I have used two different VPN clients over the two years I have been using cable modem. One is a weird Nortel client that works in combination with a SoftID token generator. Whenever I use it, no matter if it is here at home or at the office, it will pretty much kill anything not pointing towards the network we were connecting to.
The SecureRemote client is what we use to connect thru our Checkpoint firewall. This one is weird because it only works whenever you try to reach servers that are behind the firewall. It does not disturb my other communications. The first time I connect to an internal machine (say, I open Outlook and it tries to talk to the exchange server) it authenticates me. If I am connected to any protected resource it will ask me to authenticate every few hours, but it works without messing up everything else like the Nortel client does.
Why are these two so different? Anyone can point me to a FAQ? As for @home, around here they enforce things selectively. Basically keep a low profile and nobody will ever bother you.
Over the years I have noticed a great difference between the kids in school and college that just stop living and only want to play computer games and the professionals that on top of a long work day go home straight to the computer to play 4 or more hours (myself included, ouch).
So far I think the kids in school and college are doing much worse. The are pretty much isolating themselves from the real world, they are not even bothering to keep up with their school work because the game world to them is more rewarding.
Those of us already out there and working use gaming as a way to relief from stress. Sometimes a half-hour session of Quake III Team Arena is the only thing that keeps me from staying grumpy after coming back from the office.
Still there is a very minor group that are pretty much stuck into the gaming world too just like the kids in school.
At one time I was worried that I was spending too much time playing, and then one day I realized that for the last few weeks I was not averaging an hour a day of gaming, especially 3D shooters. Real Time STrategy usually mean spending at least 2 hours, so little by little I have stopped playing these.
Of course, I also know programmers that go home and play 3D shooters for 6-10 hours straight. I guess there's one in every company!
What he learned with the chinese communist route army was an experience.
What the USMC did with the two provisional Raider batallions was an experiment.
It was a lot more complicated than that. The British had commando raids that even if only did minor damage to the enemy they did wonders to increase the morale of the civilian population in England. The USMC did their own version of the commandos, the Raiders.
The Raiders were doomed from the start because the Marines were already an elite corps, so making an elite within an elite did not make a hell of a lot of sense.
"The movie has an authentic, gung-ho quality too it"
Katz, do you even know what the hell gung-ho really means? Gung-ho means "striving for harmony" which is what pretty much the core leadership model for the USMC Raider Battalions (which started as an experiment on chinese comunist guerrilla operations).
Katz was probably referring to the bastardized version of "gung ho" made popular by the propaganda movies of the period.
As for the movie itself, it rocked. Loud as hell and well worth it. The politics of the movie were disturbing, which added to the overall theme.
One thing that did not make any sense was when Gene Hackman called the aircraft carrier a "boat." In the navy a surface vessel is a "ship," while a "boat" is a submarine (not that it matters, since to a submariner, anything on the surface is classified as a target, hostile or not). Notice that our submarines are built at a place called the Electric Boat Company (General Dynamics, http://www.gdeb.com/) while our surface vessels are built in shipyards (like for example Grumman's Newport News shipyard, http://www.nns.com/).
Still, it rocked. It definitely rocked. I think Behind Enemy Lines took the title from Top Gun for the aerial sequences.
The first thing you have to ask yourself is what is the main function of the website.
If the site is used for brochureware then it is a marketing function. Marketing should have somebody to oversee the website, with both technical and content people working on the site.
If the site provides a service, then it falls under operations because it is part of the day-to-day business of the organization.
I have a half-half situation in my organization. I have a brochureware corporate site and a very complex intranet application that is web-based. The solution:
1. The outside website is run by marketing and sales (it comes out of their budget, so it is theirs). Whenever they need programmers to work in it they buy our time with their own budget.
2. The intranet is run by operations. We assign internal resources to deal with it.
3. The outside website has some automated components that are being fed from the intranet. These dynamic components are maintained by operations. Any and all content issues are solved by Marketing and Sales.
Final recommendation: Keep the team as small as you can afford. Avoid yourself heartbreak later. I already see you will need a project manager, a good programmer and somebody to deal with content. The graphic artist you do not need full time (unless you are one of those lucky bastards that has a good programmer that also has decent graphic skills!).
