Well I wanted something at home to be honest and I am a poor college student.
I guess its back to tightVNC between my 2 computers over my wifi. But I do graphics programing and its quite sluggish sometimes and network intensive to do anything gui with VNC.
I agree with the data center but I was viewing it as somethign for someones desktop. When I was an intern lan admin most of us had 2 desktops. One dual booting into Netware/NT and the other as a regular corporate desktop. Some of us used Linux.
I figured KVM would be a good idea but not real cost effective if you add all the users up.
Using a terminal over a serial port makes sense and I wish x86 servers did this but since the majority of them run Windows, they do not include it.
I believe Dell was researching a blade desktop that could use 4-8 users but sharing keyboards and mice in the office. I wonder if this is still in development or if Dell pulled the plug.
I could see the office doing something like this to save on TCO by having just one pc shared among 4 cubicles.
WindowsXP-starter does have some serious limitions like only 3 apps can run and the resolution can not go beyond 800 x 600. MS used this marketing of having only 10 connections available in NT workstation to market NT server.
Quite effective.
I do not buy MS's argument that its because pentiumIII 350 systems have video cards too poor to display anything up to 1024 x 768. I ran that resolution on old pentiumI's.
It is crippled and poor quality at the same time. I only hope it encourages users to look at Linux after being fed up.
Still for someone dirt poor you could get more bang for the buck by pirating XP and you get a full version or you could run a FOSS os. I would avoid these systems alltogether. Hell I live in the US and still do this by building more own systems.
I know when I shop for computers I always look at price as well as quality and speed. If I can save $179 by not chosing an OS then I do so. $450 for a new system is several months salary for alot of people and nothing to sneeze at. The last thing they want is to pay any money at all for software.
But for the average user who wants to learn or run MS office they are going to pirate anyway. Like a poor russian who makes $200 a month is going to fork over $600 for MS-Office so he can read documents email from work. Come on.
The videos Timothy mentioned in this story are besides the point that no one wants to learn an OS, know what it is, or cares. They just want to plug there systems on and go and be able to read MS Office documents.
But still why not include Firefox and thunderbird as replacements to Mozilla's web browser and email and just keep it a suite?
Mozilla is heavily bloated compared to firefox. Firefox brought about real changes so it could be used on older systems that were too slow for Mozilla.
My wishlist would be integration with firefox and thunderbird and include some of the other mozilla programs.
Really only a simple task bar is needed to launch the other mozilla apps.
People who end up with WindowsXP starter edition do not buy it directly. The OEM does for them.
THis is why I could not stand the arguments like "Consumers chose MS with their wallets..." when the anti trust trial was going on.
Lusers do not know what Linux is or care. ALl they know is they bought a computer and want to plug it in and use it. Do they even know what an OS is?
I looked at the WindowsXP crippled errr starter edition in the link of the story. It is crippled regardless of what MS may tell you otherwise so they can get you to fork over $200 (alot of money in third world countries) if you want features like resolutions above 800 x 600. The users in these countries never owned a pc so they have no concept of features nor care.
My point is training video's will help users of course learn the os but they will only use what comes with their computer and nothing else. Installing software or requiring them to learn is too much of an effort. Many I bet wont even click the video's because that would be too much of an effort.
The exception would be a dos oriented computer which many OEM's like HP include in the countries that install the starter edition. Since dos requires the users to actually learn commands, most will find a friend to install WindowsXP for them so they can use a mouse with the nice pretty icons.
NDS is many leaps and bounds better than active directory.
I am still puzzled why America chose a bloated and buggy Microsoft implementation that if I recall created 20x as much data and caused synchronization nightmares without serious lan upgrades. Of course my knowledge is from 99/2000 in a novell shop so it may be outdated.
I do not like supporting Samba because it gives Microsoft the advantage.
Why do you think corporations love IE despite security concerns? Its because you can do things like integrate security settings with an NT domain controller for intranet sites.
If the Samba project instead focuses on Novel we would have alot less Windows based servers as a result. CIO's love integration and single platforms.
Have any idea how many older systems that run Windows3.1, SunOS, SCO/MS Xenix, or other obsolete platforms?
