We had thin clients to cut costs out on the factory floor. We switched software vendors and the new vendor's app (surprise!) doesnt support citrix or rdp. So I've been setting up older machines to host the app and I have a small pile of not terribly expensive thin clients doing nothing.
I'm not saying theyre bad, just not practical or feasible for most cases.
There are no details in the article, but I'm hoping for an optic-based connection. This can remove the length restrictions and electric interference. Not to mention the cable will be much cheaper.
Your points can be summarized in a different way. A cellphone is designed for voice calls. Talking. A gameboy advance is designed for gaming. These guys are making games for cellphones, a bit like Office2003 for the Xbox. The numeric pad is bad for games, battery life is abysmal for the sake of size and cost and the titles are really bad in most cases. No wonder people just get pacman and tetris.
They should put up the same games in flash as adverts for people to play and get used to, before they try downloading it on the cellphone. Ofcourse, both the interface and bettery life must be changed for games. I have games on my phone. I never play them because (1) I'm always close to a computer (2) I need the battery life for calls. I cant play games on the cellphone while camping since I NEED the joules to talk, and thats the the only place I could get bored enough to play cellphone games.
On my own accord I'd always choose slackware or the debian-based distros like knoppix and ubuntu. If I need enterprise support I'll go with redhat or suse. CentOS doesnt give me the support.
Moreover I'd only use redhat because the commercial world depends on redhat's linux than any other distro. I can install oracle, websphere, domino etc with minimal pain on redhat. Now CentOS doesnt have the name, which these apps check for. That brings down redhat to the importance of other joe-shmoe distros. Lower even, since many things about knoppix, ubuntu, slackware are superior. CentOS doesnt have the majority of the reasons the majority of the people who choose redhat use to be used.
It just doesnt smack of a pyramid. They probably just tiled a hill or built many cobbled streets all over a hill. The Egypt pyramids sharply break the horizon, testament to the enormous amount of work required to move so much material there. If I were to build a pyramid in ancient Bosnia, I'd just tile a hill and present a huge bill to the king.
MSN simply isnt important enough. Firefox only lists the top few most important search sites (read: most sought). MSN gets large number of hits due to Microsoft's tricks and it being the default homepage on all windows. But its really quite a minor search engine site.
Since its a small company, I assume you use a windows2000 or 2003 domain. Use an OpenBSD box that redirects PPTP connections to the windows server.
Sure there are superior systems but they dont necessarily 'fit' into the small business wintel setup. If youre running an all Linux network, you wouldnt be asking this question and you sure as hell wouldnt look around for commercial offerings.
If your users are OK with typing in an extra password, use OpenBSD's own SSH or ipsec based VPN, and L2TP on the client windows side.
Its the slashdot editor who put that article there whose on crack. There are plenty of wild ideas out there, but Dvorak keeps getting quoted and paid attention to. We might as well become the press department of Darl McBride.
While I was thinking about the OP's half-assed Microsoft-plagiarized antispam idea, I realized a slightly modified idea might work. You see, most antispam systems that can see your mailbox will whilelist everyone in your address book, and everyone you send emails to. Now clients like Thunderbird could once a day send your address book, and whoever you sent emails to, to a central server which will just collect the addresses and mark them. Emails which have a high incidence of ending up in someones address book will be given higher points which means theyre less likely spam addresses. All thats needed here is the client developers' cooperation like Mozilla, outlook, lotus etc.
Of course theres the whole issue of people allowing their addresses and address books to be sent to some server outside. *shudder*
I wonder if his entertainment factor gives him any kind of advantage. Kerry was boring, but this guy cracks people up. Its one thing to elect big actors like Arnold and Raegan, another entirely to elect someone who is entertaining while in office.
Oh and the wars arent boring either for this cowboy country.
Think of redundancy. What is it supposed to achieve? One goes down the other keeps going...
Now 3 servers would be a waste. Think about it. What are the chances a casing would FAIL?
So lets put 3 servers in one box. Data has to go onto each of the 3 disks. Instantly. Theres so much IO involved. Should each email coming in have to go through the tcpip stack, through the kernel API levels, through the HAL out the driver, out the network card, through the switch and all the way back down to the disk? Using too much makes things less stable.
