Hah! Your setup is almost identical to mine, well played sir! The only real difference is that my work docs and files/etc are on an OSX server, and that filesystem is then AFP mounted on the various OSXen and CIFS mounted on the sole Windows box laying around. Love Xmarks also, but publish to my own DAV'd Apache on an external ISP box that I run. rsync on OSX server does nightly syncs with [monthly] backup folders on the external ISP box. The only other "p.s." is a script within my $HOME on the OSX server called "setupabox" that basically takes an IP as $ARGV1 and pushes out $HOME/.bash_profile, $HOME/lib/bash/* $HOME/.ssh/*{pub,au*keys} and a few other things. So basically I have a single.bash_profile that works on any machine, knows where it is and is smart enough to set the right stuff up. Also have "syncabox" which similarly makes sure that box $ARGV1 is "fresh". $DEITY, I love UNIX.
P.S. (real one this time)
Just got turned onto Evernote. Wow. I mean, WOW.
While I understand your well made point of how easy and non-scary it is for we techies to download and install the necessary codecs, we can't possibly expect John Q. Public-type endusers to open up xterms and start entering 'scary' commands (yes they are scary to regular people).
I think scary EULA dialogs are far more acceptable than scary shell interactions to most non-techie computer users. Besides, there are always "ways and means" that knowledgable users can download and install things like codecs, even if there isn't a "legitimate" way of doing so.
Alas, for the regular users out there, they are doomed to keep clicking through the EULAs because our super duper corporate overlords, the ones who decide which "standards" our devices will use for the next decade CANNOT DECIDE ON A FRICKIN STANDARD!!!
Ogg Vorbis is dead! Long live Ogg Vorbis!
OSX's "Exposé" has increased my productivity by leaps and bounds. Being able to hit a single button and have the contents of all my windows shown to me in beautiful Quartz-rendered tiny-ness -- its a hell of a timesaver.
Go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/expose.html for a demo.
That said, a previous poster had it right. Old-school window managers like wm -- correctly configured -- are just about the fastest and most productive UI's out there.
A variant of the "sentence as password" idea that I've been using for years, is to come up with a sentence (be it apropos to the system or not) and then use the first letter of each word in the sentence.
It combines the best of both worlds.
i) a 'complex' password because it can't be broken by a dictionary-based attack ii) easy to remember (sentence-based)
Add to the mix some tranposition of characters (use 1's instead of i's etc etc) and you've got yourself a fairly decent password, at least better than most.
Works just fine on password-size challenged systems.
I worked at Nortel in the early 90s writing telco protocol (CMIS) translation code in C. The code and libraries coming our way from the programmers in Canada was littered with the most foul, anti-American NHL team rhetoric I've ever seen. One-upmanship between the Canadian and the American programmers re: their favorite NHL teams was rife, each side blasting the other side's teams. They even played funny buggers with RCS headers to make it more interesting. Let's face it - programmers are a dirty bunch - especially those wacky Canucks!
And your own analogy about technology running great 10 years ago shows your inexperience. If you can look us all in the eye and try and convince us that computers were used in the same way 10 years ago as they are today, then you're an idiot. Times change just as the users' needs change.
Did you even USE a computer outside of your bedroom 10 years ago? If you can sit there and tell us all that a 10-year old PC that ran Linux 0.99pl4's X11 with twm and associated apps with a modicum of speed (at the time) can run a recent release of Linux with X11 & Gnome or KDE with a modicum of speed (right now) - then 'scuse us while we all laugh. But then again I'm a dickwad, so what do I know, right?. Hell - change "Linux" to "Windows". The outcome is still the same. OS is immaterial here. Irrespective of the "Microsoft bloat", the bloat is everywhere. The bloat is in how we use computers, there is NO escaping from it.
You tell me to "use software that is appropriate". I actually do. My users require certain things: they require the generic "office services" that most other office type people have and require (word processing, printing, shared files/calendars, etc). Along with those needs, they also need compatibility with the files that all the other non-technical people send them. And it all needs to be wrapped up in an easy to use package.
