I've had fantastic luck with Windows Home Server since about October of last year. I've got 1.5TB in it (three 500GB Western Digital HDDs) and it serves files via CIFS/SMB over gigabit ethernet. My three Windows PCs, my Leopard iMac, and my Xbox360 can all watch movies, play music, and look at pictures hosted on the server (and access non-multimedia files as well, of course). Further, the client backup/restore offered by WHS is awesome (though Windows-only). Nightly backups of my three PCs, with data de-duplication, and it keeps a few months' worth of data. Backups can be accessed from any client through Windows Explorer or through the WHS console.
The crown jewel, though, is full PC restores. I swapped the hard drive out on one of my PCs for a bigger one, and instead of re-installing Windows onto the new drive and then laboriously copying my user files back, I just restored its image from WHS onto the new hard drive. The fact that the new drive was a different size didn't affect the restore at all--I popped in the restore CD, hit the "GO" button, and about an hour later my PC was exactly as it was before, but with a bigger hard drive.
I have no complaints about WHS. It handles as much hard drive space as you can throw on it, it will automatically duplicate shared data to multiple physical drives to mitigate the loss caused by drive failure, it functions as a web-facing RDC gateway for your clients if you'd like, and you can access your shares from the Internet if you'd like. It's great.
My wife, of all people, ended up getting this--she called me in yesterday and wanted to know "What the hell is wrong with [my] Gmail?" Among other things, it looks like they've further integrated the IM features (which we both hate) and made them far more difficult to disable. She's one of those computer users that gets absolutely terrified and unnerved if anything about her computing experience changes, so this is not at all a positive thing. Fortunately, there is an "Older version" link in the upper right corner that reverts back.
I just got off the phone with the AT&T National Business Ordering Center, and they confirmed that they *will* be selling the iPhone to individuals attached to business accounts (i.e., accounts with FANs) on 29 June. It's possible that the person to whom I spoke might have just been BS'ing, but I figure that person is at least as reliable as the anonymous sources in the article summary.
Spent several years using the Altiris Deployment Server product to install software packages in a ~4,000 user site. It worked quite well; you install the Altiris Client on each computer you want managed (there's an automated remote install, or it can be done manually, or via logon script, or whatever works for you), and then you can perform a ton of actions on the client computers from the Deployment Server console--installing packages, removing packages, power on (via Wake-on-LAN) and power off events, hardware & software inventory & reporting, all kinds of stuff. The packages you install will generally be MSIs, created yourself with something like Wise Package Studio or from regular off-the-shelf software with a transform of your own making applied post-install.
Microsoft's SMS is also a fine option and competes with Altiris; while Altiris comes with a lot more pre-configured features out of the box, SMS is just as extensible and has the same leg-up over Altiris that most MS products have over competitors--seamless integration into the host OS and domain.
When I can upgrade the BIOS and firmware on every device I have to support at work from inside of Windows, *then* I'll bid goodbye to the floppy. With the wild mix of hardware most IT shops have to deal with, I wouldn't count on it any time soon. In the PC world, we're shackled to the floppy disk because of the low level at which it's integrated into the system, and as crappy as it is, some tasks still require it.
Yes, you can do that with the nifty-keen gaming motherboard on your gaming computer, but my army of Dell Optiplex GX150s and 260s still need me to use floppies (USB sticks aren't allowed in the building for ludicrously retarded "security" reasons).
The most unpleasant surprise so far has been this snippet from NVidia's Forceware 100.54 driver release:
* DirectX 9 and OpenGL NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs and DirectX 10 NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 8800 GPUs will be available in a future driver
No SLI support at launch. I'm a little ticked that I've spent the last month settling in to using Vista at home (legally, via an MSDN subscription), and now that the operating system has launched, my second 7900GT will continue to be nothing more than a case-warmer, until some point in the unspecified "future". I could go back to XP, but it's a pain in the ass to reinstall everything and get re-settled again.
