I don't know how I wound up as AC, but that was in fact me.
Anyhow.
Yes, I think you should have some facts about why Windows is bad instead of just calling it unholy. You don't have to trot out the whole manifesto but a few words about it would be nice.
Yes, I find it totally acceptable for Windows and/or VMware to be between the operating system I'm trying to learn about and the hardware.
I assume that, if I decide I like the OS well enough to actually use it for something, it will have sufficiently good drivers on sufficiently standard hardware. But that would be phase 2 of an evaluation - because an OS is a hell of a lot more than its hardware support.
Or, I might continue to use it in a virtualized environment rather than directly on real hardware - maybe I would decide that level of performance is adequate for my needs.
Unless you're trying to do high performance graphics or massive calculations (and maybe that's your gig, I don't know) virtualized environments sure don't seem crippled.
My first job had 4 people in one room. This was a long time ago in a small, cheap company so we each had a standard 5-foot steel desk with a 386sx computer on it running Windows 3.11.
The computers were slow, and we were just using them as terminals, so we made them take them out and give us serial terminals instead. (The serial cables were in place already, and the terminals was sitting on shelves in the back room.)
There was one phone, on a file cabinet in the middle of the room. It had a long enough cord to reach all the desks.
We were all from different enough backgrounds (the fresh-from-college nerd, the mom, the Chinese guy and the jock) that there wasn't a lot of wasted time on stupid conversations. And everyone was clean.
As others have said, you should ask your developers. But here's my opionions:
If you can manage to give everyone their own office, preferably with a door, do that instead. My happiest office experience was at a small company that was slowly going out of business. When one of the VPs left, I managed to snag his office. Big office, plush (but old) carpet, giant desk, plenty of outlets, and a window. It did have two doors, so people tended to use it as a hallway, but there were so few people left in the company by then it wasn't too bad.
If they have to share a room, I say a desk for everyone. Not a shared table. If you're using actual discrete desks, put up some "Les Nessman walls" and let the individual developers position stuff how they want in their "office." Some will want to face the center, some will want to face the wall.
If you insist on using a cube/furniture system, our layout is tolerable. We each have a u-shaped desk with the open end of the u facing an aisle. Between the desks is a cube wall just high enough that I have to raise up out of my chair about a foot to see the next guy. That height cube wall make it possible to hear the neighbors but ignore them if you want.
In my case, I have the support team lead as my neighbor to the left, so if one of his guys shows up I kind of open one ear and offer information if they sound like they need it. But I handle interruption pretty well.
I have a very technical job in what is fundamentally not a technology company. (We're almost a shrink-wrap software house inside a giant retailer, doing software strictly for our stores.)
I constantly bang into the "Websense" deployment, because one of its filters is "hacking." Well damn it, it's the hackers who have figured out some of the stuff I need to know. Sometimes there's a demo or something else that is a video on YouTube or one of the others, so don't block that stuff just because you don't need it.
At the company I work for, we do actually run every set of virus updates through our QA group prior to deploying to our retail locations.
That means that the update frequency is monthly, but the retail locations are firewalled, and the retail users' web access is white listed, so we think this is the right trade-off for us.
OK, it's because you're so biased against Windows that using a reasonable tool (virtualization) for learning purposes that happens to probably but not necessarily run on top of Windows makes it wrong.
The first place I turn to play with a new OS is to a VM - because I don't have a lab full of computers, and I don't want to risk trashing the partition where all my personal stuff lives to an install error. And I am a computer professional, not some student who's still learning his way around.
The future of data centers is virtualization. You need to learn more about it if you think it's just "a crappy layer running on top of Windows.
For class work I'd use VMware Player over VMware Server. The VM is running while the user wants it, then is automatically shutdown or suspended (depending on user configuration) when they're done.
I don't know for sure when the virtualization extensions showed up in the Intel product line, but I can report that, at my job, we have at least a thousand (geographically dispersed) Pentium 4 systems happily running VMware Server, each with two virtual machines (one Windows, one Unix.)
