I've had to contact them twice recently, both regarding fairly 'tricky' subjects in my opionion. SAN Multipathing and how that interacts with raw devices, lvm and Oracle. All to do with SAN problems in a RAC environment.
Both people I spoke to were exceptionally helpful.
In fact, the whole thing was great :
- I was put straight through after going through their automated call menu. - Limited amount of 'can I take your details', just my entitlement number required. - I'm in the UK and the agents were european...dutch and german respectively at my guess but both spoke excellent english and, more importantly, had no trouble understanding mine. - I was not palmed off to anyone, the people who answered the calls were the ones who helped me with my issues - and as I said these were fairly non trivial items (but not quite kernel dumps admittedly). They had to go look some things up but I was not put on hold or transferred away. - They went outwith the scope of RH support when they realised the overall problem I was having was in an Oracle environment and gave advice on how they'd seen similar setups operating or how working systems differed config wise. - Weren't afraid to quiz *me* about things I'd told them which either didn't make sense or were a bit vauge. I was often the one 'uhmming and ahhing' about their questions..which is a change from usually being able to wrap support reps up in knots. - Overall polite and very helpful, I felt more like I was chatting to a colleague at the desk next to me rather than a stranger on the phone.
This sounds a bit like a redhat pr stunt, but it's not. Perhaps my problem wasn't as big as the ones you've tried but in both cases I was very happy.
The first time I called was as an absolute last resort (and was basically only because the company ordered me to so they could tick a box - stuff was broken, I had done everything correctly as far as I could tell but the project needed confirmation that I wasn't an idiot) and I was expecting the usual indian call centre, palmed off, phoned back, poor english, 1st line only tech. Pleasantly surprised when I got through to somone who within 2 minutes was talking at my level about the problem and being constructive about solving it.
Each call lasted ~ 1 hour...
So..I don't know, I think its great but have you go an example where it wasn't? I'm happy to call them these days but if there is a situation or scenario where the support *isn't* as good as I've experienced I'd be interested to hear about it. My company was also very happy and I suspect for larger projects they'll be quick to run alot of things past redhat support (even when they're working) just to get the 'yes we support that, you're doing it right' tick in the box.
Yep I'll second Sophos. Although I have some issues with the management client (mostly usability wise, it gets very cluttered fast and becomes almost useless for a quick at a glance 'is there anything wrong') it really is a setup the central server, install the client and then forget about it kind of deal. You can configure periodic status emails so you can see if anything goes squiffy.
We also use Samba, never got it to auto push out clients (so still requiring a manual install client side) but thats an oddity with our broken samba auth rather than anything else. Other than that, no problems.
And I agree, their support is pretty excellent. That's in addition to the wealth of documentation on the web site.
No idea on the pricing sadly, we have a site license sorted out by our headoffice so we can just install without worry.
I'm pretty poor at maths and this is exactly the reason I have difficulty. My school days of maths (I left school about 10 years ago) were fine until things started getting tricky (imaginary numbers and more advanced algebra, although thinking back what you say applies to most things) and the problems continued into the slightly more advanced maths at university required for my CS degree.
I muddled through (distinctly average grades) and the reason was I had no understanding of why I was doing what I was doing. And that's the way I work. When I can derive a process from fundamentals my understanding becomes complete and I find it trivial.
However, I was being parrot taught maths. Do step a) take results and plug into step b) take this number and lookup on chart c) computer result with equation d) and write down answer. I had no concept of why I was doing these steps only that they had to be done as part of the process. And I really struggled with it. In a way CS was as bad on some courses like robotics or vision where advanced calculations were required to machine process images or control / simulate robots in a 3d space. We were told where to plug the numbers in, but as soon as a question or problem deviated even slightly..totally lost.
I was fortunate enough to have a flatmate who was doing a maths degree and was very adept at it, he helped fill in gaps. But even he was quite surprised at the fundamental lack of understanding my lecture material conveyed. Needless to say once he'd helped explain the maths behind the curtains things were much more manageable.
