It is no surprise this happens, but how much of this is due to perverted "preferred supplier" agreements within the govt organisations, usually setup via the old hand under the table wad of cash from supplier to head bureaucrat to ensure competitors are left out. Then it is a matter for those excluded vendors to try to "piggyback" someone elses contract to get their foot in the door... None of this surprises me, it happens everywhere...
Indeed, there is no better way of getting a grasp on how it all hangs together than by building it yourself by hand, gives you a good feel for where everything is. I can personally vouch for the LFS build method;-)
*blatant plug mode* Or if you feel a little more adventurous and want multilib support for your amd64 there is cross-lfs (http://www.cross-lfs.org), it is done by mostly the same guys as LFS but emphasis is more on cross-compile toolchains for shoving linux on whatever toys you have...
If you have any issues just lob into #lfs-support on irc.linuxfromscratch.org or #cross-lfs on freenode and we'll sort you out...
And here I drove my Vax 11/750 complete with 4 RA81 hard drives (all working) onto the rubbish dump because I couldn't even give it away (advertised free to good home for 2 months)...
*Sob*
Still have all the Digital folders that came with it though...
I'll be showing this article to my girlfriend though, will stop her bitching about the pile of ancient Sun gear in the back room (affectionately known as "The Ton of Sun", still running a sparcserver 1000 w 6 attached SSA's, the old Sun3's still work too )...
My friend however is on a goldmine. His "Stack of Mac" takes up most of his house, and I know for a fact there are 2 Lisas (in working order) in there along with at least 1 of everything apple has ever produced (he still uses his newton and a DuoDock...)
Lesson to be learned here, never throw anything away...
Gonna be fun putting together User Documentation..
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 1
This is quite amusing. I do a lot of contract work and when it comes time to writing up the implementation documentation for pointy-clicky GUI applications what do you use?
Screenshots.
Tech writers are gonna love this... the idiots just dont understand the law of unintended consequences...
On the plus side, when this becomes widespread you'll have an excuse for not having to write up the damned doco...
Totally agree 100%. I would (and do) buy DVD's etc regardless of whether or not I could download them via broadband (regardless of the link speed in this country which sucks) mainly due to the fact that I like to own the physical media.
Unfortunately for me I am a criminal whenever I watch anything on my chosen operating system. I would happily purchase a HD-DVD player and HD-DVD's but alas they wouldn't work.
All they have done with the DRM is made the illegal product more desirable and useful than the legal one, in fact the illegal product is the only one I can use...
I would happily be their customer if they would let me... what can you do
Put vista ultimate on it for a look see (figuring it cant be that much worse than XP, and I need a windows partition for gaming) and it is the biggest slug known to man + dog.
This system is well within the recommended specs for vista and certainly is not sucky.
To put into perspective, the (albeit custom built and optimised) linux distro running from another partition appears twice as fast at file ops and general tasks, all the while running multiple solaris 10 x86 installs under vmware (the vmware solaris instances feel about as fast as the native Vista install).
I'll persevere for a few more weeks in the hope a pile of patches come, but frankly due to the shitty performance (esp with gaming, really the only reason I installed it) it'll be back to XP (if I can come up with a new license)...
Indeed, prior to the Microsoft Novell deal SuSE was always my first recommendation for clients when asked what linux flavour to use, specifically because Red Hat is just too non-standard (/me dons asbestos underpants as he calls Red Hat "Linux-like").
Now I tend to push Ubuntu/Debian, or due to support requirements for commercial apps like oracle, Red Hat, though I have never been much of a fan of any of the above...
Due to Novell's deal I, like a hell of a lot of other SuSE advocates/fans, felt cheated by Novell and could no longer in good faith support the product.
I hate to admit it, but frankly nowadays when asked what distro to run I tell clients to install Solaris 10...
Where do all these Linux drivers come from? Not from the hardware manufacturers (well a few perhaps like NVidia) that's for sure.
Here you are showing your ignorance. Manufacturers either provide source code for inclusion into the kernel tree, provide developers to work with the kernel team to port drivers, provide specs for the hardware so the kernel hackers can generate a driver for the kernel tree or the driver is contributed by the community after reverse engineering etc.
Point being that a lot of the linux driver code is contributed by the manufacturers, peer reviewed and then merged into the linux kernel source tree itself.
Out of tree binary blobs such as the Nvidia driver you mentioned are not the norm like in the windows world, we have a tendency to frown on things that we cant do a code audit on, especially code running in kernel space.
