Re:More like Y2K Scam, Y2K Fraud, etc...
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 2
Regardless of whether or not the date format change was necessary... Performing an update like this with floppies at every machine should have raised questions about the company's competency.
It did, origionally they didn't tell us what their floppy did, they just said it "Fixed Y2K", when I questioned how one floppy could upgrade all of the BIOSes in our building, which consists of various Dell, Gateway, and Compaq PCs, they stared blankly and said "What's a BIOS?".
It wasn't until we snagged a copy of their floppy before we realized what it did, told management, who didn't really care.
Hey, they dumped about 50 million dollars into an SAP system which doesn't work, and just spend money like crazy, what's another hundred or so thousand?
More like Y2K Scam, Y2K Fraud, etc...
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 4
I work for a very large (7 billion/yr) manufacturing company, and against the advice of those of us in the IT department, we were scammed by a consulting company telling tales of widespread system outages, downtime, and lost business if we didn't hire them to fix our machines.
What they did was send a few non technical people around to PCs, and had a floppy which just changed the date format in Win9x from mm/dd/yy to mm/dd/yyyy.
They charged $50 per machine checked for this "service", and took two months to do something a well written memo could have had our users do for free.
In the meantime, they managed to unplug a Cisco 7500 looking for the floppy drive, turned the key off on a production HP K470 machine, had their floppys in three Ultra 10 Workstations before calling IT and asking how to reboot, and other small, but costly disasters.
Basically due to the hype, our management gave them full run of our datacenter, and they caused more harm than a reasonable Y2K crash.
As the icing on the cake, even though that all of our machines were "certified" Y2K compliant by this small scam outfit, they insisted that everything be turned off for the rollover, causing even more downtime.
It just boggles the mind that executives could be scammed like this, I'm finding a new job...
Wow, between docs.sun.com and sunsolve.sun.com I can find just about anything I have ever wanted to know about Sun hardware or software. In fact, most of the time, I find there is too much documentation and have to dig through to find the really important stuff.
Those sites are definately good, so is SolarisGuide.com, but there's not a million HOW-TOs like there are for Linux oriented installs.
AFAIK, Sun or HP doesn't provide Apache documentation, but look on Linux websites and you'll probably find 10 different guides to help new users get a Webserver going.
Same for Samba, same for a lot of software which "isn't Linux", but the Linux community provides HOW-TOs and tutorials for how to install on Linux, even though the software is well documented and runs on a variety of platforms.
I wasn't trying to make Sun or HP look undocumented, rather just trying to show that Linux has specific guides for setting up otherwise well documented software.
There are many bood books ("Running Linux" by O'Reilly comes to mind) that help the new Linux user transition into the UNIX/Linux world.
I only wish Sun and HP offered a quarter of the documentation that's available for Linux, and I often find myself grabbing a Linux HOW-TO for a quick guide on how to do certain tasks on HP-UX or Solaris.
I've seen it in computers all of my life, people are lazy and would rather have someone else set something up for them than have to actually read the documentation and do it themselves.
It happens in the Sun world and the HP world, read any of the HP or Sun admin mailing lists, over half of the questions are simple questions, and when you reply to the sender and kindly let them know where to find the answer you usually get a snide remark about not fixing their problem because they need the actual command to run or need to know what to click on in 'sam'.
My advice to new users is always to get a copy of "Running Linux", and try to install Linux themselves. A lot can be learned during the install, especially if it's a "Linux only" system where you can fdisk the drive and not worry.
It's just the way people are, no amount of documentation, friendly manuals, or beginer webpages are going to change the fact that most people are lazy and would rather have someone else do their work for them.
From the article: "People are telling us they want the art of etoy and the e-commerce of eToys to co-exist," said eToys spokesman Jonathan Cutler. "We've agreed. We're not pressing the lawsuit."
Like there was any confusion in what people wanted. "Oh, Etoys decided to try and run them off of the Net because that's what we wanted".
Baloney.
Cutler: "Our intent was never to silence free artistic expression," he said.
No, it was just corporate greed, which happened to shut down an artistic Website. They're obviously only "doing the right thing" due to the negative reaction they got, and not because they've "figured it out".