Is this just a problem with the subject of math though? Is it so complicated that explaining the reasons behind the process require a high level of math understanding. Is it true that to gain a basic understanding of maths you have to be helped up at the bottom by glossing over some details?
The downside would be that the patent process would then be subject to the same problems that the scientific peer review process has.
Petty squabbling, grudges, rivalry and general politics getting in the way of what the paper (or patent) is actually about.
I too work around publishing papers and the cries of 'oh no, I have x reviewing my paper. He hates me, I'm screwed' or 'oh this woman is a good friend of mine, she'll let it by without recomending any revisions' are all too common as well as the various journals providing sections during the submission process allowing submitters to stipulate people they would particularly like / dislike to review the paper.
Extend this to a world where real tangible profits can be made and you will have cash money incentives being dished out to the peers to 'persuade' them one way or the other. In fact, full circle back to exactly the state patents are in right now.
My mind boggles when I see this attitude. If you're on a help / discussion channel channel people will...gasp...ask for help or try to enter into a discussion on the topic.
The fact you're imposing a level of technical challenge that you expect from their questions is your problem, not theirs. You're always going to see a higher percentage of simpler problems than the harder ones that actually challenge you, so deal with it...keep quiet...or leave the channel. Don't moan at people for going there to do what the # is for.
Whilst I agree slightly with what you say, I think you're mostly evangilising opensource. After all how many people coding userland apps for linux really check all the kernel source to make sure nothing funky is going to happen should, for example, someone plug in a USB memory stick at the precise moment their application redraws the screen?
However...you do raise a good point in that, if someone is coding a program and uses a standard library function call (sake of argument, lets say the windows GUI API) and the flaw in their program is revealed to be a quirk within this library...who would be held liable? the company who in good faith used the predefined function (should they have checked the function? or re written it themselves? would this make re usable code a thing of the past?) or the people who wrote the library?
...this is much much better than the old website. The important details are much clearer (i.e where to get it, what the current releases are) and the whole thing generally feels very fresh and modern.
Hopefully they will give the handbook a bit of a spring clean next...whilst informative it sometimes lacks in either explaining concepts sufficiently or just assumes a lot of prior knowledge in certain areas.
Unfortunately, one of the problems with google and the like is that you have to know what it is you want the answer to when you provide search terms.
If you're so new to unix that you're still in the middle of the paradigm shift then your problem is likely to be that you really have no idea at all what to plugin to google to get the answer.
So it was a fair and true statement. I'm often baffled by the number of people who post in 'help' newsgroups and idle in 'help' irc channels...only to never actually provide any help and complain when people ask (for them easy) questions. Why are you in a support group / channel if you're not willing to provide help, no matter what level, to others? Very confusing.
The mighty google will only answer the questions you ask...
I've had technical and non technical IT managers before and each have their own problems and benefits.
The technical ones often insisted on having too much of a hands on approach in my particular area of employment which is fine when things are going nicely but if you disagree with what how they think you should be doing your job it can cause problems (as they're the boss and ergo you'll end up doing it their way).
It also means you run the danger of them thinking they're all knowing about computers and chiming in about anything regardless of if its correct or not. And again...they're the boss so suck it up.
However, you can often defer problems off onto them and you can avoid alot of accountability for things going wrong.
On the flip, the non technical managers I've had wouldn't know a ps2 port from a usb port. However they managed. They knew the end of result of what they wanted to achieve and employed people in the areas required to do it. And more or less left us to it. Status reports were required of course and they'd make sure things were generally going in a direction they wanted but didn't care about how we got there. i.e 'I need our web page to do x y z go do it' and wouldn't be interested in getting involved in a discussion about whether we should do it in php or perl...that was our responsibility.
Bonuses: we had complete responsibility for our own jobs. We decided how to do it and the buck stopped with us. For the most part we were left completely alone to do it with no interfering. We didn't see any behind the scenes nonsense or any political company sillyness because the manager took care of that at his level before it got down to us.
Downsides: If we messed up, we messed up big and there was no one else to try and pass the buck onto. If there was something that came up that was beyond the teams scope of knowledge there was no 'higher up' person to talk to about it, we had to figure it out or come up with an alternative.
