Why o why does speccing a server have to be so hard?

I need to get a pair of servers one based in a main site, the other in a site office linked via a EES100 line.

The Main site will have up to 170 users and the site office will have about 70ish.

I need to replicate the main sites data (about 350GB at the mo, but up to 1.2TB) and AD stuff.

I need the site server to do local logins, DFS replication, GP stuff etc.

Finding a suitable spec is hard enough, but why do the manufacturers of these servers make the speccing of them so hard? I want to use a HP ML 350 G5, and the option configurator on their website is like soooo unfriendly to use.

Arghhh

I am a geek. I am a party guy. I am a thinker. I am an entrepreneur. So where do you want to categorize me? Those of you who like to keep things nicely pigeon holed and stereotyped.

You can’t. I am a geek yet I am not a nerd who doesn’t know how to have a good time. I am a geek yet I am also a music producer and a fan of trance music, the party music. I am a geek yet I don’t wear any freaking glasses! I am a thinker yet I don’t have a god damn sweeper in my ass. I am a serious guy yet I don’t make everyone depressed by my presence.

And at this night out I had both a philosophical discussion session, getting drunk session and a dancing session, all in one night. Impossible? Apparently not.

So stereotypes and categories be damned. I am I. I am unique. I am an individual. I destroy stereotypes. I destroy myths. I destroy conformism. I am the one, among the few, that are many, who are the individualist revolution.

Thank you.

The reason is quite simple really. The more capable you are to think independently and cognitively the less susceptible you will be to being controlled. If you can’t think for yourself then anyone can fool you and anyone can make you believe anything at any time. I can only feel sorry for you at that point, but no, this time I will not blame propaganda or the person who is trying to convince you of something.

I will blame you.

Propaganda is, quite simply, a tool. It can be used to convey any message or idea, whether I think it’s good or bad. The only thing that differentiates it from an educational film is that aside from your reasoning capabilities it also appeals to your emotions which can in many cases actually be a good thing. Involving emotion into the matter is what makes people passionate and energized about something. It is also a way to get people who usually don’t care about a particular thing to start caring.

Propaganda is therefore like technology. You can’t blame it, you can’t ever blame a “thing” anyway. You can only blame a human being, the producer of a propaganda movie if you believe that the idea he is conveying is the wrong one or the viewer of propaganda for being too willing to accept what is being conveyed without thinking independently about it and researching the facts.

Besides, there is no such thing as an universally wrong or an universally right idea. There is only what is real and what is not. If you have an idea which makes you act in a particular way, reality will always kick in with the consequences of your action. If you dislike the consequences then you might judge your idea as a wrong one. If the consequences are good then you might be on the right track. And the only one who can decide if the consequences are good or bad is you, with consideration to what your desires and goals actually are.

The problem with people in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China is not so much propaganda as much as the willingness of people to accept its message almost without questioning. It is ignorance and intellectual laziness. If Hitler’s propaganda was to convey the ideas of individualism, individual sovereignty, freedom, rights to life, liberty and property and people blindly accepted it, I would be willing to bet that they would all be better off because such propaganda would have the same exact message I am trying to convey with many of my posts: think for yourself.

And that would be an example of propaganda which, EVEN when accepted blindly, actually created what can by most people probably considered a good outcome, because everyone is an individual, alive and to a point selfish - and everyone wants to be free of force.

Ideally, of course, they would accept such propaganda only after they have thoroughly questioned it which is excellent because then those who do accept and adopt the idea will do so not only on basis of an emotional appeal, but on the basis of reason, making their enlightenment all the more profound.

In other words, the ideal way to tackle your exposure to propaganda is with the prioritize reason over passion mentality. This doesn’t mean that the emotional appeal shouldn’t entice you to explore the idea further. I mean, if it works for you then go for it! It just means that the emotional trigger should be secondary. It got you intrigued, it got you excited.. to stop at that and turn yourself into an immediate true believer now would be a mistake though. You still need to think it through, do some research to see if the trigger of reason would switch to green for the newly discovered idea too.

