Actually on my desktop the XP process is rat around in all the machine paperwork for the XP Pro key, boot from the XP CDROM. No HDD detected, so then go out and buy a usb floppy disk drive and have to use another computer to make the driver floppy disk to be able to add the SATA drivers during setup, then complete the install as above, then attach to windows update hopoing that this time my fully legit copy of XP is determined to be genuine. Wit over an hour for service packs to download then reboot, again. My install for Linux Mint, pretty much as above Ubuntu description. Open Office installed by default, only had to confirm proprietary NVidia drivers and Wifi Card from Cisco and all done. The first update didn't even require a restart. The only one that has been easier is OSX 10.5 on my Mac Mini, but that did take an hour or so. Using bootcamp to install Unbuntu was about 20 minutes on that including splitting the disk in half. I really hope bootcamp get improved to enable creating multiple partitions. I'd like to easily tripple boot OS X, Ubuntu and XP/Vista.
What you need to do it yourself: 2 SMTP mail gateways, with SPAM and security filtering built in. 2 Internet connections, 2 routers set in a failover condition. Atleast 2 backend mailbox servers, preferably in a cluster or other high availability arrangement. This will require expensive shared storage. These maybe over two sites for physical seperation, requiring data synchronisation between your mailbox stores. You will also need a high availability authentication system, multiple copies of your user database (active Directory, eDirectory etc) and your own public facing DNS servers x2 for redundancy. Don't forget backup and archiving! All interconnecting switches and servers will require dual paths, dual power supplies etc to avoid comms failures. This is to allow planned downtime on all equipment for patching and maintenance. Even then the unexpected can happen - a software fault in our SAN required a complete server room shutdown for us to reboot the SAN. Later in January we have to move the server room. Our only sitewide outage this year 8)
To get nine-nines is really expensive. Most medium sized organisations will settle for Business hours uptime for a fraction of the cost. Blackberries and remote access from home is driving up the availability requirement though. We are finding it increasingly difficult to get outage windows for maintenance.
I prefer console gaming as you can get a PS3 or XBox 360 for under the price of a top line video card, and there is much less chance of it crashing out, and if you fork out $100 for a game, it will probably work.
I've got an HP Tablet I use linux on and it has annoying bug in the ACPI that means the CPU speed is wrongly reported following a reboot unless you remove external power and eject the battery for a few seconds. Then when you boot you have to run the cpufreq commands again to set the speed up properly. Grrr. It's been fixed in other HP laptops of similar class already, like the non tablet version of the laptop I have but not the TC4400!! Argh!
Laptops, netbooks and casual linux users benefit from fast boot. I also have a few Linux server I wish would reboot a little faster 8) but thats usually application load and setups rather than the OS starting.
My Myth PC was a Shuttle XPC with a 500GB drive, a cheap winfast capture card, 2 GB RAM and a 2GHZ AMD CPU. Wo to go with OS install mySQL configuration and installing the myth TV packages was about 2 hrs. But I must admit I am not new to Linux or mySQL so some prior knowledge helped. My only problem was the cheap capture card was not fast enough to do capture and preview (High CPU load I think) and I was less than happy with the results, but my next plan is a Haupage DDT card which will capture Freeview digital straight to MPEG4. That should be much more reliable and lower overhead ont he CPU. If it works well, I'll add a second card too. I loved MythTVs video library feature though bu I wish it got more info by itself but again the DDT should work with the channel guide.
I don't want windows, but I do want flash, and al FULL web browser and a citrix client. These proprietary apps will only currently work on PPC and Intel CPUs. PPC are completely out of the game because of their power requirements. How about a 3GHZ Core Duo that becomes a 1.6GHz core solo when on battery?
Screen should be touch and able to rotate into tablet format. Battery should be removeable (and run for a minute or two while battery being replaced) Memory should be user upgradeable. SD or storage slots should be lockable or be covered. At least 3 USB ports. Linux supportable 3G card inbuilt as a goot option. Should be built rugged like a cellphone. Heat should be piped out away from the palm rests and base of the net book. My perfect keyboard would be a mini aluminium mac keyboard 8) Rigid, quiet, big key surface. Small external display and external power button would be nice, but I guess getting outside of the cost of a netbook. Good linux support for all of the hardware. Ship binary blobs if necessary! The Acer Aspire One is the best compromise I have found so far, I just wish the hardware support was better for the SSD card version in Ubuntu. It's far too slow and can corrupt when suspending or hibernating. 8(
I hated Windows Moble, I hated the number of taps required to get to stuff that was one or two taps away in palm OS. Media player sucked as if I turned the screen off, MP did not move on to the next track. If listneing to music when taking a call, you had to fish the phone out of your pocket to carry on listening after the call ended. Want to skip a track, pause while someone talks to you, fish out the phone again. However I sold it and bought an iPhone. I love the iPhone, but I hate almost everything about iTunes. It can take half an hour to sync my contacts and calendar, it is tied to the app store, and you can really only synch one music library at a time. I will never complain about MS Active Synch again. iTunes is much worse.