All in all I'd far rather work for an untechnical manager (as long as they understand they're not technical and are happy to purely manage on a goal orientated basis) as it allows me to actually do my job. With a technical manager I find mysel being second guessed, overruled and generally not in control of my area of work. Sometimes this was for the better (when I had got something wrong) but usually for the worst.
Curiously our IT department also falls under the supervision of the finance and HR head.
I'm not sure why this seems to be a pattern, it seems an odd trend.
It isn't so bad here, we're reasonably lucky to have one who concedes no understanding of IT and is more than willing to act on sensible recomendations but I can see how it could easily be as bad.
Other than that, yeah treated like shit. Refurbished building....we were told to buy our own furniture out of our recurrent costs (desks for our offices or badly needed DLT tapes...decisions, decisions) because they'd 'overran refurbishment' budget by kitting out other offices properly. We were also dumped (again) in the basement so not much light and down with all the heating...no air con in my office either but I do have heating pipes. ~30c on a good day in summer.
There are lots of teeny little gripes like that which sound petty but all add up to get on your nerves enough to seriously impinge on the way you work.
After the main stream press pounced on firefox a while back and extoled its virtues we had lots of calls and emails from people asking for / demanding firefox on their machines.
Now we're (relatively) in the new ages wrt browsers, and we put the mozilla suite on every machine as standard for people to use for browsing and as their primary email client. But its heavily reconfigured to lock certain preferences and store profiles / other data in certain places on the network that won't mess with peoples quota.
So we explain to people that we already use a 'derivative' of firefox in mozilla (not entirely accurate but close enough without babbling) and that installing firefox would lose their email client...so we'd have to do thunderbird too. Which means mainting two apps instead of one, not to mention the memory footprint / integration between firefox and thunderbird is larger / no quite as good as the mozilla suite. Oh...and we have it all set up and using the default firefox configs will break things for their user account and anyone else who uses the PC after them.
I think that's pretty reasonable? but we still get people who argue with us or insist we're wrong (ok we don't know everything but we're the IT department for gods sake, it's our job to tell *you* whats best to use or at least entire a reasoned dialogue about it..and I think we're doing ok with pushing mozilla) and then install it themselves (don't ask..another pet quibble). Then come running to us when their user profile breaks / goes over quota / lose bookmarks / settings etc. Then the next person to use the machine gets the firefox stuff copied into their profile which puts them over quota etc etc etc.
Bit of a tangent rant, but I agree with you totally. We don't deny / ask people inform us about programs they want to install because we're miserable bastards who want to make their work hard...it's because theres so much more happening than there is on their home pc / network that oft times what they would do at home won't play here.
It's tough in this day and age of 'everyone is a sys admin' to get people to see this and is one of the main frustrations of my job.
PHP programming and linux admin (or any kindof admin) are not computer science disciplines.
The things they want (data structures etc) are. A more abstract layer that can be practically applied in any programming language.
Computer science is, funnily enough, more about the science.
You seem surprised that computer science is theory based...I'm afraid (at least from my own degree and others in surrounding universities) it largely is. The programming parts are merely to allow a practical presentation of the theory learned.
They generally expect you to pick up languages by yourself (you may get a quick introduction your first semester but you'll probably be handed a book and told to go read) and whilst you will probably be taught a smattering of unix, it won't be from a sysadmin point of view it will be from an IPC / pipes / OS theory / thread handling slant.
I'm not from the USA so I can't comment on community college courses but I would suggest you double check the Computer Science courses you're looking at to ensure it is actually what you want to do...better now than getting there and realising it's not what you thought.
going off topic but why so? I'm looking to perhaps rent a server from them.
Do you know of problems or people offering comparable budget server schemes?
Kev
...it mentions that he has an athletic frame and holds awards for swimming etc etc. I think thats what they mean, that despite being a gaming nerd he's not following the steretype completely by being a fat sits on his ass all day gaming nerd.
Further reference for you, I've been through a CS degree and right now couldn't do the linked list insertion. Which is fairly pathetic:)
I've done it before of course, and it would take me 10 minutes to come up to speed on the data structure then slightly longer to bodge it together in language of your choice.
