Patman - Slashdot User

Comment Fairly painless upgrade... (Score 3, Interesting) 1231

by Patman on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @06:36PM (#29969654) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

I've had a fairly painless upgrade from Jaunty on two laptops and a desktop. What is weird for me is how it interacted with VirtualBox; after the upgrade, my username was missing from the vboxusers group and my XP VMs no longer saw the USB hub; easy to fix once I figured it out, but really frustrating.

Comment Brief summary of article (Score -1, Flamebait) 78

by Patman on Saturday July 11, 2009 @01:38PM (#28661533) Attached to: Behind the "My Location" Errors In Google Maps

CEO of competing firm: "This totally wouldn't happen with ours, ours is awesome!" No meat there, just an assertion passed as fact in a 'news' article.

Comment Re:composite manager? (Score 1) 871

by Patman on Friday April 24, 2009 @11:19AM (#27702221) Attached to: Ubuntu 9.04 Is As Slick As Win7, Mac OS X

I have run compiz in the past, but gave it up. No real reason, other than it just didn't give me anything I needed or really wanted.

The Nvidia drivers installed automagically on 9.04; I see no reason why compiz wouldn't be as easy as flipping a switch.

Comment Re:Very Impressed with the update (Score 1) 871

by Patman on Friday April 24, 2009 @11:08AM (#27702093) Attached to: Ubuntu 9.04 Is As Slick As Win7, Mac OS X

Right, I did the update from update-manager. I usually do; after a re-install, things normally work fine, but the update usually works great.

Except for 8.10, which was enough of a disaster that I had to re-install from scratch. And even that almost didn't work; I was on the verge of moving /home and /etc off and wiping the drive, it went that badly.

Comment Very Impressed with the update (Score 4, Informative) 871

by Patman on Friday April 24, 2009 @10:36AM (#27701657) Attached to: Ubuntu 9.04 Is As Slick As Win7, Mac OS X

I just installed 9.04 on my work machine. The upgrade had one minor hiccup, which was quickly fixed(the PCM setting in the volume control was muted). Compared to the 8.10 upgrade, which was an unmitigated disaster, this was refreshing.

I haven't really seen a noticeable improvement like the article's author has yet; maybe that will change. I can say that this is the first upgrade yet that hasn't required fiddling with Envy or the Restricted Drivers Manager to get my Nvidia card humming nicely.

Submission + - Build or Buy: Hire a Data Center?

Submitted by

bbsguru

on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:22PM

bbsguru writes: "Our Government agency has around 100 independent divisions that share a dozen national applications and a private WAN. We are working to consolidate some of these applications (e-mail, SQL databases, specialized web services), and are facing a familiar choice.

One option is to contract out data hosting, e-mail server hosting, and so forth to various vendors (with negotiated SLA's and all the best guarantees, of course). We have already started doing this for our private WAN-to-World gateways, VPN management, and one major SQL application, each with a different vendor so far.

Others are advocating the creation of a national agency-owned facility, where employees would perform these functions instead of contractors. Network management, IDS, data replication and so forth, for all the consolidated applications under one umbrella.

The costs are always a factor, but the one-way nature of the contractor choice is also weighing in this decision. Some are concerned that if the expertise to create and manage these highly custom databases and services is farmed out to contractors, there will be no other choice in the future.

Trouble is, as we evaluate our options, the process of contracting out bits of the whole is already underway. With each new contract, one more service to be brought into a datacenter is lost, making the whole thing less practical.
Are we swimming upstream here? Is a series of contractors really the way to go, or are there real benefits to keeping it in house?"

Submission + - Beating procrastination with self-imposed deadline

Submitted by castironwok on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:05PM

castironwok writes: Procrastination attracts us because of hyperbolic time discounting: the immediate (guilty) rewards are disproportionally more compelling than the greater delayed cost. Procrastination is the reward itself. An MIT professor found that when he allowed his students to give themselves their own homework deadlines, they would artificially restrict themselves to counter procrastination. However, they did not set deadlines for optimal effectiveness. I am personally a huge procrastinator and it's always a pull between rational logic (giving yourself the most time by choosing end dates as the deadline), and your past experience saying you will put it off so force yourself to start early.

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