Note that 2011 model MacBook Pros are starting to get discounted (eg. at Mac Mall) pending the announcement of a refresh in, we hope, a couple of weeks.
This was a lot more feasible before Oracle killed Sun. Ohhhhhhh how I miss ZFS. HBA RAID and the pitiful Linux MD/LVM systems are like a trip back in time.
HP printers: yeah, I laugh when I see a recommendation. After suffering through two of them, never again for me. Multiple ink colors in a single module to force replacement before it's all used. Truely dismal OSX software.
HP laptops: who cares? MBP FTW.
Servers shipped with unsigned drivers? Huh? Who with a clue doesn't install their own OS anyway?
Foreign tech support: yep, it sucks. It sucks hard. But so far I'm not convinced that it's worse than others'. The offshored techs, who refer to HP in the third person, not the first, are mostly worthless. They're instructed to demand a phone number so they can call voice, which invariably happens outside of working hours. And when you do connect with them, it's often impossible to tell what they're saying. Clue-wise, hah. I recently had HP respond to a ticket wrt iLO CLI configuration. Their response 1) gave me commands to try, which were wrong. The proper commands were listed in my ticket submission, they just didn't work and 2) were, believe it or not, specific to DELL hardware. The mind boggles.
Compare this to Sun / Oracle tech support, which increasingly seems to be offshored too. A couple of years ago they gave me OBP commands to type on an x64 system, which has ILOM not OBP from years ago.
Red Hat's "support" seems to be offshored at the first tier as well, and their responses are *always* either 1) "We can't fix that because it's 'upstream' and would FORK THE DISTRIBUTION, which seems to be like crossing the streams or 2) You need to hunt down the author and engage them yourself.
Summary: HP support sucks. But so does everyone else's.
Actually the SAS RAID HBA's for the Gen8 series startled me by offering 3-way mirrors, which I'd RFE'd last year. Mind you, SVM and ZFS have done this for years.
Now, if they'd actually get off their asses and release the P822 and 25SFF, we'd be able to actually use it.
Just like any other/. article with the word "could" in the summary, it's speculation, years from any sort of real-world practicality. I usually stop reading when I hit "could".
I have to assume that in the intervening years the embarrassing flaws of the PPI/Stepstone implementations have been fixed, eg. failure to encapsulate identifiers scopes, three incompatible implementions of asciiFiler, etc.
>especially when I can get an equally good OS and applications for free.
If only that were true. Linux in 2012 still lacks sane disk/volume/filesystem management. btrfs has been "RSN! RLY!" for years. Having to fight with 30 year old MS-DOS legacies gets old quick.
Stallman has never fought for my "rights". He has, however, argued in favor of kiddie porn, and appears to love recreational pharmacy as much as he despises showers and combs.
He is also not responsible for Linux.
This is very true in the server arena. When Oracle made buying Sun hardware nearly impossible we started looking around for alternatives. I've been dismayed at the giant steps backward in manageability the competition offers.
Sun hardware (not that I didn't say SPARC) can be set up from bare metal without more than a serial console and a host ethernet link. The service processor can be logged into without trying to have a non-English-speaker on the other side of the planet successfully find and transcribe a hidden physical tag. No legacy keyboard/monitor need be plugged in, and when using Solaris one can install the OS over the serial console - RHEL I haven't gotten to completely work without a video console.
The competitors are pitiful. Most have no serial console functionality out of the box at all. IBM systems require convoluted procedures involving local media. Cisco UCS -- the Cisco people we talked to didn't even understand the issue. HP (at least as of G7, hoping that G8 doesn't do anything unfortunate) has some serial functionality, but it's badly broken. Factory password is printed on a hidden physical tag. In some places one can't cut/paste because characters get dropped. On G7 systems, PXE booting forces the console to 115200 bps for no good reason. One G7 system I have lets one log into the service processor when at 9600 bps, but commands are randomly rejected. At 115200 bps, it curiously won't let me log in on the serial console, but authenticates the HTTP interface just fine. On none of the HP hardware have I been able to connect to the host/OS console when SSH'd in. Oh and I love how the ILO option-rom utility won't let one save changes via a serial console.
Before you tell me to just use the network interface for management, consider that
1) The network interface needs to have IP configured. Counting on remote hands being available and competent to do that, and for legacy compatible keyboard and monitor to be on-site is not an option. DHCP requires knowing the MAC -- printed only on that hidden tag 5000 miles away -- and requires either a local DHCP server (infeasible) or tricky relaying of broadcasts across the WAN.