However being a net admin I rarely have to cobble together any more important than some single run through perl scripts and occasionally debug someone elses code, I rarely have to code anything substantial from scratch. So I'm a bit out of practice!
I think whats more important here is the fact you're 15 and have taught yourself linked lists. You may not be the worlds best programmer right now (although that will certainly come with time and experience by the sounds of it) but you have the right initiative to pick something up by yourself and learn it. I don't know how long it took you to figure it out, but I get the impression probably not long. I'd far rather work with or for someone who was quick at picking up technologies and displayed some kind of iniative than someone who was rigidly stuck in one line of thinking.
Stick at it, you're on the right track and in a few years time with some job experience under your belt you'll pick up a load of stuff...even if you don't realise it!
This is possible (we do it here at my place with around 250 2k machines).
With a bit of diddling with the registry.dat and user and prefs.js files you can manually force Mozilla (and by proxy I imagine firefox or thunderbird) to look anywhere for user preferences (including cache).
In our case we point it at the users home directory (mounted under windows as h:\) so all their mozilla stuff is contained in h:\mozilla.
A couple of domain login scripts / policy edits to make sure certain files are never changed / are copied into new users directorys automagically and you're off.
I have to give credit to my work mate here who forced me to look into it with him as it turned out to be fairly easy (maybe ~1 day to implement then another week or so of trying to make it break) but the results have been flawless.
Best bit? if their home drive isn't mounted or there are some other random problems with their mozilla profile we've locked the 'manage profiles' applet down so they can't make their own broken profile or copy their existing one to god knows where.
Spend a little time on google and it will be worth your while.
Of course you may already know this and purely be making the point that this should be possible out the box as it were, rather thean hex editing mozilla binary files...which I agree with. But just in case you don't I thought I should speak up!
Ok not quite millions of books but I carry about 100 around on a memory stick with me to read on my PDA.
LCD screen, check. Images, check. take notes, check. Long battery life, check (well its about 15 hours) reasonable price, check (its the least expensive bit of electronic equipment I carry about with me. You could pick a pda up for e-book reading for $100-$150)
You should check it out, I reccomend MobiPocket or the Microsoft Reader depending on the format. Someone introduced me to it a few months ago, took a bit of getting used to but now I couldn't go back. Plus when you're reading at work people think you're busy because you're staring intently at a PDA!
"This is true, but it's not really that hard to learn something new. If an employee can't learn a new system, then how is that employee really helping out the company?"
The problem is that these people have their own jobs to do...most people want to come in and do their job then leave and live their life until the next day. Not mess around with stuff that really makes no odds to them or possibly even disorientates them.
Weigh up the amount of time someone spends getting used to the system instead of doing their work in terms of $ productivity and you begin to see where an intial outlay for the windows license doesn't seem so bad.
"The printing company where I used to work everyone worked on Linotype/Hell Combi machines..."
I'm not sure this is a good analogy? This is where there was (I think?) effectively a 'must switch' situation as opposed to a voluntary switch of an IT department from Windows to IT. In all honesty I can't see any benefits of moving from windows to linux other than the initial cost benefit (but I await the trampling hordes to point them out) from a corporate point of view.
In summary I'm not sure the average punter would really care either way whats on their desktop as long as they can get their work done, but getting their work done is the key thing. If they have to spend a week or two adjusting their work habits or re learning how to do things they've been doing for years they will resist.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had to contact them twice recently, both regarding fairly 'tricky' subjects in my opionion. SAN Multipathing and how that interacts with raw devices, lvm and Oracle. All to do with SAN problems in a RAC environment.
Both people I spoke to were exceptionally helpful.
In fact, the whole thing was great :
- I was put straight through after going through their automated call menu.
- Limited amount of 'can I take your details', just my entitlement number required.
- I'm in the UK and the agents were european...dutch and german respectively at my guess but both spoke excellent english and, more importantly, had no trouble understanding mine.