Thanks to the magic of VNC and X11 over SSH and the interweb my $600 NZ netbook has access to my white hot 3GHz core duo desktop at home. I browse, e-mail, chat and configure switches over a USB/Serial adapter, but I do everything else for work over a citrix connection, and for all my personal stuff over SSH tunnel to my home desktop. 8)
As long as I have net, I have all the power I need for $600.
Well I guess it's because what I really want is the Acer Aspire One I am typing this on, but it would be nice if it had a 2GHz plus dualcore CPU, a faster SSD drive or a bigger spinning disk, and a faster video card and a battery to last the whole of a longhaul international flight. But then it would be a $3000+ macbook air, not a $600 netbook 8)
I guess I am lucky enough to be picky about who I work for. I whent on several interviews for companies wanting in house IT staff, and most salaried positions offered no overtime, but did say they gave time in leu. Yeah right! you want me to stay late to wrok on a server/switch/application after hours when everyone has gone home and you promise I can have the day odd or a few hours off later. I dont think it ends up working that way. I prefer to work for vendors or contracts, where if I work the hours, I am paid for them. Very good money for call outs too.
For me, my job mostly involves supporting all the non MS systems on the campus.
Switches, Routers using Cisco IOS, VMWare ESX servers, Linux servers running Apache, managing syslog servers, Checkpoint firewalls using Secure Platform Linux.
Most of the day I spend in SSH terminals, editing and modifing scripts, running SMTP mail systems etc. I only have to use the windows PC beside me for mail because of Outlook, Office Comms Client, and Visio. Otherwise I would be MS free 8)
I also worked for Statistics New zeland whrere they had hundresds of unique applications for doing statistical analisys. Opensourcing these apps meant they could easily share their models with other departments and statistical groups, and use code form other sources easily.
If it was all closed source, they would not be able to open the code, or make the changes they required to fit their statistical models.
If it was broken, they also paid local developers to fix it, keeping money in NZ Good on them I say!
It's like skype compared to Gizmo Project.
With skype, do you know where your phone call is going, do you know if there is a US back door into the protocol? Can you encrypt it?
GizmoProject just uses SIP, a well understood phone protocol with many open libraries, and therefore can also potentially use PGP encrypted SIP. It is an open source app, and can be used to tie into many other IM systems, MSN, jabber based IMs like Yahoo,etc
Oh, and there are no restrictions if you happen to use a non MS OS or a non Intel CPU.
You can get a phone client for symbian, PalmOS and windows Mobile (I don't know if thy will do one for iPhone given the closed nature of it's API's)
To me thats a classic open source over proprietary example.
It's also to avoid US cultural assumptions in some programs. Here in New Zealand during summertime daylight savings, we move our clocks 1 hour ahead, so time becomes +13hrs GMT.
Amazing how many time sensitive apps I've had to fix because they cant' understand it's 1 hour into tomorrow here 8)
It would also be nice if Exchange supported webdav or iCal formats for calender sharing and LDAP for your address book. But then if those services were fully functional you wouldn't have to use Outlook for your client, and therefore windows as your OS, and therefore Active Directory as your authentication source, therefore using Active Directory CALs,or Exchange CALs, and Office CALs (Outlook no longer the free client with Exchange CALs) and you wouldn't have to pay your MS tax.
Citrix running on Windows2003 server, and install outlook as an application that can be run in a seamless window.
Not cheap, but as the ICA client can be run in many OS's without issue, is the easiest one for corporates to swallow.
Slashdot Mirror
Or beagle in Linux. Both Spotlight an Beagle predate windows desktop search. Which will still not search network drives making it useless for me.
Actually on my desktop the XP process is rat around in all the machine paperwork for the XP Pro key, boot from the XP CDROM. No HDD detected, so then go out and buy a usb floppy disk drive and have to use another computer to make the driver floppy disk to be able to add the SATA drivers during setup, then complete the install as above, then attach to windows update hopoing that this time my fully legit copy of XP is determined to be genuine.
