The issue is many user apps and business apps don't actually require any specific windows feature to work, only that they were coded for the win32 API and window GUI. If you use a cross-platform API, you can run your app on anything. If you make sure that you can run on many databases, and don't require MS SQL, then the server can be anything.
I would not have a problem with MSSQL if it could also be ported to other OS's or offered LDAP or radius authentication along with AD Integrated and SQL.
Nearly everything in the MS world is not only engineered to work with Windows only, if they do offer other OS support, the features may be limited. I have a Windows Mobile and the damn thing won't even let me install some apps as they are packaged as windows.exe files.
Come on, why the hell should I have to run a windows.exe just to unpack a tiny application to sync on the phone! No technical reason, but may keep people from migrating their desktop to other platforms.
Much easier to run apt-get install app then to locate download point, download, check for viruses, install, delete useless shortcuts etc.
The issue is with many apps once installed, configuring them can be a PITA.
Why is IIS easier for a new admin to look after/setup than Apache? the IIS admin mmc snapin.
Yast in Suse make this relatively easy, but still not quite as point and click as the IIS interface. There are other "add on" managers, but there should be one provided by default.
All the coders love to make the app, then noone wants to write the installer or management tool.
Because Windows is free too. You get it with nearly every PC, and often cant get the same hardware without it.
I want to buy a Mac Mini. It's expensive for a 2GHz core duo with only 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD, but even at NZ$1200 it's the cheapest computer with that power I can find that is that small.
I's going to drive an in car pc on a 9" screen in the back for the kids for movies and music when on long trips, and be a main desktop when out of the car for use at home.
My Son has an email-pal, some neighbour kids who moved away and now live out on Chatham Island and they have irregular email contact, but he writes his own letter and I type them in for him and a scan of any art- I leave all grammer and spelling as his as it is his work - and he has some grate fonetik spelling in some of them 8)
On the server side, it must be able to patch and restart services without interruption.
Support swapping kernels or system drives to patched versions on the fly, then the boot loader must be more freindly to other OS's and not assume it is the only one running the show.
And run faster than vista on the same hardware, not slower.
I've just upgraded my AMD64 1.8GHz system to Linux mint based on Ubuntu 8.04 and it feels so much faster than Vista. Boot less than 30 seconds to login prompt, and desktop loads in less than 10 seconds.
Came with all the software I need for home/work use and the sudo system for escallating user permissions when you need then is just 10x better than UAC. The only thing that sucks is games and kids entertainment software, and for that I have my old X-Box.
You get what you pay for.
Our corporate wireless network has a guest channel we use which just has straight internet access. For this we use a 2MB DSL line and a cisco router with a DSL WIC in it. This has never needed rebooting, ever, but did cost a bunch of money (The router supports VLANS and QOS and so does other jobs too)
My D-Link junk at home used to be reboot city, but I think that was line quality issues as the local exchange was upgraded and I now have to reboot only after my ISP throttles my link speed if I go over quota)
BBs can be good at liberating people from the office. My manager has to go get her kids from scholl at 2:00 in the after noon, but we know we can still get email responses to critial issues (project dealines update etc) right up to 5:30.
I have a BB, I use it for work. At the end of the day, I leave it at my desk.
If it is really important, they can call me at home or on my personal cell.
I can check my mail from any internet connected PC. No problems.
Sometimes when I do take it home, I use a silent profile and only check it when I want to send something 8)
First SF book I remember reading was Battle Field Earth, then on to The Hobbit.
I don't think huge books daunted me at all 8)
I also remember devouring all of the Narnia series, then many short story anthologies as my local library had heaps of them. Once started on the "golden age" masters, I was permanently hooked.
My wife finally "got" Linux last night.
I've been using her PC to play around with Linux Mint, She wanted to get her mail and wanted Thunderbird.
"In the program menu find synaptic" I said
Talked her though searching for thunderbird, click install and done.
"Wow, can you install anything like that?"
"Just about" I said.
"Anything not in those repositories is probably still under development anyway"
Anyway, I havn't had to put back her Vista disk yet as she says Mint runs much faster.