- I was not palmed off to anyone, the people who answered the calls were the ones who helped me with my issues - and as I said these were fairly non trivial items (but not quite kernel dumps admittedly). They had to go look some things up but I was not put on hold or transferred away.
- They went outwith the scope of RH support when they realised the overall problem I was having was in an Oracle environment and gave advice on how they'd seen similar setups operating or how working systems differed config wise.
- Weren't afraid to quiz *me* about things I'd told them which either didn't make sense or were a bit vauge. I was often the one 'uhmming and ahhing' about their questions..which is a change from usually being able to wrap support reps up in knots.
- Overall polite and very helpful, I felt more like I was chatting to a colleague at the desk next to me rather than a stranger on the phone.
This sounds a bit like a redhat pr stunt, but it's not. Perhaps my problem wasn't as big as the ones you've tried but in both cases I was very happy.
The first time I called was as an absolute last resort (and was basically only because the company ordered me to so they could tick a box - stuff was broken, I had done everything correctly as far as I could tell but the project needed confirmation that I wasn't an idiot) and I was expecting the usual indian call centre, palmed off, phoned back, poor english, 1st line only tech. Pleasantly surprised when I got through to somone who within 2 minutes was talking at my level about the problem and being constructive about solving it.
Each call lasted ~ 1 hour...
So..I don't know, I think its great but have you go an example where it wasn't? I'm happy to call them these days but if there is a situation or scenario where the support *isn't* as good as I've experienced I'd be interested to hear about it. My company was also very happy and I suspect for larger projects they'll be quick to run alot of things past redhat support (even when they're working) just to get the 'yes we support that, you're doing it right' tick in the box.
Kev
Yep I'll second Sophos. Although I have some issues with the management client (mostly usability wise, it gets very cluttered fast and becomes almost useless for a quick at a glance 'is there anything wrong') it really is a setup the central server, install the client and then forget about it kind of deal. You can configure periodic status emails so you can see if anything goes squiffy.
We also use Samba, never got it to auto push out clients (so still requiring a manual install client side) but thats an oddity with our broken samba auth rather than anything else. Other than that, no problems.
And I agree, their support is pretty excellent. That's in addition to the wealth of documentation on the web site.
No idea on the pricing sadly, we have a site license sorted out by our headoffice so we can just install without worry.
Kev
I can't agree with this more.
I'm pretty poor at maths and this is exactly the reason I have difficulty. My school days of maths (I left school about 10 years ago) were fine until things started getting tricky (imaginary numbers and more advanced algebra, although thinking back what you say applies to most things) and the problems continued into the slightly more advanced maths at university required for my CS degree.
I muddled through (distinctly average grades) and the reason was I had no understanding of why I was doing what I was doing. And that's the way I work. When I can derive a process from fundamentals my understanding becomes complete and I find it trivial.
However, I was being parrot taught maths. Do step a) take results and plug into step b) take this number and lookup on chart c) computer result with equation d) and write down answer. I had no concept of why I was doing these steps only that they had to be done as part of the process. And I really struggled with it. In a way CS was as bad on some courses like robotics or vision where advanced calculations were required to machine process images or control / simulate robots in a 3d space. We were told where to plug the numbers in, but as soon as a question or problem deviated even slightly..totally lost.
I was fortunate enough to have a flatmate who was doing a maths degree and was very adept at it, he helped fill in gaps. But even he was quite surprised at the fundamental lack of understanding my lecture material conveyed. Needless to say once he'd helped explain the maths behind the curtains things were much more manageable.
Is this just a problem with the subject of math though? Is it so complicated that explaining the reasons behind the process require a high level of math understanding. Is it true that to gain a basic understanding of maths you have to be helped up at the bottom by glossing over some details?
Kev
go back to the dungeon and wallop all the skeletons? :)
Job done?
Kev
The downside would be that the patent process would then be subject to the same problems that the scientific peer review process has.
:P
Petty squabbling, grudges, rivalry and general politics getting in the way of what the paper (or patent) is actually about.
