I have to call bullshit on that union comment. 'We are the laughing stock of states in the union'?
hmmph
Around these parts, in this the smallest state in the union, we would call the problems of Oregon a good day. As self-declared laughing stocks go, we take the cake. And just because Newport is nice doesn't do jack for the rest of the state.
Union-controlled socialist state? Check. Only state beside Michigan to lose population last year? Check. The popular game show 'Criminal Proceedings Against a Crooked Rhode Island Politician'? Check. Despicable infrastructure and public education? Check.
But hey, we should all ignore the local economy and housing situation because they're shooting some movies and TV shows here, including Richard Gere's new movie about a dog. Oh ya, that other dog movie Underdog? Shot in Rhode Island too.
'Shoot your dog movies here Hollywood! We're cheaper!'
Oh, and don't get me started on the accent or the townies.
No, seriously, Orlando has so much less of a hurricane risk than southern Florida, it's a booming area and you really can't beat the weather. It's still affordable, and as craigslist will tell you, there's a good amount of industry there. Plus everything is pretty cheap because all the tourists pick up the tab.
I am so sick of their elitism, their idealism, their purity-over-functionalism. I cut my teeth on Debian and I thought it was a great platform to learn on, but it has no place in the workplace. Can anybody honestly justify an email telling the userbase that 'Uh, so Firefox is being renamed to Iceweasel. No, seriously. It still works the same, but now it's different. Please adjust accordingly.'
I firmly believe that efforts such as Debian deserve their place and that we all benefit from them, but only in the sense that we also benefit from flag-waving hippies; their freedom is our freedom. But, I wouldn't want any of those hippies coming into my work, spouting liberal ideals while simultaneously interfering with actual productivity.
Keeping control of a large network is difficult enough without having the personalities of brilliant yet insignificant(to me) developers holding back shipping dates, preventing current software releases and in general preventing me from doing my job.
I think Debian needs a wakeup call. It should either be abandoned or made correct; no in-between. I remember those ideals I had a decade ago when installing Debian from floppy. Those ideals, while they have their place, should never be paramount in the decision-making process when managing a network of any size.
So, once again, filled with the frustration of knowing that a great platform has succumbed to its worst elements - Fuck Debian.
The IAP at MIT is a really neat concept. Anybody can take almost any class, and almost anybody can offer a class to teach. One that caught my eye when I worked there (never took one) was a class on 'players'. You know - those among us with the lady charm; how to be one, how to spot one, etc..
A friend of mine took a welding course during IAP, just because welding random stuff in January is definitely fun in my book.
The historical accuracy can not be conveyed so easily. Here goes:
Germany and Japan had a secret alliance. Japan agreed that whomever Germany declared war against, Japan would follow suit, and vice versa. Japan delcared war against the United States of America on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. The following day, the United States declared war on the country of Japan. Because of the secret reciprocal agreement between Germany and Japan, Germany was forced to declare war on the United States. At this time the United States was forced to delcare war on Germany. This was an integral turning point in the war. Germany was no longer fighting a dual-front war, with Russia at the east and England at the west. Germany was now fighting a three-front war, with the third front being the United States. This automatic reciprocal agreement by Germany to declare war against any enemy of Japan is considered by many to be the decisive error made by Nazi Germany, and more specifically by Adolf Hitler.
So, if a pandemic does hit, that pretty much means life as we know it will come to a crawl. After Katrina, the entire nation (and the world, but as an American, I can only personally relate to the effect on the ol US of A) was in a world of hurt. Granted, it wasn't disastrous for the rest of the country, but it definitely put a dent in our paycheck. Now, if something like this pandemic hits, then there will be an extreme need for IT folk to take care of the infrastructre that the entire modern medical community is dependent on. My original thought, if it can be called original, is that if some of us actually don the mask, take all the precautions that nurses, for example, take, then that will put us in a position where we would be able to help thousands, if not millions of sick and afflicted. I don't know about you, but just the thought of that good that I could do would have me wearing a mask 24/7 as soon as the first news of epidemic comes out of SE Asia. For all of those near a major city, it is only remedial that we realize that as soon as Singapore is affected, for example, then we are also affected, what with global travel the way it is now.
