Looks like normal SSL traffic to your IT department. Looks like the free and open internet to you. There are plenty of providers out there who will hook you up with a connection for $5-10/month, if you don't feel like setting up your own.
In my office, there are about a hundred employees and we rely on three printers which mostly sit idle. As a software development company, most of the things we are working on are digital to start with. I routinely go months without handling a piece of paper at work.
At home, there are still one or two things that come as paper mail, usually financial in nature. That gets scanned and shredded unless I'm required to keep it by law - tax documents for example. I have a three or four inch thick stack of legal and financial papers in my safe and that's all the paper in my life.
The paperless office is rare, perhaps, but quite possible.
For Windows, the default answer for deploying configuration is Group Policy. With the Group Policy Management Console you can back up your GPOs and store them in your version control system. Alternatively, you can use a specialized Group Policy version control and troubleshooting product like Group Policy Manager from Quest which allows offline editing and testing before deployment to your production environment.
You can actually extend Group Policy to your *nix and Novell machines as well using Vintela Group Policy (a part of Vintela Authentication Services), which also has features to allow your *nix machines to use your Active Directory accounts. If you use it in combination with Group Policy Manager, you can back up the *nix specific settings alongside the rest of your GPO. Also, the integration allows you to diff different versions of your *nix settings alongside the rest of your GPO.
[Disclaimer: I am a developer on the Group Policy Manager team at Quest. While I'm proud of my product, I'm not any kind of official spokesperson for my employer.]
And from the other side...
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 1
There is a Wired article quoting Darl McBride. Notably, "We're trying to work through issues in such a way that we get justice without putting a hole in the head of the penguin."
I think maybe he overestimates the size of his gun
In my opinion, you can build a comparably secure system using either Linux or Windows. I have run both, and have never had an intrusion, a virus, or any other malicious nasty.
Based on my anecdotal evidence, if you are aware and stay patched, you are very unlikely to have a problem. If you do not stay on top of things, you are very likely to find yourself in trouble.
I've heard this argument a bazillion times, and it only partially holds water. In most cases, if the developer wants to write to the standard, the Windows box will work just fine and so will the other OS's. For example, write some XHTML and CSS1, it'll work just fine on just about any box I can find. Write some MS specific markup, it'll only work with MS browsers. Whose fault is that? Microsoft's? Only partially, in my opinion.
Wow, one person actually took the time to read the article and do ten seconds of research. Bravo to you, sir. Using a separate XML namespace is exactly the right way to store this formatting information. Any XML parser that understands namespaces should be able to read it. If they don't want the formatting, don't use it. Simple. Open. Correct (if you like XML Schema).
The article referenced is so poorly written and biased as to be worse than useless.
The byline says the article comes from the Financial Post (part of Canada's other national newspaper, the National Post). I've long since given up on these sources to have any clues about the tech industry. In my opinion, there are very few good tech writers at general news publishers. Also, the editorial folks seem utterly unprepared to fact-check anything.
Re:What's got OpenGL got to do with CORBA?
on
.NET or CORBA?
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· Score: 1
You're right. You can set up COM or CORBA endpoints, enable encryption if necessary. In general, there aren't significant technical hurdles to binary RPC over the internet (notwithstanding the alleged advantages of DTD's and namespaces over interface definitions).
I think, however, that many sysadmins/net admins feel more comfortable with SOAP or XML/RPC. Almost every administrator has dealt with securing a web service.
Re:What's got OpenGL got to do with CORBA?
on
.NET or CORBA?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If you want to compare remoting methods, than you have a list including CORBA, COM,.NET Remoting, and SOAP.
CORBA and COM have proven track records and many developers understand them. In addition, many tools are available to integrate with these remoting technologies. However, CORBA and COM are difficult to configure to run over the public internet and there are many security considerations when doing so.