If I had the time to engineer it properly, and the time, and the resources, and the time to train my users, yeah you're damn right I could deploy a seriously kick-ass, auto-configuring X11 desktop environment for my users. I've done it before and I'm sure I'll do it again.
Yeh - I made the mistake in assuming you were advocating I was an asshole because I was putting Microsoft and not a *NIX on the desktop. But now it seems you're calling me an asshole because I refuse to force on my totally non-technical users a totally unfamiliar desktop environment that they don't want, that I have neither the resources nor the time to train them on?
And since when is providing close to 100% uptime on my servers (thanks to Linux) and a familiar & comfortable environment on my desktops (thanks to Microsoft & Apple), and a whole stable of happy non-technical users "not appropriate"?
When did I miss the "giving the users what they want and are happy with is now grounds for a personal attack" announcement?
I *inherited* my environment. I would have built it differently, and no I don't think that I need excessive technology -- you seem to equate "Director of I.T." with "overspender". The two != the same.
A non-profit manager is ALWAYS trading off. In my case, I have a whole office full of aging original Pentiums running mostly W95 and W98, with others. They're achingly slow, maxed out physically (try buying RAM etc for these old boxen) and are perilously close to MTBF. They need to be upgraded - period, be they running an MS OS or a *NIX variant. The hardware is old and needs to go - hardware that is both slow AND old is a liability, plain and simple. Do I need 2.4Ghz boxen? No. And I won't buy them. And neither would my colleagues - your assertion that you "need" a $5k box to run an MS desktop in an office is BS. Grow up. Lets talk $400 boxen across the board that will give my users massive speedup and will still work well in the year that the $ is written off.
So I need to buy new ones, fair enough. While I'm at it, I might as well fix up all the standard office services that none of my predecessors ever got around to like decent file/print/mail/calendaring/projmgmt services. How should I do that? Easy enough on the *NIX server side, I've done that for years. But what about using a *NIX on the desktop? In a non-profit environment where I have next to no staff, next to no time available to me for any decent engineering work, highly creative but highly non-technical users whose computer knowledge extends to microsoft word and excel who have neither the time nor inclination to be trained by me in an entirely new desktop environment, next to no money for software on top of hardware, next to no time where i could train my users in the new environment and apps and way of doing things -- what would you have me do?
I don't live in the utopian black and white world that you seem to, where it's *NIX all or nothing. I'm a realist and - hell not only that - I deploy the software and hardware specific to a situation or need - there are SO many factors I must take into consideration before I blithely decide what system goes where, running what OS and running which services. Just because I support Linux and the OSS community doesn't mean I'd stuff it into a situation where it doesn't "fit".
The reality is that I (and I would imagine the majority of IT managers at non-profits) have neither the resources nor the inclination to introduce a new desktop environment when we can continue using *NIX on the backend (as I do), and also provide the standard office services in the manner in which my users are already used to.
I applaud your utopian ideals, really I do - and in certain situations a revolutionary approach is necessary - and I've even done it myself in the past! But a non-profit (of course I generalize here) isn't that place. Budgets are tight, the userbases are notoriously nit-picky, and staff and resources are stretched tight. The odds are stacked against changing the desktop - face facts. So I give my users what they know and LIKE and I also get it for free, and I get creative on the side the people don't see - they don't even know or care that our web/IMAP/SMB/LDAP/firewall/proxy/VPN/intranet servers are *NIX. But I do. This is the real world. You should try entering it sometime. We "self-proclaimed Directors of IT" take EVERY factor into consideration before we force massive change upon our users. You should try it sometime -- its called being a good manager.
Let me tell how it really is -- I'm the Director of I.T. for an NYC-based non-profit, high-end, very prominent. Your comments about MS hurting me more are pretty offensive, and wofeully uninformed. By the way, I'm a UNIX guy, I've been an admin, an engineer, all the way since 0.99pl4 so you're preaching to the choir about open source. But reality is different.
