Slashdot is world famous. A roving random distributed denial of service attack before which web, network and systems administrators alike quake and have terrible nightmares about.
Not that it isn't a good idea but the universities etc can already do everything mentioned using Windows Terminal Server. I'm not seeing the requirement here.
It's fairly easy for Unix boxes to authenticate against AD. The reverse is not true for Windows machines.
"any SSO has got to work with AD to be successful"
Not true. The Internet and Intranet are entirely different environments. One is controlled and usually managed centrally, the other is uncontrolled and managed in a distributed fashion. A solution which is appropriate for one may not be appropriate for the other.
"not quite a cakewalk to manage the tens (hundreds?) of such applications 25,000 users would require."
Or think they do. It's all about control, either you have it or you don't. With desktops the amount of effort you have to put in to manage and maintain control increases directly in proportion with the numbers of machines, even with management tools like SMS. By the time you get to 25,000 you need a staff of hundreds or you lose control of basically everything as chaos sets in. You have lost control and are simply firefighting the biggest problems for whomever is shouting loudest.
With thin client the effort required to manage systems increases logarithmically. 100 servers are as easy to manage as 10. This leaves your staff free to do useful stuff like security checks, disaster recovery testing etc.
Interesting change of strategy. Looking for someone else to kill to take their place? Hmmm? MS Windows doomed? MS Office doomed? 5 years? Sounds about right.
I don't suppose you really have any control left but when things are getting that bad it's your only sane option. (It's the only sane option when you're getting to 100+ clients anyway). Allowing users to design your IT infrastructure is pure madness, entropy inevitably turns your network to mush.
Even Windows Terminal Server expensive as it is, is better than 25,000 desktops. We use LTSP and an array of Linux and Sun servers[1] tied together with Sun Grid Engine[2] to provide what the users think of as a single system, "The Grid". It was a remarkably easy sale to management, but we were coming from a largely Unix environment. It's a bit more difficult with Windows, the array smallish servers approach is is far more expensive to implement than Linux.
That doesn't sound too nasty, fairly conventional of him I'd say.
It's quite possible to set up file servers so that they execute commands on receipt of emails. You know, find a random xls file, change byte N from X to Y. If your sysadmin is also the DBA you wouldn't even be able to trust the data in your databases either, delete a row here, modify a number there.
The moral of the story is that if the person with the keys to your data is untrustworthy in the first place you'd better have someone very very good to replace them.
If you're firing a administrator you really have to go through the entire network they had access to and check every system for things like email responders, cron jobs, scripts. Ugh it's a huge task. It's really fairly simple to add a difficult to find backdoor to someones network.
Cos you can simply run the indexing under a less privileged user account and set up the filesystem permissions on your files to disallow other people from reading them, keep your own documents to yourself.
Wait. I bet you're running Windows XP with a FAT filesystem, aren't you.
Yeah, they are trying to push "lab certified diamonds" at the moment. That won't last as the production of manufactured (or cultured) diamonds ramps up and makes them all worthless other than a pretty stone.
Anyway, opals are far more attractive than diamonds.
If you want to learn how to scale unix systems management a good start is infrastructures.org. You don't have to follow their ideas slavishly but it'll get you into the right mindset, and that's what matters.
Keeping Unix boxes up to date is simple once you understand how, the effort required to manage 1000 machines is only marginally more than 100 which is only marginally more than required for 10.
You must have a distribution system for all of the existing applications you have on your machines. Just use that. Open Office and Firefox are no different from any other app.
Have terrible performance, it's why laptops are usually miles slower than a desktop system. Servers usually need the fastest hard disks you can find for them.
After typing all day every day for, hmm, decades now my finger joints get painful. I've found that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements work wonders. They take a couple of days to kick in but no pain. IIRC they act by improving the cushioning the joint better and allowing it to heal.
The majority of the human race lives in abject poverty with little access to science or medicine. AIDS, malaria etc are still killing thousands/millions of people.
Europe, America may be evolutionary dead ends but we are a tiny minority.
Extremists aren't a significant force in most PR systems. You simply arrange the size of the districts such that a reasonable percentage of the vote is required for seats.
e.g. in a 5 seat district, about 20% is required to secure a seat, a 10 seat district, about 10% is required to secure a seat. The Israelis have taken this to an extreme and made the whole country one big district with 120 seats meaning that less than 1% of the vote is required to gain a seat (they then put an artificial limit of 2% on this). This also means there are going to be lots of tiny parties. With PR, you just set the number of seats per district to approximately the number of political parties you want to appear. Any more than 5-7 starts getting silly.
Simply look at the types of people who are having lots of children and the types of people who are not having children. Then draw your own conclusions on the future direction of the species (and it isn't necessarily smarter/stronger).
Not only that, the political parties oversee the counting, first to make sure that it's fair and second to generate some statistical results for the wards & streets the votes are coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is world famous. A roving random distributed denial of service attack before which web, network and systems administrators alike quake and have terrible nightmares about.
How many other tech news sites can claim that?
Not that it isn't a good idea but the universities etc can already do everything mentioned using Windows Terminal Server. I'm not seeing the requirement here.
It's fairly easy for Unix boxes to authenticate against AD. The reverse is not true for Windows machines.
"any SSO has got to work with AD to be successful"
Not true. The Internet and Intranet are entirely different environments. One is controlled and usually managed centrally, the other is uncontrolled and managed in a distributed fashion. A solution which is appropriate for one may not be appropriate for the other.