Wit over an hour for service packs to download then reboot, again.
My install for Linux Mint, pretty much as above Ubuntu description. Open Office installed by default, only had to confirm proprietary NVidia drivers and Wifi Card from Cisco and all done.
The first update didn't even require a restart.
The only one that has been easier is OSX 10.5 on my Mac Mini, but that did take an hour or so. Using bootcamp to install Unbuntu was about 20 minutes on that including splitting the disk in half. I really hope bootcamp get improved to enable creating multiple partitions. I'd like to easily tripple boot OS X, Ubuntu and XP/Vista.
Also remember eMail is not a high availability or ensured delivery service. If it is important enough that is HAS to get there, use UPS.
What you need to do it yourself:
2 SMTP mail gateways, with SPAM and security filtering built in. 2 Internet connections, 2 routers set in a failover condition.
Atleast 2 backend mailbox servers, preferably in a cluster or other high availability arrangement. This will require expensive shared storage. These maybe over two sites for physical seperation, requiring data synchronisation between your mailbox stores.
You will also need a high availability authentication system, multiple copies of your user database (active Directory, eDirectory etc) and your own public facing DNS servers x2 for redundancy.
Don't forget backup and archiving!
All interconnecting switches and servers will require dual paths, dual power supplies etc to avoid comms failures. This is to allow planned downtime on all equipment for patching and maintenance.
Even then the unexpected can happen - a software fault in our SAN required a complete server room shutdown for us to reboot the SAN. Later in January we have to move the server room. Our only sitewide outage this year 8)
To get nine-nines is really expensive. Most medium sized organisations will settle for Business hours uptime for a fraction of the cost. Blackberries and remote access from home is driving up the availability requirement though. We are finding it increasingly difficult to get outage windows for maintenance.
We can also tell our users when there is going to be an outage, what we are doing to fix it and what the expected ETA is.
Then think carefully about this before you rely on the cloud. Sometimes it's sunny and there is no cloud 8)
I prefer console gaming as you can get a PS3 or XBox 360 for under the price of a top line video card, and there is much less chance of it crashing out, and if you fork out $100 for a game, it will probably work.
Location: Somewhere
Date of Birth 0 B.C.
Sex: Occasionally.
Some of my answers if I can enter it that way 8)
I never reply with real information, and I use temporary email addresses for account signups.
I've got an HP Tablet I use linux on and it has annoying bug in the ACPI that means the CPU speed is wrongly reported following a reboot unless you remove external power and eject the battery for a few seconds. Then when you boot you have to run the cpufreq commands again to set the speed up properly. Grrr. It's been fixed in other HP laptops of similar class already, like the non tablet version of the laptop I have but not the TC4400!! Argh!
Laptops, netbooks and casual linux users benefit from fast boot. I also have a few Linux server I wish would reboot a little faster 8) but thats usually application load and setups rather than the OS starting.
My Myth PC was a Shuttle XPC with a 500GB drive, a cheap winfast capture card, 2 GB RAM and a 2GHZ AMD CPU.
Wo to go with OS install mySQL configuration and installing the myth TV packages was about 2 hrs. But I must admit I am not new to Linux or mySQL so some prior knowledge helped. My only problem was the cheap capture card was not fast enough to do capture and preview (High CPU load I think) and I was less than happy with the results, but my next plan is a Haupage DDT card which will capture Freeview digital straight to MPEG4. That should be much more reliable and lower overhead ont he CPU. If it works well, I'll add a second card too.
I loved MythTVs video library feature though bu I wish it got more info by itself but again the DDT should work with the channel guide.
How about a Macbook Air, with a built in data card that can be sold on a data plan like an iPhone?
NZ$3000 laptop, on a 500MB or 1GB data only plan for $130 per month
I guess the problem is Apple can't subsidise the cost though iTunes like they can with iPhone.
I don't want windows, but I do want flash, and al FULL web browser and a citrix client. These proprietary apps will only currently work on PPC and Intel CPUs. PPC are completely out of the game because of their power requirements.
How about a 3GHZ Core Duo that becomes a 1.6GHz core solo when on battery?
Screen should be touch and able to rotate into tablet format.
Battery should be removeable (and run for a minute or two while battery being replaced)
Memory should be user upgradeable.
SD or storage slots should be lockable or be covered.
At least 3 USB ports.
Linux supportable 3G card inbuilt as a goot option.
Should be built rugged like a cellphone.
Heat should be piped out away from the palm rests and base of the net book.
My perfect keyboard would be a mini aluminium mac keyboard 8) Rigid, quiet, big key surface.