Despite what people on here say about their mums, dads, cousins, grandmas etc.. the vast majority of people would not have the time, energy or know-how to work out how to get Linux going, with Windows it's a no-brainer.
True, except for the non tech savvy I'd hand them a mac, it'll be an equivalent learning curve moving from XP to mac as it is from XP to Vista.
Lastly if Linux is so brilliant, stable, secure and useable then why is it doing so bad against Windows on the desktop market?
DirectX games, to a lesser extent MS Office file formats, also the learning curve but mostly because the user doesn't know any different.
The average windows user is incredibly tolerant of shoddy software, virii, worms, blue screens, lockups and crashes, as they generally havent used anything else they believe this to be normal for an operating system, they dont know any better...
but sometimes it is just sickening about how much MS hate there is
I think you have mistaken my rubbishing of your driver/hardware support argument for hatred of the Beast from Redmond.
This is not the case, I am ambivalent. I use whatever tool is the best fit for the job, if that means windows (as it usually does for standalone desktops) so be it. Linux desktop is still not quite ready for the masses for all tasks no matter what the zealots say.
But we were discussing hardware/driver support, not relative merit of each as a Desktop OS, (frankly they both suck but linux is a hell of a lot more robust). I suggest you take a closer look at the LKML mailing lists and see who contributes what when it comes to drivers before shooting off the uninformed drivel I quoted you on at the top.
Because colleagues of mine who use Linux have told me about little issues like when upgrading the kernel to the latest version because it supported some more hardware and then existing hardware that previously worked stopped work, NICE!!
If your colleagues are compiling the kernel themselves they are obviously too stupid to perform the task and should stick with their vendor kernels. (hint, copy across the old.config to the new source tree, add new reqd devices during config)
What a lot of you guys forget is that there are millions (if not billions) of different hardware combinations of PC hardware out there and you're trying to make out that Linux is the saviour and will work on anything whilst laughing at Vista - you are bare-faced lying and you know it.
You mention only PC hardware.
Linux works on my Ultrasparc systems (fujitsu/Sun),DEC alpha, pocketpc (arm), beige powermac (albeit with flaky ADB), G4, G5 (w multilib userspace), amd64 (multilib userspace again) and mips (o32, n32 and 64 userspace) with support for pretty much all the hardware in said systems using no more than what comes in the kernel source tree.
Linux not only "fully works" for most hardware, but "fully works" across ALL of those architectures (well, the drivers for older apple gear are pretty shonky, but hey its not like apple publish specs) and provide identical userspace.
All microsoft have to worry about is x86/x86_64, and they cant even get that right.
Who is kidding who here about hardware support?
Okay then, if what you say is true with regards to Aero then how exactly did they manage to make the POS operating system SLOWER than XP?
What else have they added to the OS (and hell they didn't add anything new as far as I can tell but DRM, Aero and UAC) to explain the performance loss and the excessive system requirements?
Prove it.
I dare you to put a freshly installed M$ system and a freshly installed linux box side by side
outside your firewall and see which gets pwned first.
My last attempt the XP box lasted precisely 24 seconds.
Try it, it will be an eye opener...
Background check discussions always amuse me.
I work as a contractor, often subcontracted out to Tier 1 vendors to work their contracts for large corporates implementing identity management solutions.
Never once have I been questioned by _anybody_ before they hand the crown jewels over to me.
And this is from sites that absolutely require checks performed on prospective employees.
Luckily for them I am honest... not all contractors are...
Base operating system used is Linux From Scratch. It shouldn't be too much of a fight to get the frontend to work on a custom LFS/Cross-LFS build...
I havent looked at their stuff but am fairly intimate with the OS build... may have a crack at it this weekend for shits and giggles...
Tin may be more brittle, but it's also STRONGER than lead, which may well be an advantage in many situations.I can't see where...
Thermal expansion + brittle joints == argh.
Brittle joints + vibration == argh.
Strength means nothing, the joints have to have some give in them, and the whiskers indeed ARE a real problem.
No sources to back me up, just 5 years in a past life doing Production Engineering on an SMT line...
What a crock of shite.
Come on down Melbourne way and watch the endless supply of FUD and bullshit being pushed during this state election.
Currently political ads running are 80% ALP advertisements (OK, 40% state govt propaganda paid out of our taxpayer dollars, 40% ALP campaign ads which all are FUD, no policies), and 20% Liberal ads (half fud, half policies).
Personally I think voting just encourages the bastards... both parties deserve to lose.
And citrix provides that better than other solutions? *cough* sunrays *cough*
At least with sunrays the clients are cheap, you have smartcards for hotdesking/access control,
and your apps and data are hosted on an OS that you can expect will stay up for more than 5 days...
