Again, this stuff is for the clueless. These aren't people who are going to try communicating with a developer about a problem, because they don't have the skills, and probably don't even care. Mandrake is trying to bring Linux to the masses- the nerds are already there.
"Not even sshd?" "How about programs that make the assumption that either port25 or/sbin/sendmail will be there for crash reporting?"
This is for desktop-only Linux newbies. They don't need ssh, and when programs crash, you can be pretty sure that they'll notice, and not need a report.
"This may change once my copy of Panther shows up, but my printer and other hardware continue to work for now."
Of course they will. That's because Mac OS is NOT a 64-bit OS, and aside from the ability to address more than four gigabytes of RAM, Apple users do not actually get any benefit from the G5 being a 64-bit CPU.
Opteron users, however, can fire up a 64-bit Linux distro and start zipping right along, enjoying the benefits of a 64-bit CPU.
"Though the author warns of the dangers of weak passwords, I would have liked to see a more thorough explanation of how to choose passwords."
Am I the only person sick of security books having yet another diatribe about password quality? How about a two page summary of recommended settings and the appropriate configuration files/menus? Security theory is nice, but dammit, if I had time to worry about the theories, I'd just read "Practical UNIX and Internet Security" and "Secrets and Lies," before writing a custom script to lock all of my systems down right after I finish with those kickstart/jumpstart scripts.
Just give me a chapter-by-chapter list of exactly what should be locked down, how to do it, and a VERY CONCISE explanation of why?
"Besides, in this day and age what do the record companies do to deserve those profits?"
The record companies don't have to deserve anything, you communist twit. They invest time, money, and manpower, and have the right to charge anything they want for their products. Nobody forces consumers to buy any of it.
It is obvious that I did a very bad job of explaining myself.
It is not that I dislike the indy music featured by emusic, in fact, those albums are why I bought in. But emusic's collection is VERY eclectic, and that means that I have to do a lot of searching and downloading to find music that I like. With unlimited downloads (A service that I would glady pay upwards of $100/month for.) I can download multiple full albums in the morning, listen all day, and keep what I like. As soon as the 40-song limit hits, it means that I have to stop and listen to those 30-second samples for every track to see what I like. At that point emusic is too much bother, as opposed to iTunes and Napster 2.0, which have high-end catalogs to make up for the the whole individual selection issue.
The catch is, most people WILL just go back to buying in a store. Human beings are very complacent animals, especially when rights are involved. Just look at the time it took to deal with slavery, the Patriot Act, or all of the business Americans did with Nazi Germany before Pearl Habor. There may be a few people out there who refuse to buy music because of the RIAA lawsuits, but for the most part music consumers are capricious youths who aren't old enough to have grounded principles.
Software installation is SO twentieth century. I use Turbo Tax Online- no more installation issues, no more worries about keeping everything installed and updated whenever I have to rebuild a machine from scratch, and somebody else handles my backups with a system that's probably a lot more reliable than my habit of burning important stuff to a CD and stuffing it in a drawer. On top of that, I don't have OS issues, because the web interface worked just fine across Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. Good luck getting prepacked software like that.
Sure some people might bitch about "privacy" concerns, but how private are my taxes? If I do an online transfer it goes through a third party, usually the software manufacturer; if I do it through the mail there are plenty of chances to steal it along the way, and god only knows how many dishonest people may be working in the IRS mailroom.
I was specifically NOT writing about great workers with technical jobs. The really special, competent techies should be operating under a different ruleset, because they have very different needs, demands and job funtions. There's a big difference between letting the sysadmins who work 50-hour weeks and are on call have unrestricted access and giving the same access to the computer-illiterates in easy jobs, who just work 40-hours and go home, and never have to worry about getting phone calls about the email servers while in line for Space Mountain.
Remember, at most companies, the IT departments are just departments, and everyone else tends to be a "luser."
In case you haven't noticed the RIAA is NOT suing customers. The targets of RIAA lawsuits are people who trying to get music WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT. The whole point of the lawsuits is that no matter how many people the RIAA pisses off, scaring people away from filesharing networks means a hell of a lot more record sales in the long run. No matter how many people try to justify Napster and its kin as great promotional vehicles, they aren't- they just allow people to search for and downloading music they already want, thus cutting out profits for the music companies.
