This is a bit of a tangent, but a somewhat relevant one none the less. But first of all, bad Microsoft! You freaking imbilices (probably misspelled to show how dumb I am too.)
Is anyone out there seriously using disk compression in a production environment? Didn't anyone teach you guys that disk compression is a crutch and not a solution? For as long as I've been working with servers, all of my mentors have led me to believe that it is pretty much generally accepted practice not to use disk compression due to the potential for data corruption and the performance hit your servers take. If you need to compress files to save space, throw them onto some LTO or DLT media and pull them completely offline.
If you're working for a company that can't come up with more money for disk space, maybe you need to click on the Dice.com adds that are all over/. here.
The market doesn't care about that. All it cares about is whether it's the cheapest or not.
Not entirely true. I've been a dedicated Compaq customer because of their Proliant server line. When HP acquired Compaq I was scared that the Proliants were going to disappear and that HP was going to push their NetServers. Luckily HP realized that the NetServer was inferior and decided to rebrand Proliants. So long as the quality stays the same, I don't give two shits about what goes on in HP's boardroom. It seems to me like the HP board is on the ball tho. This Perkins guy is breaking bat like he should.
I think it gets asked as an either-or question to give the respondent some chance to save face. If someone is simply incompetent, they can work on that and become competent. If someone is branded as a liar, they are simply a liar. Or put in another way, "Is your skillset defective, or is your character defective?"
Here's the deal smart ass. Long before Slashdot was around, and long before you were on the Internet proving how tolerant you aren't, the people writing malicious computer coded decided that the plural of virus was virii. Just like more recently, "the group" decided that the plural form of "box" in the context of a "server" or "workstation" being a "box" is "boxen" and not "boxes". It's like "pirated software" is "warez".
All you're doing by posting your little verbal spew about proper use of English on the Internet is that you're LAME, and out of the touch with the community that you're a part of. Come on man, you have a relatively low/. UID... I thought that meant you were clued in or something.
Now it is just FUBAR. By the time upper management clues in, I think it will be beyond too late.
Splitting development of the same product up into different locations in the same country is not the brightest thing to do. Across international borders that still share the basics, still less bright, but throw in massive language/geographic/time zone divide and you are looking for disaster. But hey the books will look better this quarter...
It has been long enough at this point that I can probably include facts and not get into too much trouble. Quantum ATL (the robotic tape library people) were trying to impliment Clarify to handle all of their customer support, warranty support, warranty sales... basically the entire backend sans manufacturing. The company I worked for got called in to do Crystal Reports to pull all of the data out of the new system. We did our job great and the reports worked, woo hoo, go us!
The rest of the migration didn't go so well. Quantum tapped this Indian company to do the main implimentation. The time difference was the hugest cluster-fuck ever. Any time a question came up on Quantum's side, we sent an email to India. Then we waited UNTIL THE NEXT DAY for an answer. We waited with fingers crossed that the response would be an answer, and not a request for clarification. Eventually the project got shut down because it had gone so far over budget and so far beyond the time frame for completion that management decided it was better to scrap it than to try to salvage the project.
For what it's worth, the Quantum team was pretty on the ball. They were the first company that I worked for as a consultant where I thought, "Wow, the project managers know what is going on." They had timelines, and scopes of work, and well deligated responsibilies and well setup processes to keep things flowing. The problems came in with what should have been simply answered questions. Things like, "Can we put X data in Y field?"
It's probably been 5 years since I worked on that project. In this day and age with internet connections being what they are, and remote connectivity at the stage that it is, I think that things are probably a bit better. None the less, if you're working with an Indian company, you need to be able to count on them having someone who is awake AND WORTH A DAMN at 3am their local time.
Will be the guys working in the rendering labs in Industrial Light and Magic, since they'll be the only ones with access to the required hardware. This is gonna require more oomph than Vista, and boy is that saying something!
Yup, it's called Avid. All of the editing and post production folks are already working in HD. The big battle is bringing that HD content to the consumer in a package that fits on a single disc.
Personally, when I read about all of this nonsense, I'm glad that I really don't give a flying fuck about consuming media anymore. I've pulled off the blinders and realized how worthless and unoriginal all of the content really is. I feel sorry for you guys who are fretting over all of this stuff. Ohhhh noes, no movies for you?!?! Booo hooo hooo.
And in a more serious tone, come on... you know this crap is going to be cracked in short order. You'll be able to fire up your Linux box, slap in the copied disc into your drive and watch away. Maybe I'm a little bit jaded from living in southern California and having clients in the post production business, but I've NEVER had any problem getting my hands on any sort of movie that I wanted to watch. Most of the stuff I don't even have to go to Hollywood for it. Every DVD that I've wanted to have "permanently" says Maxell on it. =) Most of the time, it came to me via the local video store and my buddy's PC. I don't see that changing simply because a new format was invented.
