Yes. Good job Microsoft. You have successfully beta tested a version of Windows and actually made money from it too by selling it to your customers. You got all the negative feedback that you need to improve it, so now you get to charge all them poor saps all over again with Windows 7! I despise this company, but I gotta admit. They are business geniuses.
Yes. When you do work for a large government client, and they yell at you because the server you installed DON'T WORK!! when in actuality they type in their password wrong 5 times and get locked out, it makes you wonder where the glory went. The only glorified field of IT nowadays seems to be in research and development. Working with a team to actually MAKE something. It is this whole IT as a paid service thing that makes people feel horrible when the day is over. Businesses don't think that IT is worth the money, their outdated equipment breaks, then they blame it on you and make you feel like shit. I've invested quite a bit of time and money in to making my job easier. By means of learning new technology and using PSA with MSP type products to manage large amounts of clients. Still, it just keeps on sucking. Not trying to sound depressed or anything, but for christ's sake. I rather be coding, not fixing people's Outlook, MSN, MyWebSearch, AOL, WinAntiVirus2009 problems. Yes it does make you feel good because there are some people out there that truly appreciate the work you do for them. But 95% of your day can be filled with awesome clients and pats on the back. It only takes that 5% of people to ruin your day. Bring the glory back. Code more.
I thoroughly enjoyed my days as a rsync and unison user. However image based backups make the most sense nowadays. The only thing that sucks is that I've had a pretty hard time finding anything image based for Linux besides Acronis. If anyone is familiar with StorageCraft's ShadowProtect, this software is making huge strides in the enterprise. The server edition works wonders as does the desktop edition. If your server dies, you have full and incremental backups that can be restored to a machine with completely different hardware without any bluescreens thanks to the hardware independent restore feature. The server edition automates all this stuff as some of you may have seen with Zenith's BDR appliance which virtualizes your entire server if it ever goes down. It too runs on ShadowProtect. I'm sorry to say that this software isn't for Linux yet, but I'd like to see how Acronis works. If you can restore images to a virtualized environment, having a backup disaster recovery appliance that not only backs up in-house, but also uploads incremental images to a data center somewhere every hour/day/week, then you're talking some serious stuff. worth the money you pay for it if you need fast recovery times. I love rsync and unison, and I'm sure you could still use a method similar to that, but I rather see it in use with image based backups rather than.gz compressed backups.
Oh yea, and I forgot to mention that most of my clients servers with 200gb or more of company data takes on average 30 minutes to perform a full backup to an SATA based RD1000. The image becomes nice and compressed and can be restored at equally the same speed. if you're backing up to a BDR appliance with virtualization failover, then you're up in a few minutes. if you're restoring an image to a different server, then give it about 30-40 minutes and you are back in business. time is money, avoid downtime is crucial. maybe not for a college TV station though:-)
I'm very happy with the current build for x64 so far. it has come a long way. it runs incredibly fast as well. it is already my default browser despite its instability.
I understand you to a certain degree although I think you misinterpreted the point of my comment. I meant for my comment to portray the fact that I'm not very keen on MSP style software packages and the scam-like marketing schemes of the people selling them and how it is actually making the IT Firm business owners a group of money hungry dickheads. I didn't mention anything about outsourcing, but I'm trying to say that 80-90% of problems CAN be avoided thanks to some of these programs like Kaseya. The sysadmin is aware of the problems before the customers are, which is a good thing. And the whole purpose of being an MSP is to offer businesses monthly service contracts to cover monitoring and certain amounts of on-site visits. ONE guy can sit at a computer and monitor 1000-2000 workstations and servers, apply patches, cleanup temp files, remove viruses or spyware, ALOT/MSN/MyWebSearch toolbars, restart services automatically when the fail, and when all else fails they can remotely take control over a machine without the user even knowing it. Yes this is a valuable tool and costs about $60,000. It is also replacing senior technicians. My point being, I see more developer jobs on craigslist than sysadmin/technician jobs. so good luck.