The datacenter at one of my employer's satellite sites has four CLARiiONs, at 2 racks each, a 5-bay DMX-3, and a 4-bay XP1024, for 380TB raw, in 3,200 sqft, along with thirty racks of servers, a P595 mainframe, and several multi-rack computing clusters. There's plenty of cooling and it's really not THAT crowded. Managing to pack 10-12 racks of storage into a 10,000 sqft data center is not anything noteworthy.
This article focuses only on console games, ignoring the similarly-large range of PC franchises torpedoed by bad decisions or greedy publishers.
Star Control III was nowhere the game its predecessors were. SC2 was possibly the best space exploration title ever released, better even than Starflight 1 & 2, whereas SC3 was a lame duck pseudo-RTS with a terrible plot and spaceships populated by talking puppets. Jesus wept.
Thief 3 was another PC title that fell far short of its predecessors, though a lot of the game's problems stemmed from compromises made in adapting the game for XBox, especially the division of levels into extremely small zones.
The thing to look it is how this might affect legitimate corporate versions of XP--and by that, I mean VLK versions actually being used in an enterprise setting.
The company for which I work has more than 100,000 copies of XP running in offices on six continents, participating in one of the largest Active Directory installations in the world. Every system's load is tightly controlled and managed, and I can tell you that there are no copies of WGA anywhere on any of those desktops (I've seen the SMS reports). Nor will there ever be.
People say to "vote with your dollars", but your dollars, and my dollars, don't matter. Large corporate dollars matter--like the kind of dollars that can outfit a company's world-wide IT needs. WGA has no place on a configuration-controlled and managed enterprise desktop, and MS would never risk upsetting their real customers--corporate Windows & Office sales--to emplace something like this.
As long as it's not multiplayer, I'll give it a look when it comes out. I've sunk ~60 hours into Oblivion over the past month or so, and the primary thing that keeps me coming back is that I feel like the focus of the story (which I am, because it's obviously a single-player game) instead of one more $CLASS, grinding out levels. Yeah, Oblivion has great graphics, ten billion sidequests, and a crazy-detailed gigantor world to play in, but the biggest plus is the fact that I don't have to share the game world with other people--no 1337-sp33k, no chat spamming, no people out of character, no griefing, and none of the other jackassery that plagues every MMORPG in the universe.
Use Microsoft's Sysprep tool to make your images hardware-agnostic. If you know all the disparate hardware in your environment, you can pre-cache the drivers on your image template computer, sysprep it, then shut it down and create your image with ghost/trueimage/altiris rdeploy/whatever you've got. You can then deploy the image to any computer.
That article seems particularly concerned with forsaking methane for hypergolic fuels in CEV. There's a very good reason to use hypergolic fuels in a space vehicle--simplicity. A hypergolic engine doesn't need an ignitor or any form of electrical power to start--all you have to do is open the valves, which can be done by hand, and the engine will light when the reactants meet in the combustion chamber.
If you have a damaged vehicle, the lack of a complex ignition system is another layer of redundancy to help get a potentially stranded crew back home.
Call me old-fashioned, but at least once every year or two I fire up Karl Buiter's Sentinel Worlds and play through it from beginning to end. I played it first in 1989 in glorious CGA, sharing the keyboard with my dad for hours every night. My life has shifted dramatically since then--family members have died, jobs and homes have come and gone, but when I sit down and start up that game and hear the PC-speaker music start up, it's like I'm eleven years old and I've come home.
(shrug) Houston's no different from any other massive city--the people you meet here are the same anonymously urban people you'd meet in NY, LA, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, or whatever other large metropolis tickles your fancy. Large population centers with pervasive telecommunications infrastructures homogenize their inhabitants.
I'm a junior-level system administrator in Houston, working for a branch of a large aerospace company involved with rockets and space stations and satellites and things.