What I don't see here is bluster. This isn't high school. People don't get up on stage at defcon and claim to have hacked something they didn't really hack.
Very, VERY true. Ever since DefCon started it has been LEGIT. It isn't smoke and mirrors. It isn't your typical security conference where the guys on stage are just parrotting information to you that they learned from someone else. The guys on stage are the guys doing it. They're the modern day l0pht crew, the Mudges and Aleph Ones of the 21st century. Up until DT decided to make EvenMorePhatLoot with BlackHat, Defcon was THE public venue for proving that you truly are a legit hacker and not some Internet loudmouth. I still remember sitting in the Sands listening to Ludwig talk about polymorphic ASM code and thinking to myself, "I'm wasting my time NOPing out copy protection routines and this guy is doing WHAT?!?!"
All BS aside, I think you've been toking the Microsoft crack pipe a bit too long. We are all entitled to our personal opinions, but when your broad generalizations are out of wack, I'm going to call you out on them. Specifically...
IE7 is much easier to use than Firefox and it will be the way to go for the majority of Internet users.
I completely disagree. I've been using the Internet since the days of 14.4 SLIP connections and I've gotten used to the "standard" interfaces. IE7 changed the interface up and moved stuff all over the place. I hate it. I have it installed on my PC, but I use Firefox as my default browser. The only time I use IE is when I have to open up OWA sites to check email.
We see things one way and believe that this is the right way. And it looks that way. Until you move your view a little bit and see that your company is hemorrhaging money. Or that a large purchase will take you from black to red.
We don't have to explain to a board of directors why the company isn't able to meet its goals. But someone does.
The power of the mighty dollar.
Thanks for replying and making some good points. It took me a while to understand the concept that "IT is a money hole." In most organizations, unless they are a technology company, IT is just a big black hole that money goes into and nothing that generates revenue comes back out of it. I think that one of the biggest battles any IT guy faces is trying to convince management that, "Just because it works now, doesn't mean it will still be working fine in three years." For most managers and most companies, they don't see the need to put money into IT until they lose data or suffer some serious down time that impacts the entire company. Then all of a sudden $10,000 for a server and SLA's doesn't seem so much in comparision to the ### of employees x $##.## per hour those employees make x # hours of downtime while those employees were sitting around doing next to nothing because a server without disk redundency suffered a disk failure.
As a consultant who often gets called in when the shit hits the fan, I've lost track of how many clients I've had to tell, "It's not really that your in house guy was completely incompetent, it's just that you really need to spend the money when he tells you to spend it."
Now granted I'm just talking out of my ass and parroting the party line. However SQL 2005 is SOX compliant, and if AT&T was SOX compliant, such things wouldn't have happened. Unfortunately SOX is only a couple of years old, and the "enforcement" stage of it at this point only really required auditted companies to identify where they aren't compliant and make a promise to come into compliance. There aren't any real penalities for being out of compliance.
Are there any other SQL packages out there that offer out of the box, table and column encryption?
Take any mid-sized business, inventory their hardware and tell me how much its going to cost to replace each system? Because you can't just do one, one there, thats where the compatibility issues come in. Say we've got 100 workstation no at EOL, nobody is going to sign off on a purchase order to replace all those functioning systems unless they have a lot of extra cash and a serious bias. Because in business sense it just doesn't add up. Then remember those EOL systems, you know, the ones the interns use, file stores, backup systems, whatever. Companies invest a lot of capitol into a solution like that and you're absolutely right, its going to be hard to topple.
This is a good point and one that I've been trying to make here on/. for a while. There are huge costs associated with just "switching" over to Linux (or Apple). You can't just send your users home on Friday night and bring them in on Monday morning expecting them to be up and running on a new OS AND application suite. The ROI would take a long time to materialize and in the interim, you'd have a bunch of unhappy, half productive people. The average corporate user just wants to get their job done and when they've been getting their job done one way, they aren't going to support you telling them that they need to do it a different way.
If you've ever worked at a company that hired a Mac user who gripes all day about having to use a PC because they do things differently on their Mac, then you have some idea of what you're in store for. Imagine suddenly having 100+ "Mac users" who are whining, "I did it this way on my other computer. How come this stupid new computer (Linux) makes me do it differently?"