Another thing that concerns me are MSP (Managed Service Provider) programs. They are technically essential for IT Vendors to come up with effective solutions to monitor all their clients' workstations and servers. If you have hundreds of clients all with anywhere from 5-50 workstations and a couple servers, you need an effective way to monitor them. Some of you may have heard of the "Kaseya" software. Being heavily promoted by the marketing expert Robin Robins who easily sways dorky IT guys in to spending THOUSANDS of dollars on OBVIOUS ways of marketing thanks to her good looks. Kaseya essentially allows you to install an agent on every computer in an organization, and it reports back to your server with a gold mine of information. It is a low memory, low CPU usage agent that can tell you when bad things happen in the event log, or when the computer is infected with a virus. More importantly when there are certain things that go wrong, you can execute custom scripts that may prevent or fix the problems without you even needing to leave the office for a service call. These are wonderful technologies of course, but sooner or later any idiot can be an MSP and manage thousands of clients without even needing to be an expert. Good bye IT:-\ You might as well start learning how to code instead of being a "Mr. Fixit" because people are coming up with new and better ways to be PROACTIVE IT Vendors rather than a REACTIVE Break-Fix IT Vendor.
well as I said in my first post, "to each his own". but frankly, you're not going to win anybody over by forcing them to learn commands and sift through menus. more importantly, consumers are going to complain no matter what kind of interface and tools you give them.
LOL man you're funny. I'm imagining what the UI would look like, and your list of commands if all the buttons and sections of the ribbon bar were converted in to such things. yea that's proficiency. oh and not to mention eye appealing. there are many types of people all who learn things differently. Being an on-site technician whose shop is directly located in front of a retirement community, I can tell you that a list of commands would make the elderly throw away their computers in frustration. which might not be a bad thing in the first place. I agree that hotkeys and menus help you get the job done quickly. Look at emacs for christ's sake. Ridiculous commands that aren't standard in any other program, and they even have commands for moving the cursor up and down. but you're frustration with the ribbon stems from something you and your father are already familiar with. he ribbon makes using references, citations, tables of contents, and formatting a hell of lot easier for people to understand since they get a nice visual as opposed to GUESSING and HOPING they pick the right hotkey or menu item. that is not proficiency and it happens everyday.
I too was very critical of the Office ribbon when it was first introduced. People don't like drastic changes to the way they work. But I do think that after you work with it on a daily basis, it really starts to help after time and makes tedious jobs more efficient. Nobody likes sifting through menus and over crowded toolbars. As much as I hated it at first, I learned to like it and the reason for its existence is to increase productivity and actually make it *easier* for people that are new to the Office Suite to find things. It makes logical sense when you look at the categories to choose from. Most people despised it because it is unfamiliar. Maybe it was bad timing for them to do that considering it was near the same time as Vista's release. Regardless, to each his own. I just hope OpenOffice.org isn't doing this to be a copy cat, but rather to make it easier for the average Joe to be productive and navigate through the program.
Most backup solutions are silly. The common user doesn't need a massive RAID array nor would they even understand how to recover if they ever experienced a disaster. Online backup solutions are *ok* but it is more likely that your hard drive dies than your house burns down. Now this isn't the perfect solution, but it is easy and it works. I highly recommend the ShadowProtect image based backup software. Matter of fact I would recommend any type of image based backup software. Being able to restore your entire computer with all your applications and data is really freakin' nice. More importantly, if your motherboard dies, you can do a hardware independent restore with your image so that you can restore your image to a totally different machine with totally different hardware and Windows won't bluescreen all to hell. All thanks to hardware abstraction layer. Yes we all wish we had off-site fireproof backups, but I trust my data with myself and only myself. So a couple external HD's with a backup image I think would be plenty sufficient for most people "in-home". And who said tapes were unreliable? Tapes are the longest lasting form of media ever in existence. hard drives die, and ink-based CDs and DVDs have a 5 year life expectancy.
I definitely understand where you're coming from. Interestingly enough though, programs like Google SketchUp are slow becoming an industry standard. I have a few architect friends that love the Pro version simply because you can get instant 3D renderings that normally take hours to render based off raw CAD data. To top it off, SketchUp exports and imports CAD files. As far as GIS is concerned, there are a decent amount of opensource applications out there. My wife is the GIS expert so I wouldn't be able to say whether the apps are any good, but its a start. If Google's OS is going to be based off Linux and GIS and CAD apps are a concern of the majority, I don't doubt for a second that they will focus a bit of their developers' time to fixing the problems people have with current Linux solutions.
it seems to me that memory usage is far less important that CPU usage. I mean if you spike out that processor, then your computer is at a fucking standstill. RAM is cheap, easy to upgrade, and can also be paged out to your hard drive. it is like putting a RAM upgrade in a Celeron. Yes it will *kinda* help with multitasking, but it will still be slow because the processor is holding it back. Chrome still has all of them beat in my eyes as far as speed is concerned.