Personally, I'll never buy from them because of the way they acted, they proved they're not concerned with treating their "neighbors" fairly on the 'net.
I made the mistake of ordering Perfume from Macys.com two weeks ago, even though I'm not far from their store in NYC, I just didn't want to put up with the crowd. Even though I paid for overnight shipping, it's not here yet.
After I realized that it didn't come, I called their customer service, and after 10 minutes of them blaming it on UPS, they finally said, "Oh, it's alcohol based, so it has to go UPS Ground".
They shouldn't have allowed me to ship overnight, or at least sent me an email telling me that it was going to ship differently then I anticipated.
So, after work on Dec 23rd, I stood for 2 hours in line with other schmucks to get the perfume, and now have to go through the hassle of returning the late bottle by UPS or whatever when it finally gets here.
Other than that, everything was fast, ordered Geek stuff from CopyLeft (which was the best), EddieBauer, etc.
On the other hand, Linux, and all Unices, have "security through a single valuable secret." Once a single key secret (the root password) is known to someone penetrating the system, the entire resources of the system is at that individual's disposal. On a Unix system once a hacker has the command prompt, there isn't a thing s/he can't do. There isn't a single additional layer of security. There's no granularity at all. This isn't necessarily a good thing.
What if I know the "Administrative" password to an NT domain, and I have physical access to a machine on that domain...same deal, you're toast.
Claiming Windows is more secure (which you didn't, I'm making a point) because it lacks functionality is like saying a Yugo is harder to steal than a Corvette, because when stolen the theif can elude the police better with the Vette.
There's add-ons to each OS, from S-Key to SecurID, to provide that additional layer of security. Personally I'd rather use a UNIX as a framework for this...
If I remember correctly I was about 5 or 6 when this aired on TV, and since I was a huge Star Wars fan wanted to watch it.
Well, my mother came back from shopping, and happened to meet a teacher of mine or someone who gave her a really bad report (since I was a little pain in the ass), and instead of watching the special, found myself in bed early as punishment.
After looking at what I missed, I'd like to send a big "thank you" to whatever teacher it was at the time. You guys taught me such crap as being able to stand an egg on end at the equinox, the moon's phase is a result of the Earth's shadow, and other lunacy, but I forgive you for sparing my young eyes from this horrible Christmas special.
After about three days, or when things get really dull (or maybe really interesting, like it becomes obvious someone is getting ready to commit murder) have the lights flicker, go out -- and then the door swings open.
Door swings open, and people in ape costumes come running in.
"Join us this week as our fearless GAP-clad heros venture into the rubble of what was the New York City Fashion District!"
"Michael Michael, isn't that Old Navy's Magic being dognapped by the mutants in ragged clothing? To Old Navy, I ripped my cargo pants!"
"I've got blood on my Sketchers!"
"Where the hell are we going to find an Alto Chi Latte with nutmeg?!"
"...in our next episode, Lenore tries to see if Performance Fleece is suitable for the nuclear winter, and Mike uses his perfect body to fend off a giant cockroach attack!!"
I think a large reason the attendance was so low was the Metro Transit Authority (MTA) was threatening to strike, which kept a lot of us who live in the NYC area at bay.
Even before an agreement was made, there were delays as buses and trains were held in the station longer than usual by the MTA workers to put the pressure on the city. If people didn't *need* to be in Manhattan, they didn't go near it!
I managed to make it to the Bazaar on Thursday, and actually like a low attendance to a high one. The vendors were more available to answer technical questions without having a bunch of suits there asking "How is this going to facilitate the methodologies for my vertical strategic initiatives......"
Overall a good show, and am looking forward to the Expo in Feb.
>oh grow up. I've been adminning unix boxes long >b4 u have im sure
Right, because you disagree, you've been doing it longer. Heh.
>[1] it doesnt have bash (or any decent shell like >tcsh - see IRIX which does come with tcsh >by default)
Please, most UNIX'es don't include bash, and it's trivial to set up and configure.
>[2] No free compiler (huh ? which braindead twit >doesnt include a compiler with a unix?)
It would be nice if it came with GCC (again, trivial to set up), but a lot of UNIX vendors would rather have you pay for it. I think it's better than paying more for an OS that has a compiler by default and having to pay extra for machines (most of which) which probably don't need it.