My recommendation in this whole debate is VMware Player + whatever distro you know best. Player is free, and it works fine on almost anything that can run Windows acceptably well.
We're using it a lot at work for the BAs to have their own copy of our production systems. I just helped one today (but she could have done it without me. She laughed about how easy it was, and that I was having to help people with it.)
Most people have Windows computers at home. Those who have Macs can go buy Fusion and play along just fine.
I know this may not be popular, but debit cards are dangerous if lost, especially if a branded debit card. (I think that's the "proper" term for a Visa/MC/Discover debit card. It's what our treasury and acquirer/processor folks use, anyhow.)
I have a branded debit card issued by my bank, but it expired two years ago. I use it to get cash out of their ATMs. Because it expired it's unusable as a Visa card.
For my day to day purchases, I use a proper MasterCard - a credit card. Everything goes on it - I've gone weeks without touching cash.
I pay it off every month. I don't charge things I can't afford. If I lose it, at most I'm out $50.
More likely, Chase will phone me and ask if I really ordered a computer to be shipped to Nigeria, and I'll say no.
The ONLY problem I've EVER had was that Chase didn't get my profile right for a while last year - they were shutting down my card and calling me once a week to confirm things I really did.
So I used my Citi card for 6 months, let Chase cool off, and now I'm back to Chase. So far so good.
And I earn points. Lots of points. Points I can use to get free stuff. Do you get that with cash?
If these are desktops, for "grounding" take the keyboard, mouse and power cord and lock them in your car trunk. If laptops, just lock the whole thing up.
My parents used to take away the stereo speakers as a punishment. Same concept.
For "hours of access" don't put the computers in the little darling's bedrooms, and send them to bed. That will mostly take care of filtering, too; nobody wants to be looking at porn in the family room.
When my stepson was 9 he had a computer in his bedroom. I put in a router rule to keep it off the internet but still let him print to the network printer. I don't know if he figured out how to get past it or not. The computer he could use with internet access was next to the TV in the living room.
PCI-DSS isn't government, though. It's supposedly an "industry coalition" but what it really is, mostly, is Visa.
If anything goes wrong, the merchant involved can be found to be in violation - everyone is in violation if you look hard enough - so it's the merchant's fault.
I read an article somewhere that said merchants should just find the cheapest, least competent auditor they can, and get them to declare the merchant PCI-DSS compliant, then do what you think is right to be secure.
Anything else is just wasted money - because if there's a breach, by definition, you were insecure, and therefore not PCI-DSS compliant.
So get the paper, then make yourself as secure as you possibly can, ignoring the BS from the auditors who don't really understand your environment.
I"m not saying I 100% agree, but it is an interesting argument.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm sick of "too big to ___________."
No company is too big to fail, or to prosecute. I just don't buy it.
If Pfizer couldn't have sold drugs to the government, well, maybe they would have had to sell their drug lines or license them to drug companies who could.
I'll bet another drug company would be glad to manufacture the drugs under license and make most, but not all, of the profit that Pfizer is making off those drugs.
Probably one of the big name companies, but there are a ton of smaller companies that primarily manufacture generics, too.
Re:Prosecuting corporations for crimes is asinine.
on
The Short Arm of the Law
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not necessarily figuratively.
If a corporation's actions lead to deaths in a jurisdiction that has a death penalty for those actions if committed by a person, then the people within the corporation responsible for those actions should be eligible for that as well.
"I was just following orders" isn't acceptable in a war crimes trial, it shouldn't be here either.
Unintended stops, stalls, misfires, or resets wouldn't make the news. If they were to happen at the same extremely low frequency as the acceleration problems, nobody would even notice.
The owner might not notice the misfire (probably wouldn't, really) and the other stuff would result in the car going in, being scanned, nothing found, and it never happening again.