Our piece of the pie is ~100 servers, ~4000 users (out of ~160,000 globally). I deal with SAN administration, Altiris CMS L1 administration, general W2k system administration (our worldwide multi-domain AD implementation is both awesome and terrifying), and documentation & config control because I'm both the youngest and newest guy in the dept.
I've a B.Sc. in Information Technology, no professional certs, three years industry experience, and my salary at this point is ~$52k/year + however much overtime I care to work
Another anecdote along those lines, related by Lt. Colonel William Burk Jr. in Ben Rich's memoirs: In the fall of '82, I flew from Mildenhall on a mission to Lebanon in response to the Marine barrack bombing. President Reagan ordered photo coverage of ill the terrorist bases in the region. The French refused to allow us to overfly, so our mission was to refuel off the south coast of England....
We completed our pass over Beirut and turned toward Malta, when I got a warning low-oil-pressure light on my right engine. Even though the engine was running fine I slowed down and lowered our altitude and made a direct line for England. We decided to cross France without clearance instead of going the roundabout way. We made it almost across, when I looked out the left window and saw a French Mirage III sitting ten feet off my left wing. He came up on our frequency and asked us for our Diplomatic Clearance Number. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I told him to stand by. I asked my backseater, who said, "Don't worry about it. I just gave it to him." What he had given him was "the bird' with his middle finger. I lit the afterbumers and left that Mirage standing still. Two minutes later, we were crossing the Channel.
I use Earthlink as my ISP, but the lines and equipment all come from Time Warner--even my bill is printed on Time Warner paper and I make my cheque out to "Time Warner". The only difference is that Earthlink's service costs $10 less per month.
Does this mean my option to use anyone but Time Warner as a cable ISP will vanish?
The street where, on 07 DEC 03, his HMMWV was hit by a radio-detonated IED and he was killed.
The hotel where the generals and commanders set up shop, and from behind which his body was airlifted to Kuwait.
What do I find in Iraq? I find that I wish I could have been there when my brother died to hold his hand. Insted, we spend as much time as we can with the members of his company, who WERE there with him. We talk to his captain, his LT, and his best friends--including the soldier who pulled my brother's body out of the HMMWV and covered him up, then stood over him with my brother's M240B and kept the attackers from taking his body until reinforcements arrived.
Take the functionality of Google Maps and make it into a local application, and that's what you get here. Instead of JAvascript-powered click-n-drag scrolling, it's OpenGL or Direct3D buttery-smooth, with texture filtering to ease some of the pixelation on the imagery.
The most amazing part is the driving directions--they're plotted out in front of you on the zoomable and scrollable earth, like Streets and Trips on steroids.
The ability to measure arbitrary lines and paths, carried over from the previous version of Keyhole, adds a nifty dimension. Instead of staring at a feature in the satellite imagery and wondering, "How big is that, anyway?", you can measure it and find out. I used it to definitively settle which of the two routes I can take home from work is shorter.
For $29, this app delivers, per dollar, more fun and utility combined than anything else I've ever purchased. You can use the layering features to do extremely useful stuff, like highlight the locations of ATMs, school district boundaries, golf courses, parks, show crime statistics, and even show placemarks set by people on the Keyhole web forum ("Look! I found a cool thing here!").
Sounds a bit like I'm babbling, but this thing is seriously hella-cool.
This site has been around for a while; written by a PhD student with too much time on his hands, it contains painstakingly detailed scientific analysis of all things Star Wars.
They are convinced the ratings dropped due to the show competing against other Trek re-runs.
voice type="Haley Joel Osment"
I see dumb people. And the worst part is, they don't even know that they're dumb. They don't see each other. They just believe what they want to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had fantastic luck with Windows Home Server since about October of last year. I've got 1.5TB in it (three 500GB Western Digital HDDs) and it serves files via CIFS/SMB over gigabit ethernet. My three Windows PCs, my Leopard iMac, and my Xbox360 can all watch movies, play music, and look at pictures hosted on the server (and access non-multimedia files as well, of course). Further, the client backup/restore offered by WHS is awesome (though Windows-only). Nightly backups of my three PCs, with data de-duplication, and it keeps a few months' worth of data. Backups can be accessed from any client through Windows Explorer or through the WHS console.