I can see why Sun and most other commercial companies don't include free software...they don't want to support it. I think that OSS is much better than most commerical apps, but I can see a corporate UNIX not wanting to have to support anything which didn't come from their own developers.
>[3] Default install is guaranteed to screw up the >filesystem unless you allocate space manually
Oh, it's small, so it screws everything up. Get real, I could see you mounting usr on the same slice and then complaining when you run out of disk.
What distros of Linux alocate your slices for you just the way you want them? I don't know of any, because this is something that an experienced admin should be doing, not an MCSE who clicks on "next" with every screen.
>[4] Frustrating and annoying SysV style >conventions and crap GUI (Click apply in the gui >print config via admintool and then click OK and >it gives an error - why? why?)
I dunno. I noticed that too. Admintool sucks the most out of smit, sam, linuxconf, etc, all of which have their bugs and glitches. If you're basing the merits of a UNIX on the GUI admin widgets, you'd probably be happier on a Win32 machine.
>[5] No ssh (huh ? no secure shell ? no >alternative ? wtf ?) or kerberised telnet or >secure telnet.
Isn't/Wasn't there export laws against most of this? Sun's going to tailor a version for each country's crypto laws, when it takes a few minutes to download and install?
Personally, I'd rather have the latest crypto from a download instead of something off 6-month-old install media.
>6] Patch list is HUGE -- and often incomplete.
The Sun patches are a rat's nest, but a lot of other commercial UNIX vendors are a lot worse.
What UNIX'es out there don't have patches, or have a pleasant patch system?
>Ever installed 500 boxes at one go ? I have - and >it sucks
No, and if I did, I'd probably try JumpStart.
You sure made an about-face from your first post, which said that once it was up, it was a joy. Now to support your argument, EVERYTHING sucks, the GUI, etc, etc, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux a lot better than Solaris, but Solaris far from sucks, especially compared to most other UNIX'es.
What other commerical UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, etc) comes loaded with the GNU Software that you're downloading from Sun Freeware? Solaris sucks because it doesn't have this installed? Get real.
How long have you been installing/administering Solaris? It's not hard to allocate more space for your filesystems, I wouldn't even hire a beginning UNIX admin who didn't know how to do this.
I hate to say it because I'm sure to be flamed by rookie admins who just got into the "Linux craze" a few months ago, but do try to actually use the product you're bashing in a real world enviornment before spewing your tripe.
Too much "if os != Linux then bash os" crap is bad for everyone, and it makes those of us who try to advocate Linux to our corporations look like idiots when M$ points to this type of response and stereotypes it to the entire community.
Discovering radio waves from a galaxy hundreds of light years away that were inadvertently beamed this way is not going to have that great an effect on our society or world. Yes, it will be a triumphant discovery. But what are they saying? When were they sent? What did those creatures look like? Without answering those questions, the average citizen just won't care.
Are you crazy? It will drastically influence society. For one it would debunk a lot of religious beliefs, as it will (hopefully) foster a new interest in the sciences.
This is getting way offtopic, who moderated this clown up?
Who said anything about only having a T1? I said fiber, which isn't a T1.
Granted, gigabit ethernet isn't exactly common, but 5 T-1's is not the be all end-all in terms of high bandwidth.
5 T1's isn't jack. What are we talking about here? You're confusing ethernet with leased lines. Call MCI and ask to have gig-ether dropped to your site. Sheesh.
A busy intranet could theoretically bog down one a linux box sooner than a NT box. Supposing you had a help system, which wouldn't require much dynamically generated pages, there you go.
What real world do you live in? I run 5 HP-UX boxes that run SAP for a 7 billion dollar corporation, everything from manufacturering to engineering to finances to shipping go through my boxes--24/7. 60,000 employees spread around to 140 sites have yet to generate a fraction of the type of traffic that your "help system" is capable of.
I think you should administer *production* systems for a while before hallucinating this little "help system".
I don't see how Mindcraft's figures can be used to compare the two OS'es in a practical enviornment, as the bandwidth that would be consumed at those levels would saturate fiber.
Would you rather tires on your car that were rated to 1000 mph that had blowouts every ten miles to tires that were solid and only rated at 500 mph?