Heh, if you are talking datacentre try the telcos, banks/insurance and government.
Mission critical does not get trusted to wintel bitty-boxes, it goes on fully redundant enterprise hardware with a real enterprise operating system.
Solaris on sparc still reigns supreme there...
Honest truth, for a corporate desktop where 99% of the requirement is office software, a mail client and browser you can swap in nearly ANY desktop, be it solaris, linux, macosx, whatever with little to no retraining.
Lock the boxes down so these users can do their job (and not much more).
Quite frankly, we cutover half of a section to using Sun Java Desktop via sunrays and the one thing we came away from it with was if users can point, click and get the job done they dont particularly care what desktop they are using (except for of course all those that wanted non-business use software such as
itunes/counterstrike/add arbitrary non SOE package or hardware and drivers here... you know... the stuff that causes support requests when users fuck with the box).
Any required legacy windows stuff is served up via central citrix/rdp boxen.
Quite frankly they value the stability, and the fact that they can hotdesk and get their desktop, as they left it, from wherever they log in.
For us looking after IT, it makes desktop management/support a trivial exercise.
All I can say with regards to management is that it depends on the industry, and where the managers originally came from.
I spent 8 years working in the electronics industry, where most management was promoted up from the work floor (production engineers/managers) or came from the engineering/design department. They all knew intimately from experience what it was that they were managing and were totally pragmatic with regards to decision making. For the most part an environment was in place where the workers managed themselves (who knows the job better, the manager or the guy that does it every day) and the managers were there for support or to go into bat for the workers. The managers job was primarily to listen and facilitate what the workers required. Best company I ever worked for... up until they got bought out...
The IT industry is a totally different case in point. In the 9 years I have been working IT (predominately as a consultant to large corporates) I can say that the PHB is the norm not the exception. From what I can see about 60% of the tards folk end up with as managers were promoted sideways with little to no IT knowledge apart from buzzwords they picked up from the latest issue of MIS magazine (they were useless in their previous non-IT role but couldnt be shown the door for one reason or another).
Another 30% come from Novell/Windows Desktop support/helpdesk management and have little to no knowledge of how anything actually really works or scales (if it cant be pointed and clicked they have no clue). Unfortunately these clowns usually think they know everything... a little bit of knowledge in the wrong hands...
The last 10% (who you want to be working for) can be split into 2 groups.
a) The old grizzled Unix/Mainframe hands that have been fighting IT since the mid 80's, early 90's who were reluctantly pushed into management (great manager for cutting through the bullshit and getting the job done right, though prone to micromanagement and/or doing it all themselves). Generally dont get along with PHB managers, therefore have trouble pushing an agenda through an organisation.
b) The developers who worked themselves up through project management who may not know how everything works, but know how to ask questions and more importantly WHO to ask questions. These guys usually know how to push their agenda through the other 90% of PHB tards and perform the onerous task as acting as a buffer between the PHB tards and the guys shovelling at the coalface.
It is a rather sad indictment that most IT managers have zero idea of what they are managing, this doesn't happen so often in other technical industries...
Re:what about the non-selected cats...
on
Hypoallergenic Cats
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· Score: 3, Funny
Surplus cats were sent to universities worldwide for helping out with the quantum computing effort. They go through a lot of cats that way...
Slashdot Mirror
It is no surprise this happens, but how much of this is due to perverted "preferred supplier" agreements within the govt organisations, usually setup via the old hand under the table wad of cash from supplier to head bureaucrat to ensure competitors are left out. Then it is a matter for those excluded vendors to try to "piggyback" someone elses contract to get their foot in the door... None of this surprises me, it happens everywhere...
Indeed, there is no better way of getting a grasp on how it all hangs together than by building it yourself by hand, gives you a good feel for where everything is. I can personally vouch for the LFS build method ;-)
*blatant plug mode* Or if you feel a little more adventurous and want multilib support for your amd64 there is cross-lfs (http://www.cross-lfs.org), it is done by mostly the same guys as LFS but emphasis is more on cross-compile toolchains for shoving linux on whatever toys you have...
If you have any issues just lob into #lfs-support on irc.linuxfromscratch.org or #cross-lfs on freenode and we'll sort you out...
And here I drove my Vax 11/750 complete with 4 RA81 hard drives (all working) onto the rubbish dump because I couldn't even give it away (advertised free to good home for 2 months)...
*Sob*
Still have all the Digital folders that came with it though...
