I've never managed a linux desktop rollout so I don't know how hard it would be to manage host OS deployments (i.e. is the Windows XP HAL more or less resistant to hardware changes than your average distro?)
I'm not completely sure that I buy the argument of distributing the images across multiple servers solving the "image distribution" problem (i.e. 20+ people simultaneously pulling down 4GB images seems like a lot of network traffic), but I suppose that is just a matter of math + how much bandwidth your serves and the backplane of your switch can put out.
I'm a vmware/virtualization fan, but I don't think this is the best application. It seems to me that it would be smarter to use terminal services / citrix / a thin client approach
If you were going to use vmware, make a standard image and push it out to the local hard drives. don't update that image unless it is time to push out a new set of windows udpates/etc. if you need to update the image though, that is going to be *hell* on your network/file servers.
I think it makes more sense to run a virtualized server than a desktop.
Also, you might end up paying for 2x the XP licenses since you'd have to pay for the host + guest operating systems.
Plenty of languages can use Excel to manipulate spreadsheets (i.e. PERL, VB,.NET, etc). This is okay for an application that runs off the user's computer.
You can also use Excel as a data source using the Jet OLEDB driver. I've had some problems w/ it (i.e. if you have a columns that contains entries like "bob", "jane", and "23" -- it will choke on the 23 because it is expecting text isntead of a number -- perhaps there is a workaround for that.
I've done web analytics implementations for smaller (i.e. $10M e-commerce sites) and larger (i.e. hundreds of millions PV/month) companies.
I'm not much of a fun of log file based analytics systems. They are simply too much work to maintain from an infrastructure POV and caching wreaks havoc with the accuracy of the stats. I therefore recommend 1x1 transparent pixel based systems. If you insist on log file based systems, NetTracker and WebTrends make some decent products.
Google analytics is a great package for smaller companies. It is free and offers a nice chunk of functionality. Caveat emptor -- you get what you pay for. When I audited my last employers GA e-commerce metrics against actual online sales, there was a substantial (I think ~10% error)! However it is still a good tool for understanding trends and issues w/ your analytics.
Webside Story (HBX) and Omniture rule the high end market. It has been a while since I checked pricing, but I think you can expect to start out at the ~$10-$20K/yr range. Both of these products are excellent.
Webside Story sells a lower end package (Hitbox Professional) that has limited commerce metrics but is also pretty decent and afforable. They have an enterprise system: HBX that is excellent.
Omniture also has am impressive system. I don't think they have much in terms of entry level offerings.
Web trends has a product Web Trends live that is about 1/2 the price of the enterprise products from Webside Story and Omniture. It has been a good 5 years since I've their product, but I wasn't especially impressed with it at the time.
Umm. Look further down that article and you can see a pic of the laptop w/ the drive opened and sure enough -- there is the DVD+R media that the slashdot article referred to!
By interspersing the other articles randomly through the content it creates the feel that there is a relationship between them (i.e. if you thought this article was interesting, look at these... or read these other articles in the same section).
They should either all be in their own section or you should come up with a way to make a relationship between the article and the suggestions. Right now its just an eye sore / confusing...
You should still build for 800x600 because ~20% of people still have 800x600 screens and that is (in my opinion) a sizeable enough percentage that you can't ignore it.
I think that 1024x768 has about ~55% and 1280x1024 about ~10%. Unfortunately, these metrics come from querying the browser DOM and most of the analytic vendors report screen resolution instead of browser window size.
As for the people who say you should build their stuff width indepdent, I seriously wonder how much experience you have with corporate web development. It is simply not possible to make an aesthetically pleasing design scale to arbitrary screen sizes more often than not.
Does anyone else find this hypocritical??
on
Hooked On The Web
·
· Score: 1
Watching x hours of passively watching television while your brain slowly rots = "okay"
I was hosting some "consumer advocacy" content that earned the animosity of some of the companies that were on my "hall of shame".
I had a lot of problems hosting my content. The lawyers from the companies sent threatening letters to the ISPs and they would drop my site. It didn't matter that the CDA held them non liable, etc -- they just didn't want to deal with anything have to do with lawyers.
Eventually I found Brand X Internet. They were recently in the news on Slashdot (they were the small ISP that took up the cause of smaller DSL providers to the supreme court and lost). Working with Brand X was a breath of fresh air!
This is a *terrible* thing for consumers. I'm a customer of a smaller ISP (I actually used to be a customer of BrandX -- the company referred to in the artcile) and have found their prices and service offerings *FAR* superior to the bells.
At my last company, our "bell" DSL line was extremely unreliable compared to the "local ISP" line we installed.
