It may surprise you but most people who use open source applications do not change the code. Even the ones who know how too, don't. Why, because they don't have the time. They download it try it, if it does what they need they use it, if not then they try an other product, if they cannot find an Open Source tool that does the job then they see if there is a commercial one that does.
Absolutely. I'm a perfect example. Where I work we needed a new helpdesk system. Our original solution was built by one of our devs in his spare time on MS-Access. It worked fine, but we wanted something a little more scalable, that had a web front-end, and automatically processed emails from users. When I started evaluating applications I started with OSS first, and ended up going with RT on MySQL before I even talked to commercial vendors. Now we have a solution that does everything that we need (now), and I've saved thousands of dollars. If we want to eventually modify the code we can do so, but since none of us know perl it's not very likely that will happen.
I personally love OSS precisely because it is usually free (beer). Now if we could just get our software vendors to start transitioning to supporting open source databases, I might be able to get rid of the 3 Oracle and 3 MS SQL servers that I have.
When the memory system has usually been updated, it doesn't make sense to throttle the upgrade by keeping the old, slower memory. When it is all said and done, I think it is generally better to sell the computer and buy or assemble a new one than it is to upgrade the main board because it often means replacing everything else too.
Generally I would say yes, but there are some cases where it makes sense. In my case I've had a video card for three years and I'm hitting the wall on performance. Normally I would just go for a new video card to hold me over until next year (when I would buy a new CPU, memory, and mainboard). But if I go AGP then I'll be stuck with a brand new card that I can't use in my next purchase. In that case it makes more sense to me to either a) buy a new PCI-E card and inexpensive PCI-E mainboard for my current CPU and memory, knowing that the mainboard will be useless next year ($65 mainboard versus several hundred dollars for a video card), or b) wait and buy an whole new mainboard, CPU, video card, and memory setup socket AM2 comes out later this year. Unless I had a seriously antiquated system (socket A perhaps) I wouldn't consider buying S939 now since there's only about 1 more year of production on those CPUs.
Don't know how much you're willing to spend, but you could go the route I just went. Bought a Jetway GT Dual board...supports both socket 754(only has 2 single channel DDR) and 939(4 dual channel ddr). It has 1 16x PCI-e. Good option if you already have a 754 and want to upgrade to 939 in the future(which I'll do when socket M is released and 939s drop). For $85 it's not too bad of a deal.
I looked at that for quite awhile but decided against it. From all of the materials that I have seen it appears that it doesn't support the Athlon X2 CPUs, which essentially limits you to a 4000+ CPU at the most. On S754 you can go to 3700+, so I didn't see much of a performance advantage in going with that board. I'm already using 2 DIMMs, so if I wanted to add more memory I would have to go to S939 and ditch my current CPU, or ditch my current memory.
I don't know when my next CPU upgrade will be (guessing within 12 months), but the new socket M2/AM2 will definitely be available by then. AMD will probably be shipping 5000+ rated processors (or faster) for M2/AM2 and requiring DDR2. So if I'm going to have to replace my CPU and memory, I'd rather just bite the bullet and go with the new architecture. I don't upgrade that often (I usually just stagger a new video card with a new CPU/mainboard over a couple years since those are the big ticket upgrades), but making this transition I want to put as little money as possible into hardware that can't be reused.
Basically this is a ho-hum card at a high price. You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350. The 7800GT is a 20 pipeline / 16 ROP card, while the 7800 GS is a 16/8. Its no contest which is faster. You can use your old DDR and CPU with the new MB making it a no brainer to avoid the 7800GS.
I may be mistaken, but those combo deals from EVGA are for Socket 939 Athlon 64 systems. If you don't have a Socket 939 CPU already, then you have to buy a new CPU, which adds about $200 to your price.
Personally, I have been weighing a similar decision for some time. I have a Socket 754 Athlon 64 and an old 9700 AGP card. I have been eyeing the 6800GS AGP as an upgrade, but it costs around $230 while the PCI-E version can be had for about $195. After looking around, I found that you could get a decent Gigabyte-brand S754 PCI-E mainboard for around $65. So I could spend $230 on an AGP card that I won't be able to use if I ever want to upgrade my CPU/Mainboard, or I could spent $260 for a PCI-E version of that card and a PCI-E mainboard for my current CPU. Or a 7800GT for $295 and a PCI-E S754 mainboard for $65 comes out to roughly the price of the 7800GS. Those seem like no-brainers to me, but only because I have a CPU that could be re-used. If you have a socket A or socket 478 CPU, you wouldn't have those options.
Currently I use a two monitor setup with WoW on one screen and Slashdot on the other.
Yeah, the MMORPGs were good for this. I used to play Ultima Online a lot, and I would have the game running on one monitor and UO Automap, a chat client connected to my guild, and other UO-specific utilities running on the other. It may playing much, much easier.
So let me get this straight...you named the company that you hated working for. You named the coworkers that you hated working with. You described the project that you (and two other people) worked on while you were there. Of those three people on the project, you admitted that you were the one running around offerring blowjobs to get the hardware to finish the project. And yet you post as Anonymous? I hate to break it to you, but anyone that would be in a position to know who you are won't need to see your handle to figure out who you are.
howabout those people who were unable to turn off automatic update after installing sp2. the only security they have is automatic updates.
The key phrase there being "after installing SP2". Many people still haven't, even those who were aware of it, and many people in corporate environments. And lest we forget, automatic updates were turned off by default in Windows XP RTM and SP1. So how did these people who don't know how to protect themselves and leave their PCs on autopilot get SP2 installed to begin with?
At any rate, the point is that you cannot be passive about security. Without active participation from the user you cannot expect to have a secure system. It's the same whether you're talking about Windows XP, Windows 2000, Linux, BSD, OSX, your antivirus software, a database, a Cisco switch, a router, or anything else programmable. If you do not take an active role to keep current with security updates, you will eventually get doinked. Coddling the people who don't know what they're doing does a disservice to them and to hose of us who do.