@home allows me to use the Linksys router (caveat: they will not provide me with technical support for network configuration issues).
What I cannot do is allow people outside of my household to connect to my network. This is why I cannot just plug-in a wireless gateway until I am sure that I can lock people out of it.
That site lists System of a Down: Toxicity as encrypted. I have that CD and I ripped it to both my home and work PCs and both sound fine.
The site comments pretty much show one guy complaining that he can't copy it to a CD, another guy complaining of weird noises and probably 10 people saying "nope, mine works fine."
I rip my CDs to encrypted windows media to avoid any trouble from some idiot trying to pin me for pirating music. The IT folks have burned people in the past for running Napster servers with 10GB+ of MP3s (all pirated), so the workaround was to let employees have music files as long as they rip them from their own CDs and they use encrypted windows media. So far all my CDs have worked fine.
A bit OT on that site:
As it is right now the site is not very usable. Also look at the "banned books" list that does not explain who banned them and why.
The AUP on my @home account explicitly forbids sharing the service with "third parties." I can either pay for up to 5 distinct IP addresses ($6.95 extra) or I can use a Linksys router and then there is no limit in how many computers I connect as long as they are all within my household.
My linksys is currently sitting in a box waiting for me to put in on eBay. It is a great piece of work, but my company installed a checkpoint firewall and the router won't work with our VPN even if I put the machine in the DMZ.
I am planning on switching my assigned PC at work for a laptop, and What I would like to have is a wireless access point that works as a hub or switch, not as a router. And I want something that won't allow access to the access point unless there is some real encryption. This way I can have wireless access for my household and I don't have to worry about @home killing my account for violating AUP. I cannot afford to lose my broadband since we don't have DSL around here yet:-(
Wind tunnels are really loud no matter the size or speed. Back in my fluid mechanics lab I hated the damn thing because it was nearly impossible to talk to each other, and we ended up wearining hearing protection thru most of the time we spent in there. Don't you think that noise would be dangerous to the animals?
Make sure the manager understands the license in question and the consequences of using open sourced products. For example, Microsoft is rewriting their licenses all over the place to keep people from mixing their development tools with open source software. They call it "viral" software.
I would personally look at things like the license itself and the maturity of the package.
Is this a project that has been worked on for years? Or did the author(s) abandoned it when they graduated college?
Is the project well documented?
Is there a network of users in place to help newcomers? Does it have one or more popular web message boards or newsgroups that you can go to look for help?
How hard is it to find a guru to consult for you to help bring in the project into your organization?
Or be a technical manager, so you are half manager, half programmer. When the cool projects come up you can take your pick. Same with new technologies.
I agree 100% with Asimov and Heinlein, they wrote timeless books that will still make sense 50 years from now.
We will probably remember:
James Patterson (Alex Cross series)
Michael Crichton
Stephen King
We will hopefully forget:
Tom Clancy
John Grisham
I am a hardcore Clancy fan, but his books are going to be terribly outdated in 50 years. Grisham was doing great but I am not too happy with his last two books.
Commercial rent is expensive, so the least space you need to dedicate out of your office to store servers the more cost effective they are.
These cards have been around for ages with various degrees of complexity. There used to be (don't know if they are still around) some of these cards that were designed to plug into a Mac so the card would do all the hard work if you wanted to emulate a PC.
I don't see the value for the home user. I can't see why a true home user (not the very small percenteage of hardcore enthusiasts or people that run a business from home) would need so much power that the solution is to get a box, plug a few of these babies and cluster them.
Still, its not so hard to come up with a home scenario:
1. Send your broadband connection to the basement of your house and spread it to all the rooms in the house with a $80 broadband router, cheap switches and hubs.
2. Put a box in a closet in the basement with different PCI cards to serve a specific purpose. For my own personal needs (I am a Microsoft dot whore, sorry) I would have an exchange server, one dedicated as a network file server, a sql server and a IIS server. A person of the Unix persuasion would have a card with sendmail and some kind of pop server, a file server, mysql or posgres and Apache.
With just a little bit of money the house now packs as much punch inside of that box in a basement closet than what it takes my company to do with a row of bulky servers. Add in a blackbox switch and a cheap 14-in monitor, keyboard and mouse and you are set. Of course Unix people would use some kind of secure shell and save themselves the trip to the basement, and us lazy Microsoft whores will just have to rely on Terminal Services or pcAnywhere.