A decade ago my old man had a friend who still used a TRS-80 that I would make fun of. Why?
Because all his data on tapes could not be transferred to a modern system.
In the business world if its not broke why fix it?
Also the layoffs and understaffing due to the.com crash has many IT shops understaffed. They do not have the time or budget to upgrade such systems. Most CEO's and CFO's after the.com phase seriously wonder if there is any return at all with upgrading software? So it stays the way it is until it hurts the bottom line.
Actually SLI for the vodoos were quite usefull for cad cam and designing.
I use to work at liz claiborne and all the folks in the graphics department for retail design wanted them over the WildCat 1 cards.
So in essence they do have commercial use and appeal. Last I want to code again and coding opengl and directX apps are more fun to me.
Maybe its a guy thing? I dunno.
But writing a mariokart clone on my spare time sounds fun and I have a right to spend money on personal things to make me happy just like some people spend $700 for a skirt..... but admiting can not afford such a card right now. Oh well. Time to upgrade to a geforce4.
Why dont you read the section about special ventilation in the offices outside the loading dock?
People could sufficate and die otherwise if many tucks were loaded at once. I know the holland tunnel in New York has one of the most sophicasted ventilation systems in the world with many backups.
Most contracts for cheap servers will allow you to do that.
But my point was what if the raid card dies and all the data needs to be retrieved? What if the system dies and you no longer work for the company or on christmas vacation in another state?
Its not expensive and you are just as likely to get screwed than buying from toothless Harl's pc's n such.
IBM's servers for entry level businesses are dirt cheap.
But if downtime is not expensive then build your own. An old desktop is fine unless its a file server or database with important data or a server for a POS cash register/terminal that could shut down your business. Then $2500 for a server with a contract is not a bad bargin if you ask me. the probablity if it being more reliable is many many times higher (but not guaranteed). Just make sure you are not accountable if the system goes down.
Many slashdotters reading this at work could have their jobs on the line or could infect their pcs.
I think emailing cmdtaco and perhaps puting an update on this story saying the site will upload a virus to your system might not be a bad idea too. After all slashdot could be sued as a result.
Ther are at least 4 exploits that Mozilla is trying to fix as I type this. But its at least alot better.
There has to be a way to prevent things like buffer overflows and stack protection. Its the 21st century and things need to be done.
I fear drm might be the only way to prevent unauthorized executables and the software industry including MS would love it since it could be used to end piracy.
1.) buy from big corp since its a server and time is money.
2.) build your own. Its cheaper and the support contracts are a joke on commercial systems.
My 2 cents are this
Estimate how much a downtime will cost the business? I know it depends on what the server is doing and the kind of business.
If it will shut down the business and cost more than a new server, then spend more bucks on a unit from big corp. Your job will be on the line if you can not fix it or when the owner will wonder why you did not buy the thing from IBM or HP. Remember you built it so its your fault if it goes down.
Remember parts are a b*tch to deal with, and Especially proprietary raid controllers. If your obsolete raid controller dies ALL DATA IS LOST. Scary. Something you need to look into.
With a brand name system and a support contract they will stock old raid cards and send a tech as soon as possible to get your server back up. Parts are important.
Issues like this are important.
I think an entry level IBM server is only $2500-3000 with a %25 of the cost for a contract. Great deal! Its not that expensive and if it goes down you can point the finger at them.
If your employer can not even afford that then it sounds liek they are in serious trouble and probably wont make it that long.
I support 1.) buying from big corp. Its an investment will worth it. Try IBM if you do this since they have teh most bang for the buck with support and Linux and Windows support. Dell has mixed reliabilty and HP support sucks.
If its just an old box sitting somewhere routing phone calls then dont worry about it and buy a used pc as a backup in case the box goes down. A $300 machine will go nicely. But if its a file server or a machine hooked to a cash register than buy big blue.
Not to sound trollish but I used the gimp and then discovered the power of Photoshop warezed.
The Gimp is unusable for any real web site design work. Its missing many features and the same algorithms make poor photoquality compared to Adobe's or paintshoppro.