I too work around publishing papers and the cries of 'oh no, I have x reviewing my paper. He hates me, I'm screwed' or 'oh this woman is a good friend of mine, she'll let it by without recomending any revisions' are all too common as well as the various journals providing sections during the submission process allowing submitters to stipulate people they would particularly like / dislike to review the paper.
Extend this to a world where real tangible profits can be made and you will have cash money incentives being dished out to the peers to 'persuade' them one way or the other. In fact, full circle back to exactly the state patents are in right now.
Call my cynical
So don't idle on a help channel?
My mind boggles when I see this attitude. If you're on a help / discussion channel channel people will...gasp...ask for help or try to enter into a discussion on the topic.
The fact you're imposing a level of technical challenge that you expect from their questions is your problem, not theirs. You're always going to see a higher percentage of simpler problems than the harder ones that actually challenge you, so deal with it...keep quiet...or leave the channel. Don't moan at people for going there to do what the # is for.
Kev
Whilst I agree slightly with what you say, I think you're mostly evangilising opensource. After all how many people coding userland apps for linux really check all the kernel source to make sure nothing funky is going to happen should, for example, someone plug in a USB memory stick at the precise moment their application redraws the screen?
However...you do raise a good point in that, if someone is coding a program and uses a standard library function call (sake of argument, lets say the windows GUI API) and the flaw in their program is revealed to be a quirk within this library...who would be held liable? the company who in good faith used the predefined function (should they have checked the function? or re written it themselves? would this make re usable code a thing of the past?) or the people who wrote the library?
Kev
...this is much much better than the old website. The important details are much clearer (i.e where to get it, what the current releases are) and the whole thing generally feels very fresh and modern.
Hopefully they will give the handbook a bit of a spring clean next...whilst informative it sometimes lacks in either explaining concepts sufficiently or just assumes a lot of prior knowledge in certain areas.
Kev
Unfortunately, one of the problems with google and the like is that you have to know what it is you want the answer to when you provide search terms.
If you're so new to unix that you're still in the middle of the paradigm shift then your problem is likely to be that you really have no idea at all what to plugin to google to get the answer.
So it was a fair and true statement. I'm often baffled by the number of people who post in 'help' newsgroups and idle in 'help' irc channels...only to never actually provide any help and complain when people ask (for them easy) questions. Why are you in a support group / channel if you're not willing to provide help, no matter what level, to others? Very confusing.
The mighty google will only answer the questions you ask...
Kev
I've had technical and non technical IT managers before and each have their own problems and benefits.
The technical ones often insisted on having too much of a hands on approach in my particular area of employment which is fine when things are going nicely but if you disagree with what how they think you should be doing your job it can cause problems (as they're the boss and ergo you'll end up doing it their way).
It also means you run the danger of them thinking they're all knowing about computers and chiming in about anything regardless of if its correct or not. And again...they're the boss so suck it up.
However, you can often defer problems off onto them and you can avoid alot of accountability for things going wrong.
On the flip, the non technical managers I've had wouldn't know a ps2 port from a usb port. However they managed. They knew the end of result of what they wanted to achieve and employed people in the areas required to do it. And more or less left us to it. Status reports were required of course and they'd make sure things were generally going in a direction they wanted but didn't care about how we got there. i.e 'I need our web page to do x y z go do it' and wouldn't be interested in getting involved in a discussion about whether we should do it in php or perl...that was our responsibility.
Bonuses: we had complete responsibility for our own jobs. We decided how to do it and the buck stopped with us. For the most part we were left completely alone to do it with no interfering. We didn't see any behind the scenes nonsense or any political company sillyness because the manager took care of that at his level before it got down to us.
Downsides: If we messed up, we messed up big and there was no one else to try and pass the buck onto. If there was something that came up that was beyond the teams scope of knowledge there was no 'higher up' person to talk to about it, we had to figure it out or come up with an alternative.
All in all I'd far rather work for an untechnical manager (as long as they understand they're not technical and are happy to purely manage on a goal orientated basis) as it allows me to actually do my job. With a technical manager I find mysel being second guessed, overruled and generally not in control of my area of work. Sometimes this was for the better (when I had got something wrong) but usually for the worst.
In summary...careful what you wish for!