2) Encoding video and sending it across the world for simple textual operations is stupid and suffers greatly from latency, as in not being able to time keypresses to get into legacy BIOS utilities. Full video console redirection functionality requiring MS-OS on the client end is just the icing on the cake.
3) Network interfaces rely on successful speed/duplex negotiation to work. In 2012 multiple vendors still ship $20,000 servers with a @#$@# 100mbit NIC that can't autonegotiate.
So, yeah, network management of servers is all the rage now, and it sucks. It sucks hard.
Standard keyboard layout? I gave up on that years ago. IBM fscked it all up in the mid 1980's when they swapped the capslock and control keys on the RT's keyboard, and it's been downhill from there.
Instead of "alternate commutes", which are more about public relations than anything else, why not pull their OS out of 1983 and make it more conducive to telecommuting, so that people don't have to travel in the first place?
Yep, I know their shuttle service -- their buses frequently block legitimate traffic. Calling it "generous" is typical for MS -- treat employees like kings, and the rest of the region like shit.
Compostable cafeteria stuff. Feh. If they cared about being "carbon neutral" they'd stop serving meat in their cafeterias and at their functions.
Actually, when did they start? Lack of backups has long plagued home / casual users. For a long time there was a lack of practical backup systems; today it's a matter of people not being aware of them.
But seriously, who on earth considers Facebook to be a backup system? Even if they didn't destructively store photos?
Slashdot Mirror
Note that 2011 model MacBook Pros are starting to get discounted (eg. at Mac Mall) pending the announcement of a refresh in, we hope, a couple of weeks.
This was a lot more feasible before Oracle killed Sun. Ohhhhhhh how I miss ZFS. HBA RAID and the pitiful Linux MD/LVM systems are like a trip back in time.
Plus, vampires are teh_shizzle these days.
Perhaps instead you should get sober.
While this show will probably show up on DVD, there are plenty of others that haven't and probably never will. Special Unit 2, anyone?
to contrast, HP once was the pinnacle of high end test equipment. these days, its called 'agilent'
Oh yeah, Agilent, the people who took huge sums of cash for FireHunter licenses, then decided to discontinue the product and keep the cash.
HP printers: yeah, I laugh when I see a recommendation. After suffering through two of them, never again for me. Multiple ink colors in a single module to force replacement before it's all used. Truely dismal OSX software. HP laptops: who cares? MBP FTW. Servers shipped with unsigned drivers? Huh? Who with a clue doesn't install their own OS anyway? Foreign tech support: yep, it sucks. It sucks hard. But so far I'm not convinced that it's worse than others'. The offshored techs, who refer to HP in the third person, not the first, are mostly worthless. They're instructed to demand a phone number so they can call voice, which invariably happens outside of working hours. And when you do connect with them, it's often impossible to tell what they're saying. Clue-wise, hah. I recently had HP respond to a ticket wrt iLO CLI configuration. Their response 1) gave me commands to try, which were wrong. The proper commands were listed in my ticket submission, they just didn't work and 2) were, believe it or not, specific to DELL hardware. The mind boggles. Compare this to Sun / Oracle tech support, which increasingly seems to be offshored too. A couple of years ago they gave me OBP commands to type on an x64 system, which has ILOM not OBP from years ago. Red Hat's "support" seems to be offshored at the first tier as well, and their responses are *always* either 1) "We can't fix that because it's 'upstream' and would FORK THE DISTRIBUTION, which seems to be like crossing the streams or 2) You need to hunt down the author and engage them yourself. Summary: HP support sucks. But so does everyone else's.
Actually the SAS RAID HBA's for the Gen8 series startled me by offering 3-way mirrors, which I'd RFE'd last year. Mind you, SVM and ZFS have done this for years. Now, if they'd actually get off their asses and release the P822 and 25SFF, we'd be able to actually use it.
Just like any other /. article with the word "could" in the summary, it's speculation, years from any sort of real-world practicality. I usually stop reading when I hit "could".
Not to mention the clouds of black smoke that diesels put out. Blah blah "clean diesel" blah blah. Bull.
With normal diesel cars mostly what we hear is GREENK GREENK GREENK GREENK. I've never understood why diesel engines have to be so loud.