Unfortunately, the effort here by Microsoft here won't save the users most likely affected by the virus. Those users who don't know how to protect themselves adequately probably rely on Windows Update to keep their computer safe. How many of them will be informed in time to use Live Safety, or for that matter, how many of them know that it exists?
Dude, what are you smoking? Those users who don't know how to protect themselves adequately probably don't even know what Windows Update is, let alone rely on it to keep their PC safe.
How many people know what a warrant even looks like?
A determined criminal could create a fake warrant easier than most other official ID badges purely because we don't know what they look like?
True enough. But anybody presenting a warrant is going to have to present identification of some sort indicating that they are actually with some branch of law enforcement. That might be harder to duplicate.
But beyond that I'm not sure why a determined criminal would want to fake a warrant. If you show up at a place of business with a warrant to seize equipment (intending to steal and resell it?), the first thing that usually happens is that the person presented with the warrant calls their lawyer/legal department. If you show up at someone's home trying the same tactic, the potential payoff is much less and the 'victim' would probably be much more likely to challenge the warrant (by calling the real police, etc).
Not only would you be likely to get nabbed on forgery, you would probably also get hit with impersonating an officer of the court as well. It's not worth it, you'd be better off just burgling it.
The chances of losing two disks at once are slim. RAID 0+1 will provide great performance and good fault tolerance if you react to problems as they happen.
But I guess it depends on what your users need. If they need raw throughput, RAID 0+1 is better. If they need low latency, then RAID 10 may be the answer. Or maybe both systems would fall within the margin of error of each other.
He has up to 100 users and says that there will probably only be 50 or so concurrent users. Reasonable performance for such a system doesn't require lots of crazy tweaking. Implement RAID5 with a hot spare and be done with it. If you have a drive failure it automatically rebuilds and you're safe. If you have another drive failure after that before replacing the dead drive, you're still running. If you are concerned about drive performance, then spread the array across as many spindles as possible. If you have any sense you will already have a decent monitoring system in place and will know the drives have failed.
I find myself saying this often on Slashdot, but for the average IT department it makes far more sense to buy a business line server that comes with proper support for everything that you need than to try and cobble it together yourself out of parts, and then try to keep enough spare parts around in case of failure, and try to get warranty service from 5 different parts suppliers with different warranty lengths. I mean really, who does that kind of thing?
Go to HP, buy a Proliant server that fits your needs and price range, and use the included management software to set up email alerts when there is a hardware problem (like a drive failure or imminent drive failure). HP has the replacement part at your doorstep next day (unless you buy a warranty with faster turnaround, and next-day is still faster than you'll get from most part suppliers), and you don't have anything to worry about. I'm sure IBM and Dell can do something similar too.
Back in the day it actually used to be cheaper to build your own computer. Not only would you save money, but you get to choose exactly the components you wanted. Nowdays the computer market has been so commoditized that it's actually much more expensive to build your own. You don't get any of the advantages of economies of scale, and the profit margins are so slim on retail models that the savings of eliminating it is negligible. And of course, now you can have your system custom built to your specs anyway. The only reason to build your own is if you want to be able to tweak and upgrade it piecemeal, like the "enthusiast" market does. That's what I do with my home PC, but I would never consider doing that with business PCs, especially a server. A server should be deployed, and after that it should pretty much sit there with zero hardware maintenance (except in the case of hardware failure).
Of course you could check the headers but these could easily be faked. In seen spams in the past that got through where I had real trouble figuring out where the fuck they came from. Some I even seemed to have sent myself.
The only real way to check it would be for hotmail to keep a track record of everyone you send mail to, add them to your adress book and then let those emails bypass your spam filters.
Silly Hotmail for not doing that. OH wait, they do! When you send an email via hotmail you are asked wether you want to add that person to your contact list. Most people don't bother.
Adding someone to your contact list is a bit excessive, but there is an intermediate step. Simply by implementing greylisting (I believe the site is at www.greylisting.org) we immediately cut out about 95% of our spam at work. Further tweaking with our anti-spam solution (XWall for Exchange) got us to almost 100%. However, we do have an option that automatically whitelists hosts that we send messages to.
So if Hotmail kept a list (on a per-account basis) of addresses, hosts, or domains that you have sent email to then it could automatically whitelist those messages when they hit your mailbox. It's basically the same as what they're doing with your contact list, only it is automatic and the user doesn't see it. Obviously this couldn't be done at the gateway, but it would help the user.
Unless they're planning on using this data to push anti-porn decency laws (which would be an abuse of power to say the least) the data doesn't suggest in the slightest the context in which the searches were made.
Abuse of power, eh? Well, oddly enough, if you had bothered to RTFA you would know that this is exactly what they are using it for (shock! horror!).
A little while back the courts shot down an "anti-porn decency law" called the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Basically, it was ruled overly broad in that it restricted the rights of adults to access legal pornographic material in the name of "protecting the children". Not that the people pushing the law would have been upset about that though, since they would prefer that adults not have access to pornographic material either. One of the other points made at the time was that there were already plenty of legal methods of protecting children that didn't affect adults (aka, web filtering).
At any rate, the Bush DOJ decided that having the law struck down wasn't good enough, and want to prepare an appeal. One of the points they are appealing is related to filtering products, and they want to prove that no web filter is as effective at blocking kids from seeing porn as their law would be (because their law would block everyone from seeing porn - duh!). They seem to think that search engines are tied into this. So they have subpoenaed "statistical data" from the major search engines to help them make their case.
Some people think that this would be an illegal use of a subpoena. Some think that it constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure. Others think that this is merely an attempt to set a precedent for search engines turning over info on searches to the government on request, because though most people don't realize it their entire search history is stored by the search engine and can be tied back to them (yes, Google remembers that you once did a search for "tea-bagging transsexual sluts" and "santorum"). Given the government's recent track record on due process (especially tied to illegal surveillance and unspecified, indefinite, un-appealable detention of individuals), some people think that we should be very worried about the precedent that this sets.