MIT has much more than a Class A. http://macfadden.mit.edu/colserv/digital/ordering/ ip.html When I worked at MIT, I was aware of the size of their IP space (larger than China), but I didn't realized the full extent of how much they really had until we needed some address space for our subdomain, csbi.mit.edu. The planned subdomain spanned a half dozen buildings spread out over a distance of four square kilometers, with dedicated fiber links between all the buildings. After I send network-ops a detailed email explaining our planned network, I sat back and waited for their reply. I was thinking we could get access to a Class C, or maybe a/28. The email that I got back said, basically, 'Ok, the 18.68.0.0/16 network is now under your control. This should take care of all your problems.' I was pretty much dumbfounded. Where else but MIT would you get this at 25? In terms of a solution, though, the Class B was the best possibile option. MIT only had to make a quick change to their OSPF routing table, and we were able to subdivide the Class B as we needed.
And yet another product of American primary education. Sarcasm is considered a form of classical rhetoric. My argument against the sensational abundance of Joss Whedon sci-fi topics that have been slashdot as of late is in the form of sarcasm. Sarcasm can be delivered in a humorous manner. Knowing that, then my comment can be correctly understood as a humorous jab at slashdot's editorial staff, in regards to a topic I have a strong opinion about.
Serious jab:Slashdot, target your content to your base (plus) Humorous deflection:go firefly you are l33t!!!@! (equal) Strong message delivered in a less egregiously direct manner.
So now do you understand that I was not actually discussing the semantics of Firefly and its production status?
Uhh, so they went shopping at newegg, what's the big deal? I picked out the same rig, with same hard drive, dvdrw, mobo but a sempron 2600 ('twas four or five months ago) and even the same case. Friday nights tend to be slow news-wise, but how did this made the front page?
Instead, how about a nice story about how a sequel is behing made to Serenity. No, wait, it's getting permanently axed. Oh, hold one one second, Joss Whedon says something different. I can help? How? ohmygododoomygodawesomeoooomygod Go Firefly!!!
But seriously though, I think slashdot should only push real tech stuff onto the front page. How about only 'highbrow' material from now on?
Stop catering to the kids in the basement and think about the career professional. You are nine years old, and for those of use who were the former when you started are now the latter.
Do you realize that you just took five paragraphs to describe your choice in online music services? I agree that some people prefer to have all the bells and whistles when it comes music services, but I, on the other hand, prefer to keep it simple.
I do systems/network design and administration during my professional waking hours, and if any software vendor decides that they know best about what I do and don't want to do with their software, well, that's when I start looking elsewhere. On the other hand, during my personal waking hours, I want simplicity.
I see an on/off switch up somewhere in my head. This switch is on when I need to think about all the possible circumstances and permutations of all affected components I am working with at the time, but it is most definitely off when I have a guest over and am listening to some music. It's just a different mentality which is more suitable for a different environment. For example, if I'm having coffee with a girl who fancies literature, football is the furthest thing from being on my mind. But, if I'm watching the Patriots at 8pm this Saturday, said girl is the furthest thing from being on my mind.
It's just different mindsets for different situations, and luckily there is different software and services for those different mindsets.
These guys definitely have a severe need for good IT staff. Can you believe that they have a.exe as a script? To start viewing available positions, you go to https://jobs1.quickhire.com/scripts/fbi.exe
To state the obvious, this is bad because: It gives the world unnecessary information about the platform you are running on. (Debatable).exe's are not exactly a programming environment geared towards web technologies.
I guess there are others I could come up with, but the basic idea is that of 'I can't believe their script is a.exe'.
Of course, this could also be an AIX box running perl scripts that are given the extension.exe, just to throw the intarweb community off.
I fully agree with the reasoning behind this article. A lot of users will only want a pretty desktop, intelligently-designed apps and a lot of hand-holding. For the geeks among us, they will want to 'figure out' the system, and distros like Suse and Redhat make that a little bit more difficult. It makes sense to start from scratch and build up the knowledge from there. In fact, I highly recommend it. I remember back in '98 using Debian on a 386-33 with 8 megs of ram. I learned the system, the file structure, the startup scripts, samba for windows sharing and ipfwadm to let the windows systems on the newly built network share the net connection. It must have been seven or eight months into using it, on a 40 meg hard drive, with a floppy drive controller that wasn't supported by the kernel, before somebody told me about kde. I thought 'Is that like that X thing I've heard about?'. I looked at kde.org and I was absolutely amazed at the screenshots. I honestly was blown away. Before that, I honestly thought that there was no gui for linux because the command line is all that you need.