Propaganda is especially useful for small grassroots movements who are having trouble convincing people to even give them a chance, to at least try and hear them out. So if making an emotional appeal can get people to listen who can blame them for trying it? They aren’t forcing you to believe anything after all and they aren’t the ones who can brainwash your mind if you don’t let it. You can proclaim them as “evil” if you end up disliking the idea they conveyed (though in my opinion that’d be a foolish proclamation as I don’t believe anyone is inherently evil) or you can praise them for “opening your eyes”, but in both cases it is you who is responsible for what you end up believing in and the consequences of actions you undertake in pursuit of such beliefs, and nobody else!

Since Jabber rooms are not as widely used as IRC channels and this causes that some people have trouble to access them, we have created an IRC channel at Freenode.net for our translators, which replaces our Jabber room.

The new channel is #glm-l18n.

LugRadio recently featured a section on “community” in their latest episode — Finding Emo — discussing how many individuals and companies alike endeavor to form communities around their projects and products, and how in the end many of these fail. In particular with Jono Bacon on team it is a noteworthy listen (segment starts at approx. 27:00). I think the only thing that was missing at the end of the rather long segment was a conclusion of thoughts by Jono. Here’s my take, in order:

1. Don’t be a no-one: in order to start doing something yourself you’re the only one in need of convincing and inspiring that that something it’s in fact worth doing. Conversely, acquiring a community of contributers (developers, documentation writers, usability nutters and crazy “orange-sunglass-wearing” artists like myself) requires a bit more. To ensure others will jump onboard when you launch your project build a positive presence in an open source community; being known for your work gives you an air of trust and commitment that inspires others to lend an ear when you have something to say.
2. Be involved and listen: this should almost come automatically as part of having a presence in a project and as part of a community, but the last part is what really needs pointing out. Sometimes you have more to gain from listening to others than speaking yourself (and this applies far outside of open source communities). Listening will let help you understand the community you are apart of and the people within it, who ultimately are the easiest and possibly largest pool of possible contributers you can reach out to (at least at launch).
3. Become part of the community and launch from it: it is easier setting a stage within your community and communicating directly to its participants who already contribute to an open source project than from somewhere outside. Still address the world at large and invite anyone who is interested, but do it from a stage where you’re bound to have an audience.

These apply as much to companies that want to extend their products and build their services whilst contributing to open source as to individuals who just want to start their own project but could do with a few extra hands. Too many companies simply put up a web page offering links to a public version control repository and hope a mad flock of developers will form around their project.

Don’t be a no-one, get involved, and listen so that when you’re ready to kick-off your project close to the community you’ve become a part of you will pique the interest of contributors.

I would like to announce the creation of the editorial team, a group of community members in charge of editing the contents of our websites, in particular GetGNULinux.org .

Our activity is growing not only in size but also in scope — which means that leading members are spending more and more of their time working on community growth, enabling faster translation, developing new things, and trying to reach to a larger audience. The editing of the existing websites (initially done on the basis of 1-to-1 mail exchanges and occasional re-readings) should not suffer from this; it deserves better.

The editorial group will allow faster reaction and improvement of website contents. It will focus on the English sites (modifications to which are ported automatically into our translation system) and be led by a handful of editors.

We already have a long list of pending changes and we frequently receive more suggestions by mail or through the forum. From dated screenshots, awkward phraseologies, to missing information (although our intention is not to build an exhaustive reference), there is plenty of room for improvement.

It is our wish to see more people involved in the direct editing of our websites. As is commonplace within free software development projects, leading contributors will progressively obtain commit rights and authority.

If you have a good understanding of our work, purpose, and intended audience, we warmly invite you to participate!

