mikedanko

Neurofunk. Try on the lifted music podcast from Spor and Chris Renegade on for a good dose.

I never got it to work. Multiple boxes, various problems. I was really sort of interested in building on it and liked the concept, but I ended up just tossing it in the end and syncing data via jungledisk and keeping a cloud drive with it.

Yeah, I'm completely lost at Dropbox's new price point when compared to Jungle Disk, which is just as, if not more flexible than Dropbox. Jungle Disk is a lot more user friendly than you're letting on to, I've used it both personally and in the workgroup edition.

5 users over the course of the year on Jungle Disk: $240 320Gb of storage on Jungledisk for a year: $576. Total

I'm tempted to say these are non-competing products since you can just mount the cloud disk with Jungle Disk, but you need to sync with Dropbox, but you can do the same with Jungle Disk.

Probably when SysAdmins did too, as I believe the ChromeOS program manager was quoted along those lines the other day. The wording was closer to pink slipping them completely, but I'm going off the top of my head here.

I think the pilot program is about right for something as bold as how they're marketing this. Putting as many of these in the hands of the very people they're pissing at and saying "ok, you tell us then" is the only way to change some minds. If they don't ship 100,000 of these to smart people, I can't see it taking off.

The marketing is horrendous otherwise. A new sort of web based platform? I get that, I'm ok with that. A new sort of product that has marketing materials telling me my opinions are bullhookey and a PM that wants to see me out of a job is another.

Has anyone used Kinect's video chat? Does it work with computers or is it like the PS3 where you have to have another PS3 to have video?

I'm really surprised no one has tried to deploy some business apps for consoles, I'd imagine it'd take off pretty well as it'd be a great excuse for team building after hours.

Conflict free iPhones made by Chinese slave labor. There is absolutely no way to get past the fact that someone may have died to bring you that shiny gadget. As disconnected as people are with their food supply, they're even more disconnected to everything else in their homes.

Not so much. There are some open source projects based around red5 like bigbluebutton, but for the most part, they don't work all that well.

Adobe Connect, or Acrobat.com, or whatever it's been re-branded to, used to allow a meeting holder to have two other participants and gave you a free conference bridge. That's been relegated to one other participant and VoIP. You can still do presentations, share screens, have webcams, etc., but just with one other person and you have to call them on the phone.

I've found that it's great for a sort of RAD tool, but the functionality ends there because licensing and scalability are so expensive. The other problem is that it's so generally purposed that it reaches a point where integration with existing sort of FCAPS compliant setups is more of a chore than anything. Best put, it sort of reminds me of a Oracle Application Express for logs. I can do most anything with it quickly to get a good handle on things, but in the end I'm going to take those ideas and make something better with them.

This sounds super for Facebook users, but does this entice any Non-Facebook users? Are they doing anything to capture the people who don't see value in it?

Google does it now but integration is poor, and I suppose Facebook sort of took the user stories and simplified them but...

I don't see how this is different than anything Yahoo did 4-5 years ago. From the standpoint of using their IM app, things are forwarded to email or SMS depending on what the user wants. If you're in the webmail app similar options are provided. They also had a sort of seamless SMS from their webmail client a long time ago. I'm not sure what I'd call it, Intermodal Communication? How is what Facebook is doing here any different than the Yahoo model?

The only thing with gmail is that it's a pain to deal with between Voice/IM/GTalk, it's far from unified and you can't use it like normal GMail users if you're GAFYD. Google talk supports the whole email sort of exchange, but only after a conversation has been initiated and there are no more paths for the jabber transports to take.

Lion Server? Has there even been talk of it? Dead now?

I'd imagine the only use case for server that couldn't be done easily in a better way was spotlight server, and it's only a matter of doing it more cheaply than available CMS solutions.

My body and mind have taken a beating I don't think I can do much longer from ten years of useless night work swinging shifts sometimes three times a week, that guy is too happy.

That's a great list of personal reasons, but business can come first for the same reasons. My last big deployment was to half a million set top boxes. In the end, I had to do it at night, but I had oh so many reasons for doing it during the day:

* What if a percentage of the boxes bricked halfway through the deployment? A statistical insignificance in the lab doesn't help me help 15k people with bricks on their TV's. When they start playing with the boxes, I'm going to have to roll trucks and that's expensive. Instead man up the call center during a time where we don't have to pay shift diff.