So lets put the 3 disks together with one chip and lets call the chip servraid. Data is copied across the disks immediately by the chip in hardware, and the OS doesnt see it. Offloading work from the CPU and OS. You can do the same for the CPU and memory, and it will resemble the IBM xSeries 236, or countless others from Sun, HP, Dell etc. Medium level servers from these companies have redundant disks, power supplies, multiple redundant CPUs and NICs and even redundant memory slots. The only common part is the chipset and the motherboard, and of course the metal chassis. Both have extremely low instances of failure. About the same as the switch that connects the 3 servers, and the mechanism on the public side that is supposed to round-robin or otherwise load balance the servers.
Just get something like the x236 (or the equivalent Opteron system from Sun). Use qmail on FreeBSD and you will not lose email.
Everyones using USB disks for backups now rather than tapes. So many benefits there. Thats why Lacie and Maxtor are making a killing on selling drive + MCU + USB + casing packages. How many small and medium sized companies have total data exceeding 750GB?
Even more interesting is who will release the first terabyte drive and (this is what I'm interested in) who will be the first to put one terabyte on a single platter. A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later. Sure I understand Moores law and how 10MB was huge back then. But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it. Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there. Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that. Our humans senses will cease to notice any further difference. Games might require 2 blue-ray DVDs but will not require say 32 blue-ray DVDs in the next 10 years. What will you PUT on it?
Maybe this will mean I'll finally have as much space in hotmail as I have in gmail.
I've learned the same, only less dramatically. I've had trouble convincing everyone to start using Linux when I was personally responsible for the entire company's IT system and my job was on the line. The thing is, unix is just pleasurable. Its intuitive, clean and clear, even the commercial unix are. You know what each command does and you build scripts on top of them. And you can always switch to another terminal rather than stare at the frozen window, its simply a pleasure to work with.
Everything has its place. Sometimes that DOS app needs DOS. Sometimes some weird but critical app requires windows 9x to function and you cant go to windows 2003. OSS is not the solution to everything... yet.
I may be wrong, but to me mysql is a different class of database than sql2000. They cannot be compared. Similarly certain queries from sqlite will be faster than from mysql. It doesnt necessarily mean sqlite is superior or dbase5 is superior. We've run ERP systems on oracle and sql2000, and I've played with the idea of trying to copy all the schemas to a mysql database and attempt to use mysql as the database (DB size 7GB, hundereds of tables and ~30 simultaneous connections). Not sure it will practically work at all since so many users updating will require quite a fine level of row locking and transaction control. Not to mention the depth of views, stored proc, triggers etc thats required... may not be usable on postgres either.
I think access will be closer in scale to mysql, although its a different beast entirely.
I have two TR switches on my desk now and piles of NICs. Theyre not being used and will end up on ebay soon. I dont expect to get much from selling them.
I've HEARD of banks using them, but all the banks I've visited use Dell or IBM PC workstations with AIX or AS/400 servers using 100mbit ethernet. TR died for the same reasons ATM died for smaller locations... its way to complex to make. An ethernet hub is $10 and a gigabit ethernet hub is under $50. Theyre also well standardized compared to TR and others... say your computer has a TR nic. What will you connect it to? Almost all new laptops have built-in ethernet nic. For a TR you have to buy the card and do the driver dance.
TR is great, ATM is great, FDDI is great, and once upon a time arcnet was useful (still have the passive hubs here). But if you dont want ANY headaches, just use ethernet.
I wont pay 1000 but I can pay 100+ per month. I can also pay per GB if the rate is reasonable. However in no way I want to be 'limited' behind the scenes. The power companies never ask what you do with the power, they just sell it to you in full and take the money.
Thats not the issue. People are using higher ports everywhere with good results. The problem is with the ISP being the morality police, and limiting what was advertised to be unlimited (invisible caps). Theres always a way around their blockades, but we shouldnt have to.