Since then I've worked on near every architecture linux supports, beowulf clusters of intel and amd systems and most every major piece of server software in common use. I now know that I can come across any new hardware/system/os and get it to work in any environment, all because I started out with among the most difficult linux installations you can imagine.
So, in summation, Slacware does indeed matter. Just not to everybody.
I worked in the Biology department at MIT when this happened. While Van Parijs' lab was under renovations, he took up space on my floor. After that, our department(mini-department? sub-department?, whatever) provided some computing resources for their lab. I was the network/systems guy, so I took care of our machines in their lab. One day, I noticed that the Windows box in their lab wasn't responding and had been reported as haven been taken by the Cancer Center's sysadmin guy. I talked to a buddy of mine who sits across from me and did lab work for the Van Parijs. He called and asked about the machine. A couple of minutes later, the head of the Cancer Center called him and firmly told him to drop all inquries into said machine. He said it felt like the part of The Matrix where Neo gets the 'How are you going to talk without a mouth, Mr Anderson' line. That's when the shit hit the fan. I was a weekly regular at the Plough and Stars in Cambridge on Wednesdays, and the Van Parijs members made it out there every other week or so. After six weeks or so, the guys who confronted Luk finally started talking about it. It was quite the news in the department. I don't know about the rest of MIT, but all of Biology, and the CCR, Whitehead, and surrounding buildings knew about it since day one. It worked out well for the members of the lab. Everybody joined up with a different lab, except for one guy. He pretty much started working for himself. He's doing some post-doc work, and in light of what happened, the department just let him start doing his own thing until he finishes up. What I remember about Luk Van Parijs(other than that he had the most gorgeous Russian administrative assistant. I could write for hours about her. I mean, she was hot and she said things like 'I think my phone just did a core dump' Hi Masha!) was that he was pretty much a jerk. Not that remarkable being that for MIT professors this is the rule and not the exception, but a jerk nonetheless.
Anyways, everybody thinks the New Scientist article was pretty scathing.
In addition, any company doing enterprise rollouts will have somebody on staff who can create and modify msis for the enterprise. If the ones available on the net won't suffice, as the msi packager for some assistance or hire somebody.
>On the other hand, it's much more likely that Apple would switch the processors in the iPod from PortalPlayer-supplied ARM7s to Intel ones.
Intel is currently a licensee of ARM's chips, so it should be noted that a possible switch of the processor in the iPod to Intel would require virtually no modification to the iPod, save for a possible pinout reconfig on the pcb.
I came across this project called SCST http://scst.sourceforge.net/ It lets you take direct storage(lvm, raid, plain disks) or files on the system and serve them out over fibre channel to clients. So you can take 4 sata disks of 200GB each, RAID5 that up and get 600GB usable space. Break that 600GB into ten 60GB partitions and serve that out, and you have absolutely failsafe storage for your systems. Windows systems can use any old supported(most are) fibre channel card($25 on ebay), plug into a linux box that is running SCST(linux box needs a qla2200/qla2300 card, also cheap on ebay) and the Windows host sees a 60GB scsi drive. I'm testing it out right now, but it seems to solve the problem of remote storage cheaply and sanely.
First off, his comment on access to regedit is totally ridiculous for coporate environments. You can easily modify specific file permissions domain-wide, e.g. you can specify that users cannot run the regedit binary or msconfig. This doesn't prevent a user from downloading the regedit binary and running it off of their desktop, but it should still be a first step for a corporate desktop/workstation. Linux is much easier to support. At MIT, their Athena environment for linux is completely automated. The workstations run cron scripts that update all their packages, which are globally available over afs. Users login, use software, log out. Admins _never_ visit the systems. MITs WinAthena environment is also similarly configured, configuration and development on Windows simply takes longer, as most software is not written with the assumption that user!=admin. MIT has local running systems of both Windows and RedHat update servers. The difference in support here is directly related to IIS on Windows and Apache on linux, with IIS significantly harder to maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to call bullshit on that union comment. 'We are the laughing stock of states in the union'?
hmmph
Around these parts, in this the smallest state in the union, we would call the problems of Oregon a good day. As self-declared laughing stocks go, we take the cake. And just because Newport is nice doesn't do jack for the rest of the state.
Union-controlled socialist state?
Check.
Only state beside Michigan to lose population last year?
Check.
The popular game show 'Criminal Proceedings Against a Crooked Rhode Island Politician'?
Check.
Despicable infrastructure and public education?
Check.