You lose freedom as well if FOSS does not have a good package thats as good as the alternative.
Show me in the princeton review where programing languages of choice are listed for each college?
Its not just a school but 80% of the colleges today are Microsoft certified academic centers. Basically the schools get massive discounts if they switch all their software to.net and leave only a few courses that are unix specific out.
MS has the power to do this because they can raise the cost of MS office and Windows on each desktop if the school refuses to go along with the program.
MS loves it because it adds to the argument about TCO of Linux. After all many cs students with master degrees today have never logged into a unix box. MS products are all they know and make for future customers.
Last, many deans realize the world runs on Microsoft and this is what they will be using anyway out of college.
ALso I may add many universities have continuing education programs which include the MCSE program and MS can make quite some sweet deals if they switch their crediting programs to MS specific platforms.
" hence the need for open file formats, when your college demands MS Word.doc files & etc... then your college is a salesman for M$FT..."
Hate to say it bust most institutions including MIT itself from what I heard are MS acedemic schools.
MS comes in and offers free.NET and MS Office software for next to nothing under the condition that its all they teach unless for some very specific courses like operating systems internals 101, etc.
Since uncle sam wants tax cuts and funding from both the local and national levels is so low many universities have no choice but to allow ms to do this to keep tuition costs low.
MS has one of the best sales teams in the world. Can't say anything else about them but they know how to sell their products.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I wanted something at home to be honest and I am a poor college student.
I guess its back to tightVNC between my 2 computers over my wifi. But I do graphics programing and its quite sluggish sometimes and network intensive to do anything gui with VNC.
I agree with the data center but I was viewing it as somethign for someones desktop. When I was an intern lan admin most of us had 2 desktops. One dual booting into Netware/NT and the other as a regular corporate desktop. Some of us used Linux.
I figured KVM would be a good idea but not real cost effective if you add all the users up.
Using a terminal over a serial port makes sense and I wish x86 servers did this but since the majority of them run Windows, they do not include it.
I believe Dell was researching a blade desktop that could use 4-8 users but sharing keyboards and mice in the office. I wonder if this is still in development or if Dell pulled the plug.
I could see the office doing something like this to save on TCO by having just one pc shared among 4 cubicles.
$900?
For that money you could buy a nice L-shaped desk to host both computers with a unique set of external devices.
Hell you might even have enough money saved for a third system.
Ha!
:-)~ .... and admitting teh games were not all there at the time besides Zaxxon. :-(
My father was a project manager and brought home a $5000 IBM 286 AT with full 16 color CGA monitor while the rest of you had monochrome.
So take that!
Not in this day and age.
My old Diamond stealth circa 1996 on an old pentium one had 1026 x 768.
Even the integrated graphics controllers today can support 1280 x 1024.
The main difference is 3d performance and some refresh rates at higher settings.
Yes
Not poor quality per say but crippled.
WindowsXP-starter does have some serious limitions like only 3 apps can run and the resolution can not go beyond 800 x 600. MS used this marketing of having only 10 connections available in NT workstation to market NT server.
Quite effective.
I do not buy MS's argument that its because pentiumIII 350 systems have video cards too poor to display anything up to 1024 x 768. I ran that resolution on old pentiumI's.
It is crippled and poor quality at the same time. I only hope it encourages users to look at Linux after being fed up.
More affordable with freedos or no os at all?
Still for someone dirt poor you could get more bang for the buck by pirating XP and you get a full version or you could run a FOSS os. I would avoid these systems alltogether. Hell I live in the US and still do this by building more own systems.
I know when I shop for computers I always look at price as well as quality and speed. If I can save $179 by not chosing an OS then I do so. $450 for a new system is several months salary for alot of people and nothing to sneeze at. The last thing they want is to pay any money at all for software.
But for the average user who wants to learn or run MS office they are going to pirate anyway. Like a poor russian who makes $200 a month is going to fork over $600 for MS-Office so he can read documents email from work. Come on.
The videos Timothy mentioned in this story are besides the point that no one wants to learn an OS, know what it is, or cares. They just want to plug there systems on and go and be able to read MS Office documents.