I'll be showing this article to my girlfriend though, will stop her bitching about the pile of ancient Sun gear in the back room (affectionately known as "The Ton of Sun", still running a sparcserver 1000 w 6 attached SSA's, the old Sun3's still work too )...
My friend however is on a goldmine. His "Stack of Mac" takes up most of his house, and I know for a fact there are 2 Lisas (in working order) in there along with at least 1 of everything apple has ever produced (he still uses his newton and a DuoDock...)
Lesson to be learned here, never throw anything away...
This is quite amusing. I do a lot of contract work and when it comes time to writing up the implementation documentation for pointy-clicky GUI applications what do you use?
Screenshots.
Tech writers are gonna love this... the idiots just dont understand the law of unintended consequences...
On the plus side, when this becomes widespread you'll have an excuse for not having to write up the damned doco...
No need to clone Sparc, Its open hardware nowadays... you can download the VHDL and whack it on an FPGA...
Totally agree 100%. I would (and do) buy DVD's etc regardless of whether or not I could download them via broadband (regardless of the link speed in this country which sucks) mainly due to the fact that I like to own the physical media.
Unfortunately for me I am a criminal whenever I watch anything on my chosen operating system. I would happily purchase a HD-DVD player and HD-DVD's but alas they wouldn't work.
All they have done with the DRM is made the illegal product more desirable and useful than the legal one, in fact the illegal product is the only one I can use...
I would happily be their customer if they would let me... what can you do
Dual core AMD64 (FX60), 2G ram, Geforce 7900GTX.
Put vista ultimate on it for a look see (figuring it cant be that much worse than XP, and I need a windows partition for gaming) and it is the biggest slug known to man + dog.
This system is well within the recommended specs for vista and certainly is not sucky.
To put into perspective, the (albeit custom built and optimised) linux distro running from another partition appears twice as fast at file ops and general tasks, all the while running multiple solaris 10 x86 installs under vmware (the vmware solaris instances feel about as fast as the native Vista install).
I'll persevere for a few more weeks in the hope a pile of patches come, but frankly due to the shitty performance (esp with gaming, really the only reason I installed it) it'll be back to XP (if I can come up with a new license)...
Microsoft really screwed the pooch on this one...
Indeed, prior to the Microsoft Novell deal SuSE was always my first recommendation for clients when asked what linux flavour to use, specifically because Red Hat is just too non-standard (/me dons asbestos underpants as he calls Red Hat "Linux-like"). Now I tend to push Ubuntu/Debian, or due to support requirements for commercial apps like oracle, Red Hat, though I have never been much of a fan of any of the above... Due to Novell's deal I, like a hell of a lot of other SuSE advocates/fans, felt cheated by Novell and could no longer in good faith support the product. I hate to admit it, but frankly nowadays when asked what distro to run I tell clients to install Solaris 10...
Absolutely correct, it was a stringbag that took out the Bismarck.
But we were discussing hardware/driver support, not relative merit of each as a Desktop OS, (frankly they both suck but linux is a hell of a lot more robust). I suggest you take a closer look at the LKML mailing lists and see who contributes what when it comes to drivers before shooting off the uninformed drivel I quoted you on at the top.
Linux works on my Ultrasparc systems (fujitsu/Sun),DEC alpha, pocketpc (arm), beige powermac (albeit with flaky ADB), G4, G5 (w multilib userspace), amd64 (multilib userspace again) and mips (o32, n32 and 64 userspace) with support for pretty much all the hardware in said systems using no more than what comes in the kernel source tree.
Linux not only "fully works" for most hardware, but "fully works" across ALL of those architectures (well, the drivers for older apple gear are pretty shonky, but hey its not like apple publish specs) and provide identical userspace.
All microsoft have to worry about is x86/x86_64, and they cant even get that right.
Who is kidding who here about hardware support?
Okay then, if what you say is true with regards to Aero then how exactly did they manage to make the POS operating system SLOWER than XP? What else have they added to the OS (and hell they didn't add anything new as far as I can tell but DRM, Aero and UAC) to explain the performance loss and the excessive system requirements?
Prove it. I dare you to put a freshly installed M$ system and a freshly installed linux box side by side outside your firewall and see which gets pwned first. My last attempt the XP box lasted precisely 24 seconds. Try it, it will be an eye opener...
Most interesting, informative post I have run into in this thread... really, you shouldn't have posted this AC
Background check discussions always amuse me. I work as a contractor, often subcontracted out to Tier 1 vendors to work their contracts for large corporates implementing identity management solutions. Never once have I been questioned by _anybody_ before they hand the crown jewels over to me. And this is from sites that absolutely require checks performed on prospective employees. Luckily for them I am honest... not all contractors are...
