Take your task seriously. KPI (Key Performance Indexes) are a great way to prove your worth to the company. But instead of just concentrating on the obvious, how fast is service X, what is the service level/uptime on service Y etc try to create another metric that captures the other side of the coin. What happens if you fail? You now have an opportunity to provide data on how important your contribution to the company is - sure, as others have mentioned, you aren't making teapots or cars but if you fail - how many teapots or cars aren't made? How much does the company loose? What is the probability of failure currently and how could you improve it? These are tough things to figure out but if you can - the beancounters will love you.
For instance, begin from just simply calculating the average income per hour per user, this is the absolute minimum the company looses if they are unable to work. How long will they be without computer services if something catastrophic happens, do you have plans for this catastrophic event? How probably is the event?
Begin from there and tell a story about how you are a productive part of the company by enabling them to do their job.
Jonathan Ive, vice President of Industrial Design at Apple is also pretty much untouchable considering he designed pretty much every high-selling item Apple has going these days.
OS X has Inkwell built in, the Legendary handwriting-recognition system known from the Apple Newtons so if he has a working digitizer it's no problem at all.
uhm... There are quite alot of cars that are "contains no user-serviceable parts" - Audi A2 comes into mind - You can't open the hood without a proprietary key. But it's not like there is alot in a modern car that joe sixpack can poke around with to their advantage.
I don't know about the windows part im afraid but for Linux there is pam_usb that works with all XDM/GDM/KDM and other PAM aware login and autentication programs. Its a simple public/private key system with the private key residing on a USB-memory.
Ars Technica, known for alot of good articles often referred to on slashdot and other sites, have a very active forum which includes NT, Win2K and XP Technical Mojo. From my limited knowledge it seems like the place you are looking for.
Try VideoLAN. Superior multiplatform support. They have two applications, VLS - Video Lan Server and VLC, Video Lan Client. Very nice and flexible.
Open source and everything too:).
Re:Privacy implications are nill
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I am more worried about the fact that small amounts of DNA-strands can be left everywhere by yourself and brought to the crime-scene by accident or purpose.
I mean you might hug a chick that goes away and commits suicide and then all the sudden some of your hair is found on her coat.. alright that might not be that bad but imagine a devious mind bringing your dna and being careful not to spread his on the crime-scene. All the sudden you might be in the spotlights and police say they are 100% sure its your DNA.
Use of DNA and other technology is ok by me to tie a suspect to a scene but not find the suspect. neither is broad searches through a DNA-database (same as trying to find the suspect imho)
I recently arranged for a server for our student organization (computer engineers mostly) because the university unices were quite slow and small harddrives.
We arent that many users but then again several of us are power-users thus using more cycles and RAM than your intended users.
Our budget was way less than yours but im quite happy with what we got: P4 2400MHz/533 1GB RAM 3x80GB 7200RPM IDE-drives (RAID-1 for two of them, third is a scratch drive for projects - maybe upgraded to RAID-5 soon) and a nice Antec case that should be sufficient in the future too (and the PSU is quite reliable)
its connected at 100mbps to the university network.
Yes - its single CPU but about the fastest we had money for, RAM was important since we do alot of X11-forwarding aswell as ssh-connections with all kinds of stuff running in the background. www with dynamic pages and databases etc (nothing big yet but its growing).
currently its been in "production usage" for alittle over 100 days and working great (running a modified version of RH 7.3). The hardware isnt server grade but Intel motherboard and Kingston RAM along with a shitload of fans should make it stable enough for the time being. Its been fast enough.
I dont think you need to be afraid of not enough power - personally i'd rather use the leftover money for backup (which we dont have currently, and yes - i keep living in fear though i backup the system itself and keep reminding users that their stuff IS NOT BACKED UP) and/or future upgrades(or possible hw-breakdown) depending on how the money is supposed to be spent. I'd also go ahead and note that harddrive speed wont be an issue as long as your connection speed is 100mbps or less, very few tasks need fast harddrives on a server of this kind.
Hope that helps, my email is in my profile is you want to ask more.
umm.. yeah. last time i checked Egypt wasnt really known for its high broadband penetration for the masses... Which means that its a very small "elite" of people that are able to download it - thus not making a huge difference since these people are probably considered intellectuals and have been in contact with all kinds of material that might not be good for the "public".
Maybe its largely unused because servers etc which are the biggest use of "the industry" aswell as workstations are supposed to be physically secure anyways and when in use the crypto-filesystems would be running unencrypted.
