Equity in a company should reward those who take a risk (such as putting in some VC or working unpaid hours until the business is mature), not those who get paid by the hour, even if they work hard. Especially as a contractor you are expected to work hard and you (should) get good money for that commitment.
IMO if you think you are a valuable asset then you should request a higher rate - if you are right they will agree, and if you are not right then better find somewhere else to shine.
Also if you have been working there for a while and you bring up the question of options once they start to have good revenues, then it could suggest that you are in mostly for the money.
I think Google should not be indexing Facebook. And they should also not be indexing websites like experts-exchange.com or bigresources.com that keep polluting the search results when I am googling for an answer to a technical problem.
I don't understand why the IT world is going down the drain like that. Ten years ago there was Dejanews - a gold mine for technical people, a place to go in your hour of need when you had this mysterious log entry and all you had to access usenet was Lynx. Also a place to hang out on your lunch break at the office and help other people. The best of both worlds - usenet and the web; I remember knowing what search keywords to use to always find that one-liner I sometime needed. Then Google took over (poorly) and now usenet is a wasteland of pr0n, spam and support groups for people with albino cats.
Nowadays if you look for an answer you have to deal with thousands of poorly maintained forums. You find blog posts from two years ago where the answer does not apply anymore. You get Wikipedia entries where there is just enough information to be listed in the results but not enough to help you. And if you want to help people you need to start your own blog or to post a comment on another blog.
It will be a sad day when I will get results from Facebook while googling for a problem with mod_autoindex.
The real cost is not 170,000,000.00$, it is 170,000,009.99$ because I was planning to buy Tetris from the PSN and with their lousy security they just lost my business...
That should teach them, and if this is not enougn, I will also not hesitate to send them a strongly worded letter.
> Geez, you can know a nerd from his over analyzing narrow vision, and conclusions based on air.
Says the guy who complains about Windows questions to someone who posted a joke about Seagate hard drives.
> Please, post your Windows questions somewhere else, on your favorite forum, I really don't care where
There was never a Windows question. I suggest you read again my post really slow (maybe with the help of someone), then read you reply, and if it does not dawn on you that it is you that brought Windows, Microsoft and.net in this thread then you should have a serious talk with those voices inside your head because they are misleading you (and if one of them is telling you to hurt people then maybe you should start to worry).
> All I ask for, is less Microsoft while reading Slashdot.
Again, you are the one who brought Microsoft in this thread. This being said, you have no control over what is posted by other people and while you can make all the demands you want, unless you have some kind of leverage like a hijacked plane full of kids and puppies, I suspect you will never obtain satisfaction.
The pursuit of happiness is part of the American dream so you are welcome to keep complaining all the time, but I would say your odds of success will be significantly higher if you don't bring up yourself the subjects you dislike.
You fool, hot babes don't play chess, they are too busy posing for cheap t-shirts ads, wearing headsets (see http://www.headsethotties.com/) and/or using their charms to make people sign waivers when they get caught in lousy hidden camera pranks. Duh.
Not only those people give asylum to known subversive people (such as Bobby Fischer) but with their volcano eruptions they are speeding up glaciers melting, causing people to believe in global warming. And whenever they run out of money because they can't do proper banking they make deals with the communists.
If they could send the fumes over Libya it could cripple the army and help the revolution - but no, they prefer bothering the good people who are planning a trip to Europe.
(Days like this one, I feel like I could do a pretty decent job at Fox news).
> Although, the real problem is that you're posting on Slashdot about it. We're not interested, ok?
It's easy to spot insecure people, they tend to talk in the name of a group because they feel their opinion as an individual is not worth a lot.
I am curious as to who is this "we" you talk about. Are you a spokeperson for the Slashdot community as a whole, or just a very specific subset, some kind of elite group maybe? Do you have a newsletter I could subscribe to, or maybe a webring or a Facebook page? Do you have a secret handshake that I could use to talk my way out of a ticket or to cut in line at the theater?
> I'm sure there's a.net forum somewhere you can rant on.
Out of curiosity I took a quick look at your recent posts and there is a pattern... Usually you tell people to go post their stuff on Digg, but in my case you made an exception and suggested for some reason to find a.net forum. Which is peculiar, since my post was about hard drives.
Either you are a true Slashdot Vigilante, or you are a shareholder of Digg and various.net forums and you try to bring in more traffic. Tsk tsk.
