Actually, my comment was to the hosting service that runs FreeBSD. I was waiting for cries of "why don't they run Linux... Its so much better.. blah blah blah "place uninformed opinion here about linux vs. FreeBSD here""
I'm now waiting 99.5% of the Slashdot croud to start complaining about "why don't they run linux??? Its so much better.. Oh wait.. My blinders fell off."
I think one of the main reasons why FreeBSD wasn't viewed as a great desktop OS is because in earlier versions (2.x and the early 3.x tree) the support for desktop related hardware (sound cards, video cards, multimedia, etc) was lackluster or non-existant. It might have been there, but the main focus for the FreeBSD project has been to make one of the best server platforms out there. Linux on the other hand, while being a good server, also makes a good desktop. There is much more support for cutting edge hardware in Linux because the software/driver developers have a much easier time getting their drivers added to the kernel or making a kernel patch.
Fastforward to the 4.x tree, and you'll find support for pretty much whatever you've got in your computer. There is also better support for PNP devices (read soundblaster Live! cards) and more video support. Plus, more X desktop environments are supported under FreeBSD now like KDE, Enlightenment and Gnome. Pack that on top of FreeBSD's ultra stable kernel, fast TCP stack and really sweet filesystem, and you've got one hell of a desktop OS or server platform.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the KISS train of thought (Keep it simple stupid...). I would think that the most simple solution is to keep all of your licenses together in a file cabinet or something. Or, even better, photocopy the page with the serial number and hologram on it, and tape it to the underside of the computer, or inside the computer case, THEN throw it in a file cabinet.
If you're really feeling daring, install Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, and write your own database application to have a searchable index of all of your licenses. Won't that WOW the M$ people that you're not using SQL Server. Oh.. And then throw all of the licenses in the file cabinet.:)
You're half right. The original issue was licenses. Then the poster said something about switching to Linux.
Yes, Linux is better than Windows. Personally, I'm a huge FreeBSD fan and I would rather use that over Linux. But, thats just me. If Linux floats your boat, then let it float.
However, the root of the point was the licenses. If the posted kept better records, he wouldn't have this problem, and this whole thread could have been avoided.
My question is, if this guy works for such a huge company, and they can't/don't keep track of their Windows licenses, what else are they screwing up?
A lot of posts on the forums here always point to "too bad we can't switch to Linux" or "We wouldn't have this problem with Linux". While I agree that Linux, or pretty much any version of Unix, is better than running M$ products, Linux is NOT ALWAYS the answer. In your case, your answer is to keep better records of your Windows licenses. I find it odd that if you're such a big company, that you don't have a site license for your workstations.
Picture putting Linux on one of your sales force's desk. They wouldn't know what to do with it. Linux (or in my case FreeBSD) is the answer for people like US. All of the techies, kernel hackers, coders and network admins that understand how to use Unix. You would spend more money retraining your people, and higher support costs running around answering questions, than you would spending to make your company M$ license compliant.
Get a site license and don't worry about it. You'll sleep better tonight.
I can see where you're coming from. Selling the devices would be easier if you could tell your clients that their toaster is directly accessable from their office or whatever. However, with the IPV4 shortage, it isn't going to happen.
Perhaps consider writing a slick web interface control station for your products. That way the end user can connect to the firewall or a webserver behind the firewall, through a tunnel, and control the devices. Always a possibility.
I've used both Rogers@Home, CGO@Home and Bell Sympatico HSE Edition. A quick rundown:
Bell: Totally sucked. However, I'm pretty far from the CO. What I didn't like was the excessive downtime and AccessMangler (Bell's PPPoE client). Some people swear by it. Those people are also right nextdoor to the local CO.
CGO@Home: Initally, they sucked too. Their connection before they got @Home was WAAAAY over subscribed and their support was terrible. Once they got into bed with the @Home people, things started to look up, but they pulled a bait and switch on their customers. It was ~2KBits/s down and 500KBits/s out with LANCity modems, but then came the Samsung modems and the 128KBit upload caps. They have since been removed ( 1 year later ). Now, they are a decent provider, but I don't live in their area anymore.