I am one of them. I am also one of those people that believes that if you want to "protect your children" on the Internet then you need to supervise and participate in your child's Internet activities. I call it "being a parent". But then I RTFA too, so I could be kinda crazy.
Looking back at my company, 10 years ago, our machines were connected directly to the Internet, no proxy, no firewall, no antivirus software.
Looking back 10 years ago, your biggest threat was someone bringing a virus-infected floppy disk into work and taking down one of the 20 computers in your 50-person office. But hey, if you want to connect your PC to the Internet with no proxy, no firewall, and no virus protection, then be my guest. I doubt your PC lasts 24 hours before it becomes unusable.
Today, my company's proxy server blocks access to: 'bad' web sites (such as Google Groups;
And also very likely thousands of hacking, piracy, virus, worm, spyware, and phishing-related sites.
our 'antivirus' software prevents our machines (even machines that host production applications) from carrying out legitimate functions, such as the sending of email via SMTP
If it really is a legitimate purpose, you shouldn't have any problems being granted an exception for your specific case. Everywhere I have ever worked has done so.
and individual employees are forced to apply security patches with little or no notice, under threat of their machines loosing network access, if they do not comply by the deadline.
Ah, now I see. Your administration is incompetent. Under no circumstances should end users be installing security patches. They should be installed by administrators (if not automatically), and there shouldn't be any concern about cutting off non-compliant PCs because there won't be any. Anything less isn't security at all.
have we become so secure that we're stifling our own ability to get things done?
We haven't, but it sounds like the folks running the show at your place may have. But it also sounds like they don't know what they're doing either.
I think yes. What he did/does is marketing, nothing to do with technology.
I disagree. I think that Bill Gates, along with Paul Allen and the other early Microsofites are all geeks. The difference is that now that they're multi-millionaires and billionaires, you don't see as much of the geeking as you used to.
If you read some of the histories of early Microsoft (or bios of Gates) I think you would be suprised. Bill dropped out of college because he was more interested in tinkering with early computers and writing software for them than getting his degree. The first company he formed with Paul Allen (Traf-o-data) was basically just the two of them building traffic monitoring computers and writing software for them, and then trying to sell them to cities for flow/congestion analysis.
Bill himself was responsible for writing some of the early BASIC interpreters on multiple platforms in the late 70's and early 80's. They wrote CPU emulators because they couldn't get their hands on prototypes of early computing platforms but needed to write software for them. And this was the stuff that was going on when MS only had 8-10 employees.
You might not like Bill Gates or Microsoft for what they are today, but it is absolutely ludicrous to pretend that he hasn't more than earned his chops as a geek.
If it is off-the-shelf parts, CDW will overnight hardware and they're big enough that most of what they sell is in stock and available to be overnighted. I really like them.
If it is server/platform specific, go back to your hardware vendor. This is where all the guys mocking us for buying from HP, IBM, Sun, or other big top hardware vendors will get burned. Sure, you can build a server for less from parts ordered off of NewEgg, and you can troubleshoot it yourself, but you won't get anything better than next-day service. But if you buy from one of the big boys you can get service contracts/agreements that offer 4-hour turnaround time.
I used to work for a company that did courier work for HP and IBM. Basically, they have a nationwide network of small warehouses in most reasonable-sized cities. Odds are there is one less than 2-3 hours from you. Some of them are partnered with firms like Entex. In the city where I worked, HP, IBM, and Sun were all three located in the same building/warehouse. If you have a 4-hour contract they will have a courier drive the part out to you. If they don't have the part locally (for some reason), they will drive the part in from wherever they do have it. If it's too far to drive it, they will put it on the next available flight and have a courier deliver it to you when it lands. We did this many times where I used to work, and I have made use of this on several occasions as an end-user.
If it is mission critical, you have to recognize that when the server is procured and buy it from a company that can treat it like it is mission critical.
That is about the most succinct analysis I have seen of the real problem that plagues the IT industry.
There really are a lot of stupid people out there who honestly believe that they know what they are talking about.
Yes. There have actually been scientific studies that demonstrated that the less knowledgeable a person was about a particular topic, the more likely they were to overestimate there level of knowledge on that topic.
1. A developer will tend to be on one or a few projects at a time, but the employer will tend to have a basket of projects and so less exposed.
Not everyone in IT is a developer. In fact, it's probably pretty safe to say that the majority are not.
2. The relationship is not equal unless the developers also get to decide on which contracts are taken on. Otherwise the developers are taking on equal risk but without equal input.
Nobody said that the relationship was equal. What I said was that he had a more equalized structure of risk versus reward. The business takes on less risk (in the form of smaller initial wage outlays before the project is paid for) and the the employee takes on more risk (in the form of less money before the project is paid for). The business reaps less reward (in the form of reduced profit margin) and the employee gets more reward (in the form of larger bonuses).
If this is what he's doing, then it makes decent sense. What he is basically doing is partnering with his employees "or future competition, if you will".
In most employee-employer relationships, the employer assumes the majority of the risk and reaps the majority of the reward. The employee gets a set, predictable, livable salary. In return he only has show up for work each day and do his job. In this case, unless there is an additional bonus structure the employee may not be especially motivated to do more than their job.
In the dada21 case, he has a more equalized structure of risk and reward. The employee accepts a lower wage, risking potential future earnings if the project goes south. But in turn they are rewarded with a larger portion of the reward if the project is successful. It's probably not a bad system, for those who are interested in it.
It's actually not that much different from pay arrangements that are used for salesmen. A lot of times they are paid a minimal wage/salary, but then earn large commissions on each sale. The risk is that they won't make the sale, but the reward can be a huge commission check. Of course, that tends to breed more aggressive sales people and more sales for the company. In dada21's model, it should breed more aggressive IT staff (meaning harder working and more likely to finish the project ahead of schedule). Probably some of them will eventually compete with him one day. Keep in mind, though, that there is such a thing as "too aggresive". We've all encountered the overly aggressive salesperson who promises an undeliverable fantasy in order to make the sale. If the IT worker in the dada21 model gets too aggressive, you could potentially end up with sloppy or slapdash work.