So both dealer and owner would shrug and move on with their lives.
I'm of the opinion that this is going to turn out to be a software defect, or at least fixed by a software change. There's clearly a computer in the car that knows if the brakes are applied and also has some measure of throttle control (that's how cruise control works.) Maybe they should do a new firmware that ignores throttle input and goes to zero if they are.
Just like the rest of us do in software - if you can't figure out why something is happening, just make it stop happening, via brute force if necessary.
(I have no idea if the computers in the vehicle are designed such that such a firmware change is even possible. Quite possibly not.)
I can accept that, technically, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them.
But the US has taken these people, on a battlefield of sorts, and is detaining them.
If we are not to treat them as POWs, and are not to treat them as accused criminals, then we need another model - a model that is 100% compatible with the spirit of the country's founding fathers and founding documents - the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
The United States has a moral and ethical responsibility to not be evil, to preserve freedom, to respect and promote individual rights and individual liberties. Even at the expense of personal safety of its citizens, or "homeland security."
I don't understand why our government is so incapable of doing so.
I hoped that Obama would have the strength to fix this, over the protests of the generals and the intelligence agencies if needed.
It appears, sadly, that he does not. Maybe the former POW would have been the better choice for people who care about this issue - but probably not, given the neocon control of the Republican party.
I am not only American and love America, I have (almost) always voted Republican.
Gitmo needs to be closed as a detention facility. I'm not even sure it needs to exist as a naval base, but that's a different issue.
The "detainees" are either criminals or they are prisoners of war.
We have rules for dealing with both. A determination needs to be made, one by one, in an expedited manner, which is which, and those rules followed.
If we can't assign a person to either group then maybe they should be released wherever they were captured, with a change of clothes and an apology for the water boarding and genital chewing.
The fact that we are apparently incapable of doing so and would rather continue the water boarding and genital chewing is an embarrassment.
Instead, if the Chicago Tribune is to be believed, we're going to start sending them to Bagram (Afghanistan) instead. (Today's paper, section 1, page 25.)
The whole point of "closing Gitmo" is supposed to be to do the right thing - not to do the wrong thing again, just somewhere else. Some quotes:
But without a location outside the U.S. for sending prisoners, the administration must resort to turning terrorism suspects over to foreign governments, bringing them to U.S. soil, or killing them.
U.S. officials find those options unappealing for handling suspects they want to question but lack the evidence to prosecute. For such suspects, a facility like Bagram is necessary, officials said."
...terrorism suspects held inside the U.S. would likely have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. Bagram, for now, is outside the reach of U.S. courts.
From my perspective, that is kind of the point. If the U.S. government is holding someone, that person should have access to U.S. courts, or they should be subject to the Geneva Convention rules. Period.
This kind of behavior is not what the United States is supposed to stand for - it isn't even what we are supposed to tolerate in other countries.
I would guess that most people who use power tools do so with very few injuries. I've been using power tools of one sort of another for around 30 years now (I'm 41) and the only time I've done myself any serious damage was with the electric hedge trimmers (and even that didn't require medical attention. Hurt like hell though.)
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Agreed. I've had a lot of fun catching up with high school friends I haven't seen or heard from in almost 25 years.
Would I have ever gone and found these people via a more traditional mechanism? Of course not.
Is it fun to chat with them, hear about who died, who had kids, and argue about politics? Yes.
Could I live without it? Yes.
I don't know how I wound up as AC, but that was in fact me.
Anyhow.
Yes, I think you should have some facts about why Windows is bad instead of just calling it unholy. You don't have to trot out the whole manifesto but a few words about it would be nice.
Yes, I find it totally acceptable for Windows and/or VMware to be between the operating system I'm trying to learn about and the hardware.
I assume that, if I decide I like the OS well enough to actually use it for something, it will have sufficiently good drivers on sufficiently standard hardware. But that would be phase 2 of an evaluation - because an OS is a hell of a lot more than its hardware support.