Forget it. It comes straight out of the base employees' salaries.
Actually, it's being passed on to the consumer in the form of overpriced software. I don't know anyone who's going to work for less than the going rate because the company is having some of its products stolen.
What some of you don't seem to get, though, is that as long as our industry operates on those principles, ordinary peoples' lives can be harmed by flippant acts of "rebellion" such as piracy.
This is very much the case with smaller software companies who can't afford to have their software stolen, but I don't see Microsoft paying their engineers $8/hr because the pirates are running them out of business.
I'm not advocating that it's okay to steal software from anywhere, but their anti-piracy campaign is more rooted in greed rather than trying to keep their business out of the red.
Gartner didn't originally release the report, it's for subscribers and paid customers. But because of this "controversy", they've put it up for the public to read.
Where? What Gartner has up on their site is the same exact thing that Microsoft posted.
If they published the "real report" for everyone, please link to it, as I'm sure a lot of us would like to see it.
Where? You're obviously privy to another report. Sheesh. Stop the zealotry and start to look at things with a *calm* and objective eye.
Oh I agree entirely that the Linux zealots can get a little out of hand. What I'm questioning is why there's a Microsoft published "Webletter" that just regurgitates the origional report?
It doesn't strike you as odd that they'll spend money to do this, when Gartner already has a copy up themselves? Especially since there's not much indication that it's a Microsoft report, other than a little legalese at the bottom.
If Microsoft is spending money to rehash their public reports, wouldn't that be considered an income source for Gartner, and be in their best interest to publish material which Microsoft will likely pay for?
As an aside, how do you find the consultants for Gartner who come to your site? I worked for an IT corporation, who had a "Strategic Alliance" with them. What I remember most is when one of their "visionaries" who was supposed to be giving a presentation on the "Future of Internet Technologies" stood in front of the audience like a buffoon because he couldn't figure out how to plug his laptop into the projector.
I pretty much expected from the get-go that Linux was going to come out in a negative light. I'm not suprised in the least.
Is it inept management, editors, and journalists at Ziff Davis? Are they just favoring their biggest advertizer? A lot of both?
Most of their articles are geard torward non-technical, upper management, and this kind of publicity for Linux isn't good at all, and they know it. There was a firewall, nonstandard configurations--the list goes on.
Traditional media would never be able to get away with a similar test which more of the public can relate to. Imagine an article in a major newspaper claiming one airline was better than another, no facts or evidence other than because a reporter flew on it once without crashing. Now imagine if that airline was one of the newspaper's main advertizers.
The public would never stand for it, the paper would lose credibility, and that would be it. But Ziff Davis can get away with it because most of the people who *would* be influenced by a story such as this don't know any better.
A little objectivity would go a long way, and until I see that from Ziff Davis, I'm not going to patronize any of their advertizers. When asked for reccomendations at work or with companies I consult for, I'm going to weigh whether or not the vendor/product in question supports a company with such poor journalistic values.
In fact, I'm going to type up a letter and send it to the companies I don't use, telling them why I went with "the other guys".
I'm not asking for pro-Linux articles when they're not due, just a little fairness and competence in reporting from some of their journalists.
Why would RedHat lawyers have Amazon yank your site? You think they would contact you *directly*. Why is Walnut Creek still have the "non-box" Red Hat on their site? Same goes for Cheapbytes.
Who cares what Amazon says, what did Red Hat legal say? You *did* contact them over this, right?
Or did you go straight to trying to spin this out of proportion?
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of whether or not the date format change was necessary... Performing an update like this with floppies at every machine should have raised questions about the company's competency.
It did, origionally they didn't tell us what their floppy did, they just said it "Fixed Y2K", when I questioned how one floppy could upgrade all of the BIOSes in our building, which consists of various Dell, Gateway, and Compaq PCs, they stared blankly and said "What's a BIOS?".
It wasn't until we snagged a copy of their floppy before we realized what it did, told management, who didn't really care.
Hey, they dumped about 50 million dollars into an SAP system which doesn't work, and just spend money like crazy, what's another hundred or so thousand?