Well you see. Thanks to proprietary drivers from bullshit MIDI controllers, the proper linux drivers can't be developed as quickly as it can with Windows. However, there are several programs out there that work perfectly fine with MIDI devices. You should really learn a little bit more about the software that is out there. The point of this article is that in the past 2 years, audio applications for Linux have grew dramatically in regards to support and functionality. Ardour can easily do MIDI stuff. There are also countless notational editors for KDE and Gnome that can capture MIDI as well. I can think of tons of professionals that could use a simple *FREE* composition program. And of course finally, there are quite a few USB MIDI controllers that are natively supported in Linux. THERE ARE TONS of people that use their Rolands with Linux thanks to libusb. You eat what you like, and I'll eat what I like. Which is free beer.
I HIGHLY agree with this. I thought audio production was at a complete standstill in the days of Rosegarden since it crashed for no reason on any machine I installed it on. It was a great concept, but it simply didn't work. When I installed Ardour I couldn't believe how great and functional it was. The ubuntustudio package is indeed a super easy way to get yourself up and running. Not to mention there is a pretty big following in #ardour on Freenode. Always someone there willing to lend a hand. Beats spending tons of Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, Sonar, or anything else out there. I believe there's a Mac version too.
definitely no offense, but if it has only been 1.5 years and you're already burnt out, then you might want to consider a different field.. you can stay in IT, but maybe not be as someone who serves customers. I miss the good ol' R&D jobs. there's some still floating around out there. But regardless, I work with a 5 man operation and we have about 75 business clients and about 2000 residential clients. The best way to not be so stressed out about this is to proactively monitor your networks so that YOU know about the problems before your customer does. It is the *only* way because it doesn't matter how many times you explain your policies to your customers, they will still want INSTANT service when something bad happens. It is almost impossible to avoid phone calls for minor things, but with the help of Managed Services you might very well be able to find a happy medium. Take a look at programs like Kaseya. Some people might scoff at this, but when you're growing fast, I think it is crucial for any small IT operation to use *big* software to help proactively monitor their networks instead of being reactive and just sit around waiting for problems all day and being stressed out.
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Yes. Good job Microsoft. You have successfully beta tested a version of Windows and actually made money from it too by selling it to your customers. You got all the negative feedback that you need to improve it, so now you get to charge all them poor saps all over again with Windows 7! I despise this company, but I gotta admit. They are business geniuses.
Yes. When you do work for a large government client, and they yell at you because the server you installed DON'T WORK!! when in actuality they type in their password wrong 5 times and get locked out, it makes you wonder where the glory went. The only glorified field of IT nowadays seems to be in research and development. Working with a team to actually MAKE something. It is this whole IT as a paid service thing that makes people feel horrible when the day is over. Businesses don't think that IT is worth the money, their outdated equipment breaks, then they blame it on you and make you feel like shit. I've invested quite a bit of time and money in to making my job easier. By means of learning new technology and using PSA with MSP type products to manage large amounts of clients. Still, it just keeps on sucking. Not trying to sound depressed or anything, but for christ's sake. I rather be coding, not fixing people's Outlook, MSN, MyWebSearch, AOL, WinAntiVirus2009 problems. Yes it does make you feel good because there are some people out there that truly appreciate the work you do for them. But 95% of your day can be filled with awesome clients and pats on the back. It only takes that 5% of people to ruin your day. Bring the glory back. Code more.
Does it run Linux?
Oh yea, and I forgot to mention that most of my clients servers with 200gb or more of company data takes on average 30 minutes to perform a full backup to an SATA based RD1000. The image becomes nice and compressed and can be restored at equally the same speed. if you're backing up to a BDR appliance with virtualization failover, then you're up in a few minutes. if you're restoring an image to a different server, then give it about 30-40 minutes and you are back in business. time is money, avoid downtime is crucial. maybe not for a college TV station though :-)
Go fuck yourself.
I'm very happy with the current build for x64 so far. it has come a long way. it runs incredibly fast as well. it is already my default browser despite its instability.
They're only depressed because Duke Nukem Forever hasn't been released yet. The same old games get boring after a while.