Crypted filesystems have their uses but they arent as many as one would imagine. Laptops for instance should have it by default. That should be remedied. But as long as there arent crypto offloading chipsets by default it wont be widely used because of fear to loose speed. Also its not easy enough to use yet..
I'm afraid that there might not be much of these around that works perfectly and transparently. One of the reasons is probably that Windows doesnt have a standard and well working loopback device mount function that is modular (can add own read/write-modules) like for instance OS X and Linux has. Finding or making some of these existing work on OS X and Linux is probably feasible (not sure if they exist) but Windows is a problem. It's not like Microsoft lets people know how to code filesystems to Windows - otherwise im sure we'd see atleast ext2fs support in Windows.
But for a temporary solution i present BCrypt - powerful multiplatform file encryption tool. Its also small and light but uses a 448bit Blowfish-encryption. You can carry the different version of the binary on your pendrive and encrypt/decrypt on virtually any platform. Of course it just encrypts files so you need to add zip or something for multiple files - yes its a bitch if there is alot of them but its the best suggestion i have.
So how many has any of these UPSes? I know me and my friend have (probably, hasnt checked my serial yet but its very probably one of them). That's 2;).
Yeah, Last time i've heard or noticed any problems with SMS was one christmas when the SMS-gateways got totally hammered and alot of SMS's were lost and/or delayed - this was many years ago btw... The phone company admitted that they didnt have enough server capacity and some other technical reasons and decided that all the text-messages that were sent during christmas weren't going to be charged for.
Other than that i find SMS quite useful and reliable enough.
If you go to Egypt you to see the pyramids of Giza, then dont forget the huge museum they have. Oh and the Cairo Zoo is... different - if youre a softie you'll think they are being cruel. But atleast the tour guide opens the terrarium to the snakes and lets you hold poisonous snakes:D
Sakkara is actually more intresting than Giza when it comes to history imho - though the Pyramids in Giza are abit larger and then there is the Sphinx.
Yeah its in Peenemünde in the former eastern Germany. Its a really intresting place to visit aswell - got alot of technology and historical stuff from German WWII science-projects.
so if you use console only - what time-management application might you use? just wondering if there is some that i might've missed and should look into. i think laptops have their part to play and pda's their..
Slashdot Mirror
I'm planning on getting one of these:
http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/BAREBONE_SERVERS.html
5 drive-bays, Dual-core Atom, 2GB RAM, nice and silent etc.
Take your task seriously. KPI (Key Performance Indexes) are a great way to prove your worth to the company. But instead of just concentrating on the obvious, how fast is service X, what is the service level/uptime on service Y etc try to create another metric that captures the other side of the coin. What happens if you fail? You now have an opportunity to provide data on how important your contribution to the company is - sure, as others have mentioned, you aren't making teapots or cars but if you fail - how many teapots or cars aren't made? How much does the company loose? What is the probability of failure currently and how could you improve it? These are tough things to figure out but if you can - the beancounters will love you.
For instance, begin from just simply calculating the average income per hour per user, this is the absolute minimum the company looses if they are unable to work. How long will they be without computer services if something catastrophic happens, do you have plans for this catastrophic event? How probably is the event?
Begin from there and tell a story about how you are a productive part of the company by enabling them to do their job.
Jonathan Ive, vice President of Industrial Design at Apple is also pretty much untouchable considering he designed pretty much every high-selling item Apple has going these days.
OS X has Inkwell built in, the Legendary handwriting-recognition system known from the Apple Newtons so if he has a working digitizer it's no problem at all.
uhm... There are quite alot of cars that are "contains no user-serviceable parts" - Audi A2 comes into mind - You can't open the hood without a proprietary key. But it's not like there is alot in a modern car that joe sixpack can poke around with to their advantage.
I don't know about the windows part im afraid but for Linux there is pam_usb that works with all XDM/GDM/KDM and other PAM aware login and autentication programs. Its a simple public/private key system with the private key residing on a USB-memory.
WTF? You're running Gentoo for datacenter-applications?
The Register article about PowerPC 970FX. Seems plausible to me atleast.
Ars Technica, known for alot of good articles often referred to on slashdot and other sites, have a very active forum which includes NT, Win2K and XP Technical Mojo. From my limited knowledge it seems like the place you are looking for.
Open source and everything too :).