As you have undoubtedly noticed by now, freenode recently changed services. Along with this new look, we thought it would be a good time to formally (and perhaps not-so-formally) announce the addition of new staff. You’ll find below a list of all our current staff, and in this post and some that follow, we’ll give you a tiny snapshot of the new (and some of the old) members of our circus^Wteam.

Current freenode staff:

AndrewB
chb
christel
cybersystem
Dave2
denny
DLange
dmwaters
Exstatica
Ganneff
Gary
jenda
JonathanD
Karlprof
kloeri
Lorez
Martinp23
Matt
Md
nalioth
njan
numist
PhilKC
pinpoint
PriceChild
RichiH
seanw
Sejo
skenmy
SportChick
Stx
stylus
tomaw
Udontknow
vorian
weasel
werdan7
wimt
Yaakov

And now, for a little insight on a couple of individuals:

• christel: If by now, you don’t know christel…well, where have you been?! For the last couple of years, she has been the head of staff of freenode and has seen it through many changes. No, freenode is not yet pink (though if she had her way, it would be entirely pink - you can thank some of the male staffers for preventing that so far). She did once say that if she were to leave a job in a flamboyant manner, she’d simply go to work in pink body paint. Her secret desire has always been to become a Russian spy…however, being from Norway, she’s had to settle for being self-employed and an irc mogul in her spare time. She got her start on irc nearly half her lifetime ago, creating havoc on EfNet and running up her dial-up internet bills.

• vorian: One of the more recent additions to staff, vorian’s first experience on irc was starting up a Local (Ubuntu) Community team in 2006. Though married (for 10 years!) and with four children, he clearly wasn’t busy enough. A long-time wolf-bot addict, vorian has announced his goal for the future of freenode - creating a unified wolf-bot game where everyone plays by the rules, pays strict attention, and always has a minimum of 8 players per round (this replaces his former goal of becoming a jet pilot AND nurse for the navy).

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I’ve had an excuse to let my inner-child out with my recent tongue piercing as solid foods were off the menu for the past week. So at our recent visit to the supermarket I stashed up on soups and the like — perfect excuse to get some alphabet noodles.

Of course silliness always ensues with alphabet noodles — I was reading an article over lunch today on iLT:

Yum.

It is interesting how both The Borg and The Dominion, two of the greatest evil adversaries in Star Trek are portrayed to desire one thing above all else: order. The Borg assimilate everything they find valuable to their collective, valuable according to their own view of order. Everything then becomes a part of a bigger whole and without a shred of individualism. Just as it was once said in Hitler’s Germany; Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler. The same can be literally said for The Borg and The Borg queen. Perfection that Borg so adamantly pursues is in fact the most extreme form of totalitarianism possible.

The Dominion, on the other hand, was founded by a race of shapeshifters who were once exploring the galaxy and finding many “solids” (non shapeshifting beings) to be quite fearful and thereby violent to them (or so they believe). Shapeshifters then begun perceiving all “solids” as a threat and that became a part of their own order of things. Instead of being the hunted now they are the hunters. Instead of being controlled now they are in control. The Dominion is portrayed to be a powerful force in the gamma quadrant, of course, with a job of establishing order upon chaos.

Now while these are fictions, they do come from the creative minds of certain human individuals and they do therefore reflect particular characteristics of the reality as we know it, a reality in which we ourselves have repeatedly established governments in order to do exactly the same thing that these fictive organizations were portrayed to exist for: establish order upon chaos.

The concept of government exists as part of an ideology that can be summed up as a “Religion of Order”. This “religion” consists of these three core beliefs:

1. A certain limited set of beliefs constitutes and defines “order”. Everything else is the opposite; chaos.

This is essentially a perpetual self administered delusion, that things we currently believe to be true are the only things that really are true absolutely, that things we currently believe are right are the only things that could ever be right, that things that do not conform to our current set of beliefs belong to the realm of chaos.

This is a result of a fundamentally closed minded, self defeating and self limiting idea which lives, like a virus, in the minds of the masses on this planet.