In a corporate environment the space saving actually pays off (you don't pay your apartment rent or home mortgage by the square foot like most businesses do) as soon as you recover some of the space wasted by the server room. Right now I can see how I could take ours, gut it out, put a couple boxes full of these PCI cards in a good closet with the proper ventilation, and then turn the old equipment room into a telecommuter's lounge.
The home solution would rock because my wife will not bother me anymore about all those weird boxes sitting under my desk in my home office. All the clutter goes away and I just keep my tower case.
Then you turn around and peddle open source as a way of making money.
Oxymoron anyone?
Pedro
http://veraperez.com
Re:why is mozilla engine so slow?
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 1
This is correct. ASP is not part of the equation since it just spits out HTML. If the developer is careless and produces bad asp then both IE and NS will suffer.
Certain ASP programmers will be unlucky enough to be forced to generate different versions of the site for IE and NS. I can assure you that they will put most of their energy into the IE version, and the NS version will be patched just to make it run. All the weird mickey mouse things you have to do to NS to make it render are what make the pages load slower.
Of course, this is a moot point. Little by little our customers are forgetting NS even exists, and if the issue is raised we can convince them in less than 10 minutes on why it is cheaper to code for IE.
They have an interesting battery of tests for digital cameras. Take a look at some of their tests and that will give you an idea as of what you should be looking for.
BTW, the guys are right. Don't expect consumer hardware to be consistent. You are just not paying for that consistency. Also keep in mind these things are not built to take the abuse of continuous usage. Devices that are a bit more expensive are usually built better. For example, look at a $50 scanner and a $200 scanner. Now guess which one will still have a functional lid after a month of intense use.
Let's allow IBM to spearhead and champion (!) the Open Source movement until they are the heavyweigth. Then let them little by little pollute it until they downright own it. Somebody as big as IBM has the political power and the lobby dollars to pretty much wipe their asses with your o-so-precious GPL.
Think about it, don't you see this is the same IBM that not so long ago was in the same position as Microsoft these days?
I can't wait to see you morons 10-15 years down the road praising Microsoft for embracing the "Open Monopoly" and spitting at IBM for being such an anti-competitive monster.
Those that forget history are bound to repeat its mistakes...
We use these terms a bit different. First of all none of the architects belongs to the operations/production branch of the company. They belong to sales/marketing.
Why?
Because their job is not to build things. The architect works with a business developer (read: salesman) in the preparation of the proposal, follow-ups, etc. The main function of our architects is to make sure we sell things that can be done, not things that sound cool to both the business developer and the client.
Our architects are marketroids that happen to be good planners and are technically oriented. They cannot write one line of code but they are very well aware of the benefits and limitations of say, use a database-backed website at a corporate level, etc.
I am not saying our definition is right, just the way we use your title to describe the techies that work exclusively for the marketroids.
Fair use says you should be able to copy it to other mediums as long as it is for your own personal use. A CD with pre-licensed WMA files will give you just that.
I use encrypted WMA files for a simple reason. It allows me to have a few gigs worth of music that I paid for and nobody can sue my company for me hosting a "pirated music server." See, all the music is encrypted and tied to that machine. Nobody can download the music since to them it will be useless. WMA doesn't sound worse than MP3 when you have shitty $20 headphones. And the size of the files is no worse either.
Also, if the CD comes with the music pre-ripped I can just copy the WMA files and turn on the license, I don't have to go thru the process of ripping the CD.
What I don't want is the kind of copy protection that renders the CD useless in a CDROM drive. That is desperate on their part. If the CD is still usable in the PC then I am all for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have used two different VPN clients over the two years I have been using cable modem. One is a weird Nortel client that works in combination with a SoftID token generator. Whenever I use it, no matter if it is here at home or at the office, it will pretty much kill anything not pointing towards the network we were connecting to.
The SecureRemote client is what we use to connect thru our Checkpoint firewall. This one is weird because it only works whenever you try to reach servers that are behind the firewall. It does not disturb my other communications. The first time I connect to an internal machine (say, I open Outlook and it tries to talk to the exchange server) it authenticates me. If I am connected to any protected resource it will ask me to authenticate every few hours, but it works without messing up everything else like the Nortel client does.