But hey, we should all ignore the local economy and housing situation because they're shooting some movies and TV shows here, including Richard Gere's new movie about a dog. Oh ya, that other dog movie Underdog? Shot in Rhode Island too.
'Shoot your dog movies here Hollywood! We're cheaper!'
Oh, and don't get me started on the accent or the townies.
>> like, e.g. log in locally once a PC is connected to a domain without having to know the PC's EXACT name
.\username Yup, the old . for current working directory is used for current working computername.
Try
Nerds!!!
AAARGHGHGH!!!!!!!
Disneyworld.
No, seriously, Orlando has so much less of a hurricane risk than southern Florida, it's a booming area and you really can't beat the weather. It's still affordable, and as craigslist will tell you, there's a good amount of industry there. Plus everything is pretty cheap because all the tourists pick up the tab.
You know what?
Fuck Debian.
I am so sick of their elitism, their idealism, their purity-over-functionalism. I cut my teeth on Debian and I thought it was a great platform to learn on, but it has no place in the workplace. Can anybody honestly justify an email telling the userbase that 'Uh, so Firefox is being renamed to Iceweasel. No, seriously. It still works the same, but now it's different. Please adjust accordingly.'
I firmly believe that efforts such as Debian deserve their place and that we all benefit from them, but only in the sense that we also benefit from flag-waving hippies; their freedom is our freedom. But, I wouldn't want any of those hippies coming into my work, spouting liberal ideals while simultaneously interfering with actual productivity.
Keeping control of a large network is difficult enough without having the personalities of brilliant yet insignificant(to me) developers holding back shipping dates, preventing current software releases and in general preventing me from doing my job.
I think Debian needs a wakeup call. It should either be abandoned or made correct; no in-between. I remember those ideals I had a decade ago when installing Debian from floppy. Those ideals, while they have their place, should never be paramount in the decision-making process when managing a network of any size.
So, once again, filled with the frustration of knowing that a great platform has succumbed to its worst elements - Fuck Debian.
The IAP at MIT is a really neat concept. Anybody can take almost any class, and almost anybody can offer a class to teach. One that caught my eye when I worked there (never took one) was a class on 'players'. You know - those among us with the lady charm; how to be one, how to spot one, etc..
A friend of mine took a welding course during IAP, just because welding random stuff in January is definitely fun in my book.
Let's hear it for ancient readme files.
The historical accuracy can not be conveyed so easily. Here goes:
Germany and Japan had a secret alliance. Japan agreed that whomever Germany declared war against, Japan would follow suit, and vice versa. Japan delcared war against the United States of America on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. The following day, the United States declared war on the country of Japan. Because of the secret reciprocal agreement between Germany and Japan, Germany was forced to declare war on the United States.
At this time the United States was forced to delcare war on Germany. This was an integral turning point in the war. Germany was no longer fighting a dual-front war, with Russia at the east and England at the west. Germany was now fighting a three-front war, with the third front being the United States. This automatic reciprocal agreement by Germany to declare war against any enemy of Japan is considered by many to be the decisive error made by Nazi Germany, and more specifically by Adolf Hitler.
Since when is slashdot about politics? Puh-lease.
So, if a pandemic does hit, that pretty much means life as we know it will come to a crawl. After Katrina, the entire nation (and the world, but as an American, I can only personally relate to the effect on the ol US of A) was in a world of hurt. Granted, it wasn't disastrous for the rest of the country, but it definitely put a dent in our paycheck.
Now, if something like this pandemic hits, then there will be an extreme need for IT folk to take care of the infrastructre that the entire modern medical community is dependent on. My original thought, if it can be called original, is that if some of us actually don the mask, take all the precautions that nurses, for example, take, then that will put us in a position where we would be able to help thousands, if not millions of sick and afflicted.
I don't know about you, but just the thought of that good that I could do would have me wearing a mask 24/7 as soon as the first news of epidemic comes out of SE Asia.
For all of those near a major city, it is only remedial that we realize that as soon as Singapore is affected, for example, then we are also affected, what with global travel the way it is now.
MIT has much more than a Class A./ ip.html /28. The email that I got back said, basically, 'Ok, the 18.68.0.0/16 network is now under your control. This should take care of all your problems.' I was pretty much dumbfounded. Where else but MIT would you get this at 25?
http://macfadden.mit.edu/colserv/digital/ordering
When I worked at MIT, I was aware of the size of their IP space (larger than China), but I didn't realized the full extent of how much they really had until we needed some address space for our subdomain, csbi.mit.edu. The planned subdomain spanned a half dozen buildings spread out over a distance of four square kilometers, with dedicated fiber links between all the buildings.