* From an end-user standpoint, there's a different set of eyes on the products at different times of day. Think about it this way, if you sell porn, how much are you selling at 2AM vs. 9AM do you think? They're not going to call and complain about their porno not working, but it doesn't mean there's not a huge level of dissatisfaction. There's a lot of general economics and trade offs involved.

* Top notch help has the luxury of sleeping at this hour because they've probably earned the tenure. I'm not going to get the vendor of a vendor to help me with this stuff at 3am, and they're definitely not going to be fresh and chipper, and getting anyone beyond support on the phone takes hours -- by that time, they're awake anyway.

Change the above as you see fit to adapt to your type of work, it's all the same.

I missed some context there. I thought "yes, I need medicine after night work". Why did I completely miss the mark? Swing shifts all week.

Folks have mentioned Eclipse as an IDE, but there's also Eclipse as a platform. I have three Eclipse RCP apps I use for visualization daily.

I also manage a lot of equipment that requires java webstart to load a configuration GUI to accomplish tasks that would be darn near impossible at a CLI or any other way.

I logged into Cisco TAC the other day. Requires Java for ticket management tasks.

I use some rf propagation tools for a hobby that are java apps.

I make frequent use of Deskzilla. Java app.

I could go for days. I won't.

Large scale engineering dept guy here, the problem there is that most companies like that won't accept a SaaS solution.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely brilliant. I think it's the first time I've ever given a thumbs up to a third level metasolution to a problem.

Pagerduty needs to push some use cases on their site. It might break the SaaS reluctance to steaks and strippers type corporate managers. "It can eat my rediclously complicated jasper report that I send straight to the trash bin on arrival so I don't have to read it and figure out what buttons on the phone I have to push with all the reluctance of a four year old kid with a plate of brussel sprouts and broccoli in front of them? Sign me up!"

It's easy to say you're doing it wrong, it's much harder to say how you'd do it right. The ideas are there, they need some integration.

Google News? I abuse the heck out of it, just as feeds to feed Reader however.

The problem I still see with those sites as well as your own, that there's just way too much clicking and tab management involved. Everyone does it, you'll follow a really engaging story, try your damnedest to find the "print" button so you can get it all one one page then decide to instapaper for later or readability for now. Open endless tabs to look up references or if something is late breaking head off to twitter search.

I'd imagine a news portal could be interesting, but not without dramatically lowering the time it takes to navigate around the content and act on it. Finding a way to unobtrusively simplify the use case of someone following tasks to read and understand an article hasn't been done AFAIK, or at least done well. It would seem to me that unscatter is just adding an extra layer on to an already complicated navigation process.

I was laying in bed and for whatever reason it just smacked me in the face. Yes, there's a reason, and I was reminded of an anecdote regarding blackberries being served in the lobby to the press.

iChat is a presence and messaging framework that's completely ad hoc. The server frameworks don't do anything but presence and messaging.

Not so with Facetime. Apple just aimed a loaded gun at RIM, Avaya, and Ericsson today, and Facetime is the proof of concept. Verizon on the iPad was cocking the hammer. Apple has just shown the world that it has full enterprise communication stack integration from LDAP to device and more importantly the network in-between... and that network in between has a lot of control. Apple needs these guys a lot.

Submitting the protocol stack to the IETF is a win with consumers, but I'm sure that RIM, Ericsson, etc., are seeing this as spit on the face and more to the point it's probably why the guy at RIM completely lost his cool last week.

Apple is going at the enterprise in a remarkable manner, and probably the only way they could have.

According to the presentation, it's supposed to be made a standard. I'm assuming this would hit the IETF's Audio/Video transport working group, so that'd be where to keep a lookout.

Are you sure? That seems to be nothing but delivery of transport streams over HTTP and suggests nothing of negotiating calls ala SIP.

Thomas Limoncelli's book "Time Management for System Administrators" covered how to deal with all your "customers" years ago. There's some google videos of presentations regarding the book material, and its very relavant to this subject. The mutual interruption field, how to deal with users/managers/vp's/etc, how to come off as cool as possible -- it's all in there. I don't agree with this methodologies for keeping time, but the book is still full of gold.

Good luck. This data is worth more than the actual revenue and income for most of these companies. It's how they negotiate for carriage in different avenues and grow at all. I've often seen it as the cause of make or break deals between various parties when negotiating said distribution. On the same point, most of this data has to be provided back to the content originator per contract anyway for billing purposes. Even if its free to users, someone's paying the royalty bills.