Rogers@Home: Aside from their outages (2 fibre cuts in the past month.. 6 days of total downtime) they are pretty fast. Anything on the @Home network is obviously fast, and speed at night is generally decent. The on paper speed of Rogers is 3Mbps down and 500Kbps out (speed in bits/s).
However, you need to keep a couple of things in mind when you compare these two types of connectivity. Aside from cable's bad rep for neighbourhood over crouding, it is generally faster on paper. What it REALLY boils down to is how fat their pipe is that connects their network to the rest of the world, and who they peer with in other areas. Rogers@Home peers with pretty much all of Toronto through Torix, so getting to TUCows is SCREAMING fast anytime of day or night. @Home must also peer with Microsoft's provider as I get very fast speeds when I need to get the latest service patch for my couple of NT Boxen. However, they do NOT peer with CRL (supplier of FreeBSD's bandwidth) and its generally slow most of the time.
Generally, the people with the biggest pipes and the fattest peering arrangements win.
Class C to every home? What would the average home owner do with a/24? There are many reasons why they WON'T allocatate a/24 to every house.
ARIN does not allow public addresses to be allocated for workstations. I'm sure that ARIN considers a toaster, TV, home security system, PDA, whatever to be a workstation and therefore doesn't need a public IP address
If I had that kind of connectivity to my house, I would be certain to run some kind of firewall software. Even the most novice of user can setup Internet Connection sharing on their WinME computer. Most/.'ers will opt to some kind of Unix platform I'm sure, but none the less, a firewall should/would (I hope) be in place thus allowing private IPs to be used
How many computers do you have in your house? Between myself, my 2 roommates (all 3 of us are Telecom students) and our landlord, there are only 13 computers in total. Even if we had a killer LAN party and had 14 of our closest friends over, with 2 computers each, thats still only 41 computers.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love a/24 to come bundled with my spankin' new 100mbps Inet connect, but I honestly can't see it happening. Most people could hardly justify a/29.
I have an Ultra 5 workstation at the ISP that I work for. Its a pretty slick little unit which has the addin PCI card.
For starters, the PCI card is an AMD K6-2-400 w/64mb of ram. Sun is now using Celeron processors on their PCI cards. The main system hard drive has a partition on it that acts as the storage for the PCI card (think VMWare here.. )
When you boot into Solaris, your WM is loaded as per normal. You can use the machine without even launching the PCI card. There is a program that spawns the PCI and whatever Windows operating system is installed on the partition. Windows is then run in whatever size window you want and it is 90% independent from the rest of the machine. When Windows crashes, it only crashes the PCI program, and the rest of your programs chug on as normal.
The one major setback is that you MUST run windows on the PCI addon board. You can not run another version of Unix, BEos etc. The reason behind this is because special drivers for the keyboard, mouse, hard drive and display are needed to drive the PCI card. You use the same KB, Mouse and display for both "computers".
To answer your question (finally) its pretty much like VMWare except that instead of emulating a PC, there is actually another one installed on a PCI card inside the desktop.
I purchased a bunch of CDs at a store in Toronto called Factory Direct. $30 for 100 74Min CD-Rs. The owner had a sign up with the government document posted and the tax highlighted. If memory serves it was only 16 cents. Funny thing is, the price of CDRs at CostCo hasn't changed at all.
Canada has also started taxing CDR media (for real this time) as of Jan 01/01. The tax isn't too bad, only $0.16 CAN per cd. I don't honestly see how this tax will help the recording artists. The loyal fans buy the cds and go see them in concerts. Radio stations play the music and the artists get money every time the song is played. Maybe I would be more sympathetic if concerts weren't so expensive ($135 + Ticketmaster service charges for the upcoming U2 show... but I doubt they get any of the tax money). I'm all for Canadian music, but I wonder how much of it the artists really see. The Canadian government REALLY loves their tax money.
Congrats on your recovery! I can't even begin to imagine how hard it must have been for you and your wife.