But still why not include Firefox and thunderbird as replacements to Mozilla's web browser and email and just keep it a suite?
Mozilla is heavily bloated compared to firefox. Firefox brought about real changes so it could be used on older systems that were too slow for Mozilla.
My wishlist would be integration with firefox and thunderbird and include some of the other mozilla programs.
Really only a simple task bar is needed to launch the other mozilla apps.
THis is why I could not stand the arguments like "Consumers chose MS with their wallets..." when the anti trust trial was going on.
Lusers do not know what Linux is or care. ALl they know is they bought a computer and want to plug it in and use it. Do they even know what an OS is?
I looked at the WindowsXP crippled errr starter edition in the link of the story. It is crippled regardless of what MS may tell you otherwise so they can get you to fork over $200 (alot of money in third world countries) if you want features like resolutions above 800 x 600. The users in these countries never owned a pc so they have no concept of features nor care.
My point is training video's will help users of course learn the os but they will only use what comes with their computer and nothing else. Installing software or requiring them to learn is too much of an effort. Many I bet wont even click the video's because that would be too much of an effort.
The exception would be a dos oriented computer which many OEM's like HP include in the countries that install the starter edition. Since dos requires the users to actually learn commands, most will find a friend to install WindowsXP for them so they can use a mouse with the nice pretty icons.
Let me get this straight?
You are waiting for Windows2k to be certified for security and reliablity but somehow NT fit the bill??
Its Windows. Why bother?
NDS is many leaps and bounds better than active directory.
I am still puzzled why America chose a bloated and buggy Microsoft implementation that if I recall created 20x as much data and caused synchronization nightmares without serious lan upgrades. Of course my knowledge is from 99/2000 in a novell shop so it may be outdated.
I do not like supporting Samba because it gives Microsoft the advantage.
Why do you think corporations love IE despite security concerns? Its because you can do things like integrate security settings with an NT domain controller for intranet sites.
If the Samba project instead focuses on Novel we would have alot less Windows based servers as a result. CIO's love integration and single platforms.
A decade ago my old man had a friend who still used a TRS-80 that I would make fun of. Why?
Because all his data on tapes could not be transferred to a modern system.
In the business world if its not broke why fix it?
Also the layoffs and understaffing due to the
Actually SLI for the vodoos were quite usefull for cad cam and designing.
.... but admiting can not afford such a card right now. Oh well. Time to upgrade to a geforce4.
I use to work at liz claiborne and all the folks in the graphics department for retail design wanted them over the WildCat 1 cards.
So in essence they do have commercial use and appeal. Last I want to code again and coding opengl and directX apps are more fun to me.
Maybe its a guy thing? I dunno.
But writing a mariokart clone on my spare time sounds fun and I have a right to spend money on personal things to make me happy just like some people spend $700 for a skirt.
From what I see at www.tomshardware.com, doom3 requires a 6800 just to run optimally at 1024x768.
Its insane and no graphics card is powerfull enough in my book.
I would agree witn 1600 x 1800 as excessive but ID software keeps rewriting the rules whenever a new game comes out.
Why dont you read the section about special ventilation in the offices outside the loading dock?
People could sufficate and die otherwise if many tucks were loaded at once. I know the holland tunnel in New York has one of the most sophicasted ventilation systems in the world with many backups.
The replys would be worth a great laugh since spamming was so abominable back then.
Also the first goatse.cx pic on slashdot and its replies for those who have never seen it might be hilarious as well.
Trolling is immature I know but I remember a few of the replies like "GOOOD SFDS*&^~!"
I think slashdot posted this article 2 years ago with other links like the first IBM pc and a new os called dos. Good stuff.
Then return the server.
This is a small business.
Most contracts for cheap servers will allow you to do that.
But my point was what if the raid card dies and all the data needs to be retrieved? What if the system dies and you no longer work for the company or on christmas vacation in another state?
Its not expensive and you are just as likely to get screwed than buying from toothless Harl's pc's n such.
IBM's servers for entry level businesses are dirt cheap.