In any case, I friended you (as neutral, but still). I am looking forward to see more of your posts in the future, and for everybody's convenience maybe you could include a hyperlink to Digg so I would not need a bookmark, I would just need to have a look at your redundant posts.
> The backup directory has a pristine copy of the current data, with the outdated content stored as incrementals going back as far as you want. (We do 13 months.)
Which is awesome. Having 13 months of deltas that are absolute garbage if you lose the backup directory means that every time you run your backup you play russian roulette with your deltas (and with 12.96 months of backup history). You might feel like you have a bullet-proof system but actually my aunt who runs NTBackup every once in a while is better protected than you (she also does a terrific apple pie).
Keeping old deltas is not a backup strategy. Keeping old deltas is a convenience that one can offfer to users so they can access data as it was a long time ago. For disaster recovery purposes, one need reliable, fully independent backups.
Once in a while we see in the news some big company who lost a lot of data and was unable to restore it from their backup. A long chain of deltas is often involved.
> Any sort of delta/snapshot style backup strategy handles this just fine. As long as you have enough space on the backup media to store all of the deltas for the time duration that you want
I totally disagree with your backup strategy, however you are correct that an unlimited amount of deltas and an unlimited amount of space will definitely handle the loss of a file - as long as your main backup is working and as long as the creation and loss of the file does not occur between your backup windows.
Do you check that all your files are there before taking a backup? Probably not. Even if you have a very complex strategy of nested backup with grandfather and his whole family, odds are that once you notice that the said file is gone, it is also gone on your backup.
You see, just typing stuff in uppercase does not mean you are right. There is a whole discipline around this kind of stuff, it's called Information Lifecycle Management. But in any case this is completely off-topic, as my comment was merely an opportunity to complain about my bad experience with Seagate hard disks.
> RAID IS NOT A SUBSTITUTION FOR BACKUPS!
UPPERCASE IS NOT A SUBSTITION FOR HAVING SOMETHING INTERESTING TO SAY.
> Call me when that toy becomes as powerful as the Linux/UNIX tools we've been using for decades.
Well don't get involved in a thread about automation on Windows if you are not interested. Showing your incredible SSH skills and your disdain for Windows is definitely impressive but it is also off-topic.
But one thing is sure: as soon as I can get a client to have a budget so someone can send himself files with mutt I will contact you (I hope they won't pay by the line otherwise it will be a bad deal for you with your powerful 7-liners).
> What the heck does it mean that PS can extend the.Net framework, and itself be extended by.Net
Using.Net you can create commands (CmdLets) which can then be used in Powershell scripts. It is therefore pretty easy to extend the built-in CmdLets by adding something customized for your needs. You can even dynamically create data types in Powershell using C# syntax, and then use the objects in the scripts.
On the other hand you can invoke Powershell from a.Net software to use its powerful features. Many tools nowadays in the System Center suite are built using Powershell, and only the GUI is done in C#. Powershell is more fluid and flexible.
Most enterprise software on Windows now comes with a.Net SDK; being able to interact with those libraries in a scripting language is very convenient.
> To be more convincing, I would like to see some example commands showcasing the power and flexibility of PS.
Just an example, using PowerCLI (the VMWare Powershell extension), if you want to get the list of VMs on all the hosts managed by the VC to which you are connected, you simply use this command:
Get-Hosts | Get-VM
and if you want the output in a nice CSV file that you can then import in a DB or open with Excel, you type this:
Now with this short one-liner you can get you VM inventory; imagine what you can do with a whole script. The piping is extremely powerful, the engine will figure out if you pass a property, an object or a string. But you can also use enumerators (such as For Each) or use a Perl-like notation (such as | % {} instead of For Each).
> Quite honestly, your post just seems like a bunch of buzzwords
The original question was about automation on Windows; I think Powershell is a perfect tool for that kind of task so I had to disagree with the guy who said it was an abomination. When you know how to use it, it is very powerful and convenient. It feels a lot like Perl, but with some features that are specific to Windows.
Opsware (now HP Operations Orchestrator) is just awesome. Besides lots and lots of plugins and templates it has a very cool feature which allows you to create a new workflow item based on a web service signature (WSDL).
Have a look at Opalis, which has been acquired by Microsoft and is now part of the System Center suite. It is a very interesting runbook automation environment with plugins for most Windows-related tasks. It is graphical and pretty user-friendly, and if something cannot be done natively you can extend it with Powershell.