In the non-profit world, budgets are so slim as to be non-existent. You're working on yesterday's technology (for the most part), you cobble together what you can. But there are certain things that all non-profits must have, the basic "office services" that we all take for granted. But these places don't have them, they have a bastardised collection of w98 and w95 and god forbid novell on dos desktops, all somehow strung together with a chain of ancient hubs, etc. You get the picture. We as IT guys in these places have very little resources, both in terms of people and time - oh and the previously mentioned money. We need MAXIMUM bang for the buck.
As a UNIX zealot I already know that with OSS/Linux/*NIX there's nothing better than a free lunch. But - I also have 75 people in the office who know absolutely nothing about computers except to click Send/Receive and read their email, or use the Outlook calendar. Believe me, if I had the time and the resources to build and deploy my own Linux desktops, I'd do it - oh god would I do it. But I have to face cold, hard facts and the fact is that as an IT guy at a non-profit I have to give as much with as little as I get, and that little is the "Microsoft Office environment" and goddamnit thats what these people know, and its what they expect and it's all they'll ever know.
Having said that - the money that I don't have to spend on Microsoft Office and the various OS' that I need to run it on are ALWAYS used (at least anywhere that I work) on as many servers as possible to run the important stuff -- stuff like intranets running apache & php, monitoring with netsaint, my sendmail relay, my free/swan VPN - don't get me wrong. There is more than a huge void in the non-profit world where OSS could be used, and should be. And the more progressive IT people do I think head in that direction.
But the fact is that the non-profit will always be strapped for cash, and more importantly IT staff and time. And thats why a full *NIX adoption would always be difficult in that environment, along with the "standard" of MS Office being important in such a creative environment, with many files being passed in and out to such non-technical people. That said, the foresight and generosity of OSS folk and their beliefs and awesome software are appreciated by the more foresight-friendly non-profit IT guys.
I don't dispute that MS ultimately profits from their donations -- just look at the other side of the coin before you say the non-profits are being hurt, dude.
Hello? If you care to reread his article, I don't think you'll find he's "down" on *nix. I think you'll find he's "down" on Linux. He didn't mention anything bad about any of the other Unix variants out there.
In fact, that was the whole point of his article.
IMHO, he could have been talking about any of the "free" Unix variants out there.
His whole point was that even though Linux is supported (in fact, probably has the best support out there!), it's still not ready for primetime.
Why does everyone take these articles so damn personally? -- main(v, c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Rik Tait [rik@marketxt.com]\n)";(!!c)[*c]
After reading most of these comments, I am beginning to wonder if people out here on/. really have had any experience in designing and architecting *heavy-hitting* websites, whether they serve static or dynamic content.
I mean, come on. All of the *best* sites out there are architected such that it really doesn't matter what the boxes are. Most of the big sites use hardware load-balancers (big/ip, I/Pivot, LocalDirector, HydraWeb etc). They use load-balancing "front-ends" such as Dynamo. They don't "hack" things with things like RR DNS, they have the bucks to spend on what is *right* for the job, when they have the money to spend. Right now, Linux is not *right* for a transaction-heavy DB engine. (Please, no flames about MySQL or other lightweight).
Sure - they don't use Linux boxes as databases, simply because the big DB's haven't been out long enough on Linux to prove themselves. So what if they use Oracle on Solaris on the backend and use 12 load-balanced Linux boxes to serve the web-content? That's fantastic IMHO!
Would you use a Linux box to serve TCP-based NFS across 25 switched Ethernet segments to over 2000 users? No way! Would you use a big Sun or HP box? Sure.
C'mon guys - it's all about using what's right for the job! Right now, Linux is not a *perfect* fit for certain things. People want as close to perfection as possible. Dvorak was wrong in his assumption that Linux is only good for the desktop.
But - that's not to say it's perfect for *every* server situation either. When I moved a major financial website from NT in Seattle to UNIX in NYC, I bought boxes that were right for the job. Few Solaris heavyweights for the backend, and many Linux boxes for the frontend. It works perfectly.