I'm pretty much a pragmatist. I've been working in IT for over a decade at this point. What it comes down to is you go with the tools that get the job done within the budget you've been given. The users are the most important priority and you don't want to rock their boat. If things are working well enough, you better have a damn good reason for wanting to change things. And if you change things, you're staking your career that the change isn't going to make things worse. In terms of leaving Microsoft... sure, Microsoft may blow in some regards, but it's not broken enough to make business sense for most organizations to switch.
...something, the stronger it will become." I was originally presented with that concept through NLP in the frame of "not being able to not think about something." I think that Microsoft is doing themselves a HUGE disservice by trying to quash open source at all costs. The more effort they put into trying to make it go away, the more people are going to begin to wonder what the big deal is all about. The more people wonder about what the big deal is all about, the more people are going to look at OSS and all the OSS propoganda and start to believe, "Gee, no wonder MS is trying to make this go away. OSS can do everything Microsoft can do for us, only cheaper!"
If Microsoft had any brains, they'd point out where their products are superior to the open source offerings. Unfortunately for them, I don't think that they have many talking points on that platform. An example of that was seen with the recent Massachusetts education fiasco where all they could come up with is, "OSS doesn't support access for people with disabilities."
Or at least that is what the guys playing those characters tell you.
Maybe that's what they tell YOU. I'm talking from real life experience. I was dating an attractive, geeky girl before I started playing WoW and one day when I went to visit, I saw her sister playing. Her sister, although only about 17, is freakin hot. Like straight off of MTV, looks like she should be at the mall crushing guy's egos hot. Her sister's friend plays too, and she's hot. My girlfriend plays, she's hot. Not super model, porn star hot, but definitely, want to fuck more than a few times hot. My friend's g/f plays, she's hot, like makes my girlfriend jealous when I quest with her and talk to her hot.
I'm not saying that the majority of "girls" in WoW aren't really guys. Hell, another friend of mine's g/f (she's not hot) made a "guy" character in WoW because she hated being constantly bothered by guys trying to get to know her.
I can honestly say that WoW has one thing going for it that I have NEVER seen in any other game. There are ATTRACTIVE women who play the game. There is something about the fantasy genre that draws attractive women to it. Just take a look at LotR. Being a fantasy geek has gone mainstream and gained acceptance. Blizzard pretty much has a lock on the fantasy MMO with WoW. There aren't any other genres out there that will have a similar draw across so many segments of the population.
I personally think that the world of Shadowrun could come close and compete with WoW because of it's blend of fantasy and cyberpunk. The two big limiting factors on Shadowrun are A) Microsoft holds the IP license and B) there isn't enough hardware power to populate an entire city for thousands of players to run around in at the same time. But in terms of the content possibility (criminals vs cops, the lower class vs the evil corporations, magic, matrix, etc), you can't really beat the potential of the Shadowrun universe. You can have soloing in the world, then you can have instances as runs against corporations. Most importantly, the Shadowrun universe doesn't lend itself to the gear grind like WoW does. The playing field remains pretty level throughout the character advancement process. You don't gain more hitpoints and mana as you advance. It just becomes less likely that you will lose them as quickly. One of the big limiting factors I see to doing Shadowrun "right" would be the adult oriented nature of the game. I'm not sure how many parents who fork over $15 a month for Johnny to fight orcs and trolls are going to be happy with Johnny running drugs for the mob and killing the family of corporate whistleblowers.
Slashdot Mirror
Is anyone out there seriously using disk compression in a production environment? Didn't anyone teach you guys that disk compression is a crutch and not a solution? For as long as I've been working with servers, all of my mentors have led me to believe that it is pretty much generally accepted practice not to use disk compression due to the potential for data corruption and the performance hit your servers take. If you need to compress files to save space, throw them onto some LTO or DLT media and pull them completely offline.
If you're working for a company that can't come up with more money for disk space, maybe you need to click on the Dice.com adds that are all over /. here.
Does that include ignorance of culture and "societal norms" within a given group?
Not entirely true. I've been a dedicated Compaq customer because of their Proliant server line. When HP acquired Compaq I was scared that the Proliants were going to disappear and that HP was going to push their NetServers. Luckily HP realized that the NetServer was inferior and decided to rebrand Proliants. So long as the quality stays the same, I don't give two shits about what goes on in HP's boardroom. It seems to me like the HP board is on the ball tho. This Perkins guy is breaking bat like he should.
I think it gets asked as an either-or question to give the respondent some chance to save face. If someone is simply incompetent, they can work on that and become competent. If someone is branded as a liar, they are simply a liar. Or put in another way, "Is your skillset defective, or is your character defective?"