Or, I might continue to use it in a virtualized environment rather than directly on real hardware - maybe I would decide that level of performance is adequate for my needs.
Unless you're trying to do high performance graphics or massive calculations (and maybe that's your gig, I don't know) virtualized environments sure don't seem crippled.
My first job had 4 people in one room. This was a long time ago in a small, cheap company so we each had a standard 5-foot steel desk with a 386sx computer on it running Windows 3.11.
The computers were slow, and we were just using them as terminals, so we made them take them out and give us serial terminals instead. (The serial cables were in place already, and the terminals was sitting on shelves in the back room.)
There was one phone, on a file cabinet in the middle of the room. It had a long enough cord to reach all the desks.
We were all from different enough backgrounds (the fresh-from-college nerd, the mom, the Chinese guy and the jock) that there wasn't a lot of wasted time on stupid conversations. And everyone was clean.
As others have said, you should ask your developers. But here's my opionions:
If you can manage to give everyone their own office, preferably with a door, do that instead. My happiest office experience was at a small company that was slowly going out of business. When one of the VPs left, I managed to snag his office. Big office, plush (but old) carpet, giant desk, plenty of outlets, and a window. It did have two doors, so people tended to use it as a hallway, but there were so few people left in the company by then it wasn't too bad.
If they have to share a room, I say a desk for everyone. Not a shared table. If you're using actual discrete desks, put up some "Les Nessman walls" and let the individual developers position stuff how they want in their "office." Some will want to face the center, some will want to face the wall.
If you insist on using a cube/furniture system, our layout is tolerable. We each have a u-shaped desk with the open end of the u facing an aisle. Between the desks is a cube wall just high enough that I have to raise up out of my chair about a foot to see the next guy. That height cube wall make it possible to hear the neighbors but ignore them if you want.
In my case, I have the support team lead as my neighbor to the left, so if one of his guys shows up I kind of open one ear and offer information if they sound like they need it. But I handle interruption pretty well.
I have a very technical job in what is fundamentally not a technology company. (We're almost a shrink-wrap software house inside a giant retailer, doing software strictly for our stores.)
I constantly bang into the "Websense" deployment, because one of its filters is "hacking." Well damn it, it's the hackers who have figured out some of the stuff I need to know. Sometimes there's a demo or something else that is a video on YouTube or one of the others, so don't block that stuff just because you don't need it.
At the company I work for, we do actually run every set of virus updates through our QA group prior to deploying to our retail locations.
That means that the update frequency is monthly, but the retail locations are firewalled, and the retail users' web access is white listed, so we think this is the right trade-off for us.
OK, it's because you're so biased against Windows that using a reasonable tool (virtualization) for learning purposes that happens to probably but not necessarily run on top of Windows makes it wrong.
The first place I turn to play with a new OS is to a VM - because I don't have a lab full of computers, and I don't want to risk trashing the partition where all my personal stuff lives to an install error. And I am a computer professional, not some student who's still learning his way around.
The future of data centers is virtualization. You need to learn more about it if you think it's just "a crappy layer running on top of Windows.
One question:
Why?
For class work I'd use VMware Player over VMware Server. The VM is running while the user wants it, then is automatically shutdown or suspended (depending on user configuration) when they're done.
I don't know for sure when the virtualization extensions showed up in the Intel product line, but I can report that, at my job, we have at least a thousand (geographically dispersed) Pentium 4 systems happily running VMware Server, each with two virtual machines (one Windows, one Unix.)
My recommendation in this whole debate is VMware Player + whatever distro you know best. Player is free, and it works fine on almost anything that can run Windows acceptably well.
We're using it a lot at work for the BAs to have their own copy of our production systems. I just helped one today (but she could have done it without me. She laughed about how easy it was, and that I was having to help people with it.)
Most people have Windows computers at home. Those who have Macs can go buy Fusion and play along just fine.