The bells are using lines financed by our tax dollars. They have a monopoly on the lines because of this. They shouldn't have a monopoly on Internet service over DSL lines as well!
Are there any organized letter writing campaigns going on???
That's actually when I do. I'm running my own version of Smack which was a modified version of Guardian. It basically follows Snort's/var/log/alert and then fires off IPtables deny rules when it finds something interesting.
The biggest problem that I had with the system was that there was a number of more "informative" snort messages that don't represent actual intrusions. I probably should have just built something that "whitelists" certain snort rules. Instead, I'd just go through and comment out the snort rules I didn't want logged which made updates a bitch.
I implemented something like this at my home network, but its a dangerous approach to use professionally unless you are sure that it couldn't be used to create a DOS attack. For example, if I spoofed traffic from a bunch of IPs, the system might start denying the spoofed IPs access...
"If they own the computers, are running the network themselves, and are not violating any agreement with their employer, then finding/squashing the networks is really none of your business."
I disagreed. Adding your own wireless network that is connected to the corporate network is a security risk.
A company has legitimate reasons from wanting to stop you from setting up wireless networks at the office.
Say you want to use your corporate laptop in a conference room without a network conneciton and you don't have 802.11. You circumvent IT and set up your own and plug it into the network. Congrats! You could easily have just opened up the network to neighboring companies, wardrivers, etc. "oops!"
As to the presumption that its fine to bring equipment in to the office. Say you want to bring in a personal laptop or computer into the office and connect it to the corporate network. You are now potentially a source for virus/worm infection (unless you happen to be better at keeping patches applied, ports locked down, and anti-virus definitions up to date than corporate IT)
It's relatively uncommon for employees to bring in their own equipment and set up private wireless gaming networks while at the office. But I'd agree in that this late night gaming scenario that it would be stupid of company IT to care. Of course, the rogue wireless networks presumably wouldn't be running while IT management was making its scans.
I don't have a balcony on my apartment and can not mount a dish on the roof or bolt it to the external wall.
I do have casement windows.
Solution:
One of my casement windows in my bedroom is always open. In its place is a plexiglass sheet that I purchased at home depot. I always keep the blinds closed in the bedroom anyways (sunlight! ick!) so this isn't an eye sore.
The DirecTV signal will go through plexiglass with barely any signal degradation. Apparently plexiglass has a different dielctric (sp?) constant than glass (which absolutely destroys the signal).
I get excellent reception. The only thing that stinks is the "once or twice a year" event where someone bumps the satellite dish. However, since I marked on the dresser the orientation marks, it usually only takes me a few minutes to get it recalibrated.
I never understood why people actually want pagers, blackberries, etc.
When I contracted at Warner Music Group, I avoided getting issued a two way pager as long as possible. Eventually when I was added to the "on call" rotation, I made the argument that I was saving the company money by not requiring my own pager and worked it out so that I shared the two way pager of one of the other admins. Whomever was on call would have to drag the damn thing around and get/deal with the messages.
I gave my cell phone number to my boss and a few coworkers but made sure that it wasn't published on any other lists. The company wasn't paying for my cell phone bill so as far as I was concerned, it wasn't up for their usage.
I read this site yesterday after seeing a link in the Slickdeals discussion forums.
It sounds like extracting the 4GB CF isn't much of a problem.
People have been able to put it in a CF reader and get it working fine on their computers.
A number of people have reported problems getting the CF to work with their cameras or other CF devices working in the iPod. I suspect that this has something to do with how apple formatted the disk and will eventually be solved.
For those of you laughing at iPod mini buyers -- they could probably sell the 4GB CF cards for a profit.
Thanks for the information. I haven't heard of this project. According to the performance stats at their site, it certainly sounds like iptablse would be eaten alive.
I use iptables for NAT, but it is intriguing that you could used NF-HIPAC to handle the filtering.
It may subject me to potential DOS attacks, but I have snort-detected intrusions feed a PERL script that I've worked on that in turn fires off iptables deny rules. HIPAC sounds like a better solution to this -- although I really like being lazy and just downloading auto kernel updates...:p
Slashdot Mirror
Good points all around. :)
I've never managed a linux desktop rollout so I don't know how hard it would be to manage host OS deployments (i.e. is the Windows XP HAL more or less resistant to hardware changes than your average distro?)
I'm not completely sure that I buy the argument of distributing the images across multiple servers solving the "image distribution" problem (i.e. 20+ people simultaneously pulling down 4GB images seems like a lot of network traffic), but I suppose that is just a matter of math + how much bandwidth your serves and the backplane of your switch can put out.