My question to you is this: How do you feel towards the driver? Do you have a great malice towards him? Would you do the same thing to him as he did to you so he could know first hand what you went through? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, do you forgive him? Do you realize that he made a terrible mistake by getting behind the wheel and driving drunk and that he will be punished by the law, which while it can't equal the physical pain that you've gone through, he will be locked away from society. Or, do you forgive him completely?
Slashdot Mirror
Way to to Linux. Just one more thign that you've ripped off from FreeBSD... Good job!
Actually, my comment was to the hosting service that runs FreeBSD. I was waiting for cries of "why don't they run Linux... Its so much better.. blah blah blah "place uninformed opinion here about linux vs. FreeBSD here""
I'm now waiting 99.5% of the Slashdot croud to start complaining about "why don't they run linux??? Its so much better.. Oh wait.. My blinders fell off."
Brad
I think one of the main reasons why FreeBSD wasn't viewed as a great desktop OS is because in earlier versions (2.x and the early 3.x tree) the support for desktop related hardware (sound cards, video cards, multimedia, etc) was lackluster or non-existant. It might have been there, but the main focus for the FreeBSD project has been to make one of the best server platforms out there. Linux on the other hand, while being a good server, also makes a good desktop. There is much more support for cutting edge hardware in Linux because the software/driver developers have a much easier time getting their drivers added to the kernel or making a kernel patch.
Fastforward to the 4.x tree, and you'll find support for pretty much whatever you've got in your computer. There is also better support for PNP devices (read soundblaster Live! cards) and more video support. Plus, more X desktop environments are supported under FreeBSD now like KDE, Enlightenment and Gnome. Pack that on top of FreeBSD's ultra stable kernel, fast TCP stack and really sweet filesystem, and you've got one hell of a desktop OS or server platform.
Brad
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the KISS train of thought (Keep it simple stupid...). I would think that the most simple solution is to keep all of your licenses together in a file cabinet or something. Or, even better, photocopy the page with the serial number and hologram on it, and tape it to the underside of the computer, or inside the computer case, THEN throw it in a file cabinet.
:)
If you're really feeling daring, install Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, and write your own database application to have a searchable index of all of your licenses. Won't that WOW the M$ people that you're not using SQL Server. Oh.. And then throw all of the licenses in the file cabinet.
Brad
Yeesh, you think the voice of reason would get a higher post score.. :)
Brad
You're half right. The original issue was licenses. Then the poster said something about switching to Linux.
Yes, Linux is better than Windows. Personally, I'm a huge FreeBSD fan and I would rather use that over Linux. But, thats just me. If Linux floats your boat, then let it float.
However, the root of the point was the licenses. If the posted kept better records, he wouldn't have this problem, and this whole thread could have been avoided.
My question is, if this guy works for such a huge company, and they can't/don't keep track of their Windows licenses, what else are they screwing up?
Brad
A lot of posts on the forums here always point to "too bad we can't switch to Linux" or "We wouldn't have this problem with Linux". While I agree that Linux, or pretty much any version of Unix, is better than running M$ products, Linux is NOT ALWAYS the answer. In your case, your answer is to keep better records of your Windows licenses. I find it odd that if you're such a big company, that you don't have a site license for your workstations.
Picture putting Linux on one of your sales force's desk. They wouldn't know what to do with it. Linux (or in my case FreeBSD) is the answer for people like US. All of the techies, kernel hackers, coders and network admins that understand how to use Unix. You would spend more money retraining your people, and higher support costs running around answering questions, than you would spending to make your company M$ license compliant.
Get a site license and don't worry about it. You'll sleep better tonight.
Brad
I can see where you're coming from. Selling the devices would be easier if you could tell your clients that their toaster is directly accessable from their office or whatever. However, with the IPV4 shortage, it isn't going to happen.
Perhaps consider writing a slick web interface control station for your products. That way the end user can connect to the firewall or a webserver behind the firewall, through a tunnel, and control the devices. Always a possibility.
Brad
I've used both Rogers@Home, CGO@Home and Bell Sympatico HSE Edition. A quick rundown:
Bell: Totally sucked. However, I'm pretty far from the CO. What I didn't like was the excessive downtime and AccessMangler (Bell's PPPoE client). Some people swear by it. Those people are also right nextdoor to the local CO.