Why are these two so different? Anyone can point me to a FAQ? As for @home, around here they enforce things selectively. Basically keep a low profile and nobody will ever bother you.
Over the years I have noticed a great difference between the kids in school and college that just stop living and only want to play computer games and the professionals that on top of a long work day go home straight to the computer to play 4 or more hours (myself included, ouch).
So far I think the kids in school and college are doing much worse. The are pretty much isolating themselves from the real world, they are not even bothering to keep up with their school work because the game world to them is more rewarding.
Those of us already out there and working use gaming as a way to relief from stress. Sometimes a half-hour session of Quake III Team Arena is the only thing that keeps me from staying grumpy after coming back from the office.
Still there is a very minor group that are pretty much stuck into the gaming world too just like the kids in school.
At one time I was worried that I was spending too much time playing, and then one day I realized that for the last few weeks I was not averaging an hour a day of gaming, especially 3D shooters. Real Time STrategy usually mean spending at least 2 hours, so little by little I have stopped playing these.
Of course, I also know programmers that go home and play 3D shooters for 6-10 hours straight. I guess there's one in every company!
What he learned with the chinese communist route army was an experience.
What the USMC did with the two provisional Raider batallions was an experiment.
It was a lot more complicated than that. The British had commando raids that even if only did minor damage to the enemy they did wonders to increase the morale of the civilian population in England. The USMC did their own version of the commandos, the Raiders.
The Raiders were doomed from the start because the Marines were already an elite corps, so making an elite within an elite did not make a hell of a lot of sense.
"The movie has an authentic, gung-ho quality too it"
Katz, do you even know what the hell gung-ho really means? Gung-ho means "striving for harmony" which is what pretty much the core leadership model for the USMC Raider Battalions (which started as an experiment on chinese comunist guerrilla operations).
Katz was probably referring to the bastardized version of "gung ho" made popular by the propaganda movies of the period.
As for the movie itself, it rocked. Loud as hell and well worth it. The politics of the movie were disturbing, which added to the overall theme.
One thing that did not make any sense was when Gene Hackman called the aircraft carrier a "boat." In the navy a surface vessel is a "ship," while a "boat" is a submarine (not that it matters, since to a submariner, anything on the surface is classified as a target, hostile or not). Notice that our submarines are built at a place called the Electric Boat Company (General Dynamics, http://www.gdeb.com/) while our surface vessels are built in shipyards (like for example Grumman's Newport News shipyard, http://www.nns.com/).
Still, it rocked. It definitely rocked. I think Behind Enemy Lines took the title from Top Gun for the aerial sequences.
The first thing you have to ask yourself is what is the main function of the website.
If the site is used for brochureware then it is a marketing function. Marketing should have somebody to oversee the website, with both technical and content people working on the site.
If the site provides a service, then it falls under operations because it is part of the day-to-day business of the organization.
I have a half-half situation in my organization. I have a brochureware corporate site and a very complex intranet application that is web-based. The solution:
1. The outside website is run by marketing and sales (it comes out of their budget, so it is theirs). Whenever they need programmers to work in it they buy our time with their own budget.
2. The intranet is run by operations. We assign internal resources to deal with it.
3. The outside website has some automated components that are being fed from the intranet. These dynamic components are maintained by operations. Any and all content issues are solved by Marketing and Sales.
Final recommendation: Keep the team as small as you can afford. Avoid yourself heartbreak later. I already see you will need a project manager, a good programmer and somebody to deal with content. The graphic artist you do not need full time (unless you are one of those lucky bastards that has a good programmer that also has decent graphic skills!).
The way I see it you are going to be using either Java or a .net language. Microsoft's roadmap for .net includes a CLR that runs on Unix.
@home allows me to use the Linksys router (caveat: they will not provide me with technical support for network configuration issues).
What I cannot do is allow people outside of my household to connect to my network. This is why I cannot just plug-in a wireless gateway until I am sure that I can lock people out of it.
That site lists System of a Down: Toxicity as encrypted. I have that CD and I ripped it to both my home and work PCs and both sound fine.
The site comments pretty much show one guy complaining that he can't copy it to a CD, another guy complaining of weird noises and probably 10 people saying "nope, mine works fine."
