a few hoops to ensure the kernel source is available, apply the source RPM package, compile the code, install the compiled code, then modify my mod conf to ensure it uses this driver rather than the default tg3. Oh, and I should blacklist the tg3 modfule from coming up. HP provides some fairly simply directions to follow, but this certainly isn't as easy as Windows.
I still have a hell of a time getting a number of different wireless cards to work under Linux. There are a number of great hacks, some limited actual vendor support, but still can be problematic. This isn't necessarily the fault of Linux, rather vendors, but in the end, its the frustrated user who ends up abandoning Linux because of this.
Video drivers can occasionally be the same way (though with each release, it does get more mature). I've seen extremely weird quirks on occasion with LCD screens not being picked up correctly, requiring one to manually go in and modify some X settings to set the correct refresh rate and resolution.
So, while its easy to dismiss the user's experience as unfounded, the fact remains that he tried Linux, because it wasn't what he normally expected with Windows, he gave up. Does that mean Linux needs to become more Windows like? Some argument can be made either way in terms of whether you want to attract the masses, or keep the nice OS that we have today. Does that mean that each user needs to take more time to understand Linux instead for what it is? Some argument can also be made either way, in terms of how much time does a user want to spend learning how to tame their operating system, rather than using it as a tool towards better productivity.
License plate information is already used inappropriately by police officers. This past weekend, 3 Boston Police officers were arrested on a string of charges. One of them includes, "In conversations with his associates, he was proud of his ability to spot easy marks for identity theft: He ran the license plate numbers of expensive cars he encountered in routine traffic stops through police systems to get to the owners' private information. With the help of a worker at a local bank, he picked off those with the best credit ratings." (Article found at http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art icles/2006/07/22/pulidos_club_offered_sex_drugs_pr osecutors_say/).
I can't see this information becoming more easily accessible the least bit comforting or reassuring.
Locksmith, a powerful utility for unlocking lost passwords on Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 systems has been incorporated into other Winternals products, and is no longer sold as an add-on module.
The Locksmith utility provides an easy-to-use Wizard. You select the account whose password you wish to change from a drop-down menu, then enter and confirm the new password. When you reboot the system, the new password will take effect.
If you've been locked out of a Windows system and need to immediately replace a lost or forgotten Administrator password, you may purchase the emergency-download version of ERD Commander 2005 here.
Administrator's Pak also includes the Locksmith utility.
I just wrote my a paper for an interpersonal communications class on this very subject and finished it about literally 4 hours ago, so how odd this comes up on Slashdot. To summarize why I disagree with the assessment from my simple minded point of view:
In-Person relationships are based on a whole stage process that psychology has spent many, many years developing and refining. It is actually a fairly interesting model, and does seem applicable in many situations. The methods of how we communicate and open up to each other now with Instant Messanger, Slashdot message boards, BBS's, FidoNet, or whatever completely takes a lot of these concepts and throws them out the window. This is of great confusion to some by-the-book psychologists, and therefore, I cannot tell you how many articles I had to parse over in terms of "Whats Better: In-Person Relationships or Cyberspace Relationships." For example, http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/showdown.html
The author contrasts online versus in-person relationships and cyberspace relationships and which type might be better. He specifically poses the questions, "Is it true that real relationships...are superior... or relationships in cyberspace better?" I really don't see much value in generalizing both and making such vast assumptions about how either works or which is "better" than the other, though I can appreciate the author's efforts at trying to present a well thought article contrasting the two.
The author only hints at one such reason why I feel the generalization isn't necessarily fair - "some people may not have the opportunity to develop good relationships in person." If someone is homebound, due to physical limitations or even mental impairment, a potential relationship
in cyberspace may be that individuals only avenue or gaining some form of positive communication with the outside world. This contrasts to them living a depressed life as a hermit, and contemplating such things as suicide. I am absolutely confident that even simple online communication has given people a feeling of participating in the real world and prevented suicides.
Additionally, cyberspace allows us to discuss things that we may not normally feel comfortable discussing in person. I had a friend who was vastly overweight and joined several online chat groups to learn more about gastric bypass, developed many close relationships with people in different online groups, learned much about the procedure and its effects on your personal life, and recently underwent the surgery. I am confident that he would not have simply walked into a support meeting initially searching for information on this, as it just was not in his nature. Near strangers online confided in him very personal information about how this surgery affected their lives, and I don't believe these
barriers would have been anywhere near as easily climbed in person.
