Geez, "immoral"? Don't buy it if you don't want to, it's not a machine you need in order to live or anything. It's not clubbing baby seals or eating children or anything like that. Save the "immoral" talk for things of a more important nature.
There have been a tremendous number of articles explaining that not only is the 3G service available on a pay-as-you-go, no-contract $14.99 option for 250 MB per month, but it also has an unlimited option for $30 per month. You can literally pay for a month -- maybe to take it on vacation where wifi won't necessarily be available -- then not pay for another month of 3G service until your next vacation, if that's what you want.
This is a very good thing, and I hope this type of service becomes available in other devices of this type as they come out.
An additional update to the IE XSS Filter is currently scheduled for release in June. This change will address a SCRIPT tag attack scenario described in the Blackhat EU presentation. This issue manifests when malicious script can “break out” from within a construct that is already within an existing script block. While the issue identified and addressed in MS10-002 was identified to exist on high-profile web sites, thus far real-world examples of the SCRIPT tag neutering attack scenario have been hard to come by.
(emphasis mine)
JUNE??? They are waiting until JUNE to "schedule the release" for this bugfix? And what is this "hard to come by", either they have found examples or they haven't. My guess is they have or they would have been quick to state "we have found no examples in the wild". And somehow, I don't know, maybe someone giving a presentation on the topic might signify that others know about this too and may be actively taking advantage of it now? Maybe a teensy chance of that?
<sarcasm>Yes, folks, that's why you pay Microsoft all the big bucks. Their process seems to work so well... maybe they can work this into a regular Patch Tuesday so you don't have to reboot your servers / schedule an outage so many times that week.</sarcasm>
This is fast-food software design, cheap and not particularly good for you. This is what you get when people have low expectations and are sensitive only to price -- how many patch Tuesdays so far this year didn't affect every version of IE, every version of Office and every recent version of Windows (and for most of these, require reboots)? It's way beyond sad and way past "whoops" when a major software manufacturer has this many bugfixes and problems with almost all of their software. Yes, software is complicated, but slow down and implement some quality control techniques for goodness' sake.
This is just churning turds for profit, and we're stupid enough to eat them.
...when I maintained the citrix farm here I had 20 servers, and updating an app meant updating 20 servers
Still easier than updating software on user desktops, over WAN connections, spread all over the country. Group policy and WSUS only takes you so far. Fewer disruptions too I bet.
The last time I used Citrix, we had roughly 300 people on 3 servers; they were clustered and we would round-robin taking them down for maintenance. That was using 2000 server. We did disable MS Access for most users at that time. Maybe the more recent versions are to blame?
I've used Citrix as a client. It's painful, even on a LAN, because the sessions can randomly timeout, disconnect, or the server becomes oversaturated by a few users running an intensive database query that sucks all the CPU cycles from everyone else's session -- which when the database is hosted on the same server can create a horrible bottleneck that won't show up in the lab.
OK, so instead of talking workstation virtualization you're talking server virtualization. OK. Who in their right mind would put terminal services on a DB server? That's poor design. You should fire whomever set that up for failure. And please turn on CPU throttling per user while you're at it.
As far as terminal servers go, we use them and they work great over fractional T-1's over a WAN not only for our thin clients but also for the users connecting using workstations via remote desktop over the VPN or in the various offices. We have 19 locations so it's not just chance that the network happens to work in one or two cases, we use an MPLS network that gives a higher SLA. MPLS links just don't go down often. The primary terminal server is virtualized -- it's running on an HP 460c blade along with 2 or 3 other VM's that aren't doing much (mostly daemon processes). When we had a memory error on the blade we shut down the VM and launched it on our spare blade. Total downtime was like an hour (and wouldn't have been that much except we're using VMWare ESX and don't have the budget for a hot-fail solution). There are only a handful of servers in our colo which haven't been virtualized, 2 extremely busy servers which need all the horsepower they can get and a couple that need to connect to proprietary USB devices / dongles or fax cards, so they're not good candidates.
Don't centralize if you don't have to -- it creates a single chokepoint, a single point of failure.
On the surface this would make sense. In practice it doesn't work for various reasons. The cost of simply providing Windows and Office updates alone will sink your network (and yes I am familiar with WSUS) and the cost to maintain all those fat clients will result in higher overhead. The cost to replicate data to multiple centers (along with all the overhead and replication issues) will slow you down and complicate your life dramatically as well as severely tax your processing power and memory usage. The delays due to replication will cause you to tear your hair out. Our data from one server consumes 0.8Mb/s to replicate within 15 minutes and for certain processes which mass update records, it can stay behind for several hours. Imagine doing that with our other servers? The connection would be prohibitably expensive.