I work for a very large (7 billion/yr) manufacturing company, and against the advice of those of us in the IT department, we were scammed by a consulting company telling tales of widespread system outages, downtime, and lost business if we didn't hire them to fix our machines.
What they did was send a few non technical people around to PCs, and had a floppy which just changed the date format in Win9x from mm/dd/yy to mm/dd/yyyy.
They charged $50 per machine checked for this "service", and took two months to do something a well written memo could have had our users do for free.
In the meantime, they managed to unplug a Cisco 7500 looking for the floppy drive, turned the key off on a production HP K470 machine, had their floppys in three Ultra 10 Workstations before calling IT and asking how to reboot, and other small, but costly disasters.
Basically due to the hype, our management gave them full run of our datacenter, and they caused more harm than a reasonable Y2K crash.
As the icing on the cake, even though that all of our machines were "certified" Y2K compliant by this small scam outfit, they insisted that everything be turned off for the rollover, causing even more downtime.
It just boggles the mind that executives could be scammed like this, I'm finding a new job...
Groceries from PeaPod: $80
Shampoo from DrugStore.com: $4
Call Girls from an Online Pimp: $800
Pulling off this lame Publicity Stunt: Priceless
Wow, between docs.sun.com and sunsolve.sun.com I can find just about anything I have ever wanted to
know about Sun hardware or software. In fact, most of the time, I find there is too much documentation and have to dig through to find the really important stuff.
Those sites are definately good, so is SolarisGuide.com, but there's not a million HOW-TOs like there are for Linux oriented installs.
AFAIK, Sun or HP doesn't provide Apache documentation, but look on Linux websites and you'll probably find 10 different guides to help new users get a Webserver going.
Same for Samba, same for a lot of software which "isn't Linux", but the Linux community provides HOW-TOs and tutorials for how to install on Linux, even though the software is well documented and runs on a variety of platforms.
I wasn't trying to make Sun or HP look undocumented, rather just trying to show that Linux has specific guides for setting up otherwise well documented software.
There are many bood books ("Running Linux" by O'Reilly comes to mind) that help the new Linux user transition into the UNIX/Linux world.
I only wish Sun and HP offered a quarter of the documentation that's available for Linux, and I often find myself grabbing a Linux HOW-TO for a quick guide on how to do certain tasks on HP-UX or Solaris.
I've seen it in computers all of my life, people are lazy and would rather have someone else set something up for them than have to actually read the documentation and do it themselves.
It happens in the Sun world and the HP world, read any of the HP or Sun admin mailing lists, over half of the questions are simple questions, and when you reply to the sender and kindly let them know where to find the answer you usually get a snide remark about not fixing their problem because they need the actual command to run or need to know what to click on in 'sam'.
My advice to new users is always to get a copy of "Running Linux", and try to install Linux themselves. A lot can be learned during the install, especially if it's a "Linux only" system where you can fdisk the drive and not worry.
It's just the way people are, no amount of documentation, friendly manuals, or beginer webpages are going to change the fact that most people are lazy and would rather have someone else do their work for them.
From the article:
"People are telling us they want the art of
etoy and the e-commerce of eToys to
co-exist," said eToys spokesman
Jonathan Cutler. "We've agreed. We're
not pressing the lawsuit."
Like there was any confusion in what people wanted. "Oh, Etoys decided to try and run them off of the Net because that's what we wanted".
Baloney.
Cutler:
"Our intent was never to silence free
artistic expression," he said.
No, it was just corporate greed, which happened to shut down an artistic Website. They're obviously only "doing the right thing" due to the negative reaction they got, and not because they've "figured it out".
Personally, I'll never buy from them because of the way they acted, they proved they're not concerned with treating their "neighbors" fairly on the 'net.
I made the mistake of ordering Perfume from Macys.com two weeks ago, even though I'm not far from their store in NYC, I just didn't want to put up with the crowd. Even though I paid for overnight shipping, it's not here yet.
After I realized that it didn't come, I called their customer service, and after 10 minutes of them blaming it on UPS, they finally said, "Oh, it's alcohol based, so it has to go UPS Ground".
They shouldn't have allowed me to ship overnight, or at least sent me an email telling me that it was going to ship differently then I anticipated.