(-1, Redundant) Isn't it funny how huge corporations, governments, and software firms (Like Adobe) will dump tons of money into Microsoft's products, kiss Microsoft's ass, partner with Microsoft, and never get attention to all of the horrible flaws that need fixing? Maybe eventually it will dawn on them that the reason competing products have a small market-share is because the same people who complain about their Microsoft woes refuse to support try the competition for once?
iTunes gives me better options. I have used emusic a lot, and I can honestly say that most of what they carry is music by the minor indie labels selling albums that even Tower Records doesn't carry. Most of what I find on emusic is bad classical recordings, novelty DJ recording that get boring after a few listens, and noisy old jazz recordings from companies that got rights to shitty old recordings after the artist died. At least with iTunes I can pick *good* music.
Along with the selection, at least iTunes has a decent sales model. The 40 albums per month number emusic has established is pretty arbitrary. I would stick around if emusic gave me an option to pay per-track at $.25, or even at a higher price if emusic established a better selection. The new plan is just silly.
To cancel your emusic subscription, click here. I already canceled mine. One a related note, as of today the emusic downloader is unable to retrieve more files after ten consecutive downloads, and must be restarted to work.
I not sure whether or not users will be committed to pay until the end of the account's three-month or one-year term, however. I recommend that anyone charged beyond October dispute the charges.
I can see how this would hold true for people who need and benefit from multiple monitors, but I think that it is pretty safe to assume that most people don't actually need the monitors for a productivity boost. Most people using computers at the office aren't in technical jobs where they have the skills or need to do much more than a few simple tasks with the computer.
It seems to me that a few far better ways to increase productivity and reduce desktop clutter are: - Block all chat, IM, and streaming media, and filesharing protocols at the firewall. - Use a web proxy and to block all non-streaming media downloads, i.e. movie trailers in QuickTime. - Don't give employees the right to install ANY software beyond the corporate baseline necessary for work.
1 - OpenOffice: A perennial favorite of mine, especially since I can use it to create PDF documents. 2 - Microsoft Office XP - The most stable version of Office out there. I really only use it for resumes and college papers that must be sent in soft copy to people who demand MS Office formats. because OpenOffice inevitable mangles something in a way that only an MS Office user will see. 2 - Mozilla - For browsing and email, it doesn't get much better. 3 - OpenSSH - Must have on all *nix boxes. 4 - Putty - I used it for SSH access when I'm on Windows. 5 - CDex - Free CD ripping software that works better than most commercial stuff. 6 - GIMP - Maybe it can't do everything that Photoshop does, but GIMP is free, and still one of the best image manipulation tools around. 7 - Acrobat Reader - You will need to read PDFs at some point, so just install it ahead of time. 8 - Quake III - Duh. 9 - Trillian - IRC and AIM. Must have. 10 - GAIM - Linux IM! Must have.
Even if it does happen, will it matter? This really isn't relevant in the server world, where cheap x86 systems provide the benefit of separation-of-function, which will usually outweigh any savings one gets from piling apps onto one big machine. Putting all of those OS and application eggs into one basket seems like a pretty bad idea to me-just as it did to all of the old mainframe companies that switched to running numerous small systems.
As yet another toy for the desktop world it could be neat, as an easier option than VMWare and such, but how much of a market does something like that really have?
"Seems to me that establishing a long-term relationship with fewer as opposed to screwing people over in volume would make good business sense to garner repeat business."
That makes good business sense for a recruiting firm. Unfortunately, headhunters aren't looking to stay in that job for a long time. They either want to hop from job to job increasing their salaries and collecting bonuses along the way and cash out early (Much like the people they are trying to place.), or they're occupational transients-people who are smart and capable enough to handle a white-collar job, but not ready to settle into a career.
And don't forget that jobhunters know that headhunters are scum, and probably hate them just as much as you do. Smart techies often ignore headhunters altogether, instead just focusing on personal networking and direct applications to bigger companies with recruiting departments.
Do yourself-and the industry-a favor. Don't feed those bastards, and maybe they'll all die off.
The more money these guys have, the better off the rest of us are; because these guys are also the world's biggest philanthropists.
BillG alone has given away $24 billion just through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. That doesn't count the billions he's given away on the side. Allen just dropped $500 million to start a foundation for human brain research. Pretty sweet.
These guys are also some of the best VCs out there. Dozens of startups have been able to get going with money from these guys.
I think people really need to look at the way the big billionaires handle their money-spreading it around-and realize that a lot of that big corporate money is being handed right back over to some very good causes.
It's about time this happened. If they will follow this up by promoting talented musicians instead of models who can look good in a million-dollar music video, the recording industry could really swing back.