So let's keep this all in perspective! -- main(v, c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Rik Tait [rik@marketxt.com]\n)";(!!c)[*c]
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Your setup is almost identical to mine, well played sir! The only real difference is that my work docs and files/etc are on an OSX server, and that filesystem is then AFP mounted on the various OSXen and CIFS mounted on the sole Windows box laying around. Love Xmarks also, but publish to my own DAV'd Apache on an external ISP box that I run. rsync on OSX server does nightly syncs with [monthly] backup folders on the external ISP box. The only other "p.s." is a script within my $HOME on the OSX server called "setupabox" that basically takes an IP as $ARGV1 and pushes out $HOME/.bash_profile, $HOME/lib/bash/* $HOME/.ssh/*{pub,au*keys} and a few other things. So basically I have a single .bash_profile that works on any machine, knows where it is and is smart enough to set the right stuff up. Also have "syncabox" which similarly makes sure that box $ARGV1 is "fresh". $DEITY, I love UNIX.
P.S. (real one this time)
Just got turned onto Evernote. Wow. I mean, WOW.
While I understand your well made point of how easy and non-scary it is for we techies to download and install the necessary codecs, we can't possibly expect John Q. Public-type endusers to open up xterms and start entering 'scary' commands (yes they are scary to regular people). I think scary EULA dialogs are far more acceptable than scary shell interactions to most non-techie computer users. Besides, there are always "ways and means" that knowledgable users can download and install things like codecs, even if there isn't a "legitimate" way of doing so. Alas, for the regular users out there, they are doomed to keep clicking through the EULAs because our super duper corporate overlords, the ones who decide which "standards" our devices will use for the next decade CANNOT DECIDE ON A FRICKIN STANDARD!!! Ogg Vorbis is dead! Long live Ogg Vorbis!
OSX's "Exposé" has increased my productivity by leaps and bounds. Being able to hit a single button and have the contents of all my windows shown to me in beautiful Quartz-rendered tiny-ness -- its a hell of a timesaver. Go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/expose.html for a demo. That said, a previous poster had it right. Old-school window managers like wm -- correctly configured -- are just about the fastest and most productive UI's out there.
A variant of the "sentence as password" idea that I've been using for years, is to come up with a sentence (be it apropos to the system or not) and then use the first letter of each word in the sentence.
It combines the best of both worlds.
i) a 'complex' password because it can't be broken by a dictionary-based attack
ii) easy to remember (sentence-based)
Add to the mix some tranposition of characters (use 1's instead of i's etc etc) and you've got yourself a fairly decent password, at least better than most.
Works just fine on password-size challenged systems.
I worked at Nortel in the early 90s writing telco protocol (CMIS) translation code in C. The code and libraries coming our way from the programmers in Canada was littered with the most foul, anti-American NHL team rhetoric I've ever seen. One-upmanship between the Canadian and the American programmers re: their favorite NHL teams was rife, each side blasting the other side's teams. They even played funny buggers with RCS headers to make it more interesting. Let's face it - programmers are a dirty bunch - especially those wacky Canucks!
No, I wasn't the one with the lawnmower analogy.
And your own analogy about technology running great 10 years ago shows your inexperience. If you can look us all in the eye and try and convince us that computers were used in the same way 10 years ago as they are today, then you're an idiot. Times change just as the users' needs change.
Did you even USE a computer outside of your bedroom 10 years ago? If you can sit there and tell us all that a 10-year old PC that ran Linux 0.99pl4's X11 with twm and associated apps with a modicum of speed (at the time) can run a recent release of Linux with X11 & Gnome or KDE with a modicum of speed (right now) - then 'scuse us while we all laugh. But then again I'm a dickwad, so what do I know, right?. Hell - change "Linux" to "Windows". The outcome is still the same. OS is immaterial here. Irrespective of the "Microsoft bloat", the bloat is everywhere. The bloat is in how we use computers, there is NO escaping from it.