She doesn't like compiz/xgl though, maybe a little too different 8) so I just gave her a vista-like theme but only basic effects and she is happy.
Sysadmin - a very broad term for people who administer an IT system.
Much of my day-to-day work is simply administering a government network of about 160 servers on a distrbuted campus.
I am part of a well rounded team of 2 helpdesk ops (1st level), 3 desktop/pda engineers (SecondLevel) 1 Systems Engineer (2nd level server ops) and 3 Senior Systems Engineer/Consultants.
Of the senior engineer positions I do Network infrastructure, switches, primarily non windows systems, SMTP, DNS, LDAP etc, and general support for the Windows systems too.
We have one Windows guru - Active Directory, Exchange, and all things blue, and one scripting guru, who primarily automates many of the jobs that can be scripted, workstation deployments, reporting etc and generally supports the rest of the server level systems too.
We use support companies responsible for their own applications for many the top layer applications.
None of us are "Programmers" but then I don't know any programmer with the depth of knowledge these days to work as sysadmins. Many seem to have no concept of security, epecially those working in the really high level languages,.net etc.
However I initially trained as a Software Engineer, with small scale microprocessors (intel8088, Motorolla 68000, z80 etc.) back in the 90's before I decided that I didn't want to be a pale faced keyboard banger for the rest of my life, and applied my engineering skills into system support instead.
The advantage in knowing how software and hardware works down at the assembly level has been a huge asset however in troubleshooting many problems mainly because I can get an idea of what the code is trying to do, even if I couldn't write it myself.
Yup, the USA will stop at nothing to make sure they are the only country with Nukes, even though they are the only country in the world to have used them in anger.
It would not suprise me that "War" was waged just to take peoples mind of problems at home, secure oil to keep USA's engine running and the current party in power.
Or have two drive, small super efficient 4-8 GB micro-SD flash for OS and swap, less efficient but larger drive for user data with aggressive powersaving turned on (suspend drive when not in use etc)
In the US it doesn't seem to matter what the laws are.
Govt abusing wiretapping law, citizens sue.
Case shut down because of National Security.
Imagine - "I didn't think the govt were allowed to snoop on the location of my car on the way to a peaceful anti-[insert cause here] rally"
They aren't but you cant successfully prosecute and if you complain they can gag you or your auto-tracking provider with a National Security Letter.
Only in the land of the free.....
Last time I had a Paypal Account, I got spammed so bad I had to change my address. No way am I going to list anything and require a paypal transaction.
Luckily Trademe here in NZ has no such requirement.
Thats what happened to me.
Firefox looked nice and was the first opensource project I used. I thought, "This is pretty good" Then I tried Open Office and the Gimp.
After that I was hooked. openSuse was the next new OS upgrade for me, and the opensource "heroin" had me hooked. I havn't visited a crappy shareware download site in over 2 years. I have had 0 problems with malware on my machine in that time. Infact I chuckle when a site pops up a very windows-like dialog claiming my registry is corrups and can be fixwed by simply downloading unknown-stuff-up-your-pc.exe and running it.
Maybe I'm just anti-establishment:
This damn ubuntu cake with firefox installed by default, and who want to use the defaults, o I installed Opera an Konqueror. Oh and I like gnome, but I hate evolution so I also installed Kontact. Banshee is nice enough, but Amarok is better (and supports more plugins)
If my PC came with Ubuntu installed from the factory, I'd probably install openSuse instead.
8)
The default is for people who are happy with what they bought.
My old Xboxes BTW no longer have their factory firmware either 8)
I want to encrypt my cell phone text messages too. The are sent in the clear over radio and stored by the cell provider for as long as they want.
To make it work though secure SMS must be pervasive enough to get the phone makers to ad it to the phones.
No, they just wanted to make sure nobody in those dang forren countries could use their "superior" encryption schemes, even though most of the best work has been done outside the US. 8)
Mail me your public PGP key and all my reply mail to you will be encrypted. It is staggeringly easy to do. Only mailing people using outlook and windows where it is not pre installed is a problem 8)
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The issue is many user apps and business apps don't actually require any specific windows feature to work, only that they were coded for the win32 API and window GUI. If you use a cross-platform API, you can run your app on anything. If you make sure that you can run on many databases, and don't require MS SQL, then the server can be anything. I would not have a problem with MSSQL if it could also be ported to other OS's or offered LDAP or radius authentication along with AD Integrated and SQL. Nearly everything in the MS world is not only engineered to work with Windows only, if they do offer other OS support, the features may be limited. I have a Windows Mobile and the damn thing won't even let me install some apps as they are packaged as windows .exe files.