2. All that does not conform to this order (defined by the above set of beliefs) is wrong or evil.

This merely follows from the limited view of reality above. In addition to branding things that don’t conform as “chaos” we introduce a strong moral judgment of the non-conforming as absolutely and uncompromisingly wrong, evil, thereby worth fighting against by any means necessary.

3. Force is justified against all such evil

What else to expect from such a limited yet absolutist view? If force and violence is what it takes to purity everything that belongs to “chaos” so be it. If you don’t conform to “the order” you must be punished. This is why followers of The Religion of Order tend to eventually one way or another persecute everyone who lives in defiance or non-conformity to the order they designated as such.

I could say that all governments are guilty of being a part of this religion, but governments are nothing but just people who assumed the roles that this religion naturally provisions for; essentially the role of preaching the order (law), teaching conformity (public education and propaganda) and doing enforcement (force, violence). Governments would be meaningless without the people who give them their support and they give them their support exactly because they too believe in this religion of order - they actually agree that order, conformity and force are necessary and good and are usually utterly ignorant of the flaw inherent in this philosophy.

The flaw is that it is ultimately self defeating. It deprives from the natural tendencies and potential of the most basic unit of every human “order”: the human individual. This is how it crumbles. Sooner or later you find that believing in this religion only got you shafted, unless you were lucky, devious or foolishly hotheaded enough to actually be a successful power grubbing politician or managed to combine your ingenuity with political protectionism to build a corporate empire. But we know those people are in a minority, or else why would we speak of a divide between rich and poor, right?

So why do the rest of us, the majority who repeatedly gets shafted by this religion, still believe in it? Why do we still follow it? Why do we feed its power? I can only think of two basic reasons: ignorance or fear.

The first is probably most prevalent. As long as you conform, for instance not break any laws no matter how stupid some of them seemed, you don’t have anything to be afraid of, or at least that’s what you believe. But that’s where the story ends. You live your life within those confines and think of no better way. Your ignorance is bliss, until the almost inevitable consequences of such mind imprisoning mentality hit you - and they almost always do.

The second is fear. Even if you are a bit more inquisitive and less ignorant and find that there is a lot things wrong about “the system”, the order of things, you fear the very ideas that could set your mind free as “dangerous ideas”. You fear that if you refuse to conform one way or another you will end up punished in some way by the ignorant followers of the order.

The trouble is, we’re so deep into this problem that it indeed is hard to blame an individual for feeling either of the above two ways. This religion of order is like a pan religion whose ideas managed to pull through many other religions as well as among the supposedly non-religious people. Order, Conformism and Force. Many christians believe it. Many muslims believe it. Many atheists believe it. Too many believe it for too long. The idea has one way or another been perpetuated throughout centuries.

Yet, if we get stuck in this perpetual ignorance or fear, waiting for “better times” we will only see history repeat itself, because that is what happens when we have this single core set of beliefs governing billions of people on Earth for such an indefinite amount of time. Times change and technology changes yet the fundamental belief remains, the belief that is the very cause of “history repeating itself”. As various “orders” collide we have power struggles, wars, fascism, economic collapses etc. It will never be truly any different if we never finally wake up to the reality of what is behind all this:

The Religion of Order

It created more chaos than “chaos” itself could. When are you gonna wake up to that reality?

Found this via ILT’s latest Sunday Type from fontblog.de:

Comic Jens is a looser and more aesthetic alternative to Comic Sans by Jens Kutilek. With a wholesome set of 303 characters in regular and bold, all available freely under a Creative Commons license in OpenType format no one has an excuse to use Comic Sans anymore.

Check out the cute extra glyphs:

The font also takes advantage of OpenType ligature features:

Supported languages include Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Cornish, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Malay, Manx, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Oromo, Portuguese, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish and Turkish.

Addendum

In retrospect I have to say that when setting body copy (even for only a poster) the follow-through of the cross/strikes on the “f” and “t” come to irritate reading slightly, particularly noticeable in the bold weight.