The best way I've found to provide massive scalability for a reasonable number of users (maybe 15000 but highly dependent on usage patterns) is to have a relatively fat pipe going to a central location, then use SAN replication over other fat pipe(s) to sister facilit(ies) for DR. There are reasons why financial houses pay extra to be on the same segment as the trading servers -- which BTW usually operate as clustered machines in a centralized location with DR sent to sister sites. It might shock you to find your bank is actually a "convenience center" which ships or scans everything to a regional office for processing, the opposite of decentralization (the only reason most don't use a centralized location for processing is logistics -- both bandwidth for the images and (wo)manpower are limited). You might find that researching the methods universities use provides insight for large installs. There are reasons for that too.
While there may be good reasons for decentralizing, my experience has always proven that it costs more than it saves. Spend your money on good equipment, good network connections, and host it somewhere safe and efficient. Run DR in a responsible fashion. Adding servers to a central location is relatively simple. Use the right tools for the job and everything is made significantly easier.
Only the reception, pricing, throttling, and the fact their stuff stops working whenever we have a hurricane. $60 a month is a bit strong too especially when I had to purchase the modem. They frequently halt bandwidth flow for minutes at a time (signal strength is good during these times and disconnecting / reconnecting solves the problem temporarily). Unfortunately they're the chosen vendor for now.
I don't believe proprietary software will fix your level of incompetency if you got "hit hard" by this.
Let's see, you didn't check your logs, you didn't verify it was updating regularly, you missed the news on their site... absolutely amazing. Did you expect them to send someone to knock on your door?
You seem to think this is an "open source" problem which shows your lack of comprehension at your own fail. Do you still have the box your computer came in? Yeah, use it to ship the computer somewhere else -- anywhere else -- because it's unlikely the recipient will be as clueless as you.
As least your org is clueful enough to have you test for problems before rolling it out. Some orgs might choose to avoid it altogether because of the chance it could break something, or because they're lazy, or countless other reasons. Sounds like you're lucky you work for someone who took a timely, thoughtful approach to the problem.
if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front
While this would work, I can only imagine what people who do this will look like on the beach or outside in the sunlight in general. Can you imagine a tour guide trying to give a presentation with 20 bright spots of light shining him in the eyes? My eyes! My eyes!
People would sparkle in the light like second-rate vampires. So uncool.
Yes, similar to how IBM sold (dunno if they still do) machines with extra CPUs disabled, so they could be brought online later when they were needed. It made a lot of sense.
Part of the problem was that I'd drop back to Windows when Linux was being a pain and just not go back to Linux since there was nothing Linux did that Windows didn't.
If you haven't found anything that Linux can do that Windows can't, you're not trying very hard.
Take a look at RHEL virtualization, where memory from multiple VM's can be reduced in many cases. You won't see that in Windows.
While speaking of virutalization, you know that enterprise-grade tools from VMWare and Red Hat can use tiny Linux hypervisors right?
With ksplice, you can run and upgrade your machines in a responsible manner without reboots.
Take advantage of all CPU's and all cores by using tools such as taskset to move processes around in realtime
Easily redirect a failed printer's jobs to another printer (UNIX is supreme for printer management IMHO)
Use post-processing to modify print jobs, for instance to print to PDF and dump those PDF files onto another fileserver in the proper user's folder
Execute a command on a list of computers or across a domain (without the restrictions of runas or psexec)
Connect to your Cisco VPN in under 2 seconds every time vs the 15-to-20-second wait using the Windows driver
Image your drive, partitions etc without 3rd party utilities
Run a fully open-sourced system, with you in total control, without worry of licensing issues
You say this as if it were a bad thing. Both those topics are +10 interesting to kids and the skills they learn certainly come in handy later. I fear the newer generations lack that sort of interest and, coupled with the increased complexity of modern systems, could be responsible for a shortage of talent. Already too much of what I see is old stuff tweaked a little.
Ahhh, yes I remember the old Pilot 1000 days, and later the m100 and Treo 600 series. They did so much so well for such a long time. Their attention to usability was spot-on... it was the later years where they seemed to have the same old products without real improvements that made me switch to an iPod Touch, and later an iPhone.
I wish Palm had the heart to keep up the good fight, but lately it doesn't seem to be there. We need multiple companies constantly stirring the pot to keep ideas flowing. We all benefit from real competition.