After I send network-ops a detailed email explaining our planned network, I sat back and waited for their reply. I was thinking we could get access to a Class C, or maybe a
In terms of a solution, though, the Class B was the best possibile option. MIT only had to make a quick change to their OSPF routing table, and we were able to subdivide the Class B as we needed.
And yet another product of American primary education.
Sarcasm is considered a form of classical rhetoric. My argument against the sensational abundance of Joss Whedon sci-fi topics that have been slashdot as of late is in the form of sarcasm. Sarcasm can be delivered in a humorous manner. Knowing that, then my comment can be correctly understood as a humorous jab at slashdot's editorial staff, in regards to a topic I have a strong opinion about.
Serious jab:Slashdot, target your content to your base
(plus)
Humorous deflection:go firefly you are l33t!!!@!
(equal)
Strong message delivered in a less egregiously direct manner.
So now do you understand that I was not actually discussing the semantics of Firefly and its production status?
Why do I even bother?
Uhh, so they went shopping at newegg, what's the big deal? I picked out the same rig, with same hard drive, dvdrw, mobo but a sempron 2600 ('twas four or five months ago) and even the same case. Friday nights tend to be slow news-wise, but how did this made the front page?
Instead, how about a nice story about how a sequel is behing made to Serenity. No, wait, it's getting permanently axed. Oh, hold one one second, Joss Whedon says something different.
I can help?
How?
ohmygododoomygodawesomeoooomygod Go Firefly!!!
But seriously though, I think slashdot should only push real tech stuff onto the front page. How about only 'highbrow' material from now on?
Stop catering to the kids in the basement and think about the career professional. You are nine years old, and for those of use who were the former when you started are now the latter.
Remember, it's not a job, it's an indenture.
Bah, too complicated.
Do you realize that you just took five paragraphs to describe your choice in online music services? I agree that some people prefer to have all the bells and whistles when it comes music services, but I, on the other hand, prefer to keep it simple.
I do systems/network design and administration during my professional waking hours, and if any software vendor decides that they know best about what I do and don't want to do with their software, well, that's when I start looking elsewhere. On the other hand, during my personal waking hours, I want simplicity.
I see an on/off switch up somewhere in my head. This switch is on when I need to think about all the possible circumstances and permutations of all affected components I am working with at the time, but it is most definitely off when I have a guest over and am listening to some music. It's just a different mentality which is more suitable for a different environment. For example, if I'm having coffee with a girl who fancies literature, football is the furthest thing from being on my mind. But, if I'm watching the Patriots at 8pm this Saturday, said girl is the furthest thing from being on my mind.
It's just different mindsets for different situations, and luckily there is different software and services for those different mindsets.
These guys definitely have a severe need for good IT staff. Can you believe that they have a .exe as a script? To start viewing available positions, you go to
.exe'.
.exe, just to throw the intarweb community off.
https://jobs1.quickhire.com/scripts/fbi.exe
To state the obvious, this is bad because:
It gives the world unnecessary information about the platform you are running on.
(Debatable).exe's are not exactly a programming environment geared towards web technologies.
I guess there are others I could come up with, but the basic idea is that of 'I can't believe their script is a
Of course, this could also be an AIX box running perl scripts that are given the extension
Who else read these books by Kim Stanley Robinson?
I fully agree with the reasoning behind this article. A lot of users will only want a pretty desktop, intelligently-designed apps and a lot of hand-holding. For the geeks among us, they will want to 'figure out' the system, and distros like Suse and Redhat make that a little bit more difficult. It makes sense to start from scratch and build up the knowledge from there. In fact, I highly recommend it. I remember back in '98 using Debian on a 386-33 with 8 megs of ram. I learned the system, the file structure, the startup scripts, samba for windows sharing and ipfwadm to let the windows systems on the newly built network share the net connection. It must have been seven or eight months into using it, on a 40 meg hard drive, with a floppy drive controller that wasn't supported by the kernel, before somebody told me about kde. I thought 'Is that like that X thing I've heard about?'. I looked at kde.org and I was absolutely amazed at the screenshots. I honestly was blown away. Before that, I honestly thought that there was no gui for linux because the command line is all that you need.