The crown jewel, though, is full PC restores. I swapped the hard drive out on one of my PCs for a bigger one, and instead of re-installing Windows onto the new drive and then laboriously copying my user files back, I just restored its image from WHS onto the new hard drive. The fact that the new drive was a different size didn't affect the restore at all--I popped in the restore CD, hit the "GO" button, and about an hour later my PC was exactly as it was before, but with a bigger hard drive.
I have no complaints about WHS. It handles as much hard drive space as you can throw on it, it will automatically duplicate shared data to multiple physical drives to mitigate the loss caused by drive failure, it functions as a web-facing RDC gateway for your clients if you'd like, and you can access your shares from the Internet if you'd like. It's great.
My wife, of all people, ended up getting this--she called me in yesterday and wanted to know "What the hell is wrong with [my] Gmail?" Among other things, it looks like they've further integrated the IM features (which we both hate) and made them far more difficult to disable. She's one of those computer users that gets absolutely terrified and unnerved if anything about her computing experience changes, so this is not at all a positive thing. Fortunately, there is an "Older version" link in the upper right corner that reverts back.
I just got off the phone with the AT&T National Business Ordering Center, and they confirmed that they *will* be selling the iPhone to individuals attached to business accounts (i.e., accounts with FANs) on 29 June. It's possible that the person to whom I spoke might have just been BS'ing, but I figure that person is at least as reliable as the anonymous sources in the article summary.
Hey, I think I got some prior art for ya...
...SAY HELLO TO MY LEETLE FRIEND!!
Spent several years using the Altiris Deployment Server product to install software packages in a ~4,000 user site. It worked quite well; you install the Altiris Client on each computer you want managed (there's an automated remote install, or it can be done manually, or via logon script, or whatever works for you), and then you can perform a ton of actions on the client computers from the Deployment Server console--installing packages, removing packages, power on (via Wake-on-LAN) and power off events, hardware & software inventory & reporting, all kinds of stuff. The packages you install will generally be MSIs, created yourself with something like Wise Package Studio or from regular off-the-shelf software with a transform of your own making applied post-install.
Microsoft's SMS is also a fine option and competes with Altiris; while Altiris comes with a lot more pre-configured features out of the box, SMS is just as extensible and has the same leg-up over Altiris that most MS products have over competitors--seamless integration into the host OS and domain.
When I can upgrade the BIOS and firmware on every device I have to support at work from inside of Windows, *then* I'll bid goodbye to the floppy. With the wild mix of hardware most IT shops have to deal with, I wouldn't count on it any time soon. In the PC world, we're shackled to the floppy disk because of the low level at which it's integrated into the system, and as crappy as it is, some tasks still require it.
Yes, you can do that with the nifty-keen gaming motherboard on your gaming computer, but my army of Dell Optiplex GX150s and 260s still need me to use floppies (USB sticks aren't allowed in the building for ludicrously retarded "security" reasons).
The most unpleasant surprise so far has been this snippet from NVidia's Forceware 100.54 driver release:
* DirectX 9 and OpenGL NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs and DirectX 10 NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 8800 GPUs will be available in a future driver
No SLI support at launch. I'm a little ticked that I've spent the last month settling in to using Vista at home (legally, via an MSDN subscription), and now that the operating system has launched, my second 7900GT will continue to be nothing more than a case-warmer, until some point in the unspecified "future". I could go back to XP, but it's a pain in the ass to reinstall everything and get re-settled again.
The datacenter at one of my employer's satellite sites has four CLARiiONs, at 2 racks each, a 5-bay DMX-3, and a 4-bay XP1024, for 380TB raw, in 3,200 sqft, along with thirty racks of servers, a P595 mainframe, and several multi-rack computing clusters. There's plenty of cooling and it's really not THAT crowded. Managing to pack 10-12 racks of storage into a 10,000 sqft data center is not anything noteworthy.
