Well, Windows XP Pro's standard install media doesn't include 2 RDBMS packages, two different full-featured email clients, a couple different window manager package sets, a couple of widget packages, support for at least 2 programming languages, libraries to run code originally intended for another operating system's primary development framework, and two(Abiword counts?) office suites (part of the standard install for RHEL, mind you, but typically not considered "part of Windows XP")
In order for it to be an accurate comparison, we'd need to figure out what the "standard" Windows XP Professional install would be for the test, and then install (and consider) only those equivalent packages on the RHEL machine. Likewise with OS X. Both of the latter may require not-insignficant pruning of software to match the stereotypical XP+Office desktop setup (i.e. GIMP is far more complex than Paint, so it isn't really the same thing unless we were to install some arbitrary Photoshop-like-application on the XP machine).
Because if one is still in college after a certain amount of time, they're either studying the requisite amount in order to not be failed out for low GPA, or there is nefarious influence at play.
The amount of time considered alone is not indicative of addiction. Addiction also involves experiencing undesired consequences of the activity. If someone does their work and their primary hobby is playing video games (a much more social activity than you seem to be aware of), what's wrong with that? O noes, they aren't out getting laid and doing more typical "college" activities (as you define them to be, anyway). There's a ton of brainstems out there in the workforce with college degrees who did exactly that, and didn't experience all the benefits you allege. By and large its because they were in college to socialize, not to utilize the educational resources a university can provide. It's no coincidence that the people who did the worst on my upper division classes were the same ones that were planning where they were going out to "socialize" that night after studying.
Perhaps you mean that your own inability to comprehend the sentence is the result of such activities? I found that reply not only comprehensible, but insightful. If I want to work on something, I want to do it in a place that is both comfortable and free of distractions. A development lab is typically characterized by neither of those traits.
Other than my first job out of college and a short stint as a one-man-show, 250 is far fewer the minimum number of users my team has had to support at any given location. And, no, the teams were not massive in number.
Here's the thing, you're operating under the assumption that just because someone is a local administrator, you can't restrict what happens on their machine. You certainly can by properly maintaining a domain-based security system. Granted, this requires expertise that is often not available at a smaller shop, but it's very possible to implement.
Centralized anti-virus and anti-spyware systems that update, monitor, report, scan, prevent infections, and auto-clean infected machines can alleviate a lot of the work (not all of it, but a significant amount). Even in situations where we have people out on the other side of the planet who rarely hit a bona fide corporate office, we don't see machines go down in 5 weeks if they're a known model that got a known good.gho on them. We have people who are out in the "wild" for months at a time, but so long as you have your systems set up to poll a corporate patch/antivirus server (any reasonably sized office has their wandering people using a vpn solution that enables this), you can keep things up to date and generate notices when things are wrong. Once in a while we get problems after a.gho is updated and put on a machine, but not often (annoying as hell when it happens tho).
In short, "removing local admin" for windows machines can be one approach, I suppose, but I've never found it to be a practical one.
too many times we are skeptics of someone else's information because it does not jive with what we believe, factual or not
Correct. We should be skeptical of information we like the sound of AND the information that runs counter to our likes. Your statement implies we should be, in general, less skeptical. Obviously this is not desirable.
Sometimes it works this way, but honestly, I could imagine it backfiring. Give Taco Bell cashiers internet access, and I could easily imagine that leading to them telling customers, "Hold on a second..." while they finish reading some MySpace page. If you fired them over that, you'd just fire a bunch of people all the time, because people would do it anyway.
You're probably correct, but I don't see what the problem is there. People fire employees who aren't doing their jobs for a lot less.
Web usage probably, overall, has a net-loss of productivity, but it isn't practical for me to ban myself from port 80, even if I didn't need it for my job (which I do).
Perhaps but without non-BS metrics for measuring productivity (which very few industries have outside of manufacturing), there's no way to prove the claim.
I guess I'm just not of the belief that happier employees are necessarily more productive employees. There's a limit on each side. If people are too unhappy, they aren't productive, but if you give them everything they want and let them do what they want when they want to, they aren't productive then either.