I was a groomsman in a wedding a couple of years ago for my friend Aaron, and his wife Tiffanie. He was an office manager living in New Hampshire, and she was finishing a communications degree and lived in Montana (she was also a former Miss Teen Montana). He is a great guy, and most girls regard him as pretty decent looking, though he is very shy and had an extremely difficult time working out relationships with women. He met Tiffanie online in a Yahoo chat forum years ago, and they built a relationship from that point. They learned about each other, started to share secrets and personal information, and truly learned about each others values. This then transpired into phone conversations, and eventually they flew back and forth to meet each other, converting into an in-person relationship. They have been married several years now, and I can honestly say that they are the happiest couple I know.
I think a better argument is to recognize online chatting for what it is, an
At a recent auto expo, Ford CEO William Clay Ford Jr. spoke of how fellow company officer Derrick Kuzak was asked to rid his car of all the annoying squeeks, quirks, and failing parts that had made the product highly unreliable over the few years he has owned it. As the story goes, neither Kuzak nor top Ford engineers could fix the car. The article goes on to discuss and compare Ford's newest automotive protection program and solution to such a problem, the Ford PayUsForever program.
If you wouldn't accept this as an adequate solution for an unreliable car, why would you accept this as an adequate solution for something many of us arguably spend more time in front of? Why not try switching car brands to something more reliable if your current vehicle is so problematic?
* Ford was just used as an example and have nothing against the company itself.
The brand itself seems to have lost a significant amount of value and overall relevancy to me. I remember many endless nights playing Duke 3D, and the great world it immersed you in. The character itself was great, as was the game. Everyone was excited to see what they could do next with the franchise, and they sounded really ambitious about what they wanted to do. Then, time passed.. and passed.. and passed.. and games like Deus Ex came out, which again kicked some serious ass (the sequel maybe not quite as much). So, obviously the industry has moved on, and would this game coming out even make as much as a splash as much as it once may have? I mean in all this time, they had plenty of opportunity to license another engine (again, like Deus Ex) and take the original game to the next level. Instead, I honestly have no idea what they have been doing, and in the meantime, many other great games have come along to fill the void. No matter what they come out with at this point, it is never going to live up to the expectations that they have working on this game, theoretically, for 10 years now.
... and in a symbolic jesture, tens of thousands of system administrators threw their blackberry devices into the toilets of the world in disgust that bosses will continue to harass them at all hours of the day, night, weekend, or vacation day to perform even the most remedial of tasks. If you're not happy with the status quo, just go find yourself another job. What? The other job also expects you to instantly respond to every email without excuse as well?
Not that there aren't a dozen other companies waiting to jump in and fill the void at a moments notice with other technology solutions, but sometimes this blackberry craze strikes me as ridiculous in terms of what the expectations are when your employer gives you one. After seeing what this device did to many of my co-workers, I deliberately told my employer for several years that I did not want this device, as it would be a waste of money. I did not work like this on _MY_ time. I still maintained an old cell phone from them for reasonable true emergency purposes, as this requires some extra effort on their part to get ahold of me if a system crash, etc. The cell phone has basic email receipt functionality, so serious system alerts still were sent to me. This seemed like a reasonable medium. Enter a few months ago, and I finally had my job threatened if I did not take a Blackberry to demonstrate a committment to my job equal to my peers (I guess the 50+ hours a week I put in isn't enough anymore). As I suspected all along, the line is slowly being pushed. If an end user sends an email about their crashing of an old, little used dev box on the weekend, my boss expects me to respond right away from the "convenience" of my blackberry while out with the family or at a movie. By respond, this means telling the guy that I will rush home to remote access in and try and reset the dev box so he can keep playing, or drive into the office to physically resolve the issue. Had it just been a cell phone, I know for a fact the guy would have just waited until Monday morning when I was back on company time. If my boss emails me with a question on Saturday afternoon where he is sharing his thoughts about Microsoft's latest strategy, I am expected to respond from the Blackberry within whatever his daily definition of a "reasonable" timeframe to agree with him or give an immediate plan of when this is going to be implemented in our company.