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Geez, "immoral"? Don't buy it if you don't want to, it's not a machine you need in order to live or anything. It's not clubbing baby seals or eating children or anything like that. Save the "immoral" talk for things of a more important nature.
Not sure if you're trolling or just misinformed.
There have been a tremendous number of articles explaining that not only is the 3G service available on a pay-as-you-go, no-contract $14.99 option for 250 MB per month, but it also has an unlimited option for $30 per month. You can literally pay for a month -- maybe to take it on vacation where wifi won't necessarily be available -- then not pay for another month of 3G service until your next vacation, if that's what you want.
This is a very good thing, and I hope this type of service becomes available in other devices of this type as they come out.
An additional update to the IE XSS Filter is currently scheduled for release in June. This change will address a SCRIPT tag attack scenario described in the Blackhat EU presentation. This issue manifests when malicious script can “break out” from within a construct that is already within an existing script block. While the issue identified and addressed in MS10-002 was identified to exist on high-profile web sites, thus far real-world examples of the SCRIPT tag neutering attack scenario have been hard to come by.
(emphasis mine)
JUNE??? They are waiting until JUNE to "schedule the release" for this bugfix? And what is this "hard to come by", either they have found examples or they haven't. My guess is they have or they would have been quick to state "we have found no examples in the wild". And somehow, I don't know, maybe someone giving a presentation on the topic might signify that others know about this too and may be actively taking advantage of it now? Maybe a teensy chance of that?
<sarcasm>Yes, folks, that's why you pay Microsoft all the big bucks. Their process seems to work so well... maybe they can work this into a regular Patch Tuesday so you don't have to reboot your servers / schedule an outage so many times that week.</sarcasm>
This is fast-food software design, cheap and not particularly good for you. This is what you get when people have low expectations and are sensitive only to price -- how many patch Tuesdays so far this year didn't affect every version of IE, every version of Office and every recent version of Windows (and for most of these, require reboots)? It's way beyond sad and way past "whoops" when a major software manufacturer has this many bugfixes and problems with almost all of their software. Yes, software is complicated, but slow down and implement some quality control techniques for goodness' sake.
This is just churning turds for profit, and we're stupid enough to eat them.
...when I maintained the citrix farm here I had 20 servers, and updating an app meant updating 20 servers
Still easier than updating software on user desktops, over WAN connections, spread all over the country. Group policy and WSUS only takes you so far. Fewer disruptions too I bet.
The last time I used Citrix, we had roughly 300 people on 3 servers; they were clustered and we would round-robin taking them down for maintenance. That was using 2000 server. We did disable MS Access for most users at that time. Maybe the more recent versions are to blame?
I've used Citrix as a client. It's painful, even on a LAN, because the sessions can randomly timeout, disconnect, or the server becomes oversaturated by a few users running an intensive database query that sucks all the CPU cycles from everyone else's session -- which when the database is hosted on the same server can create a horrible bottleneck that won't show up in the lab.
OK, so instead of talking workstation virtualization you're talking server virtualization. OK. Who in their right mind would put terminal services on a DB server? That's poor design. You should fire whomever set that up for failure. And please turn on CPU throttling per user while you're at it.
As far as terminal servers go, we use them and they work great over fractional T-1's over a WAN not only for our thin clients but also for the users connecting using workstations via remote desktop over the VPN or in the various offices. We have 19 locations so it's not just chance that the network happens to work in one or two cases, we use an MPLS network that gives a higher SLA. MPLS links just don't go down often. The primary terminal server is virtualized -- it's running on an HP 460c blade along with 2 or 3 other VM's that aren't doing much (mostly daemon processes). When we had a memory error on the blade we shut down the VM and launched it on our spare blade. Total downtime was like an hour (and wouldn't have been that much except we're using VMWare ESX and don't have the budget for a hot-fail solution). There are only a handful of servers in our colo which haven't been virtualized, 2 extremely busy servers which need all the horsepower they can get and a couple that need to connect to proprietary USB devices / dongles or fax cards, so they're not good candidates.
Don't centralize if you don't have to -- it creates a single chokepoint, a single point of failure.
On the surface this would make sense. In practice it doesn't work for various reasons. The cost of simply providing Windows and Office updates alone will sink your network (and yes I am familiar with WSUS) and the cost to maintain all those fat clients will result in higher overhead. The cost to replicate data to multiple centers (along with all the overhead and replication issues) will slow you down and complicate your life dramatically as well as severely tax your processing power and memory usage. The delays due to replication will cause you to tear your hair out. Our data from one server consumes 0.8Mb/s to replicate within 15 minutes and for certain processes which mass update records, it can stay behind for several hours. Imagine doing that with our other servers? The connection would be prohibitably expensive.
