An IT department makes the choice of what standards they support. By supporting open standards there should be no problem getting almost all devices connected. However it seems increasingly popular to support just some proprietary solutions. This can cause a lot of problems in the long run, especially if wanting to change the platform.
Think of it this way, if you where in the hospital on life support would you want the latest tech or something that powers a cell phone now adays?
Well that depends. If the device powering the life support device had a good enough track record, I would definitely not want to switch to something newer. Sure computers are far more powerful, but maintaining a life support system would not require a lot of performance.
If they have spare parts, and the current computer does the job, there is no need to replace it. It's not like they are playing Quake on it?
I would have thought that a nice call from the FBI to the CxOs of the main appropriate ISPs and a selection of those users on the fastest connections (ie with the most capacity to be damaging) would have a salutary effect.
You mean make a quick way for the FBI to shut down anyones internet connection without studying the case any further? I would much prefer somebody developing applications that would manage to trace suspicious traffic, and if reliable enough direct all web traffic to a page with information on how the customer can clean his machine (the last part is actually a normal procedure for some ISP's here in Finland).
The main problem is, that I believe connections are "jammed" based on complaints, not automatically. This requires a lot of resources from the ISP, as does receiving calls from people who have no idea what is meant by an "infected machine". Of course the application detecting suspicious activity would have to be very reliable, and it would have to be very anonymous...
So am I missing something here? This is almost like a shop selling the products, he gives a features list with no mention on how the features work. Based on that article one might (for example) think Landesk is actually a useful application, when in reality managing Macs with it is extremely slow and tedious.
Office for Mac sucks on Macs with Intel processors. I have Neo Office installed on both of my computers, but still end up using MS Office as it sucks less...
But the funniest "bug" I've seen in an anti-virus software has come from F-Secure. An ancient version of their software had the uninstaller just delete everything from the folder it was installed in. A distant friend had installed it in c:/ and the uninstall had caused a huge havoc by the time the computer crashed!
As long as the performance is not bad, I'll take isolation and ease of use over an edge in performance any day. If performance is not good enough, I'll buy a faster server. If the virtuals start disturbing each other, you won't be able to fix it easily and it might be very expensive on the long run.
I have to admit I don't have a lot of experience with Xen, and even less with OpenVZ. If I was building a server at home I would probably use Xen as it's free. At work I'm happy with VMWare ESX 3. Might be the performance is not on par with Xen (though it can't be far off), but the ease of use and management features make my job so much easier. The ability to move virtuals from one server to another without shutting them down (vmotion), easily view the state and resource usage of each virtual, high availability with clustering (one node goes down the virtuals are automatically started on another host), automatic resource balancing (one server get's overloaded, a virtual is automatically moved to an idle host without shutting it down) ect. make it the only viable choice for anything important that does not have an operator at hand 24/7.
I'm not that impressed with the free VMWare Server. While it works in most things, it has very bad disk IO performance. Especially noticeable if you create new disk files or work with snapshots while running a lot of virtuals. It's ok for development or testing, but that's it.
I definitely welcome a native port of Open Office. While using X11 works, it still sucks big time. You can't use all of OSX key combinations, it's slow ect. I hate the fact that I have to use Office for it to be usable. Actually that shows how bad the situation is, Office sucks big time on Intel Mac's, and it's still far more usable then Open Office.
Maybe it will become another Newton. But it doesn't matter, because Apple can afford the risk, and they stand a fortune to gain by being the first in the unencumbered phone services market. In the States that is. In most other countries phones are not locked to certain operators, atleast not always. Remember that the States only accounts for a small fraction of the 1.3 billion phones per year market.
At work we have all the major gaming consoles that have been released. So lately we have gotten a Xbox 360, Wii and also a Playstation 3. For some strange reason, people are just always playing the Wii, and they are having a lot of fun.
I guess the differences in their natures are even more apparent when there are a lot of people around, and everyone will only play a short session. Maby the Playstation would be more fun at home alone sitting for hours in front of it?
Anyway, I claim the advertising is correct, and the Wii is just loads more fun then the others. Or from my (non gamer) point of view "far less boring".