*Good* employees that are happier are better than bad employees that are happier. The problem with your line of thought so far is that you assume everyone in every job needs to be constantly supervised and externally motivated in some parental fashion in order to do their jobs. While it's true that this segment is not insignificant in the workforce, wouldn't you rather keep sorting through people (firing and hiring) until you get good ones, than try and slave-drive the lazy stupid ones?
But also, none of this is really what I was talking about. I'm not talking about maximizing productivity of general employees, but minimizing IT costs and security risks. If your network is running like the wild west, you're going to have to hire more technicians who will spend all day straightening out problems. Restricting the services offered and allowed will cut downtime and the number of trouble calls, which will allow a company to function with a smaller IT staff.
The number of trouble calls due to "network security" from general users is very, very low. I've done user support in several places now, and *by*far* the greatest number of trouble tickets can be attributed to user error resulting in a desktop configuration problem. Restricting services does nothing to alleviate that issue (and I'm convinced that it won't decrease significantly until the 40+ age group leaves the workforce)
Maybe your mindset changes when you work in support for a couple years. For example, most of your users will complain at some point that they don't have admin rights on their computers, and you'll hear some people with computer experience say, "If someone knows enough about computers, then why not?" But if you give users admin rights, their computers will break much more often. Honestly, I don't even really know why. There's not always a clear cause-- it might have nothing to do with viruses or spyware or anything particularly horrible, but you find out that the fewer configuration changes people can make, the less downtime they have. It's just some sort of whacky mystical rule.
In the Windows world, "after you work in support for a couple years", you'll realize that for everything through Windows XP, making the users local admins and then restricting by group policy the things they can do is the *only* way you can maintain security, retain your sanity, *and* not have the users calling you for help every time some odd-ass thing requires admin access.
Maybe there's a good theory to explain this, but I just know it as a truth I've learned through experience. If you want your computer to function without trouble, install only the applications you need, and don't operate
background: I've worked IT full/part time for about 10 years now (geez) from desktop to network admin to site managing
Statement: In my experience the number of network admins that have the ability to adequately and competently run a network that both allows computing freedom (in reference to how you are saying) and is secure is very small.
I'd also note that I've seen this setup work a lot better with Universities than with corporate environments. Mostly because, insofar as I can tell personally, the network/systems admins/engineers are more concerned with enabling safe but wide-ranging activities in the university environment, as opposed to the corporate environment, where anything not expressly allowed is forbidden.
I gotta say, that $50 television cost Best Buy $20, and it cost the manufacturer $10.
Where as if someone steals my work, its not just a reduction in artificial scarcity, it is a real loss of productivity.
No. At most it is a "potential loss of income". Your productivity is how much finished work can be output in some unit of time. Particularly in the era of digital distribution, you only have to make something once, and can distribute it a countless number of times without having to make another original. On its own, this makes your work (and mine, for that matter) distinctly different than the TV in the example above.
I could have easily been creating something physical that while not all that interesting, or useful to the world, its not going to dismissed as artificial just because it can be copied.
And from that idea comes the silliness of shrinkwrap/clickwrap licenses on media -- An attempt to cram non-physical things, which can be copied without actually having to construct new physical objects, into the mold of traditional manufacturing.
To someone like me, it is EXACTLY the same as theft. You took my time. No, your time was used to make the original. The copy took nothing.
It is a non-artificial scarcity. With my health, it is becoming more and more valuable. There is no difference...they aren't taking my product, they are taking a little piece of me. Ok, this is less theft and more rape. They took nothing. You still have exactly what you started with.
Argue as much as you like, an illegal act is the same as another illegal act and it doesn't matter if its copyright infringement, or the illegal impoundments of ships on the high seas. I shouldn't even bother replying to this, but the amount of glee I get in pointing out that you've just equated petty floppy-copying to genocide makes it worth the typing.