Small external display and external power button would be nice, but I guess getting outside of the cost of a netbook.
Good linux support for all of the hardware. Ship binary blobs if necessary!
The Acer Aspire One is the best compromise I have found so far, I just wish the hardware support was better for the SSD card version in Ubuntu. It's far too slow and can corrupt when suspending or hibernating. 8(
I hated Windows Moble, I hated the number of taps required to get to stuff that was one or two taps away in palm OS. Media player sucked as if I turned the screen off, MP did not move on to the next track. If listneing to music when taking a call, you had to fish the phone out of your pocket to carry on listening after the call ended. Want to skip a track, pause while someone talks to you, fish out the phone again.
However I sold it and bought an iPhone. I love the iPhone, but I hate almost everything about iTunes.
It can take half an hour to sync my contacts and calendar, it is tied to the app store, and you can really only synch one music library at a time.
I will never complain about MS Active Synch again. iTunes is much worse.
Thanks to the magic of VNC and X11 over SSH and the interweb my $600 NZ netbook has access to my white hot 3GHz core duo desktop at home. I browse, e-mail, chat and configure switches over a USB/Serial adapter, but I do everything else for work over a citrix connection, and for all my personal stuff over SSH tunnel to my home desktop. 8)
As long as I have net, I have all the power I need for $600.
For games I have an XBox.
Well I guess it's because what I really want is the Acer Aspire One I am typing this on, but it would be nice if it had a 2GHz plus dualcore CPU, a faster SSD drive or a bigger spinning disk, and a faster video card and a battery to last the whole of a longhaul international flight.
But then it would be a $3000+ macbook air, not a $600 netbook 8)
I guess I am lucky enough to be picky about who I work for. I whent on several interviews for companies wanting in house IT staff, and most salaried positions offered no overtime, but did say they gave time in leu. Yeah right! you want me to stay late to wrok on a server/switch/application after hours when everyone has gone home and you promise I can have the day odd or a few hours off later. I dont think it ends up working that way. I prefer to work for vendors or contracts, where if I work the hours, I am paid for them. Very good money for call outs too.
So the 90% of the other clients using outlook would be able to just use Outlook if they wanted to 8)
For me, my job mostly involves supporting all the non MS systems on the campus. Switches, Routers using Cisco IOS, VMWare ESX servers, Linux servers running Apache, managing syslog servers, Checkpoint firewalls using Secure Platform Linux. Most of the day I spend in SSH terminals, editing and modifing scripts, running SMTP mail systems etc. I only have to use the windows PC beside me for mail because of Outlook, Office Comms Client, and Visio. Otherwise I would be MS free 8)
I also worked for Statistics New zeland whrere they had hundresds of unique applications for doing statistical analisys. Opensourcing these apps meant they could easily share their models with other departments and statistical groups, and use code form other sources easily. If it was all closed source, they would not be able to open the code, or make the changes they required to fit their statistical models. If it was broken, they also paid local developers to fix it, keeping money in NZ Good on them I say!
It's like skype compared to Gizmo Project. With skype, do you know where your phone call is going, do you know if there is a US back door into the protocol? Can you encrypt it? GizmoProject just uses SIP, a well understood phone protocol with many open libraries, and therefore can also potentially use PGP encrypted SIP. It is an open source app, and can be used to tie into many other IM systems, MSN, jabber based IMs like Yahoo,etc Oh, and there are no restrictions if you happen to use a non MS OS or a non Intel CPU. You can get a phone client for symbian, PalmOS and windows Mobile (I don't know if thy will do one for iPhone given the closed nature of it's API's) To me thats a classic open source over proprietary example.
It's also to avoid US cultural assumptions in some programs. Here in New Zealand during summertime daylight savings, we move our clocks 1 hour ahead, so time becomes +13hrs GMT. Amazing how many time sensitive apps I've had to fix because they cant' understand it's 1 hour into tomorrow here 8)
It would also be nice if Exchange supported webdav or iCal formats for calender sharing and LDAP for your address book. But then if those services were fully functional you wouldn't have to use Outlook for your client, and therefore windows as your OS, and therefore Active Directory as your authentication source, therefore using Active Directory CALs,or Exchange CALs, and Office CALs (Outlook no longer the free client with Exchange CALs) and you wouldn't have to pay your MS tax.
Citrix running on Windows2003 server, and install outlook as an application that can be run in a seamless window. Not cheap, but as the ICA client can be run in many OS's without issue, is the easiest one for corporates to swallow.