I rip my CDs to encrypted windows media to avoid any trouble from some idiot trying to pin me for pirating music. The IT folks have burned people in the past for running Napster servers with 10GB+ of MP3s (all pirated), so the workaround was to let employees have music files as long as they rip them from their own CDs and they use encrypted windows media. So far all my CDs have worked fine.
A bit OT on that site:
As it is right now the site is not very usable. Also look at the "banned books" list that does not explain who banned them and why.
The AUP on my @home account explicitly forbids sharing the service with "third parties." I can either pay for up to 5 distinct IP addresses ($6.95 extra) or I can use a Linksys router and then there is no limit in how many computers I connect as long as they are all within my household.
:-(
My linksys is currently sitting in a box waiting for me to put in on eBay. It is a great piece of work, but my company installed a checkpoint firewall and the router won't work with our VPN even if I put the machine in the DMZ.
I am planning on switching my assigned PC at work for a laptop, and What I would like to have is a wireless access point that works as a hub or switch, not as a router. And I want something that won't allow access to the access point unless there is some real encryption. This way I can have wireless access for my household and I don't have to worry about @home killing my account for violating AUP. I cannot afford to lose my broadband since we don't have DSL around here yet
Any suggestions?
Wind tunnels are really loud no matter the size or speed. Back in my fluid mechanics lab I hated the damn thing because it was nearly impossible to talk to each other, and we ended up wearining hearing protection thru most of the time we spent in there. Don't you think that noise would be dangerous to the animals?
Make sure the manager understands the license in question and the consequences of using open sourced products. For example, Microsoft is rewriting their licenses all over the place to keep people from mixing their development tools with open source software. They call it "viral" software.
I would personally look at things like the license itself and the maturity of the package.
Is this a project that has been worked on for years? Or did the author(s) abandoned it when they graduated college?
Is the project well documented?
Is there a network of users in place to help newcomers? Does it have one or more popular web message boards or newsgroups that you can go to look for help?
How hard is it to find a guru to consult for you to help bring in the project into your organization?
That's all I can come up with now.
I don't think permission is the right word. If I own the copyright then I don't have to get permission from anyone if I want to copy-protect my work.
gee...
You can pry my cable modem off my cold, dead fingers.
And no, I don't pay for mine. My employer pays for it, but I am so addicted to it that I would gladly pay it out of my own pocket.
If I get laid off I'll just kill my digital cable subscription, that's $75/month right off the bat.
Management!!!!!
Become a Pointy Haired Boss!!!
Or be a technical manager, so you are half manager, half programmer. When the cool projects come up you can take your pick. Same with new technologies.
I agree 100% with Asimov and Heinlein, they wrote timeless books that will still make sense 50 years from now.
We will probably remember:
James Patterson (Alex Cross series)
Michael Crichton
Stephen King
We will hopefully forget:
Tom Clancy
John Grisham
I am a hardcore Clancy fan, but his books are going to be terribly outdated in 50 years. Grisham was doing great but I am not too happy with his last two books.
Commercial rent is expensive, so the least space you need to dedicate out of your office to store servers the more cost effective they are.
These cards have been around for ages with various degrees of complexity. There used to be (don't know if they are still around) some of these cards that were designed to plug into a Mac so the card would do all the hard work if you wanted to emulate a PC.
I don't see the value for the home user. I can't see why a true home user (not the very small percenteage of hardcore enthusiasts or people that run a business from home) would need so much power that the solution is to get a box, plug a few of these babies and cluster them.
Still, its not so hard to come up with a home scenario:
1. Send your broadband connection to the basement of your house and spread it to all the rooms in the house with a $80 broadband router, cheap switches and hubs.
2. Put a box in a closet in the basement with different PCI cards to serve a specific purpose. For my own personal needs (I am a Microsoft dot whore, sorry) I would have an exchange server, one dedicated as a network file server, a sql server and a IIS server. A person of the Unix persuasion would have a card with sendmail and some kind of pop server, a file server, mysql or posgres and Apache.
With just a little bit of money the house now packs as much punch inside of that box in a basement closet than what it takes my company to do with a row of bulky servers. Add in a blackbox switch and a cheap 14-in monitor, keyboard and mouse and you are set. Of course Unix people would use some kind of secure shell and save themselves the trip to the basement, and us lazy Microsoft whores will just have to rely on Terminal Services or pcAnywhere.