"not quite a cakewalk to manage the tens (hundreds?) of such applications 25,000 users would require."
Or think they do. It's all about control, either you have it or you don't. With desktops the amount of effort you have to put in to manage and maintain control increases directly in proportion with the numbers of machines, even with management tools like SMS. By the time you get to 25,000 you need a staff of hundreds or you lose control of basically everything as chaos sets in. You have lost control and are simply firefighting the biggest problems for whomever is shouting loudest.
With thin client the effort required to manage systems increases logarithmically. 100 servers are as easy to manage as 10. This leaves your staff free to do useful stuff like security checks, disaster recovery testing etc.
Interesting change of strategy. Looking for someone else to kill to take their place? Hmmm? MS Windows doomed? MS Office doomed? 5 years? Sounds about right.
I don't suppose you really have any control left but when things are getting that bad it's your only sane option. (It's the only sane option when you're getting to 100+ clients anyway). Allowing users to design your IT infrastructure is pure madness, entropy inevitably turns your network to mush.
Even Windows Terminal Server expensive as it is, is better than 25,000 desktops. We use LTSP and an array of Linux and Sun servers[1] tied together with Sun Grid Engine[2] to provide what the users think of as a single system, "The Grid". It was a remarkably easy sale to management, but we were coming from a largely Unix environment. It's a bit more difficult with Windows, the array smallish servers approach is is far more expensive to implement than Linux.
[1] many of them ex workstations and desktops.
[2] Though Condor looks like a good option.
Join the IEEE Computer Society instead.
http://www.computer.org/
Brits: The British Computer Society
http://www.bcs.org.uk/
Aussies: The Australian Computer Society
http://www.acs.org.au/
etc etc.
How much does it cost to get a patent? Applying is only about £200 in the UK if you don't use a patent lawyer, thousands if you do.
I mean, If I'm likely to be sued by some company with a patent portfolio I want something I can use to sue back.
That doesn't sound too nasty, fairly conventional of him I'd say.
It's quite possible to set up file servers so that they execute commands on receipt of emails. You know, find a random xls file, change byte N from X to Y. If your sysadmin is also the DBA you wouldn't even be able to trust the data in your databases either, delete a row here, modify a number there.
The moral of the story is that if the person with the keys to your data is untrustworthy in the first place you'd better have someone very very good to replace them.
In business, loyalty has a dollar value. Mention that to your management at least once a year.
If you're firing a administrator you really have to go through the entire network they had access to and check every system for things like email responders, cron jobs, scripts. Ugh it's a huge task. It's really fairly simple to add a difficult to find backdoor to someones network.
Cos you can simply run the indexing under a less privileged user account and set up the filesystem permissions on your files to disallow other people from reading them, keep your own documents to yourself.
Wait. I bet you're running Windows XP with a FAT filesystem, aren't you.
Yeah, they are trying to push "lab certified diamonds" at the moment. That won't last as the production of manufactured (or cultured) diamonds ramps up and makes them all worthless other than a pretty stone.
Anyway, opals are far more attractive than diamonds.
No. Put it somewhere else.
If you want to learn how to scale unix systems management a good start is infrastructures.org. You don't have to follow their ideas slavishly but it'll get you into the right mindset, and that's what matters.
Keeping Unix boxes up to date is simple once you understand how, the effort required to manage 1000 machines is only marginally more than 100 which is only marginally more than required for 10.
You must have a distribution system for all of the existing applications you have on your machines. Just use that. Open Office and Firefox are no different from any other app.
Linux systems are simple. http://www.infrastructures.org/
Have terrible performance, it's why laptops are usually miles slower than a desktop system. Servers usually need the fastest hard disks you can find for them.
Get a slightly older spec Laptop. Specifically designed to be low power.
PowerPC is lower power than Intel which is lower power than AMD. Transmeta if you can find one. StrongARM is also low power.
Save money, don't buy more machines, balance the performance more evenly. Condor, Sun Grid Engine etc.
After typing all day every day for, hmm, decades now my finger joints get painful. I've found that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements work wonders. They take a couple of days to kick in but no pain. IIRC they act by improving the cushioning the joint better and allowing it to heal.
Medecine is already *able* to neutralise natural selection. We're not *willing* to do it and I don't think we ever will be.
No geeks or nerds should be eating anything with a GI of more than 50 over their keyboards.
etc etc
The majority of the human race lives in abject poverty with little access to science or medicine. AIDS, malaria etc are still killing thousands/millions of people.
Europe, America may be evolutionary dead ends but we are a tiny minority.
Extremists aren't a significant force in most PR systems. You simply arrange the size of the districts such that a reasonable percentage of the vote is required for seats.
e.g. in a 5 seat district, about 20% is required to secure a seat, a 10 seat district, about 10% is required to secure a seat. The Israelis have taken this to an extreme and made the whole country one big district with 120 seats meaning that less than 1% of the vote is required to gain a seat (they then put an artificial limit of 2% on this). This also means there are going to be lots of tiny parties. With PR, you just set the number of seats per district to approximately the number of political parties you want to appear. Any more than 5-7 starts getting silly.
Simply look at the types of people who are having lots of children and the types of people who are not having children. Then draw your own conclusions on the future direction of the species (and it isn't necessarily smarter/stronger).
Not only that, the political parties oversee the counting, first to make sure that it's fair and second to generate some statistical results for the wards & streets the votes are coming from.