Come on, why the hell should I have to run a windows .exe just to unpack a tiny application to sync on the phone! No technical reason, but may keep people from migrating their desktop to other platforms.
Much easier to run apt-get install app then to locate download point, download, check for viruses, install, delete useless shortcuts etc. The issue is with many apps once installed, configuring them can be a PITA. Why is IIS easier for a new admin to look after/setup than Apache? the IIS admin mmc snapin. Yast in Suse make this relatively easy, but still not quite as point and click as the IIS interface. There are other "add on" managers, but there should be one provided by default. All the coders love to make the app, then noone wants to write the installer or management tool.
Because Windows is free too. You get it with nearly every PC, and often cant get the same hardware without it. I want to buy a Mac Mini. It's expensive for a 2GHz core duo with only 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD, but even at NZ$1200 it's the cheapest computer with that power I can find that is that small. I's going to drive an in car pc on a 9" screen in the back for the kids for movies and music when on long trips, and be a main desktop when out of the car for use at home.
My Son has an email-pal, some neighbour kids who moved away and now live out on Chatham Island and they have irregular email contact, but he writes his own letter and I type them in for him and a scan of any art- I leave all grammer and spelling as his as it is his work - and he has some grate fonetik spelling in some of them 8)
We find our Windows 2003 servers boot in about 30 seconds when in VMWare. However our ESX servers are dual 2.5GHz Quad-Cores
He is also 18 and autistic.
On the server side, it must be able to patch and restart services without interruption. Support swapping kernels or system drives to patched versions on the fly, then the boot loader must be more freindly to other OS's and not assume it is the only one running the show. And run faster than vista on the same hardware, not slower. I've just upgraded my AMD64 1.8GHz system to Linux mint based on Ubuntu 8.04 and it feels so much faster than Vista. Boot less than 30 seconds to login prompt, and desktop loads in less than 10 seconds. Came with all the software I need for home/work use and the sudo system for escallating user permissions when you need then is just 10x better than UAC. The only thing that sucks is games and kids entertainment software, and for that I have my old X-Box.
You get what you pay for. Our corporate wireless network has a guest channel we use which just has straight internet access. For this we use a 2MB DSL line and a cisco router with a DSL WIC in it. This has never needed rebooting, ever, but did cost a bunch of money (The router supports VLANS and QOS and so does other jobs too) My D-Link junk at home used to be reboot city, but I think that was line quality issues as the local exchange was upgraded and I now have to reboot only after my ISP throttles my link speed if I go over quota)
BBs can be good at liberating people from the office. My manager has to go get her kids from scholl at 2:00 in the after noon, but we know we can still get email responses to critial issues (project dealines update etc) right up to 5:30.
I have a BB, I use it for work. At the end of the day, I leave it at my desk. If it is really important, they can call me at home or on my personal cell. I can check my mail from any internet connected PC. No problems. Sometimes when I do take it home, I use a silent profile and only check it when I want to send something 8)
First SF book I remember reading was Battle Field Earth, then on to The Hobbit. I don't think huge books daunted me at all 8) I also remember devouring all of the Narnia series, then many short story anthologies as my local library had heaps of them. Once started on the "golden age" masters, I was permanently hooked.
My wife finally "got" Linux last night. I've been using her PC to play around with Linux Mint, She wanted to get her mail and wanted Thunderbird. "In the program menu find synaptic" I said Talked her though searching for thunderbird, click install and done. "Wow, can you install anything like that?" "Just about" I said. "Anything not in those repositories is probably still under development anyway" Anyway, I havn't had to put back her Vista disk yet as she says Mint runs much faster. She doesn't like compiz/xgl though, maybe a little too different 8) so I just gave her a vista-like theme but only basic effects and she is happy.