I don't agree. Powershell is actually very powerful as it can extend or be extended by the.Net framework. It is also very flexible, which is very convenient for systems automation.
Big enterprise schedulers, such as Tidal, have built-in support for Powershell and many enterprise storage solutions, such as Compellent, also have built-in support. Also VMWare has the very impressive PowerCLI, which is basically a series of extensions for Powershell that can automate almost everything in VirtualCenter.
I have an idea for a commercial. Imagine lots and lots of identical people wearing identical clothes and white headphones walking in a line and going to a huge room where Steve Jobs will unveil the iPhone2000. Then someone would come in, throw a hammer on the screen where Steve Jobs is talking about how a good design and cool apps are more important than privacy.
In this commercial nobody in the room would escape, instead they would point their fingers to the "terrorist" and scream that he must be sent by Microsoftia (or Googlia or Adobia). The screen would remain broken for a few minutes because with too many iPhones in the same room nobody would be able to contact the authorities, but at some point a bunch of chinese workers would come by to fix it.
The screen would then fade out and the following words would appear: "Think Different. Like Everyone Else."
> Funny, doesn't seem like there is freedom of speech in Canada anymore
There has never been freedom of speech in Canada. You can go to jail if you deny the holocaust or if you say something that can be construed as invitation to violence.
In France it is even worse. You can go to jail for a racial joke. Actually in France you cannot even discuss race, nobody is even allowed to include ethnic background or social status in statistics.
Democracy and free speech are two distinct concepts and it is only when you don't have one of them that you can fully understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
Equity in a company should reward those who take a risk (such as putting in some VC or working unpaid hours until the business is mature), not those who get paid by the hour, even if they work hard. Especially as a contractor you are expected to work hard and you (should) get good money for that commitment.
IMO if you think you are a valuable asset then you should request a higher rate - if you are right they will agree, and if you are not right then better find somewhere else to shine.
Also if you have been working there for a while and you bring up the question of options once they start to have good revenues, then it could suggest that you are in mostly for the money.
The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and inferior intellects.
-Lord Jeffrey
I think Google should not be indexing Facebook. And they should also not be indexing websites like experts-exchange.com or bigresources.com that keep polluting the search results when I am googling for an answer to a technical problem.
I don't understand why the IT world is going down the drain like that. Ten years ago there was Dejanews - a gold mine for technical people, a place to go in your hour of need when you had this mysterious log entry and all you had to access usenet was Lynx. Also a place to hang out on your lunch break at the office and help other people. The best of both worlds - usenet and the web; I remember knowing what search keywords to use to always find that one-liner I sometime needed. Then Google took over (poorly) and now usenet is a wasteland of pr0n, spam and support groups for people with albino cats.
Nowadays if you look for an answer you have to deal with thousands of poorly maintained forums. You find blog posts from two years ago where the answer does not apply anymore. You get Wikipedia entries where there is just enough information to be listed in the results but not enough to help you. And if you want to help people you need to start your own blog or to post a comment on another blog.
It will be a sad day when I will get results from Facebook while googling for a problem with mod_autoindex.
> Why can't people get that their is no such thing as privacy on Facebook?
Yeah, that's what I told this guy who was all upset because I downloaded all the pictures of his 9 years old daughter.
> I mean really just go with the idea that Facebook is a public place
I totally agree, Facebook is a public place, like school yards, and privacy is like a restraining order, it is a violation of my civil rights.
The real cost is not 170,000,000.00$, it is 170,000,009.99$ because I was planning to buy Tetris from the PSN and with their lousy security they just lost my business...
That should teach them, and if this is not enougn, I will also not hesitate to send them a strongly worded letter.
> Geez, you can know a nerd from his over analyzing narrow vision, and conclusions based on air.
Says the guy who complains about Windows questions to someone who posted a joke about Seagate hard drives.
> Please, post your Windows questions somewhere else, on your favorite forum, I really don't care where
There was never a Windows question. I suggest you read again my post really slow (maybe with the help of someone), then read you reply, and if it does not dawn on you that it is you that brought Windows, Microsoft and .net in this thread then you should have a serious talk with those voices inside your head because they are misleading you (and if one of them is telling you to hurt people then maybe you should start to worry).
> All I ask for, is less Microsoft while reading Slashdot.
Again, you are the one who brought Microsoft in this thread. This being said, you have no control over what is posted by other people and while you can make all the demands you want, unless you have some kind of leverage like a hijacked plane full of kids and puppies, I suspect you will never obtain satisfaction.