I understand you to a certain degree although I think you misinterpreted the point of my comment. I meant for my comment to portray the fact that I'm not very keen on MSP style software packages and the scam-like marketing schemes of the people selling them and how it is actually making the IT Firm business owners a group of money hungry dickheads. I didn't mention anything about outsourcing, but I'm trying to say that 80-90% of problems CAN be avoided thanks to some of these programs like Kaseya. The sysadmin is aware of the problems before the customers are, which is a good thing. And the whole purpose of being an MSP is to offer businesses monthly service contracts to cover monitoring and certain amounts of on-site visits. ONE guy can sit at a computer and monitor 1000-2000 workstations and servers, apply patches, cleanup temp files, remove viruses or spyware, ALOT/MSN/MyWebSearch toolbars, restart services automatically when the fail, and when all else fails they can remotely take control over a machine without the user even knowing it. Yes this is a valuable tool and costs about $60,000. It is also replacing senior technicians. My point being, I see more developer jobs on craigslist than sysadmin/technician jobs. so good luck.
Another thing that concerns me are MSP (Managed Service Provider) programs. They are technically essential for IT Vendors to come up with effective solutions to monitor all their clients' workstations and servers. If you have hundreds of clients all with anywhere from 5-50 workstations and a couple servers, you need an effective way to monitor them. Some of you may have heard of the "Kaseya" software. Being heavily promoted by the marketing expert Robin Robins who easily sways dorky IT guys in to spending THOUSANDS of dollars on OBVIOUS ways of marketing thanks to her good looks. Kaseya essentially allows you to install an agent on every computer in an organization, and it reports back to your server with a gold mine of information. It is a low memory, low CPU usage agent that can tell you when bad things happen in the event log, or when the computer is infected with a virus. More importantly when there are certain things that go wrong, you can execute custom scripts that may prevent or fix the problems without you even needing to leave the office for a service call. These are wonderful technologies of course, but sooner or later any idiot can be an MSP and manage thousands of clients without even needing to be an expert. Good bye IT :-\ You might as well start learning how to code instead of being a "Mr. Fixit" because people are coming up with new and better ways to be PROACTIVE IT Vendors rather than a REACTIVE Break-Fix IT Vendor.
that I can agree with you on 100% If I wasn't forced to use it at the office, I wouldn't use it at all.
well as I said in my first post, "to each his own". but frankly, you're not going to win anybody over by forcing them to learn commands and sift through menus. more importantly, consumers are going to complain no matter what kind of interface and tools you give them.
LOL man you're funny. I'm imagining what the UI would look like, and your list of commands if all the buttons and sections of the ribbon bar were converted in to such things. yea that's proficiency. oh and not to mention eye appealing. there are many types of people all who learn things differently. Being an on-site technician whose shop is directly located in front of a retirement community, I can tell you that a list of commands would make the elderly throw away their computers in frustration. which might not be a bad thing in the first place. I agree that hotkeys and menus help you get the job done quickly. Look at emacs for christ's sake. Ridiculous commands that aren't standard in any other program, and they even have commands for moving the cursor up and down. but you're frustration with the ribbon stems from something you and your father are already familiar with. he ribbon makes using references, citations, tables of contents, and formatting a hell of lot easier for people to understand since they get a nice visual as opposed to GUESSING and HOPING they pick the right hotkey or menu item. that is not proficiency and it happens everyday.
I too was very critical of the Office ribbon when it was first introduced. People don't like drastic changes to the way they work. But I do think that after you work with it on a daily basis, it really starts to help after time and makes tedious jobs more efficient. Nobody likes sifting through menus and over crowded toolbars. As much as I hated it at first, I learned to like it and the reason for its existence is to increase productivity and actually make it *easier* for people that are new to the Office Suite to find things. It makes logical sense when you look at the categories to choose from. Most people despised it because it is unfamiliar. Maybe it was bad timing for them to do that considering it was near the same time as Vista's release. Regardless, to each his own. I just hope OpenOffice.org isn't doing this to be a copy cat, but rather to make it easier for the average Joe to be productive and navigate through the program.
I always thought the 2012 thing was a hoax. but not anymore.
I really wish eBay sellers would take just an extra 60 seconds to wipe off and clean their items before taking pictures.
my favorite!