Base operating system used is Linux From Scratch. It shouldn't be too much of a fight to get the frontend to work on a custom LFS/Cross-LFS build... I havent looked at their stuff but am fairly intimate with the OS build... may have a crack at it this weekend for shits and giggles...
Tin may be more brittle, but it's also STRONGER than lead, which may well be an advantage in many situations.I can't see where... Thermal expansion + brittle joints == argh. Brittle joints + vibration == argh. Strength means nothing, the joints have to have some give in them, and the whiskers indeed ARE a real problem. No sources to back me up, just 5 years in a past life doing Production Engineering on an SMT line...
What a crock of shite. Come on down Melbourne way and watch the endless supply of FUD and bullshit being pushed during this state election. Currently political ads running are 80% ALP advertisements (OK, 40% state govt propaganda paid out of our taxpayer dollars, 40% ALP campaign ads which all are FUD, no policies), and 20% Liberal ads (half fud, half policies). Personally I think voting just encourages the bastards... both parties deserve to lose.
And citrix provides that better than other solutions? *cough* sunrays *cough* At least with sunrays the clients are cheap, you have smartcards for hotdesking/access control, and your apps and data are hosted on an OS that you can expect will stay up for more than 5 days...
but the instructions said windows XP or better
Heh, if you are talking datacentre try the telcos, banks/insurance and government.
Mission critical does not get trusted to wintel bitty-boxes, it goes on fully redundant enterprise hardware with a real enterprise operating system.
Solaris on sparc still reigns supreme there...
Honest truth, for a corporate desktop where 99% of the requirement is office software, a mail client and browser you can swap in nearly ANY desktop, be it solaris, linux, macosx, whatever with little to no retraining.
Lock the boxes down so these users can do their job (and not much more).
Quite frankly, we cutover half of a section to using Sun Java Desktop via sunrays and the one thing we came away from it with was if users can point, click and get the job done they dont particularly care what desktop they are using (except for of course all those that wanted non-business use software such as itunes/counterstrike/add arbitrary non SOE package or hardware and drivers here... you know... the stuff that causes support requests when users fuck with the box).
Any required legacy windows stuff is served up via central citrix/rdp boxen.
Quite frankly they value the stability, and the fact that they can hotdesk and get their desktop, as they left it, from wherever they log in.
For us looking after IT, it makes desktop management/support a trivial exercise.
Or at least clean up after they try to rocket jump to the second story of a building
All I can say with regards to management is that it depends on the industry, and where the managers originally came from.
I spent 8 years working in the electronics industry, where most management was promoted up from the work floor (production engineers/managers) or came from the engineering/design department. They all knew intimately from experience what it was that they were managing and were totally pragmatic with regards to decision making. For the most part an environment was in place where the workers managed themselves (who knows the job better, the manager or the guy that does it every day) and the managers were there for support or to go into bat for the workers. The managers job was primarily to listen and facilitate what the workers required. Best company I ever worked for... up until they got bought out...
The IT industry is a totally different case in point.
In the 9 years I have been working IT (predominately as a consultant to large corporates) I can say that the PHB is the norm not the exception. From what I can see about 60% of the tards folk end up with as managers were promoted sideways with little to no IT knowledge apart from buzzwords they picked up from the latest issue of MIS magazine (they were useless in their previous non-IT role but couldnt be shown the door for one reason or another).
Another 30% come from Novell/Windows Desktop support/helpdesk management and have little to no knowledge of how anything actually really works or scales (if it cant be pointed and clicked they have no clue). Unfortunately these clowns usually think they know everything... a little bit of knowledge in the wrong hands...
The last 10% (who you want to be working for) can be split into 2 groups.
a) The old grizzled Unix/Mainframe hands that have been fighting IT since the mid 80's, early 90's who were reluctantly pushed into management (great manager for cutting through the bullshit and getting the job done right, though prone to micromanagement and/or doing it all themselves). Generally dont get along with PHB managers, therefore have trouble pushing an agenda through an organisation.
b) The developers who worked themselves up through project management who may not know how everything works, but know how to ask questions and more importantly WHO to ask questions. These guys usually know how to push their agenda through the other 90% of PHB tards and perform the onerous task as acting as a buffer between the PHB tards and the guys shovelling at the coalface.
It is a rather sad indictment that most IT managers have zero idea of what they are managing, this doesn't happen so often in other technical industries...
Surplus cats were sent to universities worldwide for helping out with the quantum computing effort. They go through a lot of cats that way...