Posts by Pirate Dave 1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008
Educational pricing was always cheaper, at least for MS software as well as Novell software. In higher-ed, eh, we're not afraid of *NIX, so MS knows they have to cut deep or we'll make everyone use VT-220 terminals again. ;)
And I seem to recall there was a large price increase in MS-SQL late last year, even for EDU. Not sure what the reason was, other than MS needed more money. Luckily, I haven't needed 2012 yet, as 2008 is still doing what we need.
You forgot to mention that businesses generally skipped Vista, in spite of Microsoft's claims that it was the bestest operating system they had ever produced (until they came out with Windows 7, of course). I think what you are actually seeing is a lot of cheerleading by Microsoft to try to drum up enthusiasm to their rather boring Operating System, when most regular Joe's couldn't give two shits about the Operating System, and businesses passing on operating systems that don't have any "gotta have it" features. Windows 8 doesn't seem to have any "gotta have it" features, at least not from what I've seen so far. In fact, it is a strange, alien, and possibly even hostile environment compared to the Windows versions we've had to put up with since 1995, so it's little wonder that business are voting with their feet by digging in their heels and sticking with XP or Win 7.
I'm trying to think of when the last time was that Microsoft helped me "out of a hole" in regards to one of their OSes.
Nope, can't think of one. No, wait, I think back in '93 I had an issue with Windows 3.1 and called and they did help me out. Back when their telephone tech support was still free because they were still a hungry company. They're all fat and well-fed now.
Although I could be wrong, maybe the problem was in VB 3, not Windows. It sucks getting old...
Funny, I think IBM felt the same way towards microcomputers/PCs and Microsoft back in the 70's. There was no financial software for those toy computers back in 1974, no COBOL., no reason to worry at all. IBM's mainframe business was HERE TO STAY and to think otherwise made "absolutely no sense for the thousands upon thousands of companies currently dependent upon customized industry solutions to switch to a non-supported OS and then use an emulator or code interpreter just to run a program that can be run natively on the original OS, with willing tech support (by the developer or the OS manufacturer, MS) to boot.".
It's a cycle, see. At some point, MS will fall and a new giant will emerge. Might be Google, might be Apple, might be RedHat, might be some little company that hasn't even been incorporated yet.
Here's even better - we run Groupwise here, and users are frequently wanting mailing lists created for one thing or another. I've tried in past times to teach users how to create their own Groupwise NAB files, but for most, it's waaay too much techno-magic-mumb0-jumbo. So now I tell them if they'll send me a list of the email addresses they want in the list, I'll create a file that they can import. So Excel gets primary duty to tweak the files they send, then Notepad gets cleanup duty of replacing commas with "," (quote comma quote) and a few other things, since Groupwise requires each field to be quoted.
I've thought about trying to do it in Powershell, but don't know if it would really save that much time. Excel + Notepad gets the job done in < 5 minutes for all but the most ridiculously long lists.
So much Notepad hatred. Why? It's a very simple little text editor that does rudimentary things. It's not great, not snazzy, not bloated, not full of colored text. It's just simple, quick, and easy. And it's already on every single Windows server in the server room. True, it is dreadfully slow and search-and-replace on large files compared to NotePad++ or Cpad or pretty much anything that isn't relying on the default capabilities of a textbox. But it's always there and it pretty much always works the same way every time.
Zawinski's Observation, from the Unix Hater's Handbook (http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf), down on page 168 (page 206 according to PDF Viewer):
Now at this point I should have remembered that profound truism:
“Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use sed.’
Now they have two problems.”
There may be other versions, but strangely, I just read that one last week, which is why it was fresh in my brain.
Beat me to it. I still remember reading the articles about how awesome Dragon's Lair was, and waiting months for the local arcade to get one. The graphics were way cool for the time, but I can't recall I was ever very good at the game itself. And, iirc, it was a 4-quarters game in the arcades around here, so playing was pricey. One game of Dragon's Lair where I was sure to die quickly, or four games of Galaxian? Wasn't too hard to make that choice. But when it first came out, DL was visually amazing.
@kb - so what you are saying is that in spite of the millions and millions of legitimate licenses that M$ sells in a year, those of us in IT would have to suffer thru SecureBoot because M$ is worried about a few percent being pirated? Fuck that. The whole PC industry shouldn't be borked just because M$ is losing a few percent of sales. We've already had to bend over and kiss our own asses for years to keep M$ happy. If M$ wants to make sure all copies of their OS are legit they should port it to the IBM mainframe and drop support for PCs, then see how long they maintain market dominance. The PC world should stay open and usable. Not all of us are total M$ whores, some of us have real work to do on these toy computers.
I'm not a purist, but I don't have X on my CenOS servers. Two primary reasons for that:
1. Takes up a lot of space (yeah, I know, disks are huge now) and adds unnecessary cluttering services
2. Keeps me from using a production server as a "one-off" desktop
3. Only a LAMER runs a GUI on a server.
Heh, ok, #3 is old-fashioned troll bait.
But, I do run X on my SLES boxes, since they are eDirectory servers and in a worst-case scenario, I COULD take some pills and run ConsoleOne directly on the server if I needed to. In fact, IIRC, it's a bit of a PITA to get the SLES boxes to NOT run a gui. DAMN YOU NOVELL!!!!
I think you missed my humor...