Of course, all of this only works if your customer base is external to your company (i.e., consulting). If you work in the IT department of a company (as a majority of IT people do), then it's pretty much irrelevant. I suspect that's why he's gotten such an adverse reaction to his "paying minimum wage" statement.
I agree that the IT job market is no where near dead. I work at a small internet company, and hiring competent IT employees is always a hassle. The problem is not that it is hard to find a job in the computer industry, it is that there arent enough competent people.
The only people that I know that are having trouble finding jobs are those without enough skill sets. Being a computer nerd, playing alot of video games, and running your MMORPG guild's website are not marketable skills. You need to actually be useful. Probably at least 95% of those 5% of jobs going overseas are just taking away jobs from the morons in the computer industry.
Agreed. We recently posted a position for a helpdesk/PC tech (doing phone and hands-on support/troubleshooting) and got close to 100 resumes. Of those, there were about 6 that looked like they might have enough relevant skills/knowledge to warrant an interview. Of those, there were only two suitable candidates. And this if for an entry level position.
We hired another helpdesk/PC tech last spring. This person performed similar duties at another company, and came to us with a CIS degree from DeVry (I know that it's not Ivy League or anything), and they are pretty much useless. They can answer the phone, but it takes them at least twice as long to solve a problem as it would any other decent tech. Half the time they end up doing more damage while trying to "fix" the problem than there was to begin with, and I end up having to clean it up. And just to illustrate that stupid people don't actually realize that they're stupid, this person actually thinks that they're in line to take over my job someday (network admin, managing Windows/Linux/AIX boxes along with Cisco equipment).
I'm sure it's probably a little different with higher-skilled jobs, but most people come to those jobs by virtue of working their way up the ladder. The longer I work in IT, the more strongly I believe that IT certs and degrees are worth less and less.
I know the way my dad thinks. If something is too much trouble, he looks for a superior alternative. I also know there are other people who think that way. It's not a stretch to me to imagine my parents and others looking at Intel Macs in the future. I mean, there's only so much that's different between the two systems; all my dad would have to do is learn which icon is the Internet and he'll be just fine.
Well, you know your parents best. But I would caution against a switch based on perceived security of another OS, because OSX and *nix get a large part of their security by virtue of being relatively uncommon compared to Windows. There are fewer exploits in the wild because there are fewer machines. Once they start building more marketshare, there will be more exploits there as well, and then people will have to learn to secure those machines. A switch is just forestalling the need to learn secuirty for your home PC.
Imagine if people suddenly got booted off and told it was because their computers needed repair, then they'd find out what's wrong (spyware/viruses) and why (holes in Windows), and then some of the more intelligent ones would investigate alternatives like Apple and Linux.
You're vastly oversimplifying. Firstly, most home PC users can barely figure out how to begin to use Windows. If you throw something completely new at them (Linux or OSX) they will probably be even worse off than where they started.
Secondly, you're assuming that it's impossible to have a secure Windows PC, and that simply isn't true. My home PCs run Windows XP and are secured. My place of employment is about 95% Windows XP, and we haven't had any security incidents or security related downtime since we opened over two years ago. No PC platform will ever be 100% secure and exploit-proof, but you can make pretty much any current platform secure enough to not be a threat to the Internet. If a user is faced with learning how to secure Windows (possibly with a minimal additional hardware/software investment) versus scrapping the whole thing and learning a whole new OS, and how to secure it (possibly with a minimal additional software investment or a completely new PC purchase), they will probably stick with Windows.
And that's the big thing about Windows, it is relatively easy to secure it for connecting to the Internet. For example:
1. Download and install a decent antivirus/firewall package. You can buy one for $50 or less from most securty vendors, or you can get a free package like Avast or AVG with ZoneAlarm or Windows Firewall.
2. Turn on automatic updates so that security patches are installed automaticall when they become available. Or for the more paranoid (like me), set it to automatically notify you when they are available so that you can review them or test them before using them.
3. (optional but highly recommended) Spend $30-$50 for a DSL/cable router/firewall with NAT capability.
4. Don't open messages from strange or unknown sources, and don't open unexpected attachments from known sources.
If you have a Windows PC and follow those 4 simple steps you should very rarely, if ever, have security issues.
So, the chances of consultants 1) being available when you need them, and 2) being able to work from the nominal recovery plan you've handed them after the flood are probably not confidence inspiring.
That's assuming that your DR plan is deficient and untested. I don't know how you do business, but we do DR drills every year where we actually go through the steps of rebuilding our environment in a platform lab. You find out pretty quickly just how well your DR plan works in those cases.
A little too much is better than a bit too little where business continuation is concerned. One always has to consider what the impact of something like a virus hit, a flood, or a fire would be. A two- or three-man team handling 250 workstations and 30 servers sounds like a recipe for a poorly documented operation and lots of pain when the inevitable bad day comes.
If you have good processes that are well documented, DR shouldn't be a problem. You can bring in contractors to help rebuild your environment to spec, restore from backups, or configure PCs from images. IMHO it makes more sense to contract out for when the "inevitable bad day comes" since bad days like that are so rare. In nearly 10 years of IT consulting and staffing, I have only seen one occasion where a customer or employer that I worked with needed to actually use DR procedures, and even then it wasn't a total enterprise failure. Granted, some companies may have higher exposure to risk (the occupants of the former WTC, or New Orleans for example) which is multiplied by the scarcity of available resources to contract from in the event of a widespread disaster. But many (most?) businesses are at a much lower risk of encountering such an event, let alone total loss from the event.