The best way I've found to provide massive scalability for a reasonable number of users (maybe 15000 but highly dependent on usage patterns) is to have a relatively fat pipe going to a central location, then use SAN replication over other fat pipe(s) to sister facilit(ies) for DR. There are reasons why financial houses pay extra to be on the same segment as the trading servers -- which BTW usually operate as clustered machines in a centralized location with DR sent to sister sites. It might shock you to find your bank is actually a "convenience center" which ships or scans everything to a regional office for processing, the opposite of decentralization (the only reason most don't use a centralized location for processing is logistics -- both bandwidth for the images and (wo)manpower are limited). You might find that researching the methods universities use provides insight for large installs. There are reasons for that too.
While there may be good reasons for decentralizing, my experience has always proven that it costs more than it saves. Spend your money on good equipment, good network connections, and host it somewhere safe and efficient. Run DR in a responsible fashion. Adding servers to a central location is relatively simple. Use the right tools for the job and everything is made significantly easier.
Only the reception, pricing, throttling, and the fact their stuff stops working whenever we have a hurricane. $60 a month is a bit strong too especially when I had to purchase the modem. They frequently halt bandwidth flow for minutes at a time (signal strength is good during these times and disconnecting / reconnecting solves the problem temporarily). Unfortunately they're the chosen vendor for now.
Most of the fat ones can't kick very high.
Same here. But I use a wireless card instead of paying money to those bastards. Yes, even Sprint is better than Comcast.
Now I have to go brush my teeth for mentioning either of those names.
I don't believe proprietary software will fix your level of incompetency if you got "hit hard" by this.
Let's see, you didn't check your logs, you didn't verify it was updating regularly, you missed the news on their site... absolutely amazing. Did you expect them to send someone to knock on your door?
You seem to think this is an "open source" problem which shows your lack of comprehension at your own fail. Do you still have the box your computer came in? Yeah, use it to ship the computer somewhere else -- anywhere else -- because it's unlikely the recipient will be as clueless as you.
As least your org is clueful enough to have you test for problems before rolling it out. Some orgs might choose to avoid it altogether because of the chance it could break something, or because they're lazy, or countless other reasons. Sounds like you're lucky you work for someone who took a timely, thoughtful approach to the problem.
if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front
While this would work, I can only imagine what people who do this will look like on the beach or outside in the sunlight in general. Can you imagine a tour guide trying to give a presentation with 20 bright spots of light shining him in the eyes? My eyes! My eyes!
People would sparkle in the light like second-rate vampires. So uncool.
Yes, similar to how IBM sold (dunno if they still do) machines with extra CPUs disabled, so they could be brought online later when they were needed. It made a lot of sense.
Good for them. At this point I'd take a Pirate Party here in the US too.
Arrrrr! Bring me the booty!
Part of the problem was that I'd drop back to Windows when Linux was being a pain and just not go back to Linux since there was nothing Linux did that Windows didn't.
If you haven't found anything that Linux can do that Windows can't, you're not trying very hard.
I second this. Have you ever tried to use Google Docs to make a spreadsheet on an iPhone? It's pathetic. Totally useless.
With a link to "anus.com" in his sig (I'm assuming this is a guy), I have to guess he knows he's talking out of his ass.
No he's correct, you should be. Might be time to update your moves. I prefer UDUDLRLR -- it usually works but that's just me.
I doubt this person is in the position to change that policy.
You say this as if it were a bad thing. Both those topics are +10 interesting to kids and the skills they learn certainly come in handy later. I fear the newer generations lack that sort of interest and, coupled with the increased complexity of modern systems, could be responsible for a shortage of talent. Already too much of what I see is old stuff tweaked a little.
When I was 12 you needed a coax crimper and terminators. I don't miss coax at all : )
+1 Informative, glad someone brought this up
Bonus points if you write it as a regex expression.
Someone had to say it.
+1 sad but true
Ahhh, yes I remember the old Pilot 1000 days, and later the m100 and Treo 600 series. They did so much so well for such a long time. Their attention to usability was spot-on... it was the later years where they seemed to have the same old products without real improvements that made me switch to an iPod Touch, and later an iPhone.
I wish Palm had the heart to keep up the good fight, but lately it doesn't seem to be there. We need multiple companies constantly stirring the pot to keep ideas flowing. We all benefit from real competition.