Besides which, there is no button marked "Desktop". There is a Recycle bin, and quick-launch icons for Server Manager, Powershell, and WIndows Explorer. Anything further requires divining just which spot to hover my mouse over, because a Start button (like we've had for 18 years now) is just too god-damned ugly or difficult for Microsoft to include anymore. So we're supposed to pretend our 16-core HP DL380G8 is a fucking 10" tablet. The thing weighs 70+ pounds, it's NOT a fucking tablet, it is a server. But not in Microsoft-land. No, in Microsoft-land, it's the same as every other piece of equipment - tablet, PC, Server, phone. Users have apparently fallen to such a low level of intelligence (even the certified professionals) that they can't be bothered with complicated things like nested menus or on-screen visual cues as to where such menus might be found, Instead these poor, dumb bastards are given a mostly blank screen where they have to ferret out the magic spots to hover, or breakdown and finally learn to use the Windows key. And if they never figure out where these magic spots are, well, hey, at least they can't break anything.
Sorry I'm venting, but I'm going to spend the next 5-6 years of my life adminning the system I'm building now, and I fucking HATE the Windows 8/2012 interface.
gouge out your eyes. You don't need them with 2012 anyway - either you install the no-gui version that's just a command line with a bunch of PowerShell scripts, or you install the no-gui version that includes the WIndows 8 desktop. Neither gives you a proper Windows server desktop, imho. I spent last week being bullied around by the Win2012 desktop on my first 2012 test server. What a wonderful load of shit. It's not bad enough that we sysadmins sometimes HAVE to run Windows servers for various things, but now we also have to use that god-awful turd-spurt of a "desktop" that Microsoft put in Win8. Thank the FSM for Classic Shell.
There, I feel better now. Thanks. Going to go fire up ConsoleOne and remember how a real PC-Server OS is administered. ;)
Well, technically they didn't "give" us the office product 13 years ago, we had to purchase it. And if it's still doing what we need it to do, why would we need to buy a newer version to do pretty much the same thing as the 13-year-old version that we've already paid for? It's not like it's wearing out like a car engine or getting old like a lapdog (or, err, wife...).
"getting hideously stuck inside vi, unable to recall the correct exit keystrokes, and so trampling all over the edit I have just made."
That sounds like a normal vi session for me. The only thing more unbearable than vi's wonderful interface (do I hit "ESC" or ":" now?) is trying to reverse-engineer what RMS was tripping on when he wrote emacs. Nano is almost always the first thing I install on a new Linux box. It helps make life worth living as a Linux admin.
Amazing that the iptables rules they use were generated in 2003... At least that's what it shows in the dump output if you follow the first link in the article.
And more curious-er - a quick whois shows the two external IP ranges aren't even directly registered to Barracuda. One is out of Layer42's block, the other from XO.
So after 9 years, Barracuda hasn't changed or dropped ISPs nor network ranges. Hopefully...
An E-4200. I think it was bought in 1998 - I inherited it from the previous SysAdmin in 2002.. Has a 400-MHz Pentium II in it (or maybe a PIII) and, err, 64 or maybe 128 megs of RAM. Still chugging along here beside my desk, serving up web pages. I think I changed the CPU and case fans in 2003, but other than that, it's been up 24/7 for a very, very long time.
Perhaps our Standards Soviet could consider a new unit for measuring these giant squid. Instead of measuring their lenght in the old units of meters or feet, these enormo squid should be measured by volume in "JapaneseStomachs".
For example - "That juvenile Giant Squid we caught with our submersible was about 872 JapaneseStomachs. And it was tender and delicious".
Or perhaps - "That crusty, old Giant Squid was a monster. 3213 JapaneseStomachs at least, but way too tangy to actually eat."
Err, the channels I watch all run commercials, so that should ideally be their revenue stream, same as it was for broadcast TV. If the cable channels were commercial-free, I could see your point. But they aren't. They are laden with commercials.
And as others have said, if a channel isn't popular enough to stand on its own, then why does it get to stay?
but I wish somebody would break the channel-bundling mindset. Why do I have to pay for 50+ channels of fucking ESPN? I'm an IT nerd, I don't watch sports other than maybe X-Games stuff. And then I have to pay for 75 OTHER (non-ESPN I guess) sports channels, 40+ Jesus channels, 20 shopping channels, and untold numbers of channels in languages I don't even speak?
Here's an idea, Cable Industry: let me pick the 20 or 30 channels I want to watch, and you charge me, say, $1.50 per channel per month. That includes you, DirectTV and DishNetwork. And you can even keep charging a premium for the "premium" movie channels like HBO, Showtime, etc.
Bullshit! Sorry, but we had plenty of innovation in the 70' and 80's before software patents became an issue. Now, I'll give you that hardware is a different story, and your claim is true there. But software patents are an evil that must be stopped. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that software patents = no innovation. Who wants to waste time writing code that may be ruled infringing on some obscure, obvious-to-all patent in 6 months time?
Dude,
that makes me glad I left programming and became a Sysadmin. I had a PM like that once back in the mid-90's - he came by every 2-3 hours to ask "How are we doing? Any progress?", and it was on a project where i was supposed to use a seriously buggy "framework" that we had licensed from a 3rd party developer (who apparently liked illicit drugs). I so wanted to give that PM a colon scan with a rabid cat.
Lester, next time label these as NSBL - Not Safe Before Lunch. It's not quite noon yet here in the States, but after seeing the souse, well, my appetite has gone missing. The scrapple didn't look too bad, though, 'specially since you used a good cut of meat as opposed to floor-scrapings from the slaughterhouse.
Agree about the speaker. It's pretty much useless in anything other than a dead-quiet environment. Loaded it with a few movies and took it camping the weekend after I got it (to keep the kids occupied in case of rain), but the sound was too quiet to be heard over the sound of light rain on the tent. Otherwise, it's a nice device. Battery lasts pretty well. The only real lack is a rear-facing camera (the SmartTools app can do some neato stuff with one).
Really, how could anyone be scared by that game, considering that an hour in, the repetitive boredom had already induced a semi-coma?
The Archvile in Doom2, now THAT gave us the definition of "pant-cacking". The alert sound made my skin crawl.
And no mention of the HORROR that was DukeNukem Forever?
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