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It may surprise you but most people who use open source applications do not change the code. Even the ones who know how too, don't. Why, because they don't have the time. They download it try it, if it does what they need they use it, if not then they try an other product, if they cannot find an Open Source tool that does the job then they see if there is a commercial one that does.
Absolutely. I'm a perfect example. Where I work we needed a new helpdesk system. Our original solution was built by one of our devs in his spare time on MS-Access. It worked fine, but we wanted something a little more scalable, that had a web front-end, and automatically processed emails from users. When I started evaluating applications I started with OSS first, and ended up going with RT on MySQL before I even talked to commercial vendors. Now we have a solution that does everything that we need (now), and I've saved thousands of dollars. If we want to eventually modify the code we can do so, but since none of us know perl it's not very likely that will happen.
I personally love OSS precisely because it is usually free (beer). Now if we could just get our software vendors to start transitioning to supporting open source databases, I might be able to get rid of the 3 Oracle and 3 MS SQL servers that I have.
When the memory system has usually been updated, it doesn't make sense to throttle the upgrade by keeping the old, slower memory. When it is all said and done, I think it is generally better to sell the computer and buy or assemble a new one than it is to upgrade the main board because it often means replacing everything else too.
Generally I would say yes, but there are some cases where it makes sense. In my case I've had a video card for three years and I'm hitting the wall on performance. Normally I would just go for a new video card to hold me over until next year (when I would buy a new CPU, memory, and mainboard). But if I go AGP then I'll be stuck with a brand new card that I can't use in my next purchase. In that case it makes more sense to me to either a) buy a new PCI-E card and inexpensive PCI-E mainboard for my current CPU and memory, knowing that the mainboard will be useless next year ($65 mainboard versus several hundred dollars for a video card), or b) wait and buy an whole new mainboard, CPU, video card, and memory setup socket AM2 comes out later this year. Unless I had a seriously antiquated system (socket A perhaps) I wouldn't consider buying S939 now since there's only about 1 more year of production on those CPUs.
Don't know how much you're willing to spend, but you could go the route I just went. Bought a Jetway GT Dual board...supports both socket 754(only has 2 single channel DDR) and 939(4 dual channel ddr). It has 1 16x PCI-e. Good option if you already have a 754 and want to upgrade to 939 in the future(which I'll do when socket M is released and 939s drop). For $85 it's not too bad of a deal.
I looked at that for quite awhile but decided against it. From all of the materials that I have seen it appears that it doesn't support the Athlon X2 CPUs, which essentially limits you to a 4000+ CPU at the most. On S754 you can go to 3700+, so I didn't see much of a performance advantage in going with that board. I'm already using 2 DIMMs, so if I wanted to add more memory I would have to go to S939 and ditch my current CPU, or ditch my current memory.
I don't know when my next CPU upgrade will be (guessing within 12 months), but the new socket M2/AM2 will definitely be available by then. AMD will probably be shipping 5000+ rated processors (or faster) for M2/AM2 and requiring DDR2. So if I'm going to have to replace my CPU and memory, I'd rather just bite the bullet and go with the new architecture. I don't upgrade that often (I usually just stagger a new video card with a new CPU/mainboard over a couple years since those are the big ticket upgrades), but making this transition I want to put as little money as possible into hardware that can't be reused.
I just did some checking, and it looks like the EVGA combo deal is no longer available.
Basically this is a ho-hum card at a high price. You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350. The 7800GT is a 20 pipeline / 16 ROP card, while the 7800 GS is a 16/8. Its no contest which is faster. You can use your old DDR and CPU with the new MB making it a no brainer to avoid the 7800GS.
I may be mistaken, but those combo deals from EVGA are for Socket 939 Athlon 64 systems. If you don't have a Socket 939 CPU already, then you have to buy a new CPU, which adds about $200 to your price.
Personally, I have been weighing a similar decision for some time. I have a Socket 754 Athlon 64 and an old 9700 AGP card. I have been eyeing the 6800GS AGP as an upgrade, but it costs around $230 while the PCI-E version can be had for about $195. After looking around, I found that you could get a decent Gigabyte-brand S754 PCI-E mainboard for around $65. So I could spend $230 on an AGP card that I won't be able to use if I ever want to upgrade my CPU/Mainboard, or I could spent $260 for a PCI-E version of that card and a PCI-E mainboard for my current CPU. Or a 7800GT for $295 and a PCI-E S754 mainboard for $65 comes out to roughly the price of the 7800GS. Those seem like no-brainers to me, but only because I have a CPU that could be re-used. If you have a socket A or socket 478 CPU, you wouldn't have those options.
Currently I use a two monitor setup with WoW on one screen and Slashdot on the other.
Yeah, the MMORPGs were good for this. I used to play Ultima Online a lot, and I would have the game running on one monitor and UO Automap, a chat client connected to my guild, and other UO-specific utilities running on the other. It may playing much, much easier.
So let me get this straight...you named the company that you hated working for. You named the coworkers that you hated working with. You described the project that you (and two other people) worked on while you were there. Of those three people on the project, you admitted that you were the one running around offerring blowjobs to get the hardware to finish the project. And yet you post as Anonymous? I hate to break it to you, but anyone that would be in a position to know who you are won't need to see your handle to figure out who you are.
um ok
howabout those people who were unable to turn off automatic update after installing sp2. the only security they have is automatic updates.
The key phrase there being "after installing SP2". Many people still haven't, even those who were aware of it, and many people in corporate environments. And lest we forget, automatic updates were turned off by default in Windows XP RTM and SP1. So how did these people who don't know how to protect themselves and leave their PCs on autopilot get SP2 installed to begin with?
At any rate, the point is that you cannot be passive about security. Without active participation from the user you cannot expect to have a secure system. It's the same whether you're talking about Windows XP, Windows 2000, Linux, BSD, OSX, your antivirus software, a database, a Cisco switch, a router, or anything else programmable. If you do not take an active role to keep current with security updates, you will eventually get doinked. Coddling the people who don't know what they're doing does a disservice to them and to hose of us who do.