SOAP runs over HTTP. As a result, it is as easy to set up as a web service. The security considerations around opening port 80 are understood. The endpoint can be logged if necessary, the same way web servers are. Of course, XML and HTTP are not very efficient mechanisms for RPC calls in a backend type situation where performance and scalability are paramount. SOAP's strength is the promise that disparate systems may be integrated over the Internet.
The track record of.NET Remoting remains to be seen. It has the same advantages and disadvantages of COM and CORBA in terms of being a binary protocol. They tend to be reasonably fast but are difficult to run over the Internet..NET Remoting's claim to fame is that it is the "native" binary remoting scheme for.NET. I don't know much about its performance though I would expect it performs favorably against COM.
You are right that many of the "webControls" are not cross-browser compliant. It's also true that some of the aspx headers may not include your preferred character-encoding, doctype, etc.
The good news is, you can still take advantage of the rest of the framework, and save the webcontrols for IE specific projects. You can develop your own usercontrols and provide the same level of integration with the IDE. Also, the IDE is excellent about leaving your ASPX (html) code alone.
In my opinion, at the very least, it's no harder to build cross-browser apps in Visual Studio.Net than it is in any other IDE.
Well, I might as well be unpopular today. I do understand the reasoning behind this product. As a Windows developer (bye, bye, Karma), I frequently have to deal with paths like "C:\Documents and Settings\myUsername\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\My Solution\Some Project\bin\Debug\datalayer.dll".
However, if I wish to search an area of the namespace, it's simple enough to set up an Index Service catalog for it (bye, bye, more Karma). So long as you're sane about it and don't index your entire filesystem, things perform fine. I use the search feature all the time. Sometimes I even define keywords on the file for searching.
If I don't use the indexer, I can always use grep, file search, or whatever, to search the namespace by content. It takes a few extra seconds, but it works.
Email is a great example of this. If you're anything like me, you get 10 spams for every real email you get, and I get lots. A few years ago, I got tired of constantly filing all my email in a folder structure. Now I just treat my inbox like a giant stream and search it whenever I need anything. The mail is already stored in a database (Exchange 2000, bye bye Karma!), and the search is quick even with a few hundred megs of mail being searched across my VPN. If I ever get around to installing SpamAssassin, my methods may change.
Now, I'm sure I'll get slammed for using Microsoft products, but the fact is I've got gigs of data on my primary development box. I've got every remotely important file and email I've ever worked with in the last ten years - pared down to about 20GB of data. I'm sure I'd be completely lost without these search features.
It doesn't sound like you're a contractor at all, but an employee. I've never heard of a "salary" being paid to a contractor, though per diem (aka per day) rates are common.
At any rate, I've found that setting expectations early is critical. Make it clear to your client what they are paying for. This does not mean you have to be inflexible. You both want the project to be successful in the end. If excessive hours are required, don't bother fighting. Simply make it clear that more work is more expensive, but that you will be happy to see to it that the client's needs are met. If your client has a problem with this, consider your relationship with them carefully. Make it clear that you understand their concerns and that you want to do whatever you can to help them, without getting screwed yourself. Your client is probably motivated by the memory of runaway projects. Make it clear that you have their best interests in mind. Remember, the client is motivated by both excitement and fear. If you can harness those emotions, you can usually turn the negotiations in a helpful direction for both of you.
Finally, it never hurts to show off your professionalism. Dress one notch more formally than those in your workplace. Be friendly and helpful at all times, but refrain from getting involved with office politics. Think about the mannerisms of your lawyer or doctor. You are a highly paid expert in your field. Act like it and your client will come to understand what they are paying for.
Paradigm Reference Studio/20. One of the best near-field monitors ever designed at any price is available for about $700 Canadian. That's a bit above $200 (but not much:). You'll pay a premium if you buy them from an American retailer. However, no matter what you pay, you end up with a speaker that would be a bargain at twice the price. Run, don't walk, to your nearest Paradigm dealer and take a listen.
P.S. I'm saving up for a pair of the full-size Studio/100's right now.
P.P.S. I'm not affiliated with Paradigm in any way. I just really love these speakers!