There is no muddying of the subject except for folks that want to pretend they are better. The only muddying is coming from folks that want to distinguish two separate items into a group of tangible vs. intangible because the general public is still trapped into blue collar lifestyles and thus incapable of understanding the second. Or, rather, they are two distinctly different things. Which they are. By your standards, TV patents should last forever, and the idea that someone other than the original patenter of some TV technology is able to later come by and make the same thing for less constitutes theft. Furthermore, "intangible" in this conversation actually means something in copyright law. To quote a copyrighted work, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
In fact, the more I hear of those muddying these waters, the more I'm glad I have the RIAA working on my side (even if the last royalty check was enough to pick up taco bell). The RIAA doesn't work for you. If they did, your royalty payments wouldn't be pennies on the dollar. There are plenty of musicians who don't work for major labels, but who have profitable careers without the benefit of the RIAA. Obviously these people aren't super rich, nor are they household names. If that's important to your career, you should definitely try to be on a major label. However, that doesn't mean you can't make a living without the media giants.
Casual schmasual. How about just in the low-cost segment. Video games have become hollywoodized, where people believe that only by investing huge amounts of money to make photorealistic, physically accurate games that you can have a hit. Sure, there's a place for that, but by the same token, no one DESERVES to have a hit if they invest a lot of money and time (see: Daikatana).
For my part, I go with the "it just wasn't that fun of a game" crowd for Doom III. Sure it was pirated a lot, but so was Half-Life 1.
However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is 'amateur' software and that we should be buying Windows servers.
Someone needs to tell your VIP to STFU and let the IT people do their jobs without him sticking his nose in. He's probably pushing it just so he can try to get some kickbacks from his friend Bob, who happens to be an MS sales rep.
There are instances and situations where the only way one could reasonably track you would be to be watching the wire at the same time and recording the data as it passed by (this, of course, also assumes the data is not encrypted or easily decryptable).
Really, it boils down that you are probably *theoretically* correct (if one had infinite time and infinite resources), but it's prohibitively impractical to "track" someone if they utilize the correct methods.
Most of the time you are correct. However, there are ways to use the internet to be completely anonymous. They're huge pains in the asses, but they're possible.
How many kids learned to have a passion for computers from those heavy beige bricks? I remember the first time I mastered peek and poke, the pure glory of your first idiotic "goto 10" message.
I gotta say that even in college (I started my "real" CS degree almost 4 years behind where most people get into college), the number of people who had the same "passion" for computer geekery seemed to be rather smaller.
Though, this was during the dot-com boom, so perhaps that was a disproportionate cause of the population skewing.
If I have some time, I'll have to price that out. Seems pricey, though you did leave out more than a few details in the setup.
Though bleeding edge prices have gotten weird these days. I find it rather rewarding to get the "most previously recent" model , which while at retail will be slightly less than the bleeding edge, can be found for significantly less via a little hunting.
My experience (not having one but having worked with those who did) is that it's a fairly well balanced cert, in regards to the context of the conversation at hand.
What do you define as "higher end"? Certain the CCIE is outrageously difficult (and outrageously expensive), but the CCNP? It might be harder than the CCNA or whatever the hell they're calling it these days, but I just can't seeing it be as hard as, dunno, DiffEq.
Yeah but that's like, vanilla, boring porn. Unless it's an "attack" of some sort, then it's stileproject porn, which is another topic entirely, I think.
Well, the real solution is that if you're doing work and they're paranoid about letting your machine on their network (which is reasonable), you have them put you on a VLAN that's external enough for their comfort level and allows you to get back to your dev environment. Requires planning and competency on their part, tho.
I spend about 15 hours a day "on the internet" (whatever that vague statement means), yet I excel at my job and get A's in my classes that I take after work.
So I guess the question is, how do you define "on the internet". Is web-surfing from a phone the same as 5 hours on WoW? They both meet the description. Does surfing the web on my laptop while watching a movie count as 2 hours of being "on the internet"? The phrase is basically meaningless the way you've decided to use it.