So, after work on Dec 23rd, I stood for 2 hours in line with other schmucks to get the perfume, and now have to go through the hassle of returning the late bottle by UPS or whatever when it finally gets here.
Other than that, everything was fast, ordered Geek stuff from CopyLeft (which was the best), EddieBauer, etc.
Merry Christmas...
On the other hand, Linux, and all Unices, have "security through a single valuable secret." Once a
single key secret (the root password) is known to someone penetrating the system, the entire resources
of the system is at that individual's disposal. On a Unix system once a hacker has the command prompt,
there isn't a thing s/he can't do. There isn't a single additional layer of security. There's no granularity at
all. This isn't necessarily a good thing.
What if I know the "Administrative" password to an NT domain, and I have physical access to a machine on that domain...same deal, you're toast.
Claiming Windows is more secure (which you didn't, I'm making a point) because it lacks functionality is like saying a Yugo is harder to steal than a Corvette, because when stolen the theif can elude the police better with the Vette.
There's add-ons to each OS, from S-Key to SecurID, to provide that additional layer of security. Personally I'd rather use a UNIX as a framework for this...
If I remember correctly I was about 5 or 6 when this aired on TV, and since I was a huge Star Wars fan wanted to watch it.
Well, my mother came back from shopping, and happened to meet a teacher of mine or someone who gave her a really bad report (since I was a little pain in the ass), and instead of watching the special, found myself in bed early as punishment.
After looking at what I missed, I'd like to send a big "thank you" to whatever teacher it was at the time. You guys taught me such crap as being able to stand an egg on end at the equinox, the moon's phase is a result of the Earth's shadow, and other lunacy, but I forgive you for sparing my young eyes from this horrible Christmas special.
After about three days, or when things get really
dull (or maybe really interesting, like it becomes obvious someone is getting ready to commit murder) have the lights flicker, go out -- and then the door swings open.
Door swings open, and people in ape costumes come running in.
Now that would be worthwhile television.
"Join us this week as our fearless GAP-clad heros venture into the rubble of what was the New York City Fashion District!"
"Michael Michael, isn't that Old Navy's Magic being dognapped by the mutants in ragged clothing? To Old Navy, I ripped my cargo pants!"
"I've got blood on my Sketchers!"
"Where the hell are we going to find an Alto Chi Latte with nutmeg?!"
"...in our next episode, Lenore tries to see if Performance Fleece is suitable for the nuclear winter, and Mike uses his perfect body to fend off a giant cockroach attack!!"
I think a large reason the attendance was so low was the Metro Transit Authority (MTA) was threatening to strike, which kept a lot of us who live in the NYC area at bay.
Even before an agreement was made, there were delays as buses and trains were held in the station longer than usual by the MTA workers to put the pressure on the city. If people didn't *need* to be in Manhattan, they didn't go near it!
I managed to make it to the Bazaar on Thursday, and actually like a low attendance to a high one. The vendors were more available to answer technical questions without having a bunch of suits there asking "How is this going to facilitate the methodologies for my vertical strategic initiatives......"
Overall a good show, and am looking forward to the Expo in Feb.
>oh grow up. I've been adminning unix boxes long >b4 u have im sure
Right, because you disagree, you've been doing it longer. Heh.
>[1] it doesnt have bash (or any decent shell like >tcsh - see IRIX which does come with tcsh
>by default)
Please, most UNIX'es don't include bash, and it's trivial to set up and configure.
>[2] No free compiler (huh ? which braindead twit >doesnt include a compiler with a unix?)
It would be nice if it came with GCC (again, trivial to set up), but a lot of UNIX vendors would rather have you pay for it. I think it's better than paying more for an OS that has a compiler by default and having to pay extra for machines (most of which) which probably don't need it.
I can see why Sun and most other commercial companies don't include free software...they don't want to support it. I think that OSS is much better than most commerical apps, but I can see a corporate UNIX not wanting to have to support anything which didn't come from their own developers.
>[3] Default install is guaranteed to screw up the >filesystem unless you allocate space manually
Oh, it's small, so it screws everything up. Get real, I could see you mounting usr on the same slice and then complaining when you run out of disk.
What distros of Linux alocate your slices for you just the way you want them? I don't know of any, because this is something that an experienced admin should be doing, not an MCSE who clicks on "next" with every screen.