Hopefully other record companies will follow suit and a free market can work it all out without getting the government even more involved.
I like this. Give everything an id. Put the machines in chare. This will make life more efficient all-around. Make it easier for the machines to do stuff for us, so that we all have more time to sit around drinking beer and discussing the meaning of life.
First, talk to your boss. Tell him that you're overtasked, and that he has one month to hire a lower-level admin for you to dump on. In the meanwhile, start interviewing elsewhere, and make sure that your boss knows you are doing so. Accept a job offer just before the big day. If there isn't someone else hired by that date, resign. There will be a peon working under you shortly.
But if you don't have the balls to do that, then just say no. If you lose your job for saying no, it probably wasn't a good job anyway.
My examples (All true): - No, I won't fix your Outlook configuration because you were being an idiot an fucked it up. Why not? What would be a better use of my time- fixing your Outlook problems, or going to Monster and getting a job where I don't have to deal with them.
- No, I won't build any more Active Directory networks. It's too complicated, too stressful, and I'm not going to waste a ton of time learning AD when I know how to manage Windows systems using Samba without all the headaches.
- No, I can't get the email system working any faster, because you were being a prick and bought a crappy firewall/proxy appliance instead of letting me set up a linux box, and it's fucking up the ESMTP sessions.
- No, I won't come in this weekend to work on this project. I'm not management, and the managers are the idiots who let it get a year behind schedule, and nothing is worth giving up weekends to spend more time working on these computers.
- No, I won't help you with Project Y, because I still have an eight-page to-do list for Project X.
You're a sysadmin, not a carpet. Don't be such a pussy, and if your job sucks, leave.
If you happen to be playing a game that actually supports multiple CPUs. Most games aren't.
Chances are that the programmers won't spend time optimizing their x86 SSE/3DNow game engines for the G5 multimedia instructions. Good luck keeping up with x86 there.
Nvidia fans are also semi-screwed, because Apply only sells the G5 computers with ATI cards; I hope you enjoy gaming with wacky ATI drivers.
The new G5 systems are nice, and have their place, but Apple continues to suck in the high-performance gamining arena.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, this stuff is for the clueless. These aren't people who are going to try communicating with a developer about a problem, because they don't have the skills, and probably don't even care. Mandrake is trying to bring Linux to the masses- the nerds are already there.
"Not even sshd?" /sbin/sendmail will be there for crash reporting?"
"How about programs that make the assumption that either port25 or
This is for desktop-only Linux newbies. They don't need ssh, and when programs crash, you can be pretty sure that they'll notice, and not need a report.
"...which comes without any server capability."
No daemons listening, no remote overflows! Yummies!
"This may change once my copy of Panther shows up, but my printer and other hardware continue to work for now."
Of course they will. That's because Mac OS is NOT a 64-bit OS, and aside from the ability to address more than four gigabytes of RAM, Apple users do not actually get any benefit from the G5 being a 64-bit CPU.
Opteron users, however, can fire up a 64-bit Linux distro and start zipping right along, enjoying the benefits of a 64-bit CPU.
Does anyone know if this company employees the same marketing/PR firm that handled the BitBoys?
"Though the author warns of the dangers of weak passwords, I would have liked to see a more thorough explanation of how to choose passwords."
Am I the only person sick of security books having yet another diatribe about password quality? How about a two page summary of recommended settings and the appropriate configuration files/menus? Security theory is nice, but dammit, if I had time to worry about the theories, I'd just read "Practical UNIX and Internet Security" and "Secrets and Lies," before writing a custom script to lock all of my systems down right after I finish with those kickstart/jumpstart scripts.
Just give me a chapter-by-chapter list of exactly what should be locked down, how to do it, and a VERY CONCISE explanation of why?
"Besides, in this day and age what do the record companies do to deserve those profits?"
The record companies don't have to deserve anything, you communist twit. They invest time, money, and manpower, and have the right to charge anything they want for their products. Nobody forces consumers to buy any of it.
It is obvious that I did a very bad job of explaining myself.
It is not that I dislike the indy music featured by emusic, in fact, those albums are why I bought in. But emusic's collection is VERY eclectic, and that means that I have to do a lot of searching and downloading to find music that I like. With unlimited downloads (A service that I would glady pay upwards of $100/month for.) I can download multiple full albums in the morning, listen all day, and keep what I like. As soon as the 40-song limit hits, it means that I have to stop and listen to those 30-second samples for every track to see what I like. At that point emusic is too much bother, as opposed to iTunes and Napster 2.0, which have high-end catalogs to make up for the the whole individual selection issue.