I'm sure your local building center could help you out. Alternatively, you may wish to contact a music store. They may be able to point you at a used 19" "road case" which is often appropriate.
One caveat. If you plan to mount your device with the front panel facing up as you describe, monitor the temperature of the unit for the first little while. 1U devices are often passively cooled and may require the correct orientation in order to work properly.
Whenever considering a new vendor or product, I always visit the customer service/support web site. It's important to me to be able to solve most of my problems on my own. Access to a knowledge base, user manuals, and other technical data over the web can save me hours on usenet or on the phone, especially if the product is not widely used. A good customer service site also tells me that the vendor is serious about customer satisfaction. The added bonus, of course, is that the vendor can save some serious dough for every customer who is able to solve their own problems. Win-win all around.
This is why I became a programmer in the first place. As a tech support type, I always wanted to be the guy who knew just about everything about the systems I was working on. I figured there was no better way than to write them myself.
I still get satisfaction when a user asks, "How do you know that?" and I can say, "because I wrote it that way.":)
There would be nothing shocking about this. Microsoft routinely reuses functionality provided by the shell and "integrated" browser - as do many 3'rd party Windows apps.
According to an article I read (can't remember where), it's primarily being marketed to students and other tech-savvy customers as a space-saving convergence unit. Kind of a swiss army knife for single person households.
It is Windows XP Media Center Edition. I expect more partner manufacturers (Dell, etc.) to offer Media Center PC's soon. It's basically Windows XP Professional with an app that provides a TV/Remote friendly interface to audio/video functions. Manufacturers are required to provide TV tuners, remotes, etc. in order to distribute the OS.
That's right. In Canada, you may make a copy of a copyrighted work for your own use, even if you do not own the original. That means you can go over to someone's house, burn all their CD's, and it's all totally legal, so long as you make the copies. Your friend can help you, but if he or she actually makes the copies for you, the copy is illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVPN
Looks like normal SSL traffic to your IT department. Looks like the free and open internet to you. There are plenty of providers out there who will hook you up with a connection for $5-10/month, if you don't feel like setting up your own.
In my office, there are about a hundred employees and we rely on three printers which mostly sit idle. As a software development company, most of the things we are working on are digital to start with. I routinely go months without handling a piece of paper at work.
At home, there are still one or two things that come as paper mail, usually financial in nature. That gets scanned and shredded unless I'm required to keep it by law - tax documents for example. I have a three or four inch thick stack of legal and financial papers in my safe and that's all the paper in my life.
The paperless office is rare, perhaps, but quite possible.
Regarding the Red Cross, it's one of the few examples of where a "super-trademark" is warranted, in my humble opinion, and it's protected by the Geneva Conventions Emblems of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
Wouldn't this make DoS easier, not harder?
For Windows, the default answer for deploying configuration is Group Policy. With the Group Policy Management Console you can back up your GPOs and store them in your version control system. Alternatively, you can use a specialized Group Policy version control and troubleshooting product like Group Policy Manager from Quest which allows offline editing and testing before deployment to your production environment.
You can actually extend Group Policy to your *nix and Novell machines as well using Vintela Group Policy (a part of Vintela Authentication Services), which also has features to allow your *nix machines to use your Active Directory accounts. If you use it in combination with Group Policy Manager, you can back up the *nix specific settings alongside the rest of your GPO. Also, the integration allows you to diff different versions of your *nix settings alongside the rest of your GPO.
[Disclaimer: I am a developer on the Group Policy Manager team at Quest. While I'm proud of my product, I'm not any kind of official spokesperson for my employer.]
There is a Wired article quoting Darl McBride. Notably, "We're trying to work through issues in such a way that we get justice without putting a hole in the head of the penguin."
I think maybe he overestimates the size of his gun
In my opinion, you can build a comparably secure system using either Linux or Windows. I have run both, and have never had an intrusion, a virus, or any other malicious nasty.