>[4] Frustrating and annoying SysV style >conventions and crap GUI (Click apply in the gui
>print config via admintool and then click OK and >it gives an error - why? why?)
I dunno. I noticed that too. Admintool sucks the most out of smit, sam, linuxconf, etc, all of which have their bugs and glitches. If you're basing the merits of a UNIX on the GUI admin widgets, you'd probably be happier on a Win32 machine.
>[5] No ssh (huh ? no secure shell ? no >alternative ? wtf ?) or kerberised telnet or >secure telnet.
Isn't/Wasn't there export laws against most of this? Sun's going to tailor a version for each country's crypto laws, when it takes a few minutes to download and install?
Personally, I'd rather have the latest crypto from a download instead of something off 6-month-old install media.
>6] Patch list is HUGE -- and often incomplete.
The Sun patches are a rat's nest, but a lot of other commercial UNIX vendors are a lot worse.
What UNIX'es out there don't have patches, or have a pleasant patch system?
>Ever installed 500 boxes at one go ? I have - and >it sucks
No, and if I did, I'd probably try JumpStart.
You sure made an about-face from your first post, which said that once it was up, it was a joy. Now to support your argument, EVERYTHING sucks, the GUI, etc, etc, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux a lot better than Solaris, but Solaris far from sucks, especially compared to most other UNIX'es.
What other commerical UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, etc) comes loaded with the GNU Software that you're downloading from Sun Freeware? Solaris sucks because it doesn't have this installed? Get real.
How long have you been installing/administering Solaris? It's not hard to allocate more space for your filesystems, I wouldn't even hire a beginning UNIX admin who didn't know how to do this.
I hate to say it because I'm sure to be flamed by rookie admins who just got into the "Linux craze" a few months ago, but do try to actually use the product you're bashing in a real world enviornment before spewing your tripe.
Too much "if os != Linux then bash os" crap is bad for everyone, and it makes those of us who try to advocate Linux to our corporations look like idiots when M$ points to this type of response and stereotypes it to the entire community.
Grow up.
Discovering radio waves from a galaxy hundreds of light years away that were inadvertently beamed this way is not going to have that great an effect on our society or world. Yes, it will be a triumphant discovery. But what are they saying? When were they sent? What did those creatures look like? Without answering those questions, the average citizen just won't care.
Are you crazy? It will drastically influence society. For one it would debunk a lot of religious beliefs, as it will (hopefully) foster a new interest in the sciences.
This is getting way offtopic, who moderated this clown up?
Gee, what's faster than a T-1?
Who said anything about only having a T1? I said fiber, which isn't a T1.
Granted, gigabit ethernet isn't exactly common, but 5 T-1's is not the be all end-all in terms of high bandwidth.
5 T1's isn't jack. What are we talking about here? You're confusing ethernet with leased lines. Call MCI and ask to have gig-ether dropped to your site. Sheesh.
A busy intranet could theoretically bog down one a linux box sooner than a NT box. Supposing you had a help system, which wouldn't require much dynamically generated pages, there you go.
What real world do you live in? I run 5 HP-UX boxes that run SAP for a 7 billion dollar corporation, everything from manufacturering to engineering to finances to shipping go through my boxes--24/7. 60,000 employees spread around to 140 sites have yet to generate a fraction of the type of traffic that your "help system" is capable of.
I think you should administer *production* systems for a while before hallucinating this little "help system".
I don't see how Mindcraft's figures can be used to compare the two OS'es in a practical enviornment, as the bandwidth that would be consumed at those levels would saturate fiber.
Would you rather tires on your car that were rated to 1000 mph that had blowouts every ten miles to tires that were solid and only rated at 500 mph?
Forget it. It comes straight out of the base employees' salaries.
Actually, it's being passed on to the consumer in the form of overpriced software. I don't know anyone who's going to work for less than the going rate because the company is having some of its products stolen.
What some of you don't seem to get, though, is that as long as our industry operates on those principles, ordinary peoples' lives can be harmed by flippant acts of "rebellion" such as piracy.
This is very much the case with smaller software companies who can't afford to have their software stolen, but I don't see Microsoft paying their engineers $8/hr because the pirates are running them out of business.
