Launch nuclear deterrent!

-Operation denied, are you root?

SUDO LAUNCH NUCLEAR DETERRENT!!!

-SUDO: command not found

help SUDO

-bash: help: no help topics match `SUDO'. Try `help help' or `man -k SUDO' or `info SUDO'.

help help

-help: help [-dms] [pattern ...]
        Display information about builtin commands.

        Displays brief summaries of builtin commands. If PATTERN is specified, gives detai...

Then all you see is a blinding white flash. ;-)

compiz works just fine under KDE4.

IME compiz is more stable, more configurable and has a smaller memory footprint than kwin plus I get to use my favorite emerald theme.

I was a diehard GNOME user for years and KDE hasn't got it completely right yet - for instance I think kate is just awful and prefer gedit for a gooey text editor. I've tried learning to like kate but so far haven't been successful.

But - I do like that KDE seems to have the integration that GNOME lacks for the most part.

In my experience buying 1,000 desktops gives you *no* leverage with the top three hardware vendors.

I just bought a million bucks worth of machines from Dell a few months ago. Dell's annual sales for the year ending January 2010 was 52.9 billion dollars, so my little million-dollar purchase was less than 0.00002% of their annual sales.

That's not a whole lot of leverage.

sorry, couldn't resist. ;-)

...and was actually discussing the switch from Windows to Linux with couple friends of mine from the IA shop. I'm in charge of desktop PC support for this 3,300-user agency.

I'd like to preface things by saying that I use Linux exclusively at home and have for several years. No dual boot, no wine and no running Windows in a VM. I could do my whole job from within Linux if Firefox supported reading encrypted mail in Outlook Web Access and if there was something available for Linux that'd allow me to read Visio drawings in their native format.

Software costs are inconsequential so we'll ignore that argument for the time being. The biggest expense in an IT budget isn't software or hardware, it's people - and although things would settle down after a year or two the cost of migration is the showstopper here, not the cost of sustainment.

I've heard different stories about what caused the USB ban but for me the short version is that somewhere in DoD some sysadmin should have been fired. I can't say for sure what happened but at least two Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) policies were violated - autorun wasn't disabled on the workstations and apparently workstation virus scanners weren't configured properly, so to minimize the threat DoD bans USB storage devices rather than fire the nitwit who wasn't doing his job.

Windows as a vector? Out of 3,300 users we had eight (yes, eight) security incidents in the last twelve months where a PC was infected by a hostile application - the reason I know this is I had to put that damn metric in a Powerpoint slide recently. Eight out of better than three thousand is a pretty good average, but the PCs still run like crap ;-)

They've authorized turning USB storage back on, but only for approved devices that will be encrypted and centrally managed - and USB storage will be enabled by device rather than by user. Unauthorized devices still won't work. We've decided that since folks have been working without thumb drives for two years we're gonna continue to let them work that way - we've got the infrastructure in place to authorize thumb drives by hardware signature but we don't plan to issue any to end users at this point.

DoD information security policies aren't written by Microsoft - Microsoft wouldn't hire anybody that stupid. Case in point - DISA mandates that LAN and WLAN interfaces on a machine can't be active at the same time but outside of creating separate hardware profiles for wired and wireless Windows doesn't support this configuration - and simply disabling network bridging doesn't satisfy the requirement. If you ask DISA how to implement this requirement they can't tell you. I can tell you there's a neat little application called Wireless AutoSwitch that'll do the job and it's dirt cheap, though.

But I digress.

I stand corrected. Thanks for keeping me straight ;-)

Did a bit of math here and at 36-bit color a raw image would be a bit more than 535mb.

I don't think the technology is available yet to process an image that large into a jpeg or copy a raw image to a storage device quickly enough to use this in most camera applications - and definitely not in your point and shoot ;-)

Yeah - my bad. I had beta ppa enabled on both machines but backports was only enabled on the 64-bit box.

cheers -

I made the switch from GNOME to KDE about a year ago and had the same question but managed to answer it for myself.

On my 32-bit netbook I've slimmed KDE down considerably and my machine uses ~180mb of RAM at idle. That's about 30mb more than LXDE or XFCE and I have desktop effects enabled. I use compiz instead of kwin because of its smaller footprint and increased functionality - so my netbook has my favorite emerald wallpaper and a proper desktop cube - and still uses only ~180mb of memory. For me the increased functionality is well worth the additional 30mb of RAM or so that KDE uses and to be honest this thing never pages to disk anyway - so all it costs me is a couple extra seconds booting the machine.

I'm running KDE 4.5 RC2 on the netbook and just upgraded my 64-bit desktop to KDE 4.5 final.

The 64-bit binaries have been released, the 32-bit haven't yet - at least not on the beta ppa.

I upgraded my 64-bit machine over FreeNX this morning and it appears to work fine.

Yeah, using a zero-fill utility isn't low level formatting.

The meaning hasn't changed, the term is used incorrectly - especially when referring to flash media, which IIRC doesn't have a stepper motor ;-)

I work for an agency under Department of Defense. We just received about $300k worth of fake Cisco stuff. Fortunately the problem was discovered before my podmate certified the vendor's invoice.

Vendor didn't get paid and contracting is still working the issue.

Not entirely. If everything else is equal the guy with the cert gets the job. I understand that all the cert does is show you can attend a boot camp but it does bring a measurable skill set with it. For instance if you've got an MS Exchange cert and I'm looking for an Exchange administrator the cert will definitely help you get the job.

However, if you put yourself out there as a certified Exchange admin and you can't do the job I'd be considerably more inclined to fire you than try to train you.

I still put my MCSE (even though it's an NT 4.0 MCSE), MCP+I and A+ on resumes mainly because it gets my resume past the first cut - which in my industry is done by a machine.

...we showed up with a pair of satellite dishes but all our network connections are wired. Additionally, we didn't feel we could or should rely on local ISPs for communications since we need those communications to be reliable and secure and sending a buncha people down there with no way to talk across the pond to home station didn't seem like the smartest move I've heard of.

So now the ISPs want the NGOs to shut off all the expensive hardware folks shipped down there and use local resources?

In the interest of full disclosure we do work for a GO, just not the one in Haiti.