Unfortunately, the effort here by Microsoft here won't save the users most likely affected by the virus. Those users who don't know how to protect themselves adequately probably rely on Windows Update to keep their computer safe. How many of them will be informed in time to use Live Safety, or for that matter, how many of them know that it exists?
Dude, what are you smoking? Those users who don't know how to protect themselves adequately probably don't even know what Windows Update is, let alone rely on it to keep their PC safe.
How many people know what a warrant even looks like?
A determined criminal could create a fake warrant easier than most other official ID badges purely because we don't know what they look like?
True enough. But anybody presenting a warrant is going to have to present identification of some sort indicating that they are actually with some branch of law enforcement. That might be harder to duplicate.
But beyond that I'm not sure why a determined criminal would want to fake a warrant. If you show up at a place of business with a warrant to seize equipment (intending to steal and resell it?), the first thing that usually happens is that the person presented with the warrant calls their lawyer/legal department. If you show up at someone's home trying the same tactic, the potential payoff is much less and the 'victim' would probably be much more likely to challenge the warrant (by calling the real police, etc).
Not only would you be likely to get nabbed on forgery, you would probably also get hit with impersonating an officer of the court as well. It's not worth it, you'd be better off just burgling it.
The chances of losing two disks at once are slim. RAID 0+1 will provide great performance and good fault tolerance if you react to problems as they happen. But I guess it depends on what your users need. If they need raw throughput, RAID 0+1 is better. If they need low latency, then RAID 10 may be the answer. Or maybe both systems would fall within the margin of error of each other.
He has up to 100 users and says that there will probably only be 50 or so concurrent users. Reasonable performance for such a system doesn't require lots of crazy tweaking. Implement RAID5 with a hot spare and be done with it. If you have a drive failure it automatically rebuilds and you're safe. If you have another drive failure after that before replacing the dead drive, you're still running. If you are concerned about drive performance, then spread the array across as many spindles as possible. If you have any sense you will already have a decent monitoring system in place and will know the drives have failed.
I find myself saying this often on Slashdot, but for the average IT department it makes far more sense to buy a business line server that comes with proper support for everything that you need than to try and cobble it together yourself out of parts, and then try to keep enough spare parts around in case of failure, and try to get warranty service from 5 different parts suppliers with different warranty lengths. I mean really, who does that kind of thing?
Go to HP, buy a Proliant server that fits your needs and price range, and use the included management software to set up email alerts when there is a hardware problem (like a drive failure or imminent drive failure). HP has the replacement part at your doorstep next day (unless you buy a warranty with faster turnaround, and next-day is still faster than you'll get from most part suppliers), and you don't have anything to worry about. I'm sure IBM and Dell can do something similar too.
Back in the day it actually used to be cheaper to build your own computer. Not only would you save money, but you get to choose exactly the components you wanted. Nowdays the computer market has been so commoditized that it's actually much more expensive to build your own. You don't get any of the advantages of economies of scale, and the profit margins are so slim on retail models that the savings of eliminating it is negligible. And of course, now you can have your system custom built to your specs anyway. The only reason to build your own is if you want to be able to tweak and upgrade it piecemeal, like the "enthusiast" market does. That's what I do with my home PC, but I would never consider doing that with business PCs, especially a server. A server should be deployed, and after that it should pretty much sit there with zero hardware maintenance (except in the case of hardware failure).
Of course you could check the headers but these could easily be faked. In seen spams in the past that got through where I had real trouble figuring out where the fuck they came from. Some I even seemed to have sent myself. The only real way to check it would be for hotmail to keep a track record of everyone you send mail to, add them to your adress book and then let those emails bypass your spam filters. Silly Hotmail for not doing that. OH wait, they do! When you send an email via hotmail you are asked wether you want to add that person to your contact list. Most people don't bother.
Adding someone to your contact list is a bit excessive, but there is an intermediate step. Simply by implementing greylisting (I believe the site is at www.greylisting.org) we immediately cut out about 95% of our spam at work. Further tweaking with our anti-spam solution (XWall for Exchange) got us to almost 100%. However, we do have an option that automatically whitelists hosts that we send messages to.
So if Hotmail kept a list (on a per-account basis) of addresses, hosts, or domains that you have sent email to then it could automatically whitelist those messages when they hit your mailbox. It's basically the same as what they're doing with your contact list, only it is automatic and the user doesn't see it. Obviously this couldn't be done at the gateway, but it would help the user.
Unless they're planning on using this data to push anti-porn decency laws (which would be an abuse of power to say the least) the data doesn't suggest in the slightest the context in which the searches were made.
Abuse of power, eh? Well, oddly enough, if you had bothered to RTFA you would know that this is exactly what they are using it for (shock! horror!).
A little while back the courts shot down an "anti-porn decency law" called the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Basically, it was ruled overly broad in that it restricted the rights of adults to access legal pornographic material in the name of "protecting the children". Not that the people pushing the law would have been upset about that though, since they would prefer that adults not have access to pornographic material either. One of the other points made at the time was that there were already plenty of legal methods of protecting children that didn't affect adults (aka, web filtering).
At any rate, the Bush DOJ decided that having the law struck down wasn't good enough, and want to prepare an appeal. One of the points they are appealing is related to filtering products, and they want to prove that no web filter is as effective at blocking kids from seeing porn as their law would be (because their law would block everyone from seeing porn - duh!). They seem to think that search engines are tied into this. So they have subpoenaed "statistical data" from the major search engines to help them make their case.
Some people think that this would be an illegal use of a subpoena. Some think that it constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure. Others think that this is merely an attempt to set a precedent for search engines turning over info on searches to the government on request, because though most people don't realize it their entire search history is stored by the search engine and can be tied back to them (yes, Google remembers that you once did a search for "tea-bagging transsexual sluts" and "santorum"). Given the government's recent track record on due process (especially tied to illegal surveillance and unspecified, indefinite, un-appealable detention of individuals), some people think that we should be very worried about the precedent that this sets.