The pursuit of happiness is part of the American dream so you are welcome to keep complaining all the time, but I would say your odds of success will be significantly higher if you don't bring up yourself the subjects you dislike.
You fool, hot babes don't play chess, they are too busy posing for cheap t-shirts ads, wearing headsets (see http://www.headsethotties.com/) and/or using their charms to make people sign waivers when they get caught in lousy hidden camera pranks. Duh.
> Not only does Iceland have chess on TV, and hot babes, but they have cool volcanoes on top of it! How can it really get any better?
They could have hot babes on tv and chess on top of volcanoes! That would be awesomer.
But no, they insist of ruining my trips to Europe.
Not only those people give asylum to known subversive people (such as Bobby Fischer) but with their volcano eruptions they are speeding up glaciers melting, causing people to believe in global warming. And whenever they run out of money because they can't do proper banking they make deals with the communists.
If they could send the fumes over Libya it could cripple the army and help the revolution - but no, they prefer bothering the good people who are planning a trip to Europe.
(Days like this one, I feel like I could do a pretty decent job at Fox news).
> Although, the real problem is that you're posting on Slashdot about it. We're not interested, ok?
It's easy to spot insecure people, they tend to talk in the name of a group because they feel their opinion as an individual is not worth a lot.
I am curious as to who is this "we" you talk about. Are you a spokeperson for the Slashdot community as a whole, or just a very specific subset, some kind of elite group maybe? Do you have a newsletter I could subscribe to, or maybe a webring or a Facebook page? Do you have a secret handshake that I could use to talk my way out of a ticket or to cut in line at the theater?
> I'm sure there's a .net forum somewhere you can rant on.
Out of curiosity I took a quick look at your recent posts and there is a pattern... Usually you tell people to go post their stuff on Digg, but in my case you made an exception and suggested for some reason to find a .net forum. Which is peculiar, since my post was about hard drives.
Either you are a true Slashdot Vigilante, or you are a shareholder of Digg and various .net forums and you try to bring in more traffic. Tsk tsk.
In any case, I friended you (as neutral, but still). I am looking forward to see more of your posts in the future, and for everybody's convenience maybe you could include a hyperlink to Digg so I would not need a bookmark, I would just need to have a look at your redundant posts.
> The backup directory has a pristine copy of the current data, with the outdated content stored as incrementals going back as far as you want. (We do 13 months.)
Which is awesome. Having 13 months of deltas that are absolute garbage if you lose the backup directory means that every time you run your backup you play russian roulette with your deltas (and with 12.96 months of backup history). You might feel like you have a bullet-proof system but actually my aunt who runs NTBackup every once in a while is better protected than you (she also does a terrific apple pie).
Keeping old deltas is not a backup strategy. Keeping old deltas is a convenience that one can offfer to users so they can access data as it was a long time ago. For disaster recovery purposes, one need reliable, fully independent backups.
Once in a while we see in the news some big company who lost a lot of data and was unable to restore it from their backup. A long chain of deltas is often involved.
> Any sort of delta/snapshot style backup strategy handles this just fine. As long as you have enough space on the backup media to store all of the deltas for the time duration that you want
I totally disagree with your backup strategy, however you are correct that an unlimited amount of deltas and an unlimited amount of space will definitely handle the loss of a file - as long as your main backup is working and as long as the creation and loss of the file does not occur between your backup windows.
> Delete a file on the RAID and it's gone
Do you check that all your files are there before taking a backup? Probably not. Even if you have a very complex strategy of nested backup with grandfather and his whole family, odds are that once you notice that the said file is gone, it is also gone on your backup.
You see, just typing stuff in uppercase does not mean you are right. There is a whole discipline around this kind of stuff, it's called Information Lifecycle Management. But in any case this is completely off-topic, as my comment was merely an opportunity to complain about my bad experience with Seagate hard disks.
> RAID IS NOT A SUBSTITUTION FOR BACKUPS!
UPPERCASE IS NOT A SUBSTITION FOR HAVING SOMETHING INTERESTING TO SAY.
A little while ago I was sure I had this malware on my computer. However the actual problem was worse: I had a Seagate hard drive.
There is an upside with Seagate products: they taught me the importance of using RAID and/or backups.
> irregardless
you are so negative
I knew something was fishy with that blueish pixel. Time for me to go to the store and get me some bit-flipping-resistant cables.