You tell me to "use software that is appropriate". I actually do. My users require certain things: they require the generic "office services" that most other office type people have and require (word processing, printing, shared files/calendars, etc). Along with those needs, they also need compatibility with the files that all the other non-technical people send them. And it all needs to be wrapped up in an easy to use package.
If I had the time to engineer it properly, and the time, and the resources, and the time to train my users, yeah you're damn right I could deploy a seriously kick-ass, auto-configuring X11 desktop environment for my users. I've done it before and I'm sure I'll do it again.
Yeh - I made the mistake in assuming you were advocating I was an asshole because I was putting Microsoft and not a *NIX on the desktop. But now it seems you're calling me an asshole because I refuse to force on my totally non-technical users a totally unfamiliar desktop environment that they don't want, that I have neither the resources nor the time to train them on?
And since when is providing close to 100% uptime on my servers (thanks to Linux) and a familiar & comfortable environment on my desktops (thanks to Microsoft & Apple), and a whole stable of happy non-technical users "not appropriate"?
When did I miss the "giving the users what they want and are happy with is now grounds for a personal attack" announcement?
Hey pal, I'm not the deluded one here.
I *inherited* my environment. I would have built it differently, and no I don't think that I need excessive technology -- you seem to equate "Director of I.T." with "overspender". The two != the same.
A non-profit manager is ALWAYS trading off. In my case, I have a whole office full of aging original Pentiums running mostly W95 and W98, with others. They're achingly slow, maxed out physically (try buying RAM etc for these old boxen) and are perilously close to MTBF. They need to be upgraded - period, be they running an MS OS or a *NIX variant. The hardware is old and needs to go - hardware that is both slow AND old is a liability, plain and simple. Do I need 2.4Ghz boxen? No. And I won't buy them. And neither would my colleagues - your assertion that you "need" a $5k box to run an MS desktop in an office is BS. Grow up. Lets talk $400 boxen across the board that will give my users massive speedup and will still work well in the year that the $ is written off.
So I need to buy new ones, fair enough. While I'm at it, I might as well fix up all the standard office services that none of my predecessors ever got around to like decent file/print/mail/calendaring/projmgmt services. How should I do that? Easy enough on the *NIX server side, I've done that for years. But what about using a *NIX on the desktop? In a non-profit environment where I have next to no staff, next to no time available to me for any decent engineering work, highly creative but highly non-technical users whose computer knowledge extends to microsoft word and excel who have neither the time nor inclination to be trained by me in an entirely new desktop environment, next to no money for software on top of hardware, next to no time where i could train my users in the new environment and apps and way of doing things -- what would you have me do?
I don't live in the utopian black and white world that you seem to, where it's *NIX all or nothing. I'm a realist and - hell not only that - I deploy the software and hardware specific to a situation or need - there are SO many factors I must take into consideration before I blithely decide what system goes where, running what OS and running which services. Just because I support Linux and the OSS community doesn't mean I'd stuff it into a situation where it doesn't "fit".
The reality is that I (and I would imagine the majority of IT managers at non-profits) have neither the resources nor the inclination to introduce a new desktop environment when we can continue using *NIX on the backend (as I do), and also provide the standard office services in the manner in which my users are already used to.
I applaud your utopian ideals, really I do - and in certain situations a revolutionary approach is necessary - and I've even done it myself in the past! But a non-profit (of course I generalize here) isn't that place. Budgets are tight, the userbases are notoriously nit-picky, and staff and resources are stretched tight. The odds are stacked against changing the desktop - face facts. So I give my users what they know and LIKE and I also get it for free, and I get creative on the side the people don't see - they don't even know or care that our web/IMAP/SMB/LDAP/firewall/proxy/VPN/intranet servers are *NIX. But I do. This is the real world. You should try entering it sometime. We "self-proclaimed Directors of IT" take EVERY factor into consideration before we force massive change upon our users. You should try it sometime -- its called being a good manager.