This is absolutely true. Nothing is more annoying then trying to do a low priority but large & stressing disk operation on a host where there are small high priority disk operations active all the time. Currently the low priority task will be handled like the others, causing everything important to a grinding halt.
The Service Console is based on RedHat 7 to be precise.
I use and have used both VmWare Server (in the test) and ESX server and they can't really be compared at all. The biggest difference in performance has to do with I/O, both network and disk. While VmWare Server only has around 10-15% overhead in CPU performance, I/O performance is significantly worse... 43% I guess:D
ESX has worse I/O too, but I'd put it somewhere around 15-20% lower then the host. It also depends on how many processors you allocate, virtual-smp is not quite as efficient as it would be. Something which shows fairly well the use of resources is that you can run double the amount of virtuals on the same machine on ESX vs. VmWare Server on RHEL.
But if you look at VmWares recomendations, they don't consider it to be a good idea to make a virtual machine out of a heavily taxed webserver. They mention light to medium web-servers to work well under virtualisation, and this has been my finding too. The whole idea is to take a lot of servers with different kinds of resource needs (and times when they are needed) and share the hosts resources between them. If you take a service which taxes the system to a full there is nothing left for the other virtuals.
You can easily run 15 or more Production server deployments in one 4-core server if you have sufficient memory, and that is where the strengh of the technology lies.
That sounds really strange. I study computer science (on the side) in Finland, and during our first year the studies included one general course (mainly intended for people doing a minor) which was very basic. The rest of the courses included 2 courses of java, one on relational database basics, one on designing programs. This was followed by a pretty thorough course on networking, another database course and a course for designing and programming a Java web application using servlets that uses oracle as a database.
I'm not sure how much would actually be included in "the first year" for a full time student, I work full time so I'm pretty slow.
Almost all the courses are very theoretical though. It works well doing it on the side of a related job which is pure practice, but I understand that most of the students are pretty lost if their only source of information are the courses.
I think servers becoming cheaper and cheaper is also affecting how eagerly companies are willing to adopt their needs to a ready package. It used to be that the hardware required to run an application and it's testing environment was so expensive that getting a custom coded application didn't feel out of line.
Most of the legacy systems we run are on either mainframes or distributed among a bunch of HP or Sun risc servers which each one cost over 10 times more then the far more powerfull computer replacing it.
A review spanning several pages looking into a computer aimed at running in your living room and no mention about noise levels? You would think that being in identical cases would give a good starting point at looking at power consumption and the systems noise levels.
What's wrong with these reviewers? Are they somehow alienated from the real world or am I?
Just check what card it is before you buy, and don't buy any that don't have Open Source, native Linux support. It's what I do. Cisco, Orinoco, the new Intel IPW drivers.
If you buy something that doesn't work, don't cry when it doesn't work. This could not really be made any harder by the companies manufacturing the cards. Sure if you buy something from Orinoco or Cisco you are on safe waters, but other then that you are on weak ice. Manufacturers (most of them) change the cards chipset for every revision, and there is no way to know what you are getting (even looking at the box or physical card might not make it any easier).
The cost of a product is not just the cost of the box but the cost of the people to support it. Linux requires more support from people with more knowledge and hence the support is more expensive. Linux compensates by requiring less work. In my old work our team maintained 450 Unix and Linux servers, and about 50 Windows servers. The Windows servers required More work. Sure the *nix machines require more specialized know how, but the added amount of work negates the savings.
I currently work in a company where the employees have a mixed Mac / Pc environment. The PC users require a lot more help with their computers, but it might also be due to the nature of their job (business people vs. programmers and graphic designers). Luckily we don't have a lot of Windows servers.
What happens if you are unhappy with Google's offerings, and want to move to another platform? How do you get your users emails and calender events out if your email solution does not support IMAP or give you access to the raw data in a proprietary format? We are not even considering Exchange as we have 500GB of emails for 200 employees with the largest mailboxes being well over 10GB, but whatever we use, we want the option to move to something else if we need to. Is that an option with Gmail?
A new Finnish real estate agent recently started with a new concept. They had photographed almost every building near the capital, and users could look at them on the net. If there was a building you liked, you could give your info so they contact you as soon as something is for sale there. All the buildings would show how many people wanted to be contacted for that building / street / part of town.