I am one of them. I am also one of those people that believes that if you want to "protect your children" on the Internet then you need to supervise and participate in your child's Internet activities. I call it "being a parent". But then I RTFA too, so I could be kinda crazy.
Looking back at my company, 10 years ago, our machines were connected directly to the Internet, no proxy, no firewall, no antivirus software.
Looking back 10 years ago, your biggest threat was someone bringing a virus-infected floppy disk into work and taking down one of the 20 computers in your 50-person office. But hey, if you want to connect your PC to the Internet with no proxy, no firewall, and no virus protection, then be my guest. I doubt your PC lasts 24 hours before it becomes unusable.
Today, my company's proxy server blocks access to: 'bad' web sites (such as Google Groups;
And also very likely thousands of hacking, piracy, virus, worm, spyware, and phishing-related sites.
our 'antivirus' software prevents our machines (even machines that host production applications) from carrying out legitimate functions, such as the sending of email via SMTP
If it really is a legitimate purpose, you shouldn't have any problems being granted an exception for your specific case. Everywhere I have ever worked has done so.
and individual employees are forced to apply security patches with little or no notice, under threat of their machines loosing network access, if they do not comply by the deadline.
Ah, now I see. Your administration is incompetent. Under no circumstances should end users be installing security patches. They should be installed by administrators (if not automatically), and there shouldn't be any concern about cutting off non-compliant PCs because there won't be any. Anything less isn't security at all.
have we become so secure that we're stifling our own ability to get things done?
We haven't, but it sounds like the folks running the show at your place may have. But it also sounds like they don't know what they're doing either.
I think yes. What he did/does is marketing, nothing to do with technology.
I disagree. I think that Bill Gates, along with Paul Allen and the other early Microsofites are all geeks. The difference is that now that they're multi-millionaires and billionaires, you don't see as much of the geeking as you used to.
If you read some of the histories of early Microsoft (or bios of Gates) I think you would be suprised. Bill dropped out of college because he was more interested in tinkering with early computers and writing software for them than getting his degree. The first company he formed with Paul Allen (Traf-o-data) was basically just the two of them building traffic monitoring computers and writing software for them, and then trying to sell them to cities for flow/congestion analysis.
Bill himself was responsible for writing some of the early BASIC interpreters on multiple platforms in the late 70's and early 80's. They wrote CPU emulators because they couldn't get their hands on prototypes of early computing platforms but needed to write software for them. And this was the stuff that was going on when MS only had 8-10 employees.
You might not like Bill Gates or Microsoft for what they are today, but it is absolutely ludicrous to pretend that he hasn't more than earned his chops as a geek.
If it is off-the-shelf parts, CDW will overnight hardware and they're big enough that most of what they sell is in stock and available to be overnighted. I really like them. If it is server/platform specific, go back to your hardware vendor. This is where all the guys mocking us for buying from HP, IBM, Sun, or other big top hardware vendors will get burned. Sure, you can build a server for less from parts ordered off of NewEgg, and you can troubleshoot it yourself, but you won't get anything better than next-day service. But if you buy from one of the big boys you can get service contracts/agreements that offer 4-hour turnaround time. I used to work for a company that did courier work for HP and IBM. Basically, they have a nationwide network of small warehouses in most reasonable-sized cities. Odds are there is one less than 2-3 hours from you. Some of them are partnered with firms like Entex. In the city where I worked, HP, IBM, and Sun were all three located in the same building/warehouse. If you have a 4-hour contract they will have a courier drive the part out to you. If they don't have the part locally (for some reason), they will drive the part in from wherever they do have it. If it's too far to drive it, they will put it on the next available flight and have a courier deliver it to you when it lands. We did this many times where I used to work, and I have made use of this on several occasions as an end-user. If it is mission critical, you have to recognize that when the server is procured and buy it from a company that can treat it like it is mission critical.
That is about the most succinct analysis I have seen of the real problem that plagues the IT industry.
There really are a lot of stupid people out there who honestly believe that they know what they are talking about.
Yes. There have actually been scientific studies that demonstrated that the less knowledgeable a person was about a particular topic, the more likely they were to overestimate there level of knowledge on that topic.
1. A developer will tend to be on one or a few projects at a time, but the employer will tend to have a basket of projects and so less exposed.
Not everyone in IT is a developer. In fact, it's probably pretty safe to say that the majority are not.
2. The relationship is not equal unless the developers also get to decide on which contracts are taken on. Otherwise the developers are taking on equal risk but without equal input.
Nobody said that the relationship was equal. What I said was that he had a more equalized structure of risk versus reward. The business takes on less risk (in the form of smaller initial wage outlays before the project is paid for) and the the employee takes on more risk (in the form of less money before the project is paid for). The business reaps less reward (in the form of reduced profit margin) and the employee gets more reward (in the form of larger bonuses).
If this is what he's doing, then it makes decent sense. What he is basically doing is partnering with his employees "or future competition, if you will".
In most employee-employer relationships, the employer assumes the majority of the risk and reaps the majority of the reward. The employee gets a set, predictable, livable salary. In return he only has show up for work each day and do his job. In this case, unless there is an additional bonus structure the employee may not be especially motivated to do more than their job.
In the dada21 case, he has a more equalized structure of risk and reward. The employee accepts a lower wage, risking potential future earnings if the project goes south. But in turn they are rewarded with a larger portion of the reward if the project is successful. It's probably not a bad system, for those who are interested in it.
It's actually not that much different from pay arrangements that are used for salesmen. A lot of times they are paid a minimal wage/salary, but then earn large commissions on each sale. The risk is that they won't make the sale, but the reward can be a huge commission check. Of course, that tends to breed more aggressive sales people and more sales for the company. In dada21's model, it should breed more aggressive IT staff (meaning harder working and more likely to finish the project ahead of schedule). Probably some of them will eventually compete with him one day. Keep in mind, though, that there is such a thing as "too aggresive". We've all encountered the overly aggressive salesperson who promises an undeliverable fantasy in order to make the sale. If the IT worker in the dada21 model gets too aggressive, you could potentially end up with sloppy or slapdash work.