Heres a great business idea with me as a potential customer:
Connection for geeks, no client-computer support at all. No ports throttled or blocked (assume customer does it themselves). Dont need http proxy, pop accounts, antispam etc, just a UUNET server will be useful. Allow servers and sell IP blocks. Allow full burstable bandwidth (max 8mbit allowable on ADSL), but offer various levels of minimum guaranteed bandwidths. I assume a guaranteed 8mbit (download) bandwidth with no caps will be expensive... I'm willing to pay $100+ for it with an SLA. My routers will do the QoS so I will not complain if my P2P traffic is slowing my VoIP even at full bandwidth. Also provide me with reverse DNS and let me own my own modem. You are responsible for line alone, you'll pay for bandwidth (and IP blocks) on your side, offer less tech support, and I'll pay you maybe $120 per month for the maximum guaranteed bandwidth.
You see, I've been paying for a dedicated server elsewhere, and I think I can run it at home with the much lower upload speeds if servers and the full theoretical (and practical) line bandwidth is guaranteed. We have 4+ desktops at home, a VoIP line, a VPN and P2P server and a potential medium-bandwidth http server. My pages are ~15kb in size so I can run it at home with good bandwidth. I know I'm not the only one here in Toronto with these requirements, but I dont know of one service (with good reviews) that offers what I'm looking for. Theres $$$ involved, I'm willing to pay (it becomes cheaper for me anyway), but I'm looking for no-frills full-bandwidth server-allowable and reliable line may it be ADSL or cable. Yes I know of (defunct) istop and techsavvy and others, but they have limits somewhere or where they believe is the maximum (reasonable) usage even though they advertise no caps. Their prices are low but the various limitations are unacceptable. All I want to buy is pure bandwidth no questions asked. No one is selling just that.
Slashdot Mirror
We had thin clients to cut costs out on the factory floor. We switched software vendors and the new vendor's app (surprise!) doesnt support citrix or rdp. So I've been setting up older machines to host the app and I have a small pile of not terribly expensive thin clients doing nothing.
I'm not saying theyre bad, just not practical or feasible for most cases.
There are no details in the article, but I'm hoping for an optic-based connection. This can remove the length restrictions and electric interference. Not to mention the cable will be much cheaper.
... but whats wrong with just all the files in a directory? I use filenames to search for songs and keep winamp playlists around.
Your points can be summarized in a different way. A cellphone is designed for voice calls. Talking. A gameboy advance is designed for gaming. These guys are making games for cellphones, a bit like Office2003 for the Xbox. The numeric pad is bad for games, battery life is abysmal for the sake of size and cost and the titles are really bad in most cases. No wonder people just get pacman and tetris.
They should put up the same games in flash as adverts for people to play and get used to, before they try downloading it on the cellphone. Ofcourse, both the interface and bettery life must be changed for games. I have games on my phone. I never play them because (1) I'm always close to a computer (2) I need the battery life for calls. I cant play games on the cellphone while camping since I NEED the joules to talk, and thats the the only place I could get bored enough to play cellphone games.
Theres a major difference. The name.
On my own accord I'd always choose slackware or the debian-based distros like knoppix and ubuntu. If I need enterprise support I'll go with redhat or suse. CentOS doesnt give me the support.
Moreover I'd only use redhat because the commercial world depends on redhat's linux than any other distro. I can install oracle, websphere, domino etc with minimal pain on redhat. Now CentOS doesnt have the name, which these apps check for. That brings down redhat to the importance of other joe-shmoe distros. Lower even, since many things about knoppix, ubuntu, slackware are superior. CentOS doesnt have the majority of the reasons the majority of the people who choose redhat use to be used.
It just doesnt smack of a pyramid. They probably just tiled a hill or built many cobbled streets all over a hill. The Egypt pyramids sharply break the horizon, testament to the enormous amount of work required to move so much material there. If I were to build a pyramid in ancient Bosnia, I'd just tile a hill and present a huge bill to the king.
MSN simply isnt important enough. Firefox only lists the top few most important search sites (read: most sought). MSN gets large number of hits due to Microsoft's tricks and it being the default homepage on all windows. But its really quite a minor search engine site.
Oh certs do have a use. They are worth something, but not the ones you and I have.
I got the MCSE NT4 years ago and it was easy. I mean REAL easy. MCSE2003 is not and is in demand.
Ask any CCIE+CISSP the worth of certs, even better, ask them their income. Especially the highschool dropout ones.