I wasn't particularly interested in replying to the rest of your comment, however I felt the need to point out that most bloggers won't do things anonymously because their entire blogging intent is 20% inform the public (which seems to be, in turn, about 1% of the blogs out there, since there's so much rehashing), and 80% trying to make a living off of their blog. Of course, this in turn requires people to know you, and anonymous publishing kinda kills that idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Windows XP Pro's standard install media doesn't include 2 RDBMS packages, two different full-featured email clients, a couple different window manager package sets, a couple of widget packages, support for at least 2 programming languages, libraries to run code originally intended for another operating system's primary development framework, and two(Abiword counts?) office suites (part of the standard install for RHEL, mind you, but typically not considered "part of Windows XP")
In order for it to be an accurate comparison, we'd need to figure out what the "standard" Windows XP Professional install would be for the test, and then install (and consider) only those equivalent packages on the RHEL machine. Likewise with OS X. Both of the latter may require not-insignficant pruning of software to match the stereotypical XP+Office desktop setup (i.e. GIMP is far more complex than Paint, so it isn't really the same thing unless we were to install some arbitrary Photoshop-like-application on the XP machine).
Because if one is still in college after a certain amount of time, they're either studying the requisite amount in order to not be failed out for low GPA, or there is nefarious influence at play.
The amount of time considered alone is not indicative of addiction. Addiction also involves experiencing undesired consequences of the activity. If someone does their work and their primary hobby is playing video games (a much more social activity than you seem to be aware of), what's wrong with that? O noes, they aren't out getting laid and doing more typical "college" activities (as you define them to be, anyway). There's a ton of brainstems out there in the workforce with college degrees who did exactly that, and didn't experience all the benefits you allege. By and large its because they were in college to socialize, not to utilize the educational resources a university can provide. It's no coincidence that the people who did the worst on my upper division classes were the same ones that were planning where they were going out to "socialize" that night after studying.
Perhaps you mean that your own inability to comprehend the sentence is the result of such activities? I found that reply not only comprehensible, but insightful. If I want to work on something, I want to do it in a place that is both comfortable and free of distractions. A development lab is typically characterized by neither of those traits.
Other than my first job out of college and a short stint as a one-man-show, 250 is far fewer the minimum number of users my team has had to support at any given location. And, no, the teams were not massive in number.
Here's the thing, you're operating under the assumption that just because someone is a local administrator, you can't restrict what happens on their machine. You certainly can by properly maintaining a domain-based security system. Granted, this requires expertise that is often not available at a smaller shop, but it's very possible to implement.
Centralized anti-virus and anti-spyware systems that update, monitor, report, scan, prevent infections, and auto-clean infected machines can alleviate a lot of the work (not all of it, but a significant amount). Even in situations where we have people out on the other side of the planet who rarely hit a bona fide corporate office, we don't see machines go down in 5 weeks if they're a known model that got a known good .gho on them. We have people who are out in the "wild" for months at a time, but so long as you have your systems set up to poll a corporate patch/antivirus server (any reasonably sized office has their wandering people using a vpn solution that enables this), you can keep things up to date and generate notices when things are wrong. Once in a while we get problems after a .gho is updated and put on a machine, but not often (annoying as hell when it happens tho).
In short, "removing local admin" for windows machines can be one approach, I suppose, but I've never found it to be a practical one.
Correct. We should be skeptical of information we like the sound of AND the information that runs counter to our likes. Your statement implies we should be, in general, less skeptical. Obviously this is not desirable.
Sometimes it works this way, but honestly, I could imagine it backfiring. Give Taco Bell cashiers internet access, and I could easily imagine that leading to them telling customers, "Hold on a second..." while they finish reading some MySpace page. If you fired them over that, you'd just fire a bunch of people all the time, because people would do it anyway.
You're probably correct, but I don't see what the problem is there. People fire employees who aren't doing their jobs for a lot less.
Web usage probably, overall, has a net-loss of productivity, but it isn't practical for me to ban myself from port 80, even if I didn't need it for my job (which I do).
Perhaps but without non-BS metrics for measuring productivity (which very few industries have outside of manufacturing), there's no way to prove the claim.
I guess I'm just not of the belief that happier employees are necessarily more productive employees. There's a limit on each side. If people are too unhappy, they aren't productive, but if you give them everything they want and let them do what they want when they want to, they aren't productive then either.