Sysadmin - a very broad term for people who administer an IT system. Much of my day-to-day work is simply administering a government network of about 160 servers on a distrbuted campus. I am part of a well rounded team of 2 helpdesk ops (1st level), 3 desktop/pda engineers (SecondLevel) 1 Systems Engineer (2nd level server ops) and 3 Senior Systems Engineer/Consultants. Of the senior engineer positions I do Network infrastructure, switches, primarily non windows systems, SMTP, DNS, LDAP etc, and general support for the Windows systems too. We have one Windows guru - Active Directory, Exchange, and all things blue, and one scripting guru, who primarily automates many of the jobs that can be scripted, workstation deployments, reporting etc and generally supports the rest of the server level systems too. We use support companies responsible for their own applications for many the top layer applications. None of us are "Programmers" but then I don't know any programmer with the depth of knowledge these days to work as sysadmins. Many seem to have no concept of security, epecially those working in the really high level languages, .net etc.
However I initially trained as a Software Engineer, with small scale microprocessors (intel8088, Motorolla 68000, z80 etc.) back in the 90's before I decided that I didn't want to be a pale faced keyboard banger for the rest of my life, and applied my engineering skills into system support instead.
The advantage in knowing how software and hardware works down at the assembly level has been a huge asset however in troubleshooting many problems mainly because I can get an idea of what the code is trying to do, even if I couldn't write it myself.
Yup, the USA will stop at nothing to make sure they are the only country with Nukes, even though they are the only country in the world to have used them in anger. It would not suprise me that "War" was waged just to take peoples mind of problems at home, secure oil to keep USA's engine running and the current party in power.
Or have two drive, small super efficient 4-8 GB micro-SD flash for OS and swap, less efficient but larger drive for user data with aggressive powersaving turned on (suspend drive when not in use etc)
In the US it doesn't seem to matter what the laws are. Govt abusing wiretapping law, citizens sue. Case shut down because of National Security. Imagine - "I didn't think the govt were allowed to snoop on the location of my car on the way to a peaceful anti-[insert cause here] rally" They aren't but you cant successfully prosecute and if you complain they can gag you or your auto-tracking provider with a National Security Letter. Only in the land of the free.....
Last time I had a Paypal Account, I got spammed so bad I had to change my address. No way am I going to list anything and require a paypal transaction. Luckily Trademe here in NZ has no such requirement.
Thats what happened to me. Firefox looked nice and was the first opensource project I used. I thought, "This is pretty good" Then I tried Open Office and the Gimp. After that I was hooked. openSuse was the next new OS upgrade for me, and the opensource "heroin" had me hooked. I havn't visited a crappy shareware download site in over 2 years. I have had 0 problems with malware on my machine in that time. Infact I chuckle when a site pops up a very windows-like dialog claiming my registry is corrups and can be fixwed by simply downloading unknown-stuff-up-your-pc.exe and running it.
Maybe I'm just anti-establishment: This damn ubuntu cake with firefox installed by default, and who want to use the defaults, o I installed Opera an Konqueror. Oh and I like gnome, but I hate evolution so I also installed Kontact. Banshee is nice enough, but Amarok is better (and supports more plugins) If my PC came with Ubuntu installed from the factory, I'd probably install openSuse instead. 8) The default is for people who are happy with what they bought. My old Xboxes BTW no longer have their factory firmware either 8)
But the IE requirement keeps you on Windows and paying your MS tax.
Firefox is fine. Flash, however, sucks hugely and is responsible for nearly all of my browser crashes lately.
I want to encrypt my cell phone text messages too. The are sent in the clear over radio and stored by the cell provider for as long as they want. To make it work though secure SMS must be pervasive enough to get the phone makers to ad it to the phones.
I thought you new big madia already owned the government, so it is in their interests to protect their copyright. Hence national security.
No, they just wanted to make sure nobody in those dang forren countries could use their "superior" encryption schemes, even though most of the best work has been done outside the US. 8)
Mail me your public PGP key and all my reply mail to you will be encrypted. It is staggeringly easy to do. Only mailing people using outlook and windows where it is not pre installed is a problem 8)