It caused a fairly big uproar when it started, with people upset about their homes being photographed. Things settled down fairly quickly, and it actually ended up being a pretty handy service. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the complaints where started by the competing companies...
it just shows people don't trust democracy any more and that they definitely don't trust the people that they voted into power. Then again, quite a minority of the Americans actually voted for the current government (I guess the ones who qualified and didn't can blame themselves though). Once you count what the percentage of people who voted was, then deduct half who voted for the "other guy" you won't be left with majority...
We've been facing similar problems. We don't have an Exchange server, and it infuriates our Windows users. Half of our employees use OsX, and we are trying to stick to a solution that does not tie us to one certain "company". Well email is easy, but what about the calendar? How to get something that will sync with iCal, Sunbird, Outlook? Maby caldav will allow for something more usable then webdav, and allow for a solution that will really be able to compete with Exchange.
Slashdot Mirror
An IT department makes the choice of what standards they support. By supporting open standards there should be no problem getting almost all devices connected. However it seems increasingly popular to support just some proprietary solutions. This can cause a lot of problems in the long run, especially if wanting to change the platform.
Well that depends. If the device powering the life support device had a good enough track record, I would definitely not want to switch to something newer. Sure computers are far more powerful, but maintaining a life support system would not require a lot of performance.
If they have spare parts, and the current computer does the job, there is no need to replace it. It's not like they are playing Quake on it?
You mean make a quick way for the FBI to shut down anyones internet connection without studying the case any further? I would much prefer somebody developing applications that would manage to trace suspicious traffic, and if reliable enough direct all web traffic to a page with information on how the customer can clean his machine (the last part is actually a normal procedure for some ISP's here in Finland).
The main problem is, that I believe connections are "jammed" based on complaints, not automatically. This requires a lot of resources from the ISP, as does receiving calls from people who have no idea what is meant by an "infected machine". Of course the application detecting suspicious activity would have to be very reliable, and it would have to be very anonymous...
So am I missing something here? This is almost like a shop selling the products, he gives a features list with no mention on how the features work. Based on that article one might (for example) think Landesk is actually a useful application, when in reality managing Macs with it is extremely slow and tedious.
Office for Mac sucks on Macs with Intel processors. I have Neo Office installed on both of my computers, but still end up using MS Office as it sucks less...
But the funniest "bug" I've seen in an anti-virus software has come from F-Secure. An ancient version of their software had the uninstaller just delete everything from the folder it was installed in. A distant friend had installed it in c:/ and the uninstall had caused a huge havoc by the time the computer crashed!
As long as the performance is not bad, I'll take isolation and ease of use over an edge in performance any day. If performance is not good enough, I'll buy a faster server. If the virtuals start disturbing each other, you won't be able to fix it easily and it might be very expensive on the long run.
I have to admit I don't have a lot of experience with Xen, and even less with OpenVZ. If I was building a server at home I would probably use Xen as it's free. At work I'm happy with VMWare ESX 3. Might be the performance is not on par with Xen (though it can't be far off), but the ease of use and management features make my job so much easier. The ability to move virtuals from one server to another without shutting them down (vmotion), easily view the state and resource usage of each virtual, high availability with clustering (one node goes down the virtuals are automatically started on another host), automatic resource balancing (one server get's overloaded, a virtual is automatically moved to an idle host without shutting it down) ect. make it the only viable choice for anything important that does not have an operator at hand 24/7.
I'm not that impressed with the free VMWare Server. While it works in most things, it has very bad disk IO performance. Especially noticeable if you create new disk files or work with snapshots while running a lot of virtuals. It's ok for development or testing, but that's it.
Coffee is traditionally made with 92-96c water, how is that not going to burn you? What did Mcdonalds do, have the water at 98c?
Someone tell the batteries which are draining out!
I definitely welcome a native port of Open Office. While using X11 works, it still sucks big time. You can't use all of OSX key combinations, it's slow ect. I hate the fact that I have to use Office for it to be usable. Actually that shows how bad the situation is, Office sucks big time on Intel Mac's, and it's still far more usable then Open Office.
At work we have all the major gaming consoles that have been released. So lately we have gotten a Xbox 360, Wii and also a Playstation 3. For some strange reason, people are just always playing the Wii, and they are having a lot of fun.