*Good* employees that are happier are better than bad employees that are happier. The problem with your line of thought so far is that you assume everyone in every job needs to be constantly supervised and externally motivated in some parental fashion in order to do their jobs. While it's true that this segment is not insignificant in the workforce, wouldn't you rather keep sorting through people (firing and hiring) until you get good ones, than try and slave-drive the lazy stupid ones?
But also, none of this is really what I was talking about. I'm not talking about maximizing productivity of general employees, but minimizing IT costs and security risks. If your network is running like the wild west, you're going to have to hire more technicians who will spend all day straightening out problems. Restricting the services offered and allowed will cut downtime and the number of trouble calls, which will allow a company to function with a smaller IT staff.
The number of trouble calls due to "network security" from general users is very, very low. I've done user support in several places now, and *by*far* the greatest number of trouble tickets can be attributed to user error resulting in a desktop configuration problem. Restricting services does nothing to alleviate that issue (and I'm convinced that it won't decrease significantly until the 40+ age group leaves the workforce)
Maybe your mindset changes when you work in support for a couple years. For example, most of your users will complain at some point that they don't have admin rights on their computers, and you'll hear some people with computer experience say, "If someone knows enough about computers, then why not?" But if you give users admin rights, their computers will break much more often. Honestly, I don't even really know why. There's not always a clear cause-- it might have nothing to do with viruses or spyware or anything particularly horrible, but you find out that the fewer configuration changes people can make, the less downtime they have. It's just some sort of whacky mystical rule.
In the Windows world, "after you work in support for a couple years", you'll realize that for everything through Windows XP, making the users local admins and then restricting by group policy the things they can do is the *only* way you can maintain security, retain your sanity, *and* not have the users calling you for help every time some odd-ass thing requires admin access.
Maybe there's a good theory to explain this, but I just know it as a truth I've learned through experience. If you want your computer to function without trouble, install only the applications you need, and don't operate
background: I've worked IT full/part time for about 10 years now (geez) from desktop to network admin to site managing
Statement: In my experience the number of network admins that have the ability to adequately and competently run a network that both allows computing freedom (in reference to how you are saying) and is secure is very small.
I'd also note that I've seen this setup work a lot better with Universities than with corporate environments. Mostly because, insofar as I can tell personally, the network/systems admins/engineers are more concerned with enabling safe but wide-ranging activities in the university environment, as opposed to the corporate environment, where anything not expressly allowed is forbidden.
Ditto. Never saw the appeal of Commander Keen. Ditto of Wolf3d, too. Esp the mod where the nazis were replaced by Pac-Man.
Where as if someone steals my work, its not just a reduction in artificial scarcity, it is a real loss of productivity. No. At most it is a "potential loss of income". Your productivity is how much finished work can be output in some unit of time. Particularly in the era of digital distribution, you only have to make something once, and can distribute it a countless number of times without having to make another original. On its own, this makes your work (and mine, for that matter) distinctly different than the TV in the example above.
I could have easily been creating something physical that while not all that interesting, or useful to the world, its not going to dismissed as artificial just because it can be copied.
And from that idea comes the silliness of shrinkwrap/clickwrap licenses on media -- An attempt to cram non-physical things, which can be copied without actually having to construct new physical objects, into the mold of traditional manufacturing.
To someone like me, it is EXACTLY the same as theft. You took my time. No, your time was used to make the original. The copy took nothing.
It is a non-artificial scarcity. With my health, it is becoming more and more valuable. There is no difference...they aren't taking my product, they are taking a little piece of me. Ok, this is less theft and more rape. They took nothing. You still have exactly what you started with.
Argue as much as you like, an illegal act is the same as another illegal act and it doesn't matter if its copyright infringement, or the illegal impoundments of ships on the high seas. I shouldn't even bother replying to this, but the amount of glee I get in pointing out that you've just equated petty floppy-copying to genocide makes it worth the typing.