So I know the typical response is if you don't like it, go find another job, which I am actually currently doing (for other reasons). What scares me about this though is that a good portion of my peers don't mind working under these conditions. I've been doing this job for many years, so I certainly understand the expectations of coming in on a weekend or late at night to resolve a crashed router or server issue. But I just see this type of technology blurring the line between when you walk out the door at 5pm/6pm/7pm, and them keeping in constant contact with you. Sure it's good... but for who?
Next up - map tracking software and GPS due to be the next big thing on these types of devices, I seriously start to wonder if my employer is going to see "Hey, he is only 9 miles from the office, so he has no excuse not to come in on Sunday to help put in a few hours."
Thanks for the info. I did enjoy reading about the project (did not know it was out there), but alas, from minoten:
- I have a DVI-D capable DVD/Satellite/Cable Box, will this work with the controller?
- Most likely, no. Almost all DVD/Satellite/Cable Boxes with DVI-D output use an encryption format called HDCP. Since this controller does not support HDCP, it cannot decrypt the video signals, resulting in a blank picture.
- Will you be able to get a HDCP-capable controller soon?
- No. Despite rumors, this is not going to happen. The reason is that the company behind HDCP charges a $15,000 yearly fee to start using HDCP components, and then charges a fee for each HDCP component used. The controller manufacturer has expressed that they do not plan on producing HDCP components, as the overhead cost is incredible.
HDTV DRM standards are still really in a state of flux. I have a digital projector I purchased around Christmas of 2004 that has full HDTV 16x9 capabilities, and includes a DVI connection to allow for straight digital content to be fed into it. I recently decided to upgrade my Comcast cable box to HDTV, thinking this would be a great combination. Even better, the Comcast cable box had a DVI connector on the back that would allow for straight digital to digital high def, with no analog conversion in the mix anywhere. I was excited that this would truly be a technical marvel (I'm one of those guys that gets excited over shit like this). I turn on the projector, turn on the cable box, jump over to the Discovery channel, and see one of the most amazingly detailed pictures I have ever seen from a tv - for about 8 seconds. Then a big box comes up blocking any further video, telling me I can't enjoy HDTV from this cable box as my projector does not include an HDCP digital rights management chip. This is something that is required to be built-in from the factory, and not something I can add later. This truly, truly pissed me off. Apparently many earlier HDTV's do not have this, as it simply did not exist at the time. I look everywhere for an intermediary device to provide this HDCP functionality while retaining the benefit of a straight digital connection, but unfortunately nothing realistic exists yet (there is a small $400+ option available in Germany, but that is out of the realm of realistic to me).
So, to make a long story short, I now have my cable box outputting its digital signal over firewire to a small media PC I built for a few hundred bucks (and doubles as my video recorder). I then have the DVI out on this going to my projector, and I am back up and running with true high def support (HBO won't come in over firewire due to other DRM issues, but I digress).
I just wanted to carry on with your theme of people doing whatever they can to circumvent this stuff, but I think it finally just allowed me to vent about what a pain in the ass technology this is proving to be.
"VMware GSX Server makes high availability affordable and scalable by protecting critical applications and data in up to 64 secure, isolated virtual machines on a single hardware system. It supports standard network load balancing, standby, replication, and clustering of virtual machines."
The new ESX v3 on its way out the door supports iSCSI clustering. I am not sure at what level you would want to run your cluster data at. VMWare stores a disk as a file, and I am not aware of a way to have multiple virtual machines accessing that file at the same time and writing to it. However, if, within your virtual machine, you have your cluster pointing to the shared data on an NFS or shared volume somewhere on the network, I don't see that being a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Background: I am a sysadmin for a 300+ node Linux shop, and have fairly lengthy experience in Solaris, Windows, and AIX as well.
I still run Windows XP as my desktop of choice. I only run it because it came with the laptop that was provided to me by IT, or I would probably still be running Windows 2000. Very simply, I use the OS as a tool to get my job done, and Windows 2000 was doing the trick. Windows XP is now doing the trick. When there is something I want to do that Windows XP can no longer do, I will look beyond. If Linux starts to pioneer in new features and areas that Windows and the Mac OS cannot answer, then I will certainly consider it for my desktop OS. Meanwhile, I deal enough headaches from users at the server level that I don't feel like battling with my Linux wifi drivers, sound card strangeness, or having to jump through other hurdles to just stay productive. Of course there are patches and ways around most/all of the issues I have seen, but that doesn't mean its acceptable to me.