Kev
Curiously our IT department also falls under the supervision of the finance and HR head.
:P
I'm not sure why this seems to be a pattern, it seems an odd trend.
It isn't so bad here, we're reasonably lucky to have one who concedes no understanding of IT and is more than willing to act on sensible recomendations but I can see how it could easily be as bad.
Other than that, yeah treated like shit. Refurbished building....we were told to buy our own furniture out of our recurrent costs (desks for our offices or badly needed DLT tapes...decisions, decisions) because they'd 'overran refurbishment' budget by kitting out other offices properly. We were also dumped (again) in the basement so not much light and down with all the heating...no air con in my office either but I do have heating pipes. ~30c on a good day in summer.
There are lots of teeny little gripes like that which sound petty but all add up to get on your nerves enough to seriously impinge on the way you work.
ho humm rant over
In summary, completely agree.
We get this alot..and specifically with firefox.
After the main stream press pounced on firefox a while back and extoled its virtues we had lots of calls and emails from people asking for / demanding firefox on their machines.
Now we're (relatively) in the new ages wrt browsers, and we put the mozilla suite on every machine as standard for people to use for browsing and as their primary email client. But its heavily reconfigured to lock certain preferences and store profiles / other data in certain places on the network that won't mess with peoples quota.
So we explain to people that we already use a 'derivative' of firefox in mozilla (not entirely accurate but close enough without babbling) and that installing firefox would lose their email client...so we'd have to do thunderbird too. Which means mainting two apps instead of one, not to mention the memory footprint / integration between firefox and thunderbird is larger / no quite as good as the mozilla suite. Oh...and we have it all set up and using the default firefox configs will break things for their user account and anyone else who uses the PC after them.
I think that's pretty reasonable? but we still get people who argue with us or insist we're wrong (ok we don't know everything but we're the IT department for gods sake, it's our job to tell *you* whats best to use or at least entire a reasoned dialogue about it..and I think we're doing ok with pushing mozilla) and then install it themselves (don't ask..another pet quibble). Then come running to us when their user profile breaks / goes over quota / lose bookmarks / settings etc. Then the next person to use the machine gets the firefox stuff copied into their profile which puts them over quota etc etc etc.
Bit of a tangent rant, but I agree with you totally. We don't deny / ask people inform us about programs they want to install because we're miserable bastards who want to make their work hard...it's because theres so much more happening than there is on their home pc / network that oft times what they would do at home won't play here.
It's tough in this day and age of 'everyone is a sys admin' to get people to see this and is one of the main frustrations of my job.
Kev
Whilst I agree the dressing up etc thing is excessive...in this day and age for kids to get excited about a book, of all things, has to be encouraged?
the latest or halo 345.3 then yeah, don't let them buy into the hype. But books (even harry potter) are surely a good thing to encourage.
Kev
PHP programming and linux admin (or any kindof admin) are not computer science disciplines.
The things they want (data structures etc) are. A more abstract layer that can be practically applied in any programming language.
Computer science is, funnily enough, more about the science.
You seem surprised that computer science is theory based...I'm afraid (at least from my own degree and others in surrounding universities) it largely is. The programming parts are merely to allow a practical presentation of the theory learned.
They generally expect you to pick up languages by yourself (you may get a quick introduction your first semester but you'll probably be handed a book and told to go read) and whilst you will probably be taught a smattering of unix, it won't be from a sysadmin point of view it will be from an IPC / pipes / OS theory / thread handling slant.
I'm not from the USA so I can't comment on community college courses but I would suggest you double check the Computer Science courses you're looking at to ensure it is actually what you want to do...better now than getting there and realising it's not what you thought.
Kev
going off topic but why so? I'm looking to perhaps rent a server from them. Do you know of problems or people offering comparable budget server schemes? Kev
reading the article...;)
...it mentions that he has an athletic frame and holds awards for swimming etc etc. I think thats what they mean, that despite being a gaming nerd he's not following the steretype completely by being a fat sits on his ass all day gaming nerd.
Rather than Halo being exercise..!