Who's your target market here? Google l4m3 and hit me up, I can answer most of your questions on this if you can give me some more data.

While awesome for a lot of tasks, I've still found that a file system and OS tweaked for a particular task can have remarkable results. On a system with a few hundred thousand RRD files, I've found that ZFS with a 16k block size reduced my load by 75%. Obviously, the average RRD workload goes is vastly improved by SSD -- the move to SSD has me forgetting about IO forever in this case.

But, it's just a hack to begin with and SSD is the patch. I don't have the time/option to find and hack out a better storage mechanism for that particular task. RRD makes little sense in this day and age, but it's what I'm stuck with due to time constraints.

Oh Jesus, can't we all stop gawking at Facebook bullshit? No one can figure out what Facebook is, but if you haven't succumbed to it, you're intimidated by it. It's worth billions of dollars and for what? The pure evil of having everyone's marketing data?

In the mindset of Rodney King, can't we all just move on? Can't we all just get past not being Zuckerberg? Can't we all get back to being hackers who do things because they make our minds happy?

We're totally not normal. That, I'll agree with.

Usage data, smoochage data. The point of bringing up ICQ was that at one time, for what seemed like a long time, it was king.

People seem to have given up and consider Facebook the winner of this era of the Internet. My point is that stuff comes along too often, and changes so much, that it won't matter eventually.

Besides all that are we really talking about two competitive products? People still haven't even decided what Facebook really is, nor have they really defined it either. Why? Because no one can figure it out.

I'm a Fedora contributor and closet Ubuntu user. While I can get extremely upset at how difficult things can be in Fedora, like python and ruby, I generally try and take care of these things myself anyway. And who's not using RVM so why does it matter in the first place?

Truth is, I spend way too much time hacking at my Fedora system to make things work. It gets frustrating. I fall back to the Ubuntu systems and somehow, it's just easier. I'd comment on the details here, but it is madness.

So why even bother with Fedora at all? People. I can't stand Ubuntu people. From uneducated bloggers to Ubuntu fanbois, it drives me insane. You know there's a popular blog called OMG Ubuntu!? As far as uneducated views, there's a lot of talk about how awesome NetworkManager is in Ubuntu... you know where all that awesomeness came from? Fedora!

The Fedora community? Just amazing talented people all over the place. I can't stand to give them up. Some of the most awesome, unique, thoughtful and mindful people I've ever met all have Fedora in common.

In the end, I can't see how much feature X has to do with anything over it not existing in another distro. I can sort of see how something as shiny and new as a new Ubuntu release can be appealing, but not enough to move me. It all comes down to people, and Fedora has what really matters here.

But I don't use Facebook. I work in a department of seven, and they all are extremely reluctant to even check their Facebook accounts. Google? We use it all day. Google is like Linux, you can't even count how much you use it until you actually talk to an engineer.

Facebook just reminds me of ICQ. It was all hot shit, everyone thought it was going to take over the world, but it was just left to little old ladys who LOL'd at everything you had to say. Which, according to schedule and my wife's age, is probably going to be about another 10 years. Facebook gets another 10 years before it's ICQ.

And WOW, this just hit me after posting. Your question to HN is by far and large more blog worthy than most of the things on your blog.

I always tend to think that in the blogging world there are those that are journalists and those that are diary writers. The diary writers only ever succeed if they're writing about things you'd read in Penthouse Forum circa 1978.

Try not to involve yourself or your feelings too much. Offer less opinion and more substance and things based on the concrete. Use the words "I" and "You" less and consider it more of a group activity -- even though people may have not shown up yet.

Instead of lines like "Do not allow anyone to read your code out of context.", you need to put the parts together and make the reader actually understand how you got to the thought process without being demanding. Instead consider something like "From practical experience I find that often, reading code out of context can obscure the meaning, context, blah." Zed is the only person who is allowed to be this opinionated, and only because he is charming at the same time.

If you want people to read, they have to feel engaged and part of the conversation. This is key.

Find your 10 favorite blogs, or ones of people you closely identify yourself as being close to professionally speaking, and do your best to gauge the voice of the ones that are extremely readable. Find your likes and dislikes, about a particular blogger or series of posts and gauge other media sources by the same methods.

I find my best writing comes after a lot of reading, pause to think, a mental break then coming back to the subject. Give it a try.