I'm not advocating that it's okay to steal software from anywhere, but their anti-piracy campaign is more rooted in greed rather than trying to keep their business out of the red.
Gartner didn't originally release the report, it's for subscribers and paid customers. But because of this "controversy", they've put it up for the public to read.
Where? What Gartner has up on their site is the same exact thing that Microsoft posted.
If they published the "real report" for everyone, please link to it, as I'm sure a lot of us would like to see it.
The "webletter" on the Gartner site is a paid Microsoft publication of the original Gartner report, it is NOT the actual Gartner report.
Are you comparing the one on Gartner's site with the one Microsoft bought?
If so, they're the same report.
It applauds what Linux is doing in other areas.
Where? You're obviously privy to another report.
Sheesh. Stop the zealotry and start to look at things with a *calm* and objective eye.
Oh I agree entirely that the Linux zealots can get a little out of hand. What I'm questioning is why there's a Microsoft published "Webletter" that just regurgitates the origional report?
It doesn't strike you as odd that they'll spend money to do this, when Gartner already has a
copy up themselves? Especially since there's not much indication that it's a Microsoft report, other than a little legalese at the bottom.
If Microsoft is spending money to rehash their public reports, wouldn't that be considered an income source for Gartner, and be in their best interest to publish material which Microsoft will likely pay for?
As an aside, how do you find the consultants for Gartner who come to your site? I worked for an IT corporation, who had a "Strategic Alliance" with them. What I remember most is when one of their "visionaries" who was supposed to be giving a presentation on the "Future of Internet Technologies" stood in front of the audience like a buffoon because he couldn't figure out how to plug his laptop into the projector.
An intern from the helpdesk fixed it for him.
Rack up $70,000 in debt gambling illegally over the 'net? Stick the credit card company with the bill!
Anyone who thinks the credit card company is going to be left holding the bag has got another thing coming.
She's probably complaining how high the interest rate is on her legitimate bills.
I pretty much expected from the get-go that Linux
was going to come out in a negative light. I'm not suprised in the least.
Is it inept management, editors, and journalists at Ziff Davis? Are they just favoring their biggest advertizer? A lot of both?
Most of their articles are geard torward non-technical, upper management, and this kind of publicity for Linux isn't good at all, and they know it. There was a firewall, nonstandard configurations--the list goes on.
Traditional media would never be able to get away with a similar test which more of the public can relate to. Imagine an article in a major newspaper claiming one airline was better than another, no facts or evidence other than because a reporter flew on it once without crashing. Now imagine if that airline was one of the newspaper's main advertizers.
The public would never stand for it, the paper would lose credibility, and that would be it. But Ziff Davis can get away with it because most of the people who *would* be influenced by a story such as this don't know any better.
A little objectivity would go a long way, and until I see that from Ziff Davis, I'm not going to patronize any of their advertizers. When asked for reccomendations at work or with companies I consult for, I'm going to weigh whether or not the vendor/product in question supports a company with such poor journalistic values.
In fact, I'm going to type up a letter and send it to the companies I don't use, telling them why I went with "the other guys".
I'm not asking for pro-Linux articles when they're not due, just a little fairness and competence in reporting from some of their journalists.
They know who they are.
As a local Yankee fan, I go yankees.com once in a while to check the upcoming schedule, and last night's visit sent me looking for my paper copy.
/. is bad enough, nevermind reading that this site is some kind of innovation.
What a nightmare to download and navigate. The old yankees.com sucked, but Steinbrenner really outdid himself with this one!
People shouldn't have to download all that junk to get the information they're looking for.
To see Website reviews on
Slashdot
News for nerds with T3s in their apartments, GUI only browsers, and time on their hands
Despite the spiffy "Linux Powered" decal on his Website, he's using IIS a la NT, according to Netcraft
Check it out
Why would RedHat lawyers have Amazon yank your site? You think they would contact you *directly*. Why is Walnut Creek still have the "non-box" Red Hat on their site? Same goes for Cheapbytes.
Who cares what Amazon says, what did Red Hat legal say? You *did* contact them over this, right?
Or did you go straight to trying to spin this out of proportion?