There goes my summer...
> Call me when that toy becomes as powerful as the Linux/UNIX tools we've been using for decades.
Well don't get involved in a thread about automation on Windows if you are not interested. Showing your incredible SSH skills and your disdain for Windows is definitely impressive but it is also off-topic.
But one thing is sure: as soon as I can get a client to have a budget so someone can send himself files with mutt I will contact you (I hope they won't pay by the line otherwise it will be a bad deal for you with your powerful 7-liners).
> What the heck does it mean that PS can extend the .Net framework, and itself be extended by .Net
Using .Net you can create commands (CmdLets) which can then be used in Powershell scripts. It is therefore pretty easy to extend the built-in CmdLets by adding something customized for your needs. You can even dynamically create data types in Powershell using C# syntax, and then use the objects in the scripts.
On the other hand you can invoke Powershell from a .Net software to use its powerful features. Many tools nowadays in the System Center suite are built using Powershell, and only the GUI is done in C#. Powershell is more fluid and flexible.
Most enterprise software on Windows now comes with a .Net SDK; being able to interact with those libraries in a scripting language is very convenient.
> To be more convincing, I would like to see some example commands showcasing the power and flexibility of PS.
Just an example, using PowerCLI (the VMWare Powershell extension), if you want to get the list of VMs on all the hosts managed by the VC to which you are connected, you simply use this command:
Get-Hosts | Get-VM
and if you want the output in a nice CSV file that you can then import in a DB or open with Excel, you type this:
Get-Hosts | Get-VM | Export-Csv -path c:\MyFile.csv
Now with this short one-liner you can get you VM inventory; imagine what you can do with a whole script. The piping is extremely powerful, the engine will figure out if you pass a property, an object or a string. But you can also use enumerators (such as For Each) or use a Perl-like notation (such as | % {} instead of For Each).
> Quite honestly, your post just seems like a bunch of buzzwords
The original question was about automation on Windows; I think Powershell is a perfect tool for that kind of task so I had to disagree with the guy who said it was an abomination. When you know how to use it, it is very powerful and convenient. It feels a lot like Perl, but with some features that are specific to Windows.
Opsware (now HP Operations Orchestrator) is just awesome. Besides lots and lots of plugins and templates it has a very cool feature which allows you to create a new workflow item based on a web service signature (WSDL).
Have a look at Opalis, which has been acquired by Microsoft and is now part of the System Center suite. It is a very interesting runbook automation environment with plugins for most Windows-related tasks. It is graphical and pretty user-friendly, and if something cannot be done natively you can extend it with Powershell.
I don't agree. Powershell is actually very powerful as it can extend or be extended by the .Net framework. It is also very flexible, which is very convenient for systems automation.
Big enterprise schedulers, such as Tidal, have built-in support for Powershell and many enterprise storage solutions, such as Compellent, also have built-in support. Also VMWare has the very impressive PowerCLI, which is basically a series of extensions for Powershell that can automate almost everything in VirtualCenter.
I have an idea for a commercial. Imagine lots and lots of identical people wearing identical clothes and white headphones walking in a line and going to a huge room where Steve Jobs will unveil the iPhone2000. Then someone would come in, throw a hammer on the screen where Steve Jobs is talking about how a good design and cool apps are more important than privacy.
In this commercial nobody in the room would escape, instead they would point their fingers to the "terrorist" and scream that he must be sent by Microsoftia (or Googlia or Adobia). The screen would remain broken for a few minutes because with too many iPhones in the same room nobody would be able to contact the authorities, but at some point a bunch of chinese workers would come by to fix it.
The screen would then fade out and the following words would appear: "Think Different. Like Everyone Else."
> Funny, doesn't seem like there is freedom of speech in Canada anymore
There has never been freedom of speech in Canada. You can go to jail if you deny the holocaust or if you say something that can be construed as invitation to violence.
In France it is even worse. You can go to jail for a racial joke. Actually in France you cannot even discuss race, nobody is even allowed to include ethnic background or social status in statistics.
Democracy and free speech are two distinct concepts and it is only when you don't have one of them that you can fully understand it.
> It's working pretty well
I guess this is the kind of in-depth understanding of current events that one gets when using the NYT app as an exclusive source of information.
> It's not like they're running a bunch of W2k8 RAID5 servers. Everything is massively redundant and replaceable.
I love those RAID5 servers, too bad they are not redundant and replaceable.