Based on my anecdotal evidence, if you are aware and stay patched, you are very unlikely to have a problem. If you do not stay on top of things, you are very likely to find yourself in trouble.
Neither OS is the pinnacle of security.
I've heard this argument a bazillion times, and it only partially holds water. In most cases, if the developer wants to write to the standard, the Windows box will work just fine and so will the other OS's. For example, write some XHTML and CSS1, it'll work just fine on just about any box I can find. Write some MS specific markup, it'll only work with MS browsers. Whose fault is that? Microsoft's? Only partially, in my opinion.
Wow, one person actually took the time to read the article and do ten seconds of research. Bravo to you, sir. Using a separate XML namespace is exactly the right way to store this formatting information. Any XML parser that understands namespaces should be able to read it. If they don't want the formatting, don't use it. Simple. Open. Correct (if you like XML Schema).
The article referenced is so poorly written and biased as to be worse than useless.
The byline says the article comes from the Financial Post (part of Canada's other national newspaper, the National Post). I've long since given up on these sources to have any clues about the tech industry. In my opinion, there are very few good tech writers at general news publishers. Also, the editorial folks seem utterly unprepared to fact-check anything.
You're right. You can set up COM or CORBA endpoints, enable encryption if necessary. In general, there aren't significant technical hurdles to binary RPC over the internet (notwithstanding the alleged advantages of DTD's and namespaces over interface definitions).
I think, however, that many sysadmins/net admins feel more comfortable with SOAP or XML/RPC. Almost every administrator has dealt with securing a web service.
If you want to compare remoting methods, than you have a list including CORBA, COM, .NET Remoting, and SOAP.
.NET Remoting remains to be seen. It has the same advantages and disadvantages of COM and CORBA in terms of being a binary protocol. They tend to be reasonably fast but are difficult to run over the Internet. .NET Remoting's claim to fame is that it is the "native" binary remoting scheme for .NET. I don't know much about its performance though I would expect it performs favorably against COM.
CORBA and COM have proven track records and many developers understand them. In addition, many tools are available to integrate with these remoting technologies. However, CORBA and COM are difficult to configure to run over the public internet and there are many security considerations when doing so.
SOAP runs over HTTP. As a result, it is as easy to set up as a web service. The security considerations around opening port 80 are understood. The endpoint can be logged if necessary, the same way web servers are. Of course, XML and HTTP are not very efficient mechanisms for RPC calls in a backend type situation where performance and scalability are paramount. SOAP's strength is the promise that disparate systems may be integrated over the Internet.
The track record of
My two cents. Hope it's useful.
You are right that many of the "webControls" are not cross-browser compliant. It's also true that some of the aspx headers may not include your preferred character-encoding, doctype, etc. The good news is, you can still take advantage of the rest of the framework, and save the webcontrols for IE specific projects. You can develop your own usercontrols and provide the same level of integration with the IDE. Also, the IDE is excellent about leaving your ASPX (html) code alone. In my opinion, at the very least, it's no harder to build cross-browser apps in Visual Studio.Net than it is in any other IDE.
Well, I certainly didn't mean intend this to be a troll, but I will accept that and be more careful next time.
Well, I might as well be unpopular today. I do understand the reasoning behind this product. As a Windows developer (bye, bye, Karma), I frequently have to deal with paths like "C:\Documents and Settings\myUsername\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\My Solution\Some Project\bin\Debug\datalayer.dll".
However, if I wish to search an area of the namespace, it's simple enough to set up an Index Service catalog for it (bye, bye, more Karma). So long as you're sane about it and don't index your entire filesystem, things perform fine. I use the search feature all the time. Sometimes I even define keywords on the file for searching.
If I don't use the indexer, I can always use grep, file search, or whatever, to search the namespace by content. It takes a few extra seconds, but it works.