Now, cue over to the server arena, and Linux is certainly replacing Windows boxes for all standard day-to-day servers. It does what I need, it does it well, and even offers features and ease of use that the Windows boxes simply cannot match. That was a compelling reason, with cost also being a close secondary, that we now run so many nodes.
Meanwhile, who really cares. If _XXXX_ does what you want, use it.
Ah, I see you also use Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Excel fails math test)
So you are making 80 grand a year on salary. Before I critique, I just want to mention that I was in your exact same shoes and was putting in 60-70 hours a week for a few years until I realized I had enough. I understand the frustration. If you are not happy with it or find it is compromising your ethics as you mention - you should seriously consider finding another job. Your work output is probably already starting to suffer, and eventually your employer will start to notice this. It may take you a week, a month, maybe even a year, so you should start as soon as you can. If you are worth your salt, then you will certainly find what you want. If you are unhappy with the hours and can't find a position demanding your skills, then you should consider refining your skills or educating yourself into a career that is more compatible with the hours you would like to have.
Now, back to the 80 grand a year - have you considered that perhaps you make that much because they are factoring in the amount of extra hours that are already expected in the position? Think about this answer and compare to a position of someone who was required to attend at minimum 4 years of college, assume debt, and probably are making less.
Why change your ticker symbol from your company name to one particular product? This is akin to Apple (AAPL) changing their symbol to IPOD. As an admin who still maintains a number of Sun servers, this now raises some question as to how committed Sun is to the hardware market in the future, or whether they will go to a software model. This is starting to sound more and more like a company without a strong vision of its future, and right now some exec found that Java is one of the last jewels of hope, so software development is the current trend to see if it sticks (Borland?).
Of course it doesn't help with the Apple-like secrecy the company seems to be putting around the product (an attempt to try and drum up interest?). I work with their products everyday, and this is the first I have even heard of this. Their own web site only seems to have a single press release from back in May (http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/g lobal_desktop.html). For an open source company, no alphas, no betas, no hints as to what sets it apart from their new Red Hat 5 Linux Desktop (http://www.redhat.com/rhel/desktop/)? I suspect it includes Mugshot and a few other consumer'ish goodies, but with so little info, who really knows.
As many other posters have suggested, when it comes to federal audit compliance, commercial reliability should be a serious consideration i.e. EMC Centera.
That being said, you did ask to see if any open source solutions. The only thing I can think of is coming up with some combined use of dnotify (http://linux.die.net/man/1/dnotify), or one of its more modern incarnations such as inotify or I think there is even an lnotify now, and then use that to launch a script to strip user write permissions from a file after it has been created/written in the directory. This would of course be tricky as you would need to be confident the user was done writing to the file before you removed their write permissions, but it is open source and gives you something easy to play with as you evaluate your options.
Best of luck!
I will now forever cringe whenever I see the "Comcast van" pull into the neighborhood. Thanks turkey.
And why would a family starting out need 1.5 acre tract of land in an urban area of 260k people (http://anchorage.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm)? I don't claim to know anything about the geography of the area, but a quick search of realtor.com shows that anyone can buy a .25 acre piece of land for an average of $25k, or half an acre for $22k-$50k. As a middle income family, you can apparently get yourself a starter home of 1200sq feet for around $180k ($100k for a starter condo). If you want to consider moving to the 'burbs, just like any other city, it of course gets much cheaper.
Now lets compare this to say, many other American cities. Anchorage has an "Owner-occupied housing units" rate of 60%, which is among the highest in the country (again, areaconnect.com/statistics.htm says that Tucson is 53%, Oklahoma City is close at 59%, Las Vegas is also 59%, Orlando is 40.7%, Boston is 32%, Syracuse is 40%, Dallas is 43%, Los Angeles is 38%, Manchester NH is 46%). So this tells me that people are having less of a hard time achieving home ownership in Anchorage than just about any other part of the country.
I'm not trying to flame you as I am sure many people there go through the same struggles as elsewhere, but just trying to put everything into a bit of perspective. Anchorage isn't the $40k housing market some people in the lower 48 might expect, but it seems easier to achieve personal home ownership there than most other urban cities in the country. I suspect if you start to consider suburbs, just like any other city, the numbers skew much differently.