Most backup solutions are silly. The common user doesn't need a massive RAID array nor would they even understand how to recover if they ever experienced a disaster. Online backup solutions are *ok* but it is more likely that your hard drive dies than your house burns down. Now this isn't the perfect solution, but it is easy and it works. I highly recommend the ShadowProtect image based backup software. Matter of fact I would recommend any type of image based backup software. Being able to restore your entire computer with all your applications and data is really freakin' nice. More importantly, if your motherboard dies, you can do a hardware independent restore with your image so that you can restore your image to a totally different machine with totally different hardware and Windows won't bluescreen all to hell. All thanks to hardware abstraction layer. Yes we all wish we had off-site fireproof backups, but I trust my data with myself and only myself. So a couple external HD's with a backup image I think would be plenty sufficient for most people "in-home". And who said tapes were unreliable? Tapes are the longest lasting form of media ever in existence. hard drives die, and ink-based CDs and DVDs have a 5 year life expectancy.
I definitely understand where you're coming from. Interestingly enough though, programs like Google SketchUp are slow becoming an industry standard. I have a few architect friends that love the Pro version simply because you can get instant 3D renderings that normally take hours to render based off raw CAD data. To top it off, SketchUp exports and imports CAD files. As far as GIS is concerned, there are a decent amount of opensource applications out there. My wife is the GIS expert so I wouldn't be able to say whether the apps are any good, but its a start. If Google's OS is going to be based off Linux and GIS and CAD apps are a concern of the majority, I don't doubt for a second that they will focus a bit of their developers' time to fixing the problems people have with current Linux solutions.
that's why there's Google Sketchup.
it seems to me that memory usage is far less important that CPU usage. I mean if you spike out that processor, then your computer is at a fucking standstill. RAM is cheap, easy to upgrade, and can also be paged out to your hard drive. it is like putting a RAM upgrade in a Celeron. Yes it will *kinda* help with multitasking, but it will still be slow because the processor is holding it back. Chrome still has all of them beat in my eyes as far as speed is concerned.
I was referring to this comment: "Real penetration into the pro audio world, guys !" which is complete bullshit.
haha funny how you mention Yamaha when a lot of their digital pianos are actually running linux. such as the Disklavier Mark IV. so yea.. bye bye.
Well you see. Thanks to proprietary drivers from bullshit MIDI controllers, the proper linux drivers can't be developed as quickly as it can with Windows. However, there are several programs out there that work perfectly fine with MIDI devices. You should really learn a little bit more about the software that is out there. The point of this article is that in the past 2 years, audio applications for Linux have grew dramatically in regards to support and functionality. Ardour can easily do MIDI stuff. There are also countless notational editors for KDE and Gnome that can capture MIDI as well. I can think of tons of professionals that could use a simple *FREE* composition program. And of course finally, there are quite a few USB MIDI controllers that are natively supported in Linux. THERE ARE TONS of people that use their Rolands with Linux thanks to libusb. You eat what you like, and I'll eat what I like. Which is free beer.
I HIGHLY agree with this. I thought audio production was at a complete standstill in the days of Rosegarden since it crashed for no reason on any machine I installed it on. It was a great concept, but it simply didn't work. When I installed Ardour I couldn't believe how great and functional it was. The ubuntustudio package is indeed a super easy way to get yourself up and running. Not to mention there is a pretty big following in #ardour on Freenode. Always someone there willing to lend a hand. Beats spending tons of Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, Sonar, or anything else out there. I believe there's a Mac version too.
definitely no offense, but if it has only been 1.5 years and you're already burnt out, then you might want to consider a different field.. you can stay in IT, but maybe not be as someone who serves customers. I miss the good ol' R&D jobs. there's some still floating around out there. But regardless, I work with a 5 man operation and we have about 75 business clients and about 2000 residential clients. The best way to not be so stressed out about this is to proactively monitor your networks so that YOU know about the problems before your customer does. It is the *only* way because it doesn't matter how many times you explain your policies to your customers, they will still want INSTANT service when something bad happens. It is almost impossible to avoid phone calls for minor things, but with the help of Managed Services you might very well be able to find a happy medium. Take a look at programs like Kaseya. Some people might scoff at this, but when you're growing fast, I think it is crucial for any small IT operation to use *big* software to help proactively monitor their networks instead of being reactive and just sit around waiting for problems all day and being stressed out.