Email is a great example of this. If you're anything like me, you get 10 spams for every real email you get, and I get lots. A few years ago, I got tired of constantly filing all my email in a folder structure. Now I just treat my inbox like a giant stream and search it whenever I need anything. The mail is already stored in a database (Exchange 2000, bye bye Karma!), and the search is quick even with a few hundred megs of mail being searched across my VPN. If I ever get around to installing SpamAssassin, my methods may change.
Now, I'm sure I'll get slammed for using Microsoft products, but the fact is I've got gigs of data on my primary development box. I've got every remotely important file and email I've ever worked with in the last ten years - pared down to about 20GB of data. I'm sure I'd be completely lost without these search features.
How is this new product different?
It doesn't sound like you're a contractor at all, but an employee. I've never heard of a "salary" being paid to a contractor, though per diem (aka per day) rates are common.
At any rate, I've found that setting expectations early is critical. Make it clear to your client what they are paying for. This does not mean you have to be inflexible. You both want the project to be successful in the end. If excessive hours are required, don't bother fighting. Simply make it clear that more work is more expensive, but that you will be happy to see to it that the client's needs are met. If your client has a problem with this, consider your relationship with them carefully. Make it clear that you understand their concerns and that you want to do whatever you can to help them, without getting screwed yourself. Your client is probably motivated by the memory of runaway projects. Make it clear that you have their best interests in mind. Remember, the client is motivated by both excitement and fear. If you can harness those emotions, you can usually turn the negotiations in a helpful direction for both of you.
Finally, it never hurts to show off your professionalism. Dress one notch more formally than those in your workplace. Be friendly and helpful at all times, but refrain from getting involved with office politics. Think about the mannerisms of your lawyer or doctor. You are a highly paid expert in your field. Act like it and your client will come to understand what they are paying for.
Paradigm Reference Studio/20. One of the best near-field monitors ever designed at any price is available for about $700 Canadian. That's a bit above $200 (but not much :). You'll pay a premium if you buy them from an American retailer. However, no matter what you pay, you end up with a speaker that would be a bargain at twice the price. Run, don't walk, to your nearest Paradigm dealer and take a listen.
P.S. I'm saving up for a pair of the full-size Studio/100's right now.
P.P.S. I'm not affiliated with Paradigm in any way. I just really love these speakers!
I'm sure your local building center could help you out. Alternatively, you may wish to contact a music store. They may be able to point you at a used 19" "road case" which is often appropriate.
One caveat. If you plan to mount your device with the front panel facing up as you describe, monitor the temperature of the unit for the first little while. 1U devices are often passively cooled and may require the correct orientation in order to work properly.
Whenever considering a new vendor or product, I always visit the customer service/support web site. It's important to me to be able to solve most of my problems on my own. Access to a knowledge base, user manuals, and other technical data over the web can save me hours on usenet or on the phone, especially if the product is not widely used. A good customer service site also tells me that the vendor is serious about customer satisfaction. The added bonus, of course, is that the vendor can save some serious dough for every customer who is able to solve their own problems. Win-win all around.
I still get satisfaction when a user asks, "How do you know that?" and I can say, "because I wrote it that way." :)
There would be nothing shocking about this. Microsoft routinely reuses functionality provided by the shell and "integrated" browser - as do many 3'rd party Windows apps.
According to an article I read (can't remember where), it's primarily being marketed to students and other tech-savvy customers as a space-saving convergence unit. Kind of a swiss army knife for single person households.
It is Windows XP Media Center Edition. I expect more partner manufacturers (Dell, etc.) to offer Media Center PC's soon. It's basically Windows XP Professional with an app that provides a TV/Remote friendly interface to audio/video functions. Manufacturers are required to provide TV tuners, remotes, etc. in order to distribute the OS.
That's right. In Canada, you may make a copy of a copyrighted work for your own use, even if you do not own the original. That means you can go over to someone's house, burn all their CD's, and it's all totally legal, so long as you make the copies. Your friend can help you, but if he or she actually makes the copies for you, the copy is illegal.
Whoever modded parent down is nuts. This is an excellent point. When everyone uses postcards, only criminals will have envelopes.