Kev
So...did they put their ad in the New York Times? Any links to scans / designs for it?
Kev
Further reference for you, I've been through a CS degree and right now couldn't do the linked list insertion. Which is fairly pathetic :)
I've done it before of course, and it would take me 10 minutes to come up to speed on the data structure then slightly longer to bodge it together in language of your choice.
However being a net admin I rarely have to cobble together any more important than some single run through perl scripts and occasionally debug someone elses code, I rarely have to code anything substantial from scratch. So I'm a bit out of practice!
I think whats more important here is the fact you're 15 and have taught yourself linked lists. You may not be the worlds best programmer right now (although that will certainly come with time and experience by the sounds of it) but you have the right initiative to pick something up by yourself and learn it. I don't know how long it took you to figure it out, but I get the impression probably not long. I'd far rather work with or for someone who was quick at picking up technologies and displayed some kind of iniative than someone who was rigidly stuck in one line of thinking.
Stick at it, you're on the right track and in a few years time with some job experience under your belt you'll pick up a load of stuff...even if you don't realise it!
Kev
This is possible (we do it here at my place with around 250 2k machines).
With a bit of diddling with the registry.dat and user and prefs.js files you can manually force Mozilla (and by proxy I imagine firefox or thunderbird) to look anywhere for user preferences (including cache).
In our case we point it at the users home directory (mounted under windows as h:\) so all their mozilla stuff is contained in h:\mozilla.
A couple of domain login scripts / policy edits to make sure certain files are never changed / are copied into new users directorys automagically and you're off.
I have to give credit to my work mate here who forced me to look into it with him as it turned out to be fairly easy (maybe ~1 day to implement then another week or so of trying to make it break) but the results have been flawless.
Best bit? if their home drive isn't mounted or there are some other random problems with their mozilla profile we've locked the 'manage profiles' applet down so they can't make their own broken profile or copy their existing one to god knows where.
Spend a little time on google and it will be worth your while.
Of course you may already know this and purely be making the point that this should be possible out the box as it were, rather thean hex editing mozilla binary files...which I agree with. But just in case you don't I thought I should speak up!
Kev
aka a PDA? :)
Ok not quite millions of books but I carry about 100 around on a memory stick with me to read on my PDA.
LCD screen, check.
Images, check.
take notes, check.
Long battery life, check (well its about 15 hours)
reasonable price, check (its the least expensive bit of electronic equipment I carry about with me. You could pick a pda up for e-book reading for $100-$150)
You should check it out, I reccomend MobiPocket or the Microsoft Reader depending on the format. Someone introduced me to it a few months ago, took a bit of getting used to but now I couldn't go back. Plus when you're reading at work people think you're busy because you're staring intently at a PDA!
Kev
"a voluntary switch of an IT department from Windows to IT."
I of course mean Windows to Linux...damn lunchtime beers. Kev
"This is true, but it's not really that hard to learn something new. If an employee can't learn a new system, then how is that employee really helping out the company?"
The problem is that these people have their own jobs to do...most people want to come in and do their job then leave and live their life until the next day. Not mess around with stuff that really makes no odds to them or possibly even disorientates them.
Weigh up the amount of time someone spends getting used to the system instead of doing their work in terms of $ productivity and you begin to see where an intial outlay for the windows license doesn't seem so bad.
"The printing company where I used to work everyone worked on Linotype/Hell Combi machines..."
I'm not sure this is a good analogy? This is where there was (I think?) effectively a 'must switch' situation as opposed to a voluntary switch of an IT department from Windows to IT. In all honesty I can't see any benefits of moving from windows to linux other than the initial cost benefit (but I await the trampling hordes to point them out) from a corporate point of view.
In summary I'm not sure the average punter would really care either way whats on their desktop as long as they can get their work done, but getting their work done is the key thing. If they have to spend a week or two adjusting their work habits or re learning how to do things they've been doing for years they will resist.
Kev
Could this be an extension of the google API set ?
http://www.google.com/apis/
Co-inciding with a launch of gmail, this could lead to a slew of advanced 3rd party gmail apps like 'pop goes the gmail'