This article focuses only on console games, ignoring the similarly-large range of PC franchises torpedoed by bad decisions or greedy publishers.
Star Control III was nowhere the game its predecessors were. SC2 was possibly the best space exploration title ever released, better even than Starflight 1 & 2, whereas SC3 was a lame duck pseudo-RTS with a terrible plot and spaceships populated by talking puppets. Jesus wept.
Thief 3 was another PC title that fell far short of its predecessors, though a lot of the game's problems stemmed from compromises made in adapting the game for XBox, especially the division of levels into extremely small zones.
If this is all true, I'll eat my hat.
The thing to look it is how this might affect legitimate corporate versions of XP--and by that, I mean VLK versions actually being used in an enterprise setting.
The company for which I work has more than 100,000 copies of XP running in offices on six continents, participating in one of the largest Active Directory installations in the world. Every system's load is tightly controlled and managed, and I can tell you that there are no copies of WGA anywhere on any of those desktops (I've seen the SMS reports). Nor will there ever be.
People say to "vote with your dollars", but your dollars, and my dollars, don't matter. Large corporate dollars matter--like the kind of dollars that can outfit a company's world-wide IT needs. WGA has no place on a configuration-controlled and managed enterprise desktop, and MS would never risk upsetting their real customers--corporate Windows & Office sales--to emplace something like this.
As long as it's not multiplayer, I'll give it a look when it comes out. I've sunk ~60 hours into Oblivion over the past month or so, and the primary thing that keeps me coming back is that I feel like the focus of the story (which I am, because it's obviously a single-player game) instead of one more $CLASS, grinding out levels. Yeah, Oblivion has great graphics, ten billion sidequests, and a crazy-detailed gigantor world to play in, but the biggest plus is the fact that I don't have to share the game world with other people--no 1337-sp33k, no chat spamming, no people out of character, no griefing, and none of the other jackassery that plagues every MMORPG in the universe.
Use Microsoft's Sysprep tool to make your images hardware-agnostic. If you know all the disparate hardware in your environment, you can pre-cache the drivers on your image template computer, sysprep it, then shut it down and create your image with ghost/trueimage/altiris rdeploy/whatever you've got. You can then deploy the image to any computer.
Do we get two front page articles because the Core Duo has two cores? Goodie!!
Perhaps while Dell is at it, they can acquire a colon?
That article seems particularly concerned with forsaking methane for hypergolic fuels in CEV. There's a very good reason to use hypergolic fuels in a space vehicle--simplicity. A hypergolic engine doesn't need an ignitor or any form of electrical power to start--all you have to do is open the valves, which can be done by hand, and the engine will light when the reactants meet in the combustion chamber.
If you have a damaged vehicle, the lack of a complex ignition system is another layer of redundancy to help get a potentially stranded crew back home.
Call me old-fashioned, but at least once every year or two I fire up Karl Buiter's Sentinel Worlds and play through it from beginning to end. I played it first in 1989 in glorious CGA, sharing the keyboard with my dad for hours every night. My life has shifted dramatically since then--family members have died, jobs and homes have come and gone, but when I sit down and start up that game and hear the PC-speaker music start up, it's like I'm eleven years old and I've come home.
(shrug) Houston's no different from any other massive city--the people you meet here are the same anonymously urban people you'd meet in NY, LA, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, or whatever other large metropolis tickles your fancy. Large population centers with pervasive telecommunications infrastructures homogenize their inhabitants.
I'm a junior-level system administrator in Houston, working for a branch of a large aerospace company involved with rockets and space stations and satellites and things.
:)
Our piece of the pie is ~100 servers, ~4000 users (out of ~160,000 globally). I deal with SAN administration, Altiris CMS L1 administration, general W2k system administration (our worldwide multi-domain AD implementation is both awesome and terrifying), and documentation & config control because I'm both the youngest and newest guy in the dept.