Since then I've worked on near every architecture linux supports, beowulf clusters of intel and amd systems and most every major piece of server software in common use. I now know that I can come across any new hardware/system/os and get it to work in any environment, all because I started out with among the most difficult linux installations you can imagine.
So, in summation, Slacware does indeed matter. Just not to everybody.
I worked in the Biology department at MIT when this happened. While Van Parijs' lab was under renovations, he took up space on my floor. After that, our department(mini-department? sub-department?, whatever) provided some computing resources for their lab. I was the network/systems guy, so I took care of our machines in their lab.
One day, I noticed that the Windows box in their lab wasn't responding and had been reported as haven been taken by the Cancer Center's sysadmin guy. I talked to a buddy of mine who sits across from me and did lab work for the Van Parijs. He called and asked about the machine. A couple of minutes later, the head of the Cancer Center called him and firmly told him to drop all inquries into said machine. He said it felt like the part of The Matrix where Neo gets the 'How are you going to talk without a mouth, Mr Anderson' line.
That's when the shit hit the fan. I was a weekly regular at the Plough and Stars in Cambridge on Wednesdays, and the Van Parijs members made it out there every other week or so. After six weeks or so, the guys who confronted Luk finally started talking about it.
It was quite the news in the department. I don't know about the rest of MIT, but all of Biology, and the CCR, Whitehead, and surrounding buildings knew about it since day one. It worked out well for the members of the lab. Everybody joined up with a different lab, except for one guy. He pretty much started working for himself. He's doing some post-doc work, and in light of what happened, the department just let him start doing his own thing until he finishes up.
What I remember about Luk Van Parijs(other than that he had the most gorgeous Russian administrative assistant. I could write for hours about her. I mean, she was hot and she said things like 'I think my phone just did a core dump' Hi Masha!) was that he was pretty much a jerk. Not that remarkable being that for MIT professors this is the rule and not the exception, but a jerk nonetheless.
Anyways, everybody thinks the New Scientist article was pretty scathing.
Repeat after me:
/. should make a point of not linking to sites that are just that shitty. Maybe the site owners will get the point.
Never, ever, ever link to a site with that level of popups.
I really think
And when the hell is Firefox going to get functionality to block flash-based popups?
In addition to the above url, http://msi-repository.sourceforge.net/ has msis in multiple languages, including Russian and German.
In addition, any company doing enterprise rollouts will have somebody on staff who can create and modify msis for the enterprise. If the ones available on the net won't suffice, as the msi packager for some assistance or hire somebody.
>On the other hand, it's much more likely that Apple would switch the processors in the iPod from PortalPlayer-supplied ARM7s to Intel ones.
Intel is currently a licensee of ARM's chips, so it should be noted that a possible switch of the processor in the iPod to Intel would require virtually no modification to the iPod, save for a possible pinout reconfig on the pcb.
I came across this project called SCST
http://scst.sourceforge.net/
It lets you take direct storage(lvm, raid, plain disks) or files on the system and serve them out over fibre channel to clients. So you can take 4 sata disks of 200GB each, RAID5 that up and get 600GB usable space. Break that 600GB into ten 60GB partitions and serve that out, and you have absolutely failsafe storage for your systems. Windows systems can use any old supported(most are) fibre channel card($25 on ebay), plug into a linux box that is running SCST(linux box needs a qla2200/qla2300 card, also cheap on ebay) and the Windows host sees a 60GB scsi drive. I'm testing it out right now, but it seems to solve the problem of remote storage cheaply and sanely.
First off, his comment on access to regedit is totally ridiculous for coporate environments. You can easily modify specific file permissions domain-wide, e.g. you can specify that users cannot run the regedit binary or msconfig. This doesn't prevent a user from downloading the regedit binary and running it off of their desktop, but it should still be a first step for a corporate desktop/workstation.
Linux is much easier to support. At MIT, their Athena environment for linux is completely automated. The workstations run cron scripts that update all their packages, which are globally available over afs. Users login, use software, log out. Admins _never_ visit the systems. MITs WinAthena environment is also similarly configured, configuration and development on Windows simply takes longer, as most software is not written with the assumption that user!=admin.
MIT has local running systems of both Windows and RedHat update servers. The difference in support here is directly related to IIS on Windows and Apache on linux, with IIS significantly harder to maintain.
That first sentence had me laughing out loud. Keep the descriptions full of this wit; I'll keep reading.