Since its a small company, I assume you use a windows2000 or 2003 domain. Use an OpenBSD box that redirects PPTP connections to the windows server.
Sure there are superior systems but they dont necessarily 'fit' into the small business wintel setup. If youre running an all Linux network, you wouldnt be asking this question and you sure as hell wouldnt look around for commercial offerings.
If your users are OK with typing in an extra password, use OpenBSD's own SSH or ipsec based VPN, and L2TP on the client windows side.
Its the slashdot editor who put that article there whose on crack.
There are plenty of wild ideas out there, but Dvorak keeps getting quoted and paid attention to. We might as well become the press department of Darl McBride.
While I was thinking about the OP's half-assed Microsoft-plagiarized antispam idea, I realized a slightly modified idea might work. You see, most antispam systems that can see your mailbox will whilelist everyone in your address book, and everyone you send emails to. Now clients like Thunderbird could once a day send your address book, and whoever you sent emails to, to a central server which will just collect the addresses and mark them. Emails which have a high incidence of ending up in someones address book will be given higher points which means theyre less likely spam addresses. All thats needed here is the client developers' cooperation like Mozilla, outlook, lotus etc.
Of course theres the whole issue of people allowing their addresses and address books to be sent to some server outside. *shudder*
I wonder if his entertainment factor gives him any kind of advantage. Kerry was boring, but this guy cracks people up. Its one thing to elect big actors like Arnold and Raegan, another entirely to elect someone who is entertaining while in office.
Oh and the wars arent boring either for this cowboy country.
Must have been way upstate newyork.
Think of redundancy. What is it supposed to achieve? One goes down the other keeps going...
Now 3 servers would be a waste. Think about it. What are the chances a casing would FAIL?
So lets put 3 servers in one box. Data has to go onto each of the 3 disks. Instantly. Theres so much IO involved. Should each email coming in have to go through the tcpip stack, through the kernel API levels, through the HAL out the driver, out the network card, through the switch and all the way back down to the disk? Using too much makes things less stable.
So lets put the 3 disks together with one chip and lets call the chip servraid. Data is copied across the disks immediately by the chip in hardware, and the OS doesnt see it. Offloading work from the CPU and OS. You can do the same for the CPU and memory, and it will resemble the IBM xSeries 236, or countless others from Sun, HP, Dell etc. Medium level servers from these companies have redundant disks, power supplies, multiple redundant CPUs and NICs and even redundant memory slots. The only common part is the chipset and the motherboard, and of course the metal chassis. Both have extremely low instances of failure. About the same as the switch that connects the 3 servers, and the mechanism on the public side that is supposed to round-robin or otherwise load balance the servers.
Just get something like the x236 (or the equivalent Opteron system from Sun). Use qmail on FreeBSD and you will not lose email.
Everyones using USB disks for backups now rather than tapes. So many benefits there. Thats why Lacie and Maxtor are making a killing on selling drive + MCU + USB + casing packages. How many small and medium sized companies have total data exceeding 750GB?
Even more interesting is who will release the first terabyte drive and (this is what I'm interested in) who will be the first to put one terabyte on a single platter. A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later. Sure I understand Moores law and how 10MB was huge back then. But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it. Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there. Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that. Our humans senses will cease to notice any further difference. Games might require 2 blue-ray DVDs but will not require say 32 blue-ray DVDs in the next 10 years. What will you PUT on it?
Maybe this will mean I'll finally have as much space in hotmail as I have in gmail.
I've learned the same, only less dramatically. I've had trouble convincing everyone to start using Linux when I was personally responsible for the entire company's IT system and my job was on the line. The thing is, unix is just pleasurable. Its intuitive, clean and clear, even the commercial unix are. You know what each command does and you build scripts on top of them. And you can always switch to another terminal rather than stare at the frozen window, its simply a pleasure to work with.
Everything has its place. Sometimes that DOS app needs DOS. Sometimes some weird but critical app requires windows 9x to function and you cant go to windows 2003. OSS is not the solution to everything... yet.
I've had access to the source code for ... Internet Explorer, MDAC, MSXML, the .NET Frameworks and CLR, SQL Server, SQLXML, Virtual PC, Visual Studio ...