CGO@Home: Initally, they sucked too. Their connection before they got @Home was WAAAAY over subscribed and their support was terrible. Once they got into bed with the @Home people, things started to look up, but they pulled a bait and switch on their customers. It was ~2KBits/s down and 500KBits/s out with LANCity modems, but then came the Samsung modems and the 128KBit upload caps. They have since been removed ( 1 year later ). Now, they are a decent provider, but I don't live in their area anymore.
Rogers@Home: Aside from their outages (2 fibre cuts in the past month.. 6 days of total downtime) they are pretty fast. Anything on the @Home network is obviously fast, and speed at night is generally decent. The on paper speed of Rogers is 3Mbps down and 500Kbps out (speed in bits/s).
However, you need to keep a couple of things in mind when you compare these two types of connectivity. Aside from cable's bad rep for neighbourhood over crouding, it is generally faster on paper. What it REALLY boils down to is how fat their pipe is that connects their network to the rest of the world, and who they peer with in other areas. Rogers@Home peers with pretty much all of Toronto through Torix, so getting to TUCows is SCREAMING fast anytime of day or night. @Home must also peer with Microsoft's provider as I get very fast speeds when I need to get the latest service patch for my couple of NT Boxen. However, they do NOT peer with CRL (supplier of FreeBSD's bandwidth) and its generally slow most of the time.
Generally, the people with the biggest pipes and the fattest peering arrangements win.
Brad
Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love a
My $0.02
Brad
I have an Ultra 5 workstation at the ISP that I work for. Its a pretty slick little unit which has the addin PCI card.
For starters, the PCI card is an AMD K6-2-400 w/64mb of ram. Sun is now using Celeron processors on their PCI cards. The main system hard drive has a partition on it that acts as the storage for the PCI card (think VMWare here.. )
When you boot into Solaris, your WM is loaded as per normal. You can use the machine without even launching the PCI card. There is a program that spawns the PCI and whatever Windows operating system is installed on the partition. Windows is then run in whatever size window you want and it is 90% independent from the rest of the machine. When Windows crashes, it only crashes the PCI program, and the rest of your programs chug on as normal.
The one major setback is that you MUST run windows on the PCI addon board. You can not run another version of Unix, BEos etc. The reason behind this is because special drivers for the keyboard, mouse, hard drive and display are needed to drive the PCI card. You use the same KB, Mouse and display for both "computers".
To answer your question (finally) its pretty much like VMWare except that instead of emulating a PC, there is actually another one installed on a PCI card inside the desktop.
2001-03-31 19:07:32
Or there abouts...
I purchased a bunch of CDs at a store in Toronto called Factory Direct. $30 for 100 74Min CD-Rs. The owner had a sign up with the government document posted and the tax highlighted. If memory serves it was only 16 cents. Funny thing is, the price of CDRs at CostCo hasn't changed at all.
Brad
Canada has also started taxing CDR media (for real this time) as of Jan 01/01. The tax isn't too bad, only $0.16 CAN per cd. I don't honestly see how this tax will help the recording artists. The loyal fans buy the cds and go see them in concerts. Radio stations play the music and the artists get money every time the song is played. Maybe I would be more sympathetic if concerts weren't so expensive ($135 + Ticketmaster service charges for the upcoming U2 show... but I doubt they get any of the tax money). I'm all for Canadian music, but I wonder how much of it the artists really see. The Canadian government REALLY loves their tax money.
Brad
Jason,
Congrats on your recovery! I can't even begin to imagine how hard it must have been for you and your wife.
My question to you is this: How do you feel towards the driver? Do you have a great malice towards him? Would you do the same thing to him as he did to you so he could know first hand what you went through? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, do you forgive him? Do you realize that he made a terrible mistake by getting behind the wheel and driving drunk and that he will be punished by the law, which while it can't equal the physical pain that you've gone through, he will be locked away from society. Or, do you forgive him completely?
All the best!
Brad