But if downtime is not expensive then build your own. An old desktop is fine unless its a file server or database with important data or a server for a POS cash register/terminal that could shut down your business. Then $2500 for a server with a contract is not a bad bargin if you ask me. the probablity if it being more reliable is many many times higher (but not guaranteed). Just make sure you are not accountable if the system goes down.
That is what I was saying and my 2 cents.
There was another advisory about a month ago mentioned here on slashdot with hijacking someone visiting a site using activeX.
my guess is a cracker saw this story on slashdot and is hijacking the communication with the activeX controls with the virus.
This bug should have been fixed already.
Same here. Scary shit.
Many slashdotters reading this at work could have their jobs on the line or could infect their pcs.
I think emailing cmdtaco and perhaps puting an update on this story saying the site will upload a virus to your system might not be a bad idea too. After all slashdot could be sued as a result.
Nasty stuff.
Firefox is not perfect either.
Ther are at least 4 exploits that Mozilla is trying to fix as I type this. But its at least alot better.
There has to be a way to prevent things like buffer overflows and stack protection. Its the 21st century and things need to be done.
I fear drm might be the only way to prevent unauthorized executables and the software industry including MS would love it since it could be used to end piracy.
There are 2 arguments here.
1.) buy from big corp since its a server and time is money.
2.) build your own. Its cheaper and the support contracts are a joke on commercial systems.
My 2 cents are this
Estimate how much a downtime will cost the business? I know it depends on what the server is doing and the kind of business.
If it will shut down the business and cost more than a new server, then spend more bucks on a unit from big corp. Your job will be on the line if you can not fix it or when the owner will wonder why you did not buy the thing from IBM or HP. Remember you built it so its your fault if it goes down.
Remember parts are a b*tch to deal with, and Especially proprietary raid controllers. If your obsolete raid controller dies ALL DATA IS LOST. Scary. Something you need to look into.
With a brand name system and a support contract they will stock old raid cards and send a tech as soon as possible to get your server back up. Parts are important.
Issues like this are important.
I think an entry level IBM server is only $2500-3000 with a %25 of the cost for a contract. Great deal! Its not that expensive and if it goes down you can point the finger at them.
If your employer can not even afford that then it sounds liek they are in serious trouble and probably wont make it that long.
I support 1.) buying from big corp. Its an investment will worth it. Try IBM if you do this since they have teh most bang for the buck with support and Linux and Windows support. Dell has mixed reliabilty and HP support sucks.
If its just an old box sitting somewhere routing phone calls then dont worry about it and buy a used pc as a backup in case the box goes down. A $300 machine will go nicely. But if its a file server or a machine hooked to a cash register than buy big blue.
My 2 cents
Problem is with money.
You have to play their game. Gun owners did just this back in the 60's when the left was huge.
Today the NRA is one of the most powerfull lobbying groups in Washington.
This is how we fight until real finance reform becomes reality.
Not to sound trollish but I used the gimp and then discovered the power of Photoshop warezed.
The Gimp is unusable for any real web site design work. Its missing many features and the same algorithms make poor photoquality compared to Adobe's or paintshoppro.
You lose freedom as well if FOSS does not have a good package thats as good as the alternative.
Show me in the princeton review where programing languages of choice are listed for each college?
.net and leave only a few courses that are unix specific out.
Its not just a school but 80% of the colleges today are Microsoft certified academic centers. Basically the schools get massive discounts if they switch all their software to
MS has the power to do this because they can raise the cost of MS office and Windows on each desktop if the school refuses to go along with the program.
MS loves it because it adds to the argument about TCO of Linux. After all many cs students with master degrees today have never logged into a unix box. MS products are all they know and make for future customers.
Last, many deans realize the world runs on Microsoft and this is what they will be using anyway out of college.
ALso I may add many universities have continuing education programs which include the MCSE program and MS can make quite some sweet deals if they switch their crediting programs to MS specific platforms.
Hate to say it bust most institutions including MIT itself from what I heard are MS acedemic schools.
MS comes in and offers free
Since uncle sam wants tax cuts and funding from both the local and national levels is so low many universities have no choice but to allow ms to do this to keep tuition costs low.
MS has one of the best sales teams in the world. Can't say anything else about them but they know how to sell their products.