I smiled when I read this question as to the viability of the lower cost storage solution and how it compares to an enterprise-level solution such as that offered by EMC, NetApp, Hitachi, etc. It reminded me of a sysadmin consulting gig I was introduced to a few years ago. An energy consulting company of approximately 50 employees had a small data center that they wanted to contract out for IT support. Up until this point, the CFO had been designing and building the systems for everyone. When I walked into the data closet, he had a stack of various Dell laptops in various precarious positions in a single 2-post telecom rack. This was his server farm that they were using to perform careful analytical data of power plants, as well as store business critical data. This was the server farm. They had found that they ran out of storage rather quickly on each "laptop server", so of course there were various USB hard drives hanging off all over the place. When I inquired as to the rationale of this type of setup, he demonstrated a sense of proud accomplishment that he had solved a server consolidation issue on the cheap by just using people's old laptops and re-deploying them as servers. He didn't want the burden of those large 2U+ servers. Sure, many of the laptops had cracked screens, keyboards that didn't work locally, or just looked severely depressed, but I quickly gained the sense that it was not worth arguing with this person as to why HP or hell, even cheap Dell servers might be better.
While I am sure the long term laptop "server" maintenance would have kept be quite busy, I passed on the consulting gig.
I am presently a financial customer of an enterprise speech recognition product that Nuance offers. For several years now, the speech recognition software industry has been under consolidation, with Nuance buying a few different competitors and technologies. Most recently, this dance has continued with Nuance being acquired by ScanSoft, a company known for specializing in type recognition.
Nuance support is marginal at best, and through all the consolidations, understanding even within their own company of how the product works is quite lacking. We have found our own developers often times educating the Nuance support folks in various aspects of how the product is working, and then inquiring as to whether this is intended behavior or not. Crickets can often be heard finishing these types of conversations. We normally would have moved to another product under these conditions, but simply put - Nuance acquired what little was left, and now has no competition in the market. Competition is what spurs innovation, and so with the continued consolidation, it is hard to see significant advances in the technology without free help from academia.
If you think the Microsoft monopoly is bad, imagine if they absorbed Apple and somehow took over Linux leaving you with a few "choices", but all under the Microsoft moniker. The technology is very neat and the enterprise level products do some basic things quite well, but there is still some glaring room for innovation that I don't expect anytime soon under present industry conditions.
Yet further proof that business ethics is an oxymoron, and one that business schools are at best one to pay lip service to? It would have been a more powerful statement had they considered him and refused to give him a degree based on how he has profited on his organization's unethical accomplishments. Not that I expect any other publicly traded company to be in it for the good will of the people, but Microsoft has certainly been rather flagrant about its practices. Apparently these are the values that Harvard holds up for all of its students to esteem to achieve.
My company was recently found guilty of anti-competitive behavior, and now Europe is currently, and has been, trying to impose penalties on my companies behavior. Oh, thanks for the honorary degree Harvard.
What is interesting is that apparently in this "spin-off", they are unloading debt, receiving roughly $2.7b or so, and Verizon will retain 60% ownership of this new company. It is actually a fairly strategic way to insulate yourself from any rulings that you suggest and yet still retain influential control of the market. http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2007/01/veri zon_to_spin.html
I think the bigger news from this article is the fact that RedHat is now offering indemnification for its customers. They slipped this into their FAQ now as well ( http://www.redhat.com/promo/believe/). While I think their hand was forced a bit on this one in order to remain competitive with where the market seems to be going, its still welcome news. This has been a significant hurdle for many companies even considering whether to adopt open source. As it becomes more widespread and "the norm" that you do not need to worry about legal hassles for running Linux, more companies will consider the switch.
Time to write a polite letter explaining you will not be voting for your elected official come election time, and that you will be encouraging your friends and family to be doing the same thanks to them trampling on your rights.
Here's the vote breakdown: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll502.xml
In business, you can build a product, and ignore your user base, but then, will it really be successful?
The original poster is providing some personal insight into his own experience with Linux. While I do agree with you on many of your own points, I still think its somewhat short-sighted to simply dismiss the original poster.
Time and time again I see a posting about someone having a particular critism with Linux, and how it does not behave as they "normally expect" from Windows. And countless times again I will see Linux fans jump all over them that this is not true, in an attempt to help clarify the persons experience. For better or worse, most of the time these are attempts at helping the frustrated user understand that this in fact isn't Windows, and that no, it doesn't behave like Windows, but there are ways around it. That is all said and good, but for many people, spending a frustrating amount of time searching with Google to find obscure walkthrough's and patches to get certain hardware to work isn't acceptable.