The catch is, most people WILL just go back to buying in a store. Human beings are very complacent animals, especially when rights are involved. Just look at the time it took to deal with slavery, the Patriot Act, or all of the business Americans did with Nazi Germany before Pearl Habor. There may be a few people out there who refuse to buy music because of the RIAA lawsuits, but for the most part music consumers are capricious youths who aren't old enough to have grounded principles.
Software installation is SO twentieth century. I use Turbo Tax Online- no more installation issues, no more worries about keeping everything installed and updated whenever I have to rebuild a machine from scratch, and somebody else handles my backups with a system that's probably a lot more reliable than my habit of burning important stuff to a CD and stuffing it in a drawer. On top of that, I don't have OS issues, because the web interface worked just fine across Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. Good luck getting prepacked software like that.
Sure some people might bitch about "privacy" concerns, but how private are my taxes? If I do an online transfer it goes through a third party, usually the software manufacturer; if I do it through the mail there are plenty of chances to steal it along the way, and god only knows how many dishonest people may be working in the IRS mailroom.
Web services ROCK. It's time consumers caught on!
I was specifically NOT writing about great workers with technical jobs. The really special, competent techies should be operating under a different ruleset, because they have very different needs, demands and job funtions. There's a big difference between letting the sysadmins who work 50-hour weeks and are on call have unrestricted access and giving the same access to the computer-illiterates in easy jobs, who just work 40-hours and go home, and never have to worry about getting phone calls about the email servers while in line for Space Mountain.
Remember, at most companies, the IT departments are just departments, and everyone else tends to be a "luser."
In case you haven't noticed the RIAA is NOT suing customers. The targets of RIAA lawsuits are people who trying to get music WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT. The whole point of the lawsuits is that no matter how many people the RIAA pisses off, scaring people away from filesharing networks means a hell of a lot more record sales in the long run. No matter how many people try to justify Napster and its kin as great promotional vehicles, they aren't- they just allow people to search for and downloading music they already want, thus cutting out profits for the music companies.
(-1, Redundant)
Isn't it funny how huge corporations, governments, and software firms (Like Adobe) will dump tons of money into Microsoft's products, kiss Microsoft's ass, partner with Microsoft, and never get attention to all of the horrible flaws that need fixing? Maybe eventually it will dawn on them that the reason competing products have a small market-share is because the same people who complain about their Microsoft woes refuse to support try the competition for once?
The universe is built from D12s! Yes! I knew that god was favoring my minotaur great axe for all these years!
iTunes gives me better options. I have used emusic a lot, and I can honestly say that most of what they carry is music by the minor indie labels selling albums that even Tower Records doesn't carry. Most of what I find on emusic is bad classical recordings, novelty DJ recording that get boring after a few listens, and noisy old jazz recordings from companies that got rights to shitty old recordings after the artist died. At least with iTunes I can pick *good* music.
Along with the selection, at least iTunes has a decent sales model. The 40 albums per month number emusic has established is pretty arbitrary. I would stick around if emusic gave me an option to pay per-track at $.25, or even at a higher price if emusic established a better selection. The new plan is just silly.
To cancel your emusic subscription, click here. I already canceled mine. One a related note, as of today the emusic downloader is unable to retrieve more files after ten consecutive downloads, and must be restarted to work.
I not sure whether or not users will be committed to pay until the end of the account's three-month or one-year term, however. I recommend that anyone charged beyond October dispute the charges.
I can see how this would hold true for people who need and benefit from multiple monitors, but I think that it is pretty safe to assume that most people don't actually need the monitors for a productivity boost. Most people using computers at the office aren't in technical jobs where they have the skills or need to do much more than a few simple tasks with the computer.
It seems to me that a few far better ways to increase productivity and reduce desktop clutter are:
- Block all chat, IM, and streaming media, and filesharing protocols at the firewall.
- Use a web proxy and to block all non-streaming media downloads, i.e. movie trailers in QuickTime.
- Don't give employees the right to install ANY software beyond the corporate baseline necessary for work.
1 - OpenOffice: A perennial favorite of mine, especially since I can use it to create PDF documents.
2 - Microsoft Office XP - The most stable version of Office out there. I really only use it for resumes and college papers that must be sent in soft copy to people who demand MS Office formats. because OpenOffice inevitable mangles something in a way that only an MS Office user will see.
2 - Mozilla - For browsing and email, it doesn't get much better.