In a corporate environment the space saving actually pays off (you don't pay your apartment rent or home mortgage by the square foot like most businesses do) as soon as you recover some of the space wasted by the server room. Right now I can see how I could take ours, gut it out, put a couple boxes full of these PCI cards in a good closet with the proper ventilation, and then turn the old equipment room into a telecommuter's lounge.
The home solution would rock because my wife will not bother me anymore about all those weird boxes sitting under my desk in my home office. All the clutter goes away and I just keep my tower case.
Let's see...
"Microsoft is evil"
"Microsoft is an anticompetitive monopoly"
".net is the end of the world as we know it"
"Fuck the RIAA"
"You can pry my DECSS from my cold, dead fingers"
Then you turn around and peddle open source as a way of making money.
Oxymoron anyone?
Pedro
http://veraperez.com
This is correct. ASP is not part of the equation since it just spits out HTML. If the developer is careless and produces bad asp then both IE and NS will suffer.
Certain ASP programmers will be unlucky enough to be forced to generate different versions of the site for IE and NS. I can assure you that they will put most of their energy into the IE version, and the NS version will be patched just to make it run. All the weird mickey mouse things you have to do to NS to make it render are what make the pages load slower.
Of course, this is a moot point. Little by little our customers are forgetting NS even exists, and if the issue is raised we can convince them in less than 10 minutes on why it is cheaper to code for IE.
They have an interesting battery of tests for digital cameras. Take a look at some of their tests and that will give you an idea as of what you should be looking for.
BTW, the guys are right. Don't expect consumer hardware to be consistent. You are just not paying for that consistency. Also keep in mind these things are not built to take the abuse of continuous usage. Devices that are a bit more expensive are usually built better. For example, look at a $50 scanner and a $200 scanner. Now guess which one will still have a functional lid after a month of intense use.
How naive...
Let's allow IBM to spearhead and champion (!) the Open Source movement until they are the heavyweigth. Then let them little by little pollute it until they downright own it. Somebody as big as IBM has the political power and the lobby dollars to pretty much wipe their asses with your o-so-precious GPL.
Think about it, don't you see this is the same IBM that not so long ago was in the same position as Microsoft these days?
I can't wait to see you morons 10-15 years down the road praising Microsoft for embracing the "Open Monopoly" and spitting at IBM for being such an anti-competitive monster.
Those that forget history are bound to repeat its mistakes...
Lemme get this straight:
If Microsoft has a monopoly, its evil.
If anyone else has a monopoly, its good for Open Source.
Make up your minds. A monopoly by definition is harmful. There are no "good" monopolies.
The only way this posting would have sounded more retarded could be only if Cmr Taco or Jon Katz had written it.
We use these terms a bit different. First of all none of the architects belongs to the operations/production branch of the company. They belong to sales/marketing.
Why?
Because their job is not to build things. The architect works with a business developer (read: salesman) in the preparation of the proposal, follow-ups, etc. The main function of our architects is to make sure we sell things that can be done, not things that sound cool to both the business developer and the client.
Our architects are marketroids that happen to be good planners and are technically oriented. They cannot write one line of code but they are very well aware of the benefits and limitations of say, use a database-backed website at a corporate level, etc.
I am not saying our definition is right, just the way we use your title to describe the techies that work exclusively for the marketroids.
Fair use says you should be able to copy it to other mediums as long as it is for your own personal use. A CD with pre-licensed WMA files will give you just that.
I use encrypted WMA files for a simple reason. It allows me to have a few gigs worth of music that I paid for and nobody can sue my company for me hosting a "pirated music server." See, all the music is encrypted and tied to that machine. Nobody can download the music since to them it will be useless. WMA doesn't sound worse than MP3 when you have shitty $20 headphones. And the size of the files is no worse either.
Also, if the CD comes with the music pre-ripped I can just copy the WMA files and turn on the license, I don't have to go thru the process of ripping the CD.
What I don't want is the kind of copy protection that renders the CD useless in a CDROM drive. That is desperate on their part. If the CD is still usable in the PC then I am all for it.
Brento is right. $220 is a lot of money when the Abit VP6 dual PIII can be had for $130.