Is this purely the fault of Linux? No, hardware vendors can, and have been, going a long way towards making many of their products work better or easier. If I am missing a driver for Windows for a sound card, a wireless network card, etc, I receive a convenient prompt that asks whether I want to search the Internet for the driver, or perhaps insert a vendor-provided CD to add the driver. This is a fairly simply process (I am ignoring your comment about the drivers being "dodgy at times", as while true, is not a fault in this overall fairly convenient process).
However, it is still important to recognize that these are indeed the frustrated comments of people who are genuienly trying to use, and move to, Linux. I have an HP DL380 G4 sitting here. To install the vendor specific network card drivers, I can simply Update the Driver within Windows GUI with a few simple mouse clicks, or I need to jump through a few hoops to ensure the kernel source is available, apply the source RPM package, compile the code, install the compiled code, then modify my mod conf to ensure it uses this driver rather than the default tg3. Oh, and I should blacklist the tg3 modfule from coming up. HP provides some fairly simply directions to follow, but this certainly isn't as easy as Windows.
I still have a hell of a time getting a number of different wireless cards to work under Linux. There are a number of great hacks, some limited actual vendor support, but still can be problematic. This isn't necessarily the fault of Linux, rather vendors, but in the end, its the frustrated user who ends up abandoning Linux because of this.
Video drivers can occasionally be the same way (though with each release, it does get more mature). I've seen extremely weird quirks on occasion with LCD screens not being picked up correctly, requiring one to manually go in and modify some X settings to set the correct refresh rate and resolution.
So, while its easy to dismiss the user's experience as unfounded, the fact remains that he tried Linux, because it wasn't what he normally expected with Windows, he gave up. Does that mean Linux needs to become more Windows like? Some argument can be made either way in terms of whether you want to attract the masses, or keep the nice OS that we have today. Does that mean that each user needs to take more time to understand Linux instead for what it is? Some argument can also be made either way, in terms of how much time does a user want to spend learning how to tame their operating system, rather than using it as a tool towards better productivity.
No answers here, just musings.
License plate information is already used inappropriately by police officers. This past weekend, 3 Boston Police officers were arrested on a string of charges. One of them includes, "In conversations with his associates, he was proud of his ability to spot easy marks for identity theft: He ran the license plate numbers of expensive cars he encountered in routine traffic stops through police systems to get to the owners' private information. With the help of a worker at a local bank, he picked off those with the best credit ratings." (Article found at http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art icles/2006/07/22/pulidos_club_offered_sex_drugs_pr osecutors_say/).
I can't see this information becoming more easily accessible the least bit comforting or reassuring.
The Google Cache:
Locksmith
Locksmith, a powerful utility for unlocking lost passwords on Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 systems has been incorporated into other Winternals products, and is no longer sold as an add-on module.
The Locksmith utility provides an easy-to-use Wizard. You select the account whose password you wish to change from a drop-down menu, then enter and confirm the new password. When you reboot the system, the new password will take effect.
If you've been locked out of a Windows system and need to immediately replace a lost or forgotten Administrator password, you may purchase the emergency-download version of ERD Commander 2005 here.
Administrator's Pak also includes the Locksmith utility.
I just wrote my a paper for an interpersonal communications class on this very subject and finished it about literally 4 hours ago, so how odd this comes up on Slashdot. To summarize why I disagree with the assessment from my simple minded point of view:
.html
...are superior ... or relationships in cyberspace better?" I really don't see much value in generalizing both and making such vast assumptions about how either works or which is "better" than the other, though I can appreciate the author's efforts at trying to present a well thought article contrasting the two.
In-Person relationships are based on a whole stage process that psychology has spent many, many years developing and refining. It is actually a fairly interesting model, and does seem applicable in many situations. The methods of how we communicate and open up to each other now with Instant Messanger, Slashdot message boards, BBS's, FidoNet, or whatever completely takes a lot of these concepts and throws them out the window. This is of great confusion to some by-the-book psychologists, and therefore, I cannot tell you how many articles I had to parse over in terms of "Whats Better: In-Person Relationships or Cyberspace Relationships." For example, http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/showdown
The author contrasts online versus in-person relationships and cyberspace relationships and which type might be better. He specifically poses the questions, "Is it true that real relationships
The author only hints at one such reason why I feel the generalization isn't necessarily fair - "some people may not have the opportunity to develop good relationships in person." If someone is homebound, due to physical limitations or even mental impairment, a potential relationship in cyberspace may be that individuals only avenue or gaining some form of positive communication with the outside world. This contrasts to them living a depressed life as a hermit, and contemplating such things as suicide. I am absolutely confident that even simple online communication has given people a feeling of participating in the real world and prevented suicides.