I know this may not be popular, but debit cards are dangerous if lost, especially if a branded debit card. (I think that's the "proper" term for a Visa/MC/Discover debit card. It's what our treasury and acquirer/processor folks use, anyhow.)
I have a branded debit card issued by my bank, but it expired two years ago. I use it to get cash out of their ATMs. Because it expired it's unusable as a Visa card.
For my day to day purchases, I use a proper MasterCard - a credit card. Everything goes on it - I've gone weeks without touching cash.
I pay it off every month. I don't charge things I can't afford. If I lose it, at most I'm out $50.
More likely, Chase will phone me and ask if I really ordered a computer to be shipped to Nigeria, and I'll say no.
The ONLY problem I've EVER had was that Chase didn't get my profile right for a while last year - they were shutting down my card and calling me once a week to confirm things I really did.
So I used my Citi card for 6 months, let Chase cool off, and now I'm back to Chase. So far so good.
And I earn points. Lots of points. Points I can use to get free stuff. Do you get that with cash?
And I had headphones when the parents took the stereo speakers.
Stop by now and then and 1) see if there's a keyboard, and 2) see if the case is warm. If so, punish further, rinse, and repeat.
If the parent has the tech savvy to manage it, fine, do firewall stuff.
If they're low tech/no tech, work the physical layer.
Shocking as it may sound, taking a computer off the network isn't the same as disabling it. ITunes and (some) games will still work.
If these are desktops, for "grounding" take the keyboard, mouse and power cord and lock them in your car trunk. If laptops, just lock the whole thing up.
My parents used to take away the stereo speakers as a punishment. Same concept.
For "hours of access" don't put the computers in the little darling's bedrooms, and send them to bed. That will mostly take care of filtering, too; nobody wants to be looking at porn in the family room.
When my stepson was 9 he had a computer in his bedroom. I put in a router rule to keep it off the internet but still let him print to the network printer. I don't know if he figured out how to get past it or not. The computer he could use with internet access was next to the TV in the living room.
PCI-DSS isn't government, though. It's supposedly an "industry coalition" but what it really is, mostly, is Visa.
If anything goes wrong, the merchant involved can be found to be in violation - everyone is in violation if you look hard enough - so it's the merchant's fault.
I read an article somewhere that said merchants should just find the cheapest, least competent auditor they can, and get them to declare the merchant PCI-DSS compliant, then do what you think is right to be secure.
Anything else is just wasted money - because if there's a breach, by definition, you were insecure, and therefore not PCI-DSS compliant.
So get the paper, then make yourself as secure as you possibly can, ignoring the BS from the auditors who don't really understand your environment.
I"m not saying I 100% agree, but it is an interesting argument.
You are a small merchant. You are making the mistake of believing that what you experience is what everyone experiences.
Merchants are split into three groups, "A", "B", and "C" if I remember correctly.
Class "C" merchants just have to do a questionnaire.
Class "B" merchants have to do more, I'm not sure what exactly.
Class "A" merchants have auditors in every year writing reports, and they always find something to ding you on.
It's a nightmare.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm sick of "too big to ___________."
No company is too big to fail, or to prosecute. I just don't buy it.
If Pfizer couldn't have sold drugs to the government, well, maybe they would have had to sell their drug lines or license them to drug companies who could.
I'll bet another drug company would be glad to manufacture the drugs under license and make most, but not all, of the profit that Pfizer is making off those drugs.
Probably one of the big name companies, but there are a ton of smaller companies that primarily manufacture generics, too.
Not necessarily figuratively.
If a corporation's actions lead to deaths in a jurisdiction that has a death penalty for those actions if committed by a person, then the people within the corporation responsible for those actions should be eligible for that as well.
"I was just following orders" isn't acceptable in a war crimes trial, it shouldn't be here either.