All you're doing by posting your little verbal spew about proper use of English on the Internet is that you're LAME, and out of the touch with the community that you're a part of. Come on man, you have a relatively low /. UID... I thought that meant you were clued in or something.
Splitting development of the same product up into different locations in the same country is not the brightest thing to do. Across international borders that still share the basics, still less bright, but throw in massive language/geographic/time zone divide and you are looking for disaster. But hey the books will look better this quarter...
It has been long enough at this point that I can probably include facts and not get into too much trouble. Quantum ATL (the robotic tape library people) were trying to impliment Clarify to handle all of their customer support, warranty support, warranty sales... basically the entire backend sans manufacturing. The company I worked for got called in to do Crystal Reports to pull all of the data out of the new system. We did our job great and the reports worked, woo hoo, go us!
The rest of the migration didn't go so well. Quantum tapped this Indian company to do the main implimentation. The time difference was the hugest cluster-fuck ever. Any time a question came up on Quantum's side, we sent an email to India. Then we waited UNTIL THE NEXT DAY for an answer. We waited with fingers crossed that the response would be an answer, and not a request for clarification. Eventually the project got shut down because it had gone so far over budget and so far beyond the time frame for completion that management decided it was better to scrap it than to try to salvage the project.
For what it's worth, the Quantum team was pretty on the ball. They were the first company that I worked for as a consultant where I thought, "Wow, the project managers know what is going on." They had timelines, and scopes of work, and well deligated responsibilies and well setup processes to keep things flowing. The problems came in with what should have been simply answered questions. Things like, "Can we put X data in Y field?"
It's probably been 5 years since I worked on that project. In this day and age with internet connections being what they are, and remote connectivity at the stage that it is, I think that things are probably a bit better. None the less, if you're working with an Indian company, you need to be able to count on them having someone who is awake AND WORTH A DAMN at 3am their local time.
Yup, it's called Avid. All of the editing and post production folks are already working in HD. The big battle is bringing that HD content to the consumer in a package that fits on a single disc.
Personally, when I read about all of this nonsense, I'm glad that I really don't give a flying fuck about consuming media anymore. I've pulled off the blinders and realized how worthless and unoriginal all of the content really is. I feel sorry for you guys who are fretting over all of this stuff. Ohhhh noes, no movies for you?!?! Booo hooo hooo.
And in a more serious tone, come on... you know this crap is going to be cracked in short order. You'll be able to fire up your Linux box, slap in the copied disc into your drive and watch away. Maybe I'm a little bit jaded from living in southern California and having clients in the post production business, but I've NEVER had any problem getting my hands on any sort of movie that I wanted to watch. Most of the stuff I don't even have to go to Hollywood for it. Every DVD that I've wanted to have "permanently" says Maxell on it. =) Most of the time, it came to me via the local video store and my buddy's PC. I don't see that changing simply because a new format was invented.
WTF are you talking about? Their Proliant servers kick ass, their Ultrium drives kick ass, and their enterprise tech support is top notch.
What we're seeing is an even greater example of what Hilter called the Big Lie Theory.
Very, VERY true. Ever since DefCon started it has been LEGIT. It isn't smoke and mirrors. It isn't your typical security conference where the guys on stage are just parrotting information to you that they learned from someone else. The guys on stage are the guys doing it. They're the modern day l0pht crew, the Mudges and Aleph Ones of the 21st century. Up until DT decided to make EvenMorePhatLoot with BlackHat, Defcon was THE public venue for proving that you truly are a legit hacker and not some Internet loudmouth. I still remember sitting in the Sands listening to Ludwig talk about polymorphic ASM code and thinking to myself, "I'm wasting my time NOPing out copy protection routines and this guy is doing WHAT?!?!"
See the subject.
I think it works the other way around. You pay them and then they allow you to update the Tagging on the article.
Sweet! I can continue to not RTFA and still be relevent in my responses. =)
My first thought about this is that Google is getting people to come up with metatag data for them by making a game out of it.
IE7 is much easier to use than Firefox and it will be the way to go for the majority of Internet users.
I completely disagree. I've been using the Internet since the days of 14.4 SLIP connections and I've gotten used to the "standard" interfaces. IE7 changed the interface up and moved stuff all over the place. I hate it. I have it installed on my PC, but I use Firefox as my default browser. The only time I use IE is when I have to open up OWA sites to check email.