Additionally, cyberspace allows us to discuss things that we may not normally feel comfortable discussing in person. I had a friend who was vastly overweight and joined several online chat groups to learn more about gastric bypass, developed many close relationships with people in different online groups, learned much about the procedure and its effects on your personal life, and recently underwent the surgery. I am confident that he would not have simply walked into a support meeting initially searching for information on this, as it just was not in his nature. Near strangers online confided in him very personal information about how this surgery affected their lives, and I don't believe these barriers would have been anywhere near as easily climbed in person.
I was a groomsman in a wedding a couple of years ago for my friend Aaron, and his wife Tiffanie. He was an office manager living in New Hampshire, and she was finishing a communications degree and lived in Montana (she was also a former Miss Teen Montana). He is a great guy, and most girls regard him as pretty decent looking, though he is very shy and had an extremely difficult time working out relationships with women. He met Tiffanie online in a Yahoo chat forum years ago, and they built a relationship from that point. They learned about each other, started to share secrets and personal information, and truly learned about each others values. This then transpired into phone conversations, and eventually they flew back and forth to meet each other, converting into an in-person relationship. They have been married several years now, and I can honestly say that they are the happiest couple I know.
I think a better argument is to recognize online chatting for what it is, an
At a recent auto expo, Ford CEO William Clay Ford Jr. spoke of how fellow company officer Derrick Kuzak was asked to rid his car of all the annoying squeeks, quirks, and failing parts that had made the product highly unreliable over the few years he has owned it. As the story goes, neither Kuzak nor top Ford engineers could fix the car. The article goes on to discuss and compare Ford's newest automotive protection program and solution to such a problem, the Ford PayUsForever program.
If you wouldn't accept this as an adequate solution for an unreliable car, why would you accept this as an adequate solution for something many of us arguably spend more time in front of? Why not try switching car brands to something more reliable if your current vehicle is so problematic?
* Ford was just used as an example and have nothing against the company itself.
The brand itself seems to have lost a significant amount of value and overall relevancy to me. I remember many endless nights playing Duke 3D, and the great world it immersed you in. The character itself was great, as was the game. Everyone was excited to see what they could do next with the franchise, and they sounded really ambitious about what they wanted to do. Then, time passed.. and passed.. and passed.. and games like Deus Ex came out, which again kicked some serious ass (the sequel maybe not quite as much). So, obviously the industry has moved on, and would this game coming out even make as much as a splash as much as it once may have? I mean in all this time, they had plenty of opportunity to license another engine (again, like Deus Ex) and take the original game to the next level. Instead, I honestly have no idea what they have been doing, and in the meantime, many other great games have come along to fill the void. No matter what they come out with at this point, it is never going to live up to the expectations that they have working on this game, theoretically, for 10 years now.
... and in a symbolic jesture, tens of thousands of system administrators threw their blackberry devices into the toilets of the world in disgust that bosses will continue to harass them at all hours of the day, night, weekend, or vacation day to perform even the most remedial of tasks. If you're not happy with the status quo, just go find yourself another job. What? The other job also expects you to instantly respond to every email without excuse as well?
Not that there aren't a dozen other companies waiting to jump in and fill the void at a moments notice with other technology solutions, but sometimes this blackberry craze strikes me as ridiculous in terms of what the expectations are when your employer gives you one. After seeing what this device did to many of my co-workers, I deliberately told my employer for several years that I did not want this device, as it would be a waste of money. I did not work like this on _MY_ time. I still maintained an old cell phone from them for reasonable true emergency purposes, as this requires some extra effort on their part to get ahold of me if a system crash, etc. The cell phone has basic email receipt functionality, so serious system alerts still were sent to me. This seemed like a reasonable medium. Enter a few months ago, and I finally had my job threatened if I did not take a Blackberry to demonstrate a committment to my job equal to my peers (I guess the 50+ hours a week I put in isn't enough anymore). As I suspected all along, the line is slowly being pushed. If an end user sends an email about their crashing of an old, little used dev box on the weekend, my boss expects me to respond right away from the "convenience" of my blackberry while out with the family or at a movie. By respond, this means telling the guy that I will rush home to remote access in and try and reset the dev box so he can keep playing, or drive into the office to physically resolve the issue. Had it just been a cell phone, I know for a fact the guy would have just waited until Monday morning when I was back on company time. If my boss emails me with a question on Saturday afternoon where he is sharing his thoughts about Microsoft's latest strategy, I am expected to respond from the Blackberry within whatever his daily definition of a "reasonable" timeframe to agree with him or give an immediate plan of when this is going to be implemented in our company.