I guess the differences in their natures are even more apparent when there are a lot of people around, and everyone will only play a short session. Maby the Playstation would be more fun at home alone sitting for hours in front of it?
Anyway, I claim the advertising is correct, and the Wii is just loads more fun then the others. Or from my (non gamer) point of view "far less boring".
This is absolutely true. Nothing is more annoying then trying to do a low priority but large & stressing disk operation on a host where there are small high priority disk operations active all the time. Currently the low priority task will be handled like the others, causing everything important to a grinding halt.
What processor does the Apple-TV ship with? Pentium -m or Core Solo? Seems like apache crashed on the linked site already.
The Service Console is based on RedHat 7 to be precise.
I use and have used both VmWare Server (in the test) and ESX server and they can't really be compared at all. The biggest difference in performance has to do with I/O, both network and disk. While VmWare Server only has around 10-15% overhead in CPU performance, I/O performance is significantly worse... 43% I guess :D
ESX has worse I/O too, but I'd put it somewhere around 15-20% lower then the host. It also depends on how many processors you allocate, virtual-smp is not quite as efficient as it would be. Something which shows fairly well the use of resources is that you can run double the amount of virtuals on the same machine on ESX vs. VmWare Server on RHEL.
But if you look at VmWares recomendations, they don't consider it to be a good idea to make a virtual machine out of a heavily taxed webserver. They mention light to medium web-servers to work well under virtualisation, and this has been my finding too. The whole idea is to take a lot of servers with different kinds of resource needs (and times when they are needed) and share the hosts resources between them. If you take a service which taxes the system to a full there is nothing left for the other virtuals.
You can easily run 15 or more Production server deployments in one 4-core server if you have sufficient memory, and that is where the strengh of the technology lies.
Please don't tell my wife!
That sounds really strange. I study computer science (on the side) in Finland, and during our first year the studies included one general course (mainly intended for people doing a minor) which was very basic. The rest of the courses included 2 courses of java, one on relational database basics, one on designing programs. This was followed by a pretty thorough course on networking, another database course and a course for designing and programming a Java web application using servlets that uses oracle as a database.
I'm not sure how much would actually be included in "the first year" for a full time student, I work full time so I'm pretty slow.
Almost all the courses are very theoretical though. It works well doing it on the side of a related job which is pure practice, but I understand that most of the students are pretty lost if their only source of information are the courses.
I think servers becoming cheaper and cheaper is also affecting how eagerly companies are willing to adopt their needs to a ready package. It used to be that the hardware required to run an application and it's testing environment was so expensive that getting a custom coded application didn't feel out of line.
Most of the legacy systems we run are on either mainframes or distributed among a bunch of HP or Sun risc servers which each one cost over 10 times more then the far more powerfull computer replacing it.
A review spanning several pages looking into a computer aimed at running in your living room and no mention about noise levels? You would think that being in identical cases would give a good starting point at looking at power consumption and the systems noise levels.
What's wrong with these reviewers? Are they somehow alienated from the real world or am I?
What happens if you are unhappy with Google's offerings, and want to move to another platform? How do you get your users emails and calender events out if your email solution does not support IMAP or give you access to the raw data in a proprietary format?
We are not even considering Exchange as we have 500GB of emails for 200 employees with the largest mailboxes being well over 10GB, but whatever we use, we want the option to move to something else if we need to. Is that an option with Gmail?
A new Finnish real estate agent recently started with a new concept. They had photographed almost every building near the capital, and users could look at them on the net. If there was a building you liked, you could give your info so they contact you as soon as something is for sale there. All the buildings would show how many people wanted to be contacted for that building / street / part of town. It caused a fairly big uproar when it started, with people upset about their homes being photographed. Things settled down fairly quickly, and it actually ended up being a pretty handy service. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the complaints where started by the competing companies...
We've been facing similar problems. We don't have an Exchange server, and it infuriates our Windows users. Half of our employees use OsX, and we are trying to stick to a solution that does not tie us to one certain "company". Well email is easy, but what about the calendar? How to get something that will sync with iCal, Sunbird, Outlook? Maby caldav will allow for something more usable then webdav, and allow for a solution that will really be able to compete with Exchange.