There is no muddying of the subject except for folks that want to pretend they are better. The only muddying is coming from folks that want to distinguish two separate items into a group of tangible vs. intangible because the general public is still trapped into blue collar lifestyles and thus incapable of understanding the second. Or, rather, they are two distinctly different things. Which they are. By your standards, TV patents should last forever, and the idea that someone other than the original patenter of some TV technology is able to later come by and make the same thing for less constitutes theft. Furthermore, "intangible" in this conversation actually means something in copyright law. To quote a copyrighted work, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
In fact, the more I hear of those muddying these waters, the more I'm glad I have the RIAA working on my side (even if the last royalty check was enough to pick up taco bell). The RIAA doesn't work for you. If they did, your royalty payments wouldn't be pennies on the dollar. There are plenty of musicians who don't work for major labels, but who have profitable careers without the benefit of the RIAA. Obviously these people aren't super rich, nor are they household names. If that's important to your career, you should definitely try to be on a major label. However, that doesn't mean you can't make a living without the media giants.
Casual schmasual. How about just in the low-cost segment. Video games have become hollywoodized, where people believe that only by investing huge amounts of money to make photorealistic, physically accurate games that you can have a hit. Sure, there's a place for that, but by the same token, no one DESERVES to have a hit if they invest a lot of money and time (see: Daikatana).
For my part, I go with the "it just wasn't that fun of a game" crowd for Doom III. Sure it was pirated a lot, but so was Half-Life 1.
However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is 'amateur' software and that we should be buying Windows servers.
Someone needs to tell your VIP to STFU and let the IT people do their jobs without him sticking his nose in. He's probably pushing it just so he can try to get some kickbacks from his friend Bob, who happens to be an MS sales rep.
There are instances and situations where the only way one could reasonably track you would be to be watching the wire at the same time and recording the data as it passed by (this, of course, also assumes the data is not encrypted or easily decryptable).
Really, it boils down that you are probably *theoretically* correct (if one had infinite time and infinite resources), but it's prohibitively impractical to "track" someone if they utilize the correct methods.
Most of the time you are correct. However, there are ways to use the internet to be completely anonymous. They're huge pains in the asses, but they're possible.
How many kids learned to have a passion for computers from those heavy beige bricks? I remember the first time I mastered peek and poke, the pure glory of your first idiotic "goto 10" message.
I gotta say that even in college (I started my "real" CS degree almost 4 years behind where most people get into college), the number of people who had the same "passion" for computer geekery seemed to be rather smaller.
Though, this was during the dot-com boom, so perhaps that was a disproportionate cause of the population skewing.
If I have some time, I'll have to price that out. Seems pricey, though you did leave out more than a few details in the setup.
Though bleeding edge prices have gotten weird these days. I find it rather rewarding to get the "most previously recent" model , which while at retail will be slightly less than the bleeding edge, can be found for significantly less via a little hunting.
GEOS!
Also, re: that mysterious sig: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=574747
And chopping off his own shins.
My experience (not having one but having worked with those who did) is that it's a fairly well balanced cert, in regards to the context of the conversation at hand.
What do you define as "higher end"? Certain the CCIE is outrageously difficult (and outrageously expensive), but the CCNP? It might be harder than the CCNA or whatever the hell they're calling it these days, but I just can't seeing it be as hard as, dunno, DiffEq.
Can you post more info / links about this?
Yeah but that's like, vanilla, boring porn. Unless it's an "attack" of some sort, then it's stileproject porn, which is another topic entirely, I think.
Well, the real solution is that if you're doing work and they're paranoid about letting your machine on their network (which is reasonable), you have them put you on a VLAN that's external enough for their comfort level and allows you to get back to your dev environment. Requires planning and competency on their part, tho.
I spend about 15 hours a day "on the internet" (whatever that vague statement means), yet I excel at my job and get A's in my classes that I take after work.
So I guess the question is, how do you define "on the internet". Is web-surfing from a phone the same as 5 hours on WoW? They both meet the description. Does surfing the web on my laptop while watching a movie count as 2 hours of being "on the internet"? The phrase is basically meaningless the way you've decided to use it.
I wasn't particularly interested in replying to the rest of your comment, however I felt the need to point out that most bloggers won't do things anonymously because their entire blogging intent is 20% inform the public (which seems to be, in turn, about 1% of the blogs out there, since there's so much rehashing), and 80% trying to make a living off of their blog. Of course, this in turn requires people to know you, and anonymous publishing kinda kills that idea.