Unintended stops, stalls, misfires, or resets wouldn't make the news. If they were to happen at the same extremely low frequency as the acceleration problems, nobody would even notice.
The owner might not notice the misfire (probably wouldn't, really) and the other stuff would result in the car going in, being scanned, nothing found, and it never happening again.
So both dealer and owner would shrug and move on with their lives.
I'm of the opinion that this is going to turn out to be a software defect, or at least fixed by a software change. There's clearly a computer in the car that knows if the brakes are applied and also has some measure of throttle control (that's how cruise control works.) Maybe they should do a new firmware that ignores throttle input and goes to zero if they are.
Just like the rest of us do in software - if you can't figure out why something is happening, just make it stop happening, via brute force if necessary.
(I have no idea if the computers in the vehicle are designed such that such a firmware change is even possible. Quite possibly not.)
I can accept that, technically, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them.
But the US has taken these people, on a battlefield of sorts, and is detaining them.
If we are not to treat them as POWs, and are not to treat them as accused criminals, then we need another model - a model that is 100% compatible with the spirit of the country's founding fathers and founding documents - the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
The United States has a moral and ethical responsibility to not be evil, to preserve freedom, to respect and promote individual rights and individual liberties. Even at the expense of personal safety of its citizens, or "homeland security."
I don't understand why our government is so incapable of doing so.
I hoped that Obama would have the strength to fix this, over the protests of the generals and the intelligence agencies if needed.
It appears, sadly, that he does not. Maybe the former POW would have been the better choice for people who care about this issue - but probably not, given the neocon control of the Republican party.
I am not only American and love America, I have (almost) always voted Republican.
Gitmo needs to be closed as a detention facility. I'm not even sure it needs to exist as a naval base, but that's a different issue.
The "detainees" are either criminals or they are prisoners of war.
We have rules for dealing with both. A determination needs to be made, one by one, in an expedited manner, which is which, and those rules followed.
If we can't assign a person to either group then maybe they should be released wherever they were captured, with a change of clothes and an apology for the water boarding and genital chewing.
The fact that we are apparently incapable of doing so and would rather continue the water boarding and genital chewing is an embarrassment.
Instead, if the Chicago Tribune is to be believed, we're going to start sending them to Bagram (Afghanistan) instead. (Today's paper, section 1, page 25.)
The whole point of "closing Gitmo" is supposed to be to do the right thing - not to do the wrong thing again, just somewhere else. Some quotes:
From my perspective, that is kind of the point. If the U.S. government is holding someone, that person should have access to U.S. courts, or they should be subject to the Geneva Convention rules. Period.
This kind of behavior is not what the United States is supposed to stand for - it isn't even what we are supposed to tolerate in other countries.
That was my dad's rule from when I was a kid. He was aiming at a rule for a kid stumbling on a gun, not someone actually supposed to be using one.
In my opinion, #1 and #2 are kind of taken up in my rule.
Hooking onto your gun-stupidity....
There's really only one rule you need to follow to be safe with guns:
Never point one at anyone or anything you don't want dead. No matter what. Even if you think it isn't loaded.
I wasn't "boasting." This was just statement of fact.
Fifth or sixth grade. Kind of implies it wasn't MY table saw, doesn't it?
It was roughly 1980. It was my dad's saw, a fairly cheap Craftsman, and the blade guard, frankly, sucked.
It sucked terribly.
It made it almost impossible to actually cut a piece of wood successfully, which is an important function for a saw. So he took it off.
"not if but when"? Really?
I would guess that most people who use power tools do so with very few injuries. I've been using power tools of one sort of another for around 30 years now (I'm 41) and the only time I've done myself any serious damage was with the electric hedge trimmers (and even that didn't require medical attention. Hurt like hell though.)
The stupid kind who isn't that fond of his fingers.
I was successfully using a table saw, unsupervised, with no blade guard, by 5th or 6th grade.
My fingers were never near the blade. Because I'm not stupid.