3 - OpenSSH - Must have on all *nix boxes.
4 - Putty - I used it for SSH access when I'm on Windows.
5 - CDex - Free CD ripping software that works better than most commercial stuff.
6 - GIMP - Maybe it can't do everything that Photoshop does, but GIMP is free, and still one of the best image manipulation tools around.
7 - Acrobat Reader - You will need to read PDFs at some point, so just install it ahead of time.
8 - Quake III - Duh.
9 - Trillian - IRC and AIM. Must have.
10 - GAIM - Linux IM! Must have.
Even if it does happen, will it matter? This really isn't relevant in the server world, where cheap x86 systems provide the benefit of separation-of-function, which will usually outweigh any savings one gets from piling apps onto one big machine. Putting all of those OS and application eggs into one basket seems like a pretty bad idea to me-just as it did to all of the old mainframe companies that switched to running numerous small systems.
As yet another toy for the desktop world it could be neat, as an easier option than VMWare and such, but how much of a market does something like that really have?
"Seems to me that establishing a long-term relationship with fewer as opposed to screwing people over in volume would make good business sense to garner repeat business."
That makes good business sense for a recruiting firm. Unfortunately, headhunters aren't looking to stay in that job for a long time. They either want to hop from job to job increasing their salaries and collecting bonuses along the way and cash out early (Much like the people they are trying to place.), or they're occupational transients-people who are smart and capable enough to handle a white-collar job, but not ready to settle into a career.
And don't forget that jobhunters know that headhunters are scum, and probably hate them just as much as you do. Smart techies often ignore headhunters altogether, instead just focusing on personal networking and direct applications to bigger companies with recruiting departments.
Do yourself-and the industry-a favor. Don't feed those bastards, and maybe they'll all die off.
The more money these guys have, the better off the rest of us are; because these guys are also the world's biggest philanthropists.
BillG alone has given away $24 billion just through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. That doesn't count the billions he's given away on the side. Allen just dropped $500 million to start a foundation for human brain research. Pretty sweet.
These guys are also some of the best VCs out there. Dozens of startups have been able to get going with money from these guys.
I think people really need to look at the way the big billionaires handle their money-spreading it around-and realize that a lot of that big corporate money is being handed right back over to some very good causes.
It's about time this happened. If they will follow this up by promoting talented musicians instead of models who can look good in a million-dollar music video, the recording industry could really swing back.
Hopefully other record companies will follow suit and a free market can work it all out without getting the government even more involved.
I like this. Give everything an id. Put the machines in chare. This will make life more efficient all-around. Make it easier for the machines to do stuff for us, so that we all have more time to sit around drinking beer and discussing the meaning of life.
First, talk to your boss. Tell him that you're overtasked, and that he has one month to hire a lower-level admin for you to dump on. In the meanwhile, start interviewing elsewhere, and make sure that your boss knows you are doing so. Accept a job offer just before the big day. If there isn't someone else hired by that date, resign. There will be a peon working under you shortly.
But if you don't have the balls to do that, then just say no. If you lose your job for saying no, it probably wasn't a good job anyway.
My examples (All true):
- No, I won't fix your Outlook configuration because you were being an idiot an fucked it up. Why not? What would be a better use of my time- fixing your Outlook problems, or going to Monster and getting a job where I don't have to deal with them.
- No, I won't build any more Active Directory networks. It's too complicated, too stressful, and I'm not going to waste a ton of time learning AD when I know how to manage Windows systems using Samba without all the headaches.
- No, I can't get the email system working any faster, because you were being a prick and bought a crappy firewall/proxy appliance instead of letting me set up a linux box, and it's fucking up the ESMTP sessions.
- No, I won't come in this weekend to work on this project. I'm not management, and the managers are the idiots who let it get a year behind schedule, and nothing is worth giving up weekends to spend more time working on these computers.
- No, I won't help you with Project Y, because I still have an eight-page to-do list for Project X.
You're a sysadmin, not a carpet. Don't be such a pussy, and if your job sucks, leave.
"...and for playing games."
If you happen to be playing a game that actually supports multiple CPUs. Most games aren't.
Chances are that the programmers won't spend time optimizing their x86 SSE/3DNow game engines for the G5 multimedia instructions. Good luck keeping up with x86 there.
Nvidia fans are also semi-screwed, because Apply only sells the G5 computers with ATI cards; I hope you enjoy gaming with wacky ATI drivers.
The new G5 systems are nice, and have their place, but Apple continues to suck in the high-performance gamining arena.