I've a B.Sc. in Information Technology, no professional certs, three years industry experience, and my salary at this point is ~$52k/year + however much overtime I care to work
Plus, I get to meet and talk to astronauts
Another anecdote along those lines, related by Lt. Colonel William Burk Jr. in Ben Rich's memoirs:
In the fall of '82, I flew from Mildenhall on a mission to Lebanon in response to the Marine barrack bombing. President Reagan ordered photo coverage of ill the terrorist bases in the region. The French refused to allow us to overfly, so our mission was to refuel off the south coast of England....
We completed our pass over Beirut and turned toward Malta, when I got a warning low-oil-pressure light on my right engine. Even though the engine was running fine I slowed down and lowered our altitude and made a direct line for England. We decided to cross France without clearance instead of going the roundabout way. We made it almost across, when I looked out the left window and saw a French Mirage III sitting ten feet off my left wing. He came up on our frequency and asked us for our Diplomatic Clearance Number. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I told him to stand by. I asked my backseater, who said, "Don't worry about it. I just gave it to him." What he had given him was "the bird' with his middle finger. I lit the afterbumers and left that Mirage standing still. Two minutes later, we were crossing the Channel.
Repost from November 04. Not bad, considering!
I use Earthlink as my ISP, but the lines and equipment all come from Time Warner--even my bill is printed on Time Warner paper and I make my cheque out to "Time Warner". The only difference is that Earthlink's service costs $10 less per month.
Does this mean my option to use anyone but Time Warner as a cable ISP will vanish?
The power station where 2/502 INF (101st Airborne) set up camp, and where this picture was taken.
This picture was taken looking east from this point.
The street where, on 07 DEC 03, his HMMWV was hit by a radio-detonated IED and he was killed.
The hotel where the generals and commanders set up shop, and from behind which his body was airlifted to Kuwait.
What do I find in Iraq? I find that I wish I could have been there when my brother died to hold his hand. Insted, we spend as much time as we can with the members of his company, who WERE there with him. We talk to his captain, his LT, and his best friends--including the soldier who pulled my brother's body out of the HMMWV and covered him up, then stood over him with my brother's M240B and kept the attackers from taking his body until reinforcements arrived.
Take the functionality of Google Maps and make it into a local application, and that's what you get here. Instead of JAvascript-powered click-n-drag scrolling, it's OpenGL or Direct3D buttery-smooth, with texture filtering to ease some of the pixelation on the imagery.
The most amazing part is the driving directions--they're plotted out in front of you on the zoomable and scrollable earth, like Streets and Trips on steroids.
The ability to measure arbitrary lines and paths, carried over from the previous version of Keyhole, adds a nifty dimension. Instead of staring at a feature in the satellite imagery and wondering, "How big is that, anyway?", you can measure it and find out. I used it to definitively settle which of the two routes I can take home from work is shorter.
For $29, this app delivers, per dollar, more fun and utility combined than anything else I've ever purchased. You can use the layering features to do extremely useful stuff, like highlight the locations of ATMs, school district boundaries, golf courses, parks, show crime statistics, and even show placemarks set by people on the Keyhole web forum ("Look! I found a cool thing here!").
Sounds a bit like I'm babbling, but this thing is seriously hella-cool.
The Star Wars Technical Commentaries
This site has been around for a while; written by a PhD student with too much time on his hands, it contains painstakingly detailed scientific analysis of all things Star Wars.
WAnt to know about the Endor Holocaust? Curious about the exact size of the two Death Stars? Or perhaps you'd like to read about hyperspace ("Phenomenological study and physical rationalisation of superluminal travel"), or the injuries of Darth Vader, or (my favorite) military walkers of the Empire.
There's months of engrossing reading there. A fascinating site.
voice type="Haley Joel Osment"
I see dumb people. And the worst part is, they don't even know that they're dumb. They don't see each other. They just believe what they want to believe.