Of course, all of this only works if your customer base is external to your company (i.e., consulting). If you work in the IT department of a company (as a majority of IT people do), then it's pretty much irrelevant. I suspect that's why he's gotten such an adverse reaction to his "paying minimum wage" statement.
I agree that the IT job market is no where near dead. I work at a small internet company, and hiring competent IT employees is always a hassle. The problem is not that it is hard to find a job in the computer industry, it is that there arent enough competent people.
The only people that I know that are having trouble finding jobs are those without enough skill sets. Being a computer nerd, playing alot of video games, and running your MMORPG guild's website are not marketable skills. You need to actually be useful. Probably at least 95% of those 5% of jobs going overseas are just taking away jobs from the morons in the computer industry.
Agreed. We recently posted a position for a helpdesk/PC tech (doing phone and hands-on support/troubleshooting) and got close to 100 resumes. Of those, there were about 6 that looked like they might have enough relevant skills/knowledge to warrant an interview. Of those, there were only two suitable candidates. And this if for an entry level position.
We hired another helpdesk/PC tech last spring. This person performed similar duties at another company, and came to us with a CIS degree from DeVry (I know that it's not Ivy League or anything), and they are pretty much useless. They can answer the phone, but it takes them at least twice as long to solve a problem as it would any other decent tech. Half the time they end up doing more damage while trying to "fix" the problem than there was to begin with, and I end up having to clean it up. And just to illustrate that stupid people don't actually realize that they're stupid, this person actually thinks that they're in line to take over my job someday (network admin, managing Windows/Linux/AIX boxes along with Cisco equipment).
I'm sure it's probably a little different with higher-skilled jobs, but most people come to those jobs by virtue of working their way up the ladder. The longer I work in IT, the more strongly I believe that IT certs and degrees are worth less and less.
I know the way my dad thinks. If something is too much trouble, he looks for a superior alternative. I also know there are other people who think that way. It's not a stretch to me to imagine my parents and others looking at Intel Macs in the future. I mean, there's only so much that's different between the two systems; all my dad would have to do is learn which icon is the Internet and he'll be just fine.
Well, you know your parents best. But I would caution against a switch based on perceived security of another OS, because OSX and *nix get a large part of their security by virtue of being relatively uncommon compared to Windows. There are fewer exploits in the wild because there are fewer machines. Once they start building more marketshare, there will be more exploits there as well, and then people will have to learn to secure those machines. A switch is just forestalling the need to learn secuirty for your home PC.
Imagine if people suddenly got booted off and told it was because their computers needed repair, then they'd find out what's wrong (spyware/viruses) and why (holes in Windows), and then some of the more intelligent ones would investigate alternatives like Apple and Linux.
You're vastly oversimplifying. Firstly, most home PC users can barely figure out how to begin to use Windows. If you throw something completely new at them (Linux or OSX) they will probably be even worse off than where they started.
Secondly, you're assuming that it's impossible to have a secure Windows PC, and that simply isn't true. My home PCs run Windows XP and are secured. My place of employment is about 95% Windows XP, and we haven't had any security incidents or security related downtime since we opened over two years ago. No PC platform will ever be 100% secure and exploit-proof, but you can make pretty much any current platform secure enough to not be a threat to the Internet. If a user is faced with learning how to secure Windows (possibly with a minimal additional hardware/software investment) versus scrapping the whole thing and learning a whole new OS, and how to secure it (possibly with a minimal additional software investment or a completely new PC purchase), they will probably stick with Windows.
And that's the big thing about Windows, it is relatively easy to secure it for connecting to the Internet. For example:
1. Download and install a decent antivirus/firewall package. You can buy one for $50 or less from most securty vendors, or you can get a free package like Avast or AVG with ZoneAlarm or Windows Firewall.
2. Turn on automatic updates so that security patches are installed automaticall when they become available. Or for the more paranoid (like me), set it to automatically notify you when they are available so that you can review them or test them before using them.
3. (optional but highly recommended) Spend $30-$50 for a DSL/cable router/firewall with NAT capability.
4. Don't open messages from strange or unknown sources, and don't open unexpected attachments from known sources.
If you have a Windows PC and follow those 4 simple steps you should very rarely, if ever, have security issues.
I'm curious - - what is the size of your operation, and in what industry do you work?
We're in healthcare, and have about 400 full-time users spread over several shifts.
So, the chances of consultants 1) being available when you need them, and 2) being able to work from the nominal recovery plan you've handed them after the flood are probably not confidence inspiring.
That's assuming that your DR plan is deficient and untested. I don't know how you do business, but we do DR drills every year where we actually go through the steps of rebuilding our environment in a platform lab. You find out pretty quickly just how well your DR plan works in those cases.
A little too much is better than a bit too little where business continuation is concerned. One always has to consider what the impact of something like a virus hit, a flood, or a fire would be. A two- or three-man team handling 250 workstations and 30 servers sounds like a recipe for a poorly documented operation and lots of pain when the inevitable bad day comes.
If you have good processes that are well documented, DR shouldn't be a problem. You can bring in contractors to help rebuild your environment to spec, restore from backups, or configure PCs from images. IMHO it makes more sense to contract out for when the "inevitable bad day comes" since bad days like that are so rare. In nearly 10 years of IT consulting and staffing, I have only seen one occasion where a customer or employer that I worked with needed to actually use DR procedures, and even then it wasn't a total enterprise failure. Granted, some companies may have higher exposure to risk (the occupants of the former WTC, or New Orleans for example) which is multiplied by the scarcity of available resources to contract from in the event of a widespread disaster. But many (most?) businesses are at a much lower risk of encountering such an event, let alone total loss from the event.