Everything would have to be built to code for that, and permitting would likely be more complex too.
How many people know that ICPak 201 was submitted to the OSF, losing to the bungle that was Motif?
The answer is Brad.
I have to assume that in the intervening years the embarrassing flaws of the PPI/Stepstone implementations have been fixed, eg. failure to encapsulate identifiers scopes, three incompatible implementions of asciiFiler, etc.
>especially when I can get an equally good OS and applications for free. If only that were true. Linux in 2012 still lacks sane disk/volume/filesystem management. btrfs has been "RSN! RLY!" for years. Having to fight with 30 year old MS-DOS legacies gets old quick. Stallman has never fought for my "rights". He has, however, argued in favor of kiddie porn, and appears to love recreational pharmacy as much as he despises showers and combs. He is also not responsible for Linux.
This is very true in the server arena. When Oracle made buying Sun hardware nearly impossible we started looking around for alternatives. I've been dismayed at the giant steps backward in manageability the competition offers. Sun hardware (not that I didn't say SPARC) can be set up from bare metal without more than a serial console and a host ethernet link. The service processor can be logged into without trying to have a non-English-speaker on the other side of the planet successfully find and transcribe a hidden physical tag. No legacy keyboard/monitor need be plugged in, and when using Solaris one can install the OS over the serial console - RHEL I haven't gotten to completely work without a video console. The competitors are pitiful. Most have no serial console functionality out of the box at all. IBM systems require convoluted procedures involving local media. Cisco UCS -- the Cisco people we talked to didn't even understand the issue. HP (at least as of G7, hoping that G8 doesn't do anything unfortunate) has some serial functionality, but it's badly broken. Factory password is printed on a hidden physical tag. In some places one can't cut/paste because characters get dropped. On G7 systems, PXE booting forces the console to 115200 bps for no good reason. One G7 system I have lets one log into the service processor when at 9600 bps, but commands are randomly rejected. At 115200 bps, it curiously won't let me log in on the serial console, but authenticates the HTTP interface just fine. On none of the HP hardware have I been able to connect to the host/OS console when SSH'd in. Oh and I love how the ILO option-rom utility won't let one save changes via a serial console. Before you tell me to just use the network interface for management, consider that 1) The network interface needs to have IP configured. Counting on remote hands being available and competent to do that, and for legacy compatible keyboard and monitor to be on-site is not an option. DHCP requires knowing the MAC -- printed only on that hidden tag 5000 miles away -- and requires either a local DHCP server (infeasible) or tricky relaying of broadcasts across the WAN. 2) Encoding video and sending it across the world for simple textual operations is stupid and suffers greatly from latency, as in not being able to time keypresses to get into legacy BIOS utilities. Full video console redirection functionality requiring MS-OS on the client end is just the icing on the cake. 3) Network interfaces rely on successful speed/duplex negotiation to work. In 2012 multiple vendors still ship $20,000 servers with a @#$@# 100mbit NIC that can't autonegotiate. So, yeah, network management of servers is all the rage now, and it sucks. It sucks hard.
Where exactly would we buy tin foil? The foil that's widely available is aluminium.
Sabbath should take precedence over "Fax Me a Beer" any day of the week.
Agreed. If one needs more oomph than that, the answer is to either get a desktop, or become friends with SSH.
Standard keyboard layout? I gave up on that years ago. IBM fscked it all up in the mid 1980's when they swapped the capslock and control keys on the RT's keyboard, and it's been downhill from there.
What about what MS did to housing costs in King County? Those 68,000 millionaires didn't come from Speakeasy.
Instead of "alternate commutes", which are more about public relations than anything else, why not pull their OS out of 1983 and make it more conducive to telecommuting, so that people don't have to travel in the first place? Yep, I know their shuttle service -- their buses frequently block legitimate traffic. Calling it "generous" is typical for MS -- treat employees like kings, and the rest of the region like shit. Compostable cafeteria stuff. Feh. If they cared about being "carbon neutral" they'd stop serving meat in their cafeterias and at their functions.
Or if you give a shit about the results, you could have a photo house like Adoramapix or MPIX do the printing instead
Actually, when did they start? Lack of backups has long plagued home / casual users. For a long time there was a lack of practical backup systems; today it's a matter of people not being aware of them. But seriously, who on earth considers Facebook to be a backup system? Even if they didn't destructively store photos?