I'm a vmware/virtualization fan, but I don't think this is the best application. It seems to me that it would be smarter to use terminal services / citrix / a thin client approach
If you were going to use vmware, make a standard image and push it out to the local hard drives. don't update that image unless it is time to push out a new set of windows udpates/etc. if you need to update the image though, that is going to be *hell* on your network/file servers.
I think it makes more sense to run a virtualized server than a desktop.
Also, you might end up paying for 2x the XP licenses since you'd have to pay for the host + guest operating systems.
Plenty of languages can use Excel to manipulate spreadsheets (i.e. PERL, VB, .NET, etc). This is okay for an application that runs off the user's computer.
You can also use Excel as a data source using the Jet OLEDB driver. I've had some problems w/ it (i.e. if you have a columns that contains entries like "bob", "jane", and "23" -- it will choke on the 23 because it is expecting text isntead of a number -- perhaps there is a workaround for that.
Access is easy to work with as a data source....
That only works for exposing secure content to a small/controlled client base. Implementing your advice on a B2C site would be idiocy.
FYI, IE7 makes visiting a site w/ a non-trusted cert even less palatable.
I've done web analytics implementations for smaller (i.e. $10M e-commerce sites) and larger (i.e. hundreds of millions PV/month) companies.
I'm not much of a fun of log file based analytics systems. They are simply too much work to maintain from an infrastructure POV and caching wreaks havoc with the accuracy of the stats. I therefore recommend 1x1 transparent pixel based systems. If you insist on log file based systems, NetTracker and WebTrends make some decent products.
Google analytics is a great package for smaller companies. It is free and offers a nice chunk of functionality. Caveat emptor -- you get what you pay for. When I audited my last employers GA e-commerce metrics against actual online sales, there was a substantial (I think ~10% error)! However it is still a good tool for understanding trends and issues w/ your analytics.
Webside Story (HBX) and Omniture rule the high end market. It has been a while since I checked pricing, but I think you can expect to start out at the ~$10-$20K/yr range. Both of these products are excellent.
Webside Story sells a lower end package (Hitbox Professional) that has limited commerce metrics but is also pretty decent and afforable. They have an enterprise system: HBX that is excellent.
Omniture also has am impressive system. I don't think they have much in terms of entry level offerings.
Web trends has a product Web Trends live that is about 1/2 the price of the enterprise products from Webside Story and Omniture. It has been a good 5 years since I've their product, but I wasn't especially impressed with it at the time.
Umm. Look further down that article and you can see a pic of the laptop w/ the drive opened and sure enough -- there is the DVD+R media that the slashdot article referred to!
I use google thoughtout the day every day for my job. Then again, I'm doing web development for a living...
By interspersing the other articles randomly through the content it creates the feel that there is a relationship between them (i.e. if you thought this article was interesting, look at these ... or read these other articles in the same section).
They should either all be in their own section or you should come up with a way to make a relationship between the article and the suggestions. Right now its just an eye sore / confusing...
You should still build for 800x600 because ~20% of people still have 800x600 screens and that is (in my opinion) a sizeable enough percentage that you can't ignore it.
I think that 1024x768 has about ~55% and 1280x1024 about ~10%. Unfortunately, these metrics come from querying the browser DOM and most of the analytic vendors report screen resolution instead of browser window size.
As for the people who say you should build their stuff width indepdent, I seriously wonder how much experience you have with corporate web development. It is simply not possible to make an aesthetically pleasing design scale to arbitrary screen sizes more often than not.
Watching x hours of passively watching television while your brain slowly rots = "okay"
Interactively using the Internet = "addiction"
?
Am I the only one who thinks that this isn't Slashdot worthy "news"?
I'm sure it must have been very technically challenging to manage to connect 6 DVD players to 6 televisions at the same time and play them.
Wow.
You can state something is your opnion until your blue in the face, but it doesn't stop someone from filing an expensive libel lawsuit against you.
I just installed foxie and I don't have iun6002 (or any spyware) on my machine according to the latest AdAware SE...
I had a lot of problems hosting my content. The lawyers from the companies sent threatening letters to the ISPs and they would drop my site. It didn't matter that the CDA held them non liable, etc -- they just didn't want to deal with anything have to do with lawyers.
Eventually I found Brand X Internet. They were recently in the news on Slashdot (they were the small ISP that took up the cause of smaller DSL providers to the supreme court and lost). Working with Brand X was a breath of fresh air!
Tell the FCC commissioners what you think:
. Copps@fcc.gov;Jonathan.Adelstein@fcc.gov
KJMWEB@fcc.gov;Kathleen.Abernathy@fcc.gov;Michael
http://www.fcc.gov/contacts.html
This is a *terrible* thing for consumers. I'm a customer of a smaller ISP (I actually used to be a customer of BrandX -- the company referred to in the artcile) and have found their prices and service offerings *FAR* superior to the bells.