Let me tell how it really is -- I'm the Director of I.T. for an NYC-based non-profit, high-end, very prominent. Your comments about MS hurting me more are pretty offensive, and wofeully uninformed. By the way, I'm a UNIX guy, I've been an admin, an engineer, all the way since 0.99pl4 so you're preaching to the choir about open source. But reality is different.
In the non-profit world, budgets are so slim as to be non-existent. You're working on yesterday's technology (for the most part), you cobble together what you can. But there are certain things that all non-profits must have, the basic "office services" that we all take for granted. But these places don't have them, they have a bastardised collection of w98 and w95 and god forbid novell on dos desktops, all somehow strung together with a chain of ancient hubs, etc. You get the picture. We as IT guys in these places have very little resources, both in terms of people and time - oh and the previously mentioned money. We need MAXIMUM bang for the buck.
As a UNIX zealot I already know that with OSS/Linux/*NIX there's nothing better than a free lunch. But - I also have 75 people in the office who know absolutely nothing about computers except to click Send/Receive and read their email, or use the Outlook calendar. Believe me, if I had the time and the resources to build and deploy my own Linux desktops, I'd do it - oh god would I do it. But I have to face cold, hard facts and the fact is that as an IT guy at a non-profit I have to give as much with as little as I get, and that little is the "Microsoft Office environment" and goddamnit thats what these people know, and its what they expect and it's all they'll ever know.
Having said that - the money that I don't have to spend on Microsoft Office and the various OS' that I need to run it on are ALWAYS used (at least anywhere that I work) on as many servers as possible to run the important stuff -- stuff like intranets running apache & php, monitoring with netsaint, my sendmail relay, my free/swan VPN - don't get me wrong. There is more than a huge void in the non-profit world where OSS could be used, and should be. And the more progressive IT people do I think head in that direction.
But the fact is that the non-profit will always be strapped for cash, and more importantly IT staff and time. And thats why a full *NIX adoption would always be difficult in that environment, along with the "standard" of MS Office being important in such a creative environment, with many files being passed in and out to such non-technical people. That said, the foresight and generosity of OSS folk and their beliefs and awesome software are appreciated by the more foresight-friendly non-profit IT guys.
I don't dispute that MS ultimately profits from their donations -- just look at the other side of the coin before you say the non-profits are being hurt, dude.
In fact, that was the whole point of his article.
IMHO, he could have been talking about any of the "free" Unix variants out there.
His whole point was that even though Linux is supported (in fact, probably has the best support out there!), it's still not ready for primetime.
Why does everyone take these articles so damn personally?
--
main(v, c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Rik Tait [rik@marketxt.com]\n)";(!!c)[*c]
I mean, come on. All of the *best* sites out there are architected such that it really doesn't matter what the boxes are. Most of the big sites use hardware load-balancers (big/ip, I/Pivot, LocalDirector, HydraWeb etc). They use load-balancing "front-ends" such as Dynamo. They don't "hack" things with things like RR DNS, they have the bucks to spend on what is *right* for the job, when they have the money to spend. Right now, Linux is not *right* for a transaction-heavy DB engine. (Please, no flames about MySQL or other lightweight).
Sure - they don't use Linux boxes as databases, simply because the big DB's haven't been out long enough on Linux to prove themselves. So what if they use Oracle on Solaris on the backend and use 12 load-balanced Linux boxes to serve the web-content? That's fantastic IMHO!
Would you use a Linux box to serve TCP-based NFS across 25 switched Ethernet segments to over 2000 users? No way! Would you use a big Sun or HP box? Sure.
C'mon guys - it's all about using what's right for the job! Right now, Linux is not a *perfect* fit for certain things. People want as close to perfection as possible. Dvorak was wrong in his assumption that Linux is only good for the desktop.
But - that's not to say it's perfect for *every* server situation either. When I moved a major financial website from NT in Seattle to UNIX in NYC, I bought boxes that were right for the job. Few Solaris heavyweights for the backend, and many Linux boxes for the frontend. It works perfectly.
So let's keep this all in perspective!
--
main(v, c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Rik Tait [rik@marketxt.com]\n)";(!!c)[*c]