So I know the typical response is if you don't like it, go find another job, which I am actually currently doing (for other reasons). What scares me about this though is that a good portion of my peers don't mind working under these conditions. I've been doing this job for many years, so I certainly understand the expectations of coming in on a weekend or late at night to resolve a crashed router or server issue. But I just see this type of technology blurring the line between when you walk out the door at 5pm/6pm/7pm, and them keeping in constant contact with you. Sure it's good... but for who?
Next up - map tracking software and GPS due to be the next big thing on these types of devices, I seriously start to wonder if my employer is going to see "Hey, he is only 9 miles from the office, so he has no excuse not to come in on Sunday to help put in a few hours."
Thanks for the info. I did enjoy reading about the project (did not know it was out there), but alas, from minoten:
:)
- I have a DVI-D capable DVD/Satellite/Cable Box, will this work with the controller?
- Most likely, no. Almost all DVD/Satellite/Cable Boxes with DVI-D output use an encryption format called HDCP. Since this controller does not support HDCP, it cannot decrypt the video signals, resulting in a blank picture.
- Will you be able to get a HDCP-capable controller soon?
- No. Despite rumors, this is not going to happen. The reason is that the company behind HDCP charges a $15,000 yearly fee to start using HDCP components, and then charges a fee for each HDCP component used. The controller manufacturer has expressed that they do not plan on producing HDCP components, as the overhead cost is incredible.
The hunt continues.
HDTV DRM standards are still really in a state of flux. I have a digital projector I purchased around Christmas of 2004 that has full HDTV 16x9 capabilities, and includes a DVI connection to allow for straight digital content to be fed into it. I recently decided to upgrade my Comcast cable box to HDTV, thinking this would be a great combination. Even better, the Comcast cable box had a DVI connector on the back that would allow for straight digital to digital high def, with no analog conversion in the mix anywhere. I was excited that this would truly be a technical marvel (I'm one of those guys that gets excited over shit like this). I turn on the projector, turn on the cable box, jump over to the Discovery channel, and see one of the most amazingly detailed pictures I have ever seen from a tv - for about 8 seconds. Then a big box comes up blocking any further video, telling me I can't enjoy HDTV from this cable box as my projector does not include an HDCP digital rights management chip. This is something that is required to be built-in from the factory, and not something I can add later. This truly, truly pissed me off. Apparently many earlier HDTV's do not have this, as it simply did not exist at the time. I look everywhere for an intermediary device to provide this HDCP functionality while retaining the benefit of a straight digital connection, but unfortunately nothing realistic exists yet (there is a small $400+ option available in Germany, but that is out of the realm of realistic to me).
So, to make a long story short, I now have my cable box outputting its digital signal over firewire to a small media PC I built for a few hundred bucks (and doubles as my video recorder). I then have the DVI out on this going to my projector, and I am back up and running with true high def support (HBO won't come in over firewire due to other DRM issues, but I digress). I just wanted to carry on with your theme of people doing whatever they can to circumvent this stuff, but I think it finally just allowed me to vent about what a pain in the ass technology this is proving to be.
You learn something new everyday. Thank you. :)
"VMware GSX Server makes high availability affordable and scalable by protecting critical applications and data in up to 64 secure, isolated virtual machines on a single hardware system. It supports standard network load balancing, standby, replication, and clustering of virtual machines." The new ESX v3 on its way out the door supports iSCSI clustering. I am not sure at what level you would want to run your cluster data at. VMWare stores a disk as a file, and I am not aware of a way to have multiple virtual machines accessing that file at the same time and writing to it. However, if, within your virtual machine, you have your cluster pointing to the shared data on an NFS or shared volume somewhere on the network, I don't see that being a problem.