At my last company, our "bell" DSL line was extremely unreliable compared to the "local ISP" line we installed.
The bells are using lines financed by our tax dollars. They have a monopoly on the lines because of this. They shouldn't have a monopoly on Internet service over DSL lines as well!
Are there any organized letter writing campaigns going on???
That's actually when I do. I'm running my own version of Smack which was a modified version of Guardian. It basically follows Snort's /var/log/alert and then fires off IPtables deny rules when it finds something interesting.
The biggest problem that I had with the system was that there was a number of more "informative" snort messages that don't represent actual intrusions. I probably should have just built something that "whitelists" certain snort rules. Instead, I'd just go through and comment out the snort rules I didn't want logged which made updates a bitch.
I implemented something like this at my home network, but its a dangerous approach to use professionally unless you are sure that it couldn't be used to create a DOS attack. For example, if I spoofed traffic from a bunch of IPs, the system might start denying the spoofed IPs access...
You wrote:
"If they own the computers, are running the network themselves, and are not violating any agreement with their employer, then finding/squashing the networks is really none of your business."
I disagreed. Adding your own wireless network that is connected to the corporate network is a security risk.
A company has legitimate reasons from wanting to stop you from setting up wireless networks at the office.
Say you want to use your corporate laptop in a conference room without a network conneciton and you don't have 802.11. You circumvent IT and set up your own and plug it into the network. Congrats! You could easily have just opened up the network to neighboring companies, wardrivers, etc. "oops!"
As to the presumption that its fine to bring equipment in to the office. Say you want to bring in a personal laptop or computer into the office and connect it to the corporate network. You are now potentially a source for virus/worm infection (unless you happen to be better at keeping patches applied, ports locked down, and anti-virus definitions up to date than corporate IT)
It's relatively uncommon for employees to bring in their own equipment and set up private wireless gaming networks while at the office. But I'd agree in that this late night gaming scenario that it would be stupid of company IT to care. Of course, the rogue wireless networks presumably wouldn't be running while IT management was making its scans.
I don't have a balcony on my apartment and can not mount a dish on the roof or bolt it to the external wall.
I do have casement windows.
Solution:
One of my casement windows in my bedroom is always open. In its place is a plexiglass sheet that I purchased at home depot. I always keep the blinds closed in the bedroom anyways (sunlight! ick!) so this isn't an eye sore.
The DirecTV signal will go through plexiglass with barely any signal degradation. Apparently plexiglass has a different dielctric (sp?) constant than glass (which absolutely destroys the signal).
I get excellent reception. The only thing that stinks is the "once or twice a year" event where someone bumps the satellite dish. However, since I marked on the dresser the orientation marks, it usually only takes me a few minutes to get it recalibrated.
Ghetto geek yes, but it sure beats AT&T cable!
I never understood why people actually want pagers, blackberries, etc.
When I contracted at Warner Music Group, I avoided getting issued a two way pager as long as possible. Eventually when I was added to the "on call" rotation, I made the argument that I was saving the company money by not requiring my own pager and worked it out so that I shared the two way pager of one of the other admins. Whomever was on call would have to drag the damn thing around and get/deal with the messages.
I gave my cell phone number to my boss and a few coworkers but made sure that it wasn't published on any other lists. The company wasn't paying for my cell phone bill so as far as I was concerned, it wasn't up for their usage.
I read this site yesterday after seeing a link in the Slickdeals discussion forums.
It sounds like extracting the 4GB CF isn't much of a problem.
People have been able to put it in a CF reader and get it working fine on their computers.
A number of people have reported problems getting the CF to work with their cameras or other CF devices working in the iPod. I suspect that this has something to do with how apple formatted the disk and will eventually be solved.
For those of you laughing at iPod mini buyers -- they could probably sell the 4GB CF cards for a profit.
I haven't read the article -- so apologies if this was addressed.
I wonder if you could use one of these devices to fly up to another satellite (say military, communications, etc) and disable it?
Thanks for the information. I haven't heard of this project. According to the performance stats at their site, it certainly sounds like iptablse would be eaten alive.
I use iptables for NAT, but it is intriguing that you could used NF-HIPAC to handle the filtering.
It may subject me to potential DOS attacks, but I have snort-detected intrusions feed a PERL script that I've worked on that in turn fires off iptables deny rules. HIPAC sounds like a better solution to this -- although I really like being lazy and just downloading auto kernel updates...:p