Thanks for replying and making some good points. It took me a while to understand the concept that "IT is a money hole." In most organizations, unless they are a technology company, IT is just a big black hole that money goes into and nothing that generates revenue comes back out of it. I think that one of the biggest battles any IT guy faces is trying to convince management that, "Just because it works now, doesn't mean it will still be working fine in three years." For most managers and most companies, they don't see the need to put money into IT until they lose data or suffer some serious down time that impacts the entire company. Then all of a sudden $10,000 for a server and SLA's doesn't seem so much in comparision to the ### of employees x $##.## per hour those employees make x # hours of downtime while those employees were sitting around doing next to nothing because a server without disk redundency suffered a disk failure.
As a consultant who often gets called in when the shit hits the fan, I've lost track of how many clients I've had to tell, "It's not really that your in house guy was completely incompetent, it's just that you really need to spend the money when he tells you to spend it."
Now granted I'm just talking out of my ass and parroting the party line. However SQL 2005 is SOX compliant, and if AT&T was SOX compliant, such things wouldn't have happened. Unfortunately SOX is only a couple of years old, and the "enforcement" stage of it at this point only really required auditted companies to identify where they aren't compliant and make a promise to come into compliance. There aren't any real penalities for being out of compliance.
Are there any other SQL packages out there that offer out of the box, table and column encryption?
This is a good point and one that I've been trying to make here on /. for a while. There are huge costs associated with just "switching" over to Linux (or Apple). You can't just send your users home on Friday night and bring them in on Monday morning expecting them to be up and running on a new OS AND application suite. The ROI would take a long time to materialize and in the interim, you'd have a bunch of unhappy, half productive people. The average corporate user just wants to get their job done and when they've been getting their job done one way, they aren't going to support you telling them that they need to do it a different way.
If you've ever worked at a company that hired a Mac user who gripes all day about having to use a PC because they do things differently on their Mac, then you have some idea of what you're in store for. Imagine suddenly having 100+ "Mac users" who are whining, "I did it this way on my other computer. How come this stupid new computer (Linux) makes me do it differently?"
I'm pretty much a pragmatist. I've been working in IT for over a decade at this point. What it comes down to is you go with the tools that get the job done within the budget you've been given. The users are the most important priority and you don't want to rock their boat. If things are working well enough, you better have a damn good reason for wanting to change things. And if you change things, you're staking your career that the change isn't going to make things worse. In terms of leaving Microsoft... sure, Microsoft may blow in some regards, but it's not broken enough to make business sense for most organizations to switch.
If Microsoft had any brains, they'd point out where their products are superior to the open source offerings. Unfortunately for them, I don't think that they have many talking points on that platform. An example of that was seen with the recent Massachusetts education fiasco where all they could come up with is, "OSS doesn't support access for people with disabilities."
I had to Google "wow cara" to figure out what you were talking about, but man... what a funny story.
You must be one of the chicken shits here... And you are!
I still appreciate your response tho, however anti-social it may have been.
...I'm not trying to talk to her.
A lot hotter than the "guys playing girls" you'd expect to find on the other side of a WoW toon.
Maybe that's what they tell YOU. I'm talking from real life experience. I was dating an attractive, geeky girl before I started playing WoW and one day when I went to visit, I saw her sister playing. Her sister, although only about 17, is freakin hot. Like straight off of MTV, looks like she should be at the mall crushing guy's egos hot. Her sister's friend plays too, and she's hot. My girlfriend plays, she's hot. Not super model, porn star hot, but definitely, want to fuck more than a few times hot. My friend's g/f plays, she's hot, like makes my girlfriend jealous when I quest with her and talk to her hot.
I'm not saying that the majority of "girls" in WoW aren't really guys. Hell, another friend of mine's g/f (she's not hot) made a "guy" character in WoW because she hated being constantly bothered by guys trying to get to know her.
I personally think that the world of Shadowrun could come close and compete with WoW because of it's blend of fantasy and cyberpunk. The two big limiting factors on Shadowrun are A) Microsoft holds the IP license and B) there isn't enough hardware power to populate an entire city for thousands of players to run around in at the same time. But in terms of the content possibility (criminals vs cops, the lower class vs the evil corporations, magic, matrix, etc), you can't really beat the potential of the Shadowrun universe. You can have soloing in the world, then you can have instances as runs against corporations. Most importantly, the Shadowrun universe doesn't lend itself to the gear grind like WoW does. The playing field remains pretty level throughout the character advancement process. You don't gain more hitpoints and mana as you advance. It just becomes less likely that you will lose them as quickly. One of the big limiting factors I see to doing Shadowrun "right" would be the adult oriented nature of the game. I'm not sure how many parents who fork over $15 a month for Johnny to fight orcs and trolls are going to be happy with Johnny running drugs for the mob and killing the family of corporate whistleblowers.