So where are the torrents?
I sure hope the current level of performance and reliability will be maintained. Youre scaring me there.
I may be wrong, but to me mysql is a different class of database than sql2000. They cannot be compared. Similarly certain queries from sqlite will be faster than from mysql. It doesnt necessarily mean sqlite is superior or dbase5 is superior. We've run ERP systems on oracle and sql2000, and I've played with the idea of trying to copy all the schemas to a mysql database and attempt to use mysql as the database (DB size 7GB, hundereds of tables and ~30 simultaneous connections). Not sure it will practically work at all since so many users updating will require quite a fine level of row locking and transaction control. Not to mention the depth of views, stored proc, triggers etc thats required... may not be usable on postgres either.
I think access will be closer in scale to mysql, although its a different beast entirely.
I have two TR switches on my desk now and piles of NICs. Theyre not being used and will end up on ebay soon. I dont expect to get much from selling them.
I've HEARD of banks using them, but all the banks I've visited use Dell or IBM PC workstations with AIX or AS/400 servers using 100mbit ethernet. TR died for the same reasons ATM died for smaller locations... its way to complex to make. An ethernet hub is $10 and a gigabit ethernet hub is under $50. Theyre also well standardized compared to TR and others... say your computer has a TR nic. What will you connect it to? Almost all new laptops have built-in ethernet nic. For a TR you have to buy the card and do the driver dance.
TR is great, ATM is great, FDDI is great, and once upon a time arcnet was useful (still have the passive hubs here). But if you dont want ANY headaches, just use ethernet.
Have you run a simple terminal services test between two machines?
Printing to a local printer is easy and reliable. Havent tried much else. I've never been compelled to use citrix for anything.
I'm interested. If Sentex really doesnt throttle ports and is UNLIMITED, I'm more than willing to give it a shot.
Are servers (25,80) allowed?
Look at all the replies. Notice the frustration?
Doesnt that give you a new business idea?
I wont pay 1000 but I can pay 100+ per month. I can also pay per GB if the rate is reasonable. However in no way I want to be 'limited' behind the scenes. The power companies never ask what you do with the power, they just sell it to you in full and take the money.
Thats not the issue. People are using higher ports everywhere with good results. The problem is with the ISP being the morality police, and limiting what was advertised to be unlimited (invisible caps). Theres always a way around their blockades, but we shouldnt have to.
Heres a great business idea with me as a potential customer:
Connection for geeks, no client-computer support at all. No ports throttled or blocked (assume customer does it themselves). Dont need http proxy, pop accounts, antispam etc, just a UUNET server will be useful. Allow servers and sell IP blocks. Allow full burstable bandwidth (max 8mbit allowable on ADSL), but offer various levels of minimum guaranteed bandwidths. I assume a guaranteed 8mbit (download) bandwidth with no caps will be expensive... I'm willing to pay $100+ for it with an SLA. My routers will do the QoS so I will not complain if my P2P traffic is slowing my VoIP even at full bandwidth. Also provide me with reverse DNS and let me own my own modem. You are responsible for line alone, you'll pay for bandwidth (and IP blocks) on your side, offer less tech support, and I'll pay you maybe $120 per month for the maximum guaranteed bandwidth.
You see, I've been paying for a dedicated server elsewhere, and I think I can run it at home with the much lower upload speeds if servers and the full theoretical (and practical) line bandwidth is guaranteed. We have 4+ desktops at home, a VoIP line, a VPN and P2P server and a potential medium-bandwidth http server. My pages are ~15kb in size so I can run it at home with good bandwidth. I know I'm not the only one here in Toronto with these requirements, but I dont know of one service (with good reviews) that offers what I'm looking for. Theres $$$ involved, I'm willing to pay (it becomes cheaper for me anyway), but I'm looking for no-frills full-bandwidth server-allowable and reliable line may it be ADSL or cable. Yes I know of (defunct) istop and techsavvy and others, but they have limits somewhere or where they believe is the maximum (reasonable) usage even though they advertise no caps. Their prices are low but the various limitations are unacceptable. All I want to buy is pure bandwidth no questions asked. No one is selling just that.