I am more worried about the fact that small amounts of DNA-strands can be left everywhere by yourself and brought to the crime-scene by accident or purpose.
I mean you might hug a chick that goes away and commits suicide and then all the sudden some of your hair is found on her coat.. alright that might not be that bad but imagine a devious mind bringing your dna and being careful not to spread his on the crime-scene. All the sudden you might be in the spotlights and police say they are 100% sure its your DNA.
Use of DNA and other technology is ok by me to tie a suspect to a scene but not find the suspect. neither is broad searches through a DNA-database (same as trying to find the suspect imho)
I recently arranged for a server for our student organization (computer engineers mostly) because the university unices were quite slow and small harddrives.
We arent that many users but then again several of us are power-users thus using more cycles and RAM than your intended users.
Our budget was way less than yours but im quite happy with what we got:
P4 2400MHz/533
1GB RAM
3x80GB 7200RPM IDE-drives (RAID-1 for two of them, third is a scratch drive for projects - maybe upgraded to RAID-5 soon)
and a nice Antec case that should be sufficient in the future too (and the PSU is quite reliable)
its connected at 100mbps to the university network.
Yes - its single CPU but about the fastest we had money for, RAM was important since we do alot of X11-forwarding aswell as ssh-connections with all kinds of stuff running in the background. www with dynamic pages and databases etc (nothing big yet but its growing).
currently its been in "production usage" for alittle over 100 days and working great (running a modified version of RH 7.3). The hardware isnt server grade but Intel motherboard and Kingston RAM along with a shitload of fans should make it stable enough for the time being. Its been fast enough.
I dont think you need to be afraid of not enough power - personally i'd rather use the leftover money for backup (which we dont have currently, and yes - i keep living in fear though i backup the system itself and keep reminding users that their stuff IS NOT BACKED UP) and/or future upgrades(or possible hw-breakdown) depending on how the money is supposed to be spent.
I'd also go ahead and note that harddrive speed wont be an issue as long as your connection speed is 100mbps or less, very few tasks need fast harddrives on a server of this kind.
Hope that helps, my email is in my profile is you want to ask more.
umm.. yeah. last time i checked Egypt wasnt really known for its high broadband penetration for the masses... Which means that its a very small "elite" of people that are able to download it - thus not making a huge difference since these people are probably considered intellectuals and have been in contact with all kinds of material that might not be good for the "public".
Sweet! Thanks for the link. Got AC2 in paperback but more books are always nice! now to find a decent laser...
Maybe its largely unused because servers etc which are the biggest use of "the industry" aswell as workstations are supposed to be physically secure anyways and when in use the crypto-filesystems would be running unencrypted.
Crypted filesystems have their uses but they arent as many as one would imagine. Laptops for instance should have it by default. That should be remedied. But as long as there arent crypto offloading chipsets by default it wont be widely used because of fear to loose speed. Also its not easy enough to use yet..
I'm afraid that there might not be much of these around that works perfectly and transparently. One of the reasons is probably that Windows doesnt have a standard and well working loopback device mount function that is modular (can add own read/write-modules) like for instance OS X and Linux has. Finding or making some of these existing work on OS X and Linux is probably feasible (not sure if they exist) but Windows is a problem. It's not like Microsoft lets people know how to code filesystems to Windows - otherwise im sure we'd see atleast ext2fs support in Windows.
But for a temporary solution i present BCrypt - powerful multiplatform file encryption tool. Its also small and light but uses a 448bit Blowfish-encryption. You can carry the different version of the binary on your pendrive and encrypt/decrypt on virtually any platform. Of course it just encrypts files so you need to add zip or something for multiple files - yes its a bitch if there is alot of them but its the best suggestion i have.
So how much is one official LOC? :)
Dont even need a crossover on most Gigabit NIC's. Intels Pro/1000 cards all have Auto-detect MDI-X.
Shouldnt there be accessibility functions with an onscreen keyboard? use that and your keystrokes wont be seen atleast via the keyboard...
So how many has any of these UPSes? I know me and my friend have (probably, hasnt checked my serial yet but its very probably one of them). That's 2 ;).
Yeah, Last time i've heard or noticed any problems with SMS was one christmas when the SMS-gateways got totally hammered and alot of SMS's were lost and/or delayed - this was many years ago btw... The phone company admitted that they didnt have enough server capacity and some other technical reasons and decided that all the text-messages that were sent during christmas weren't going to be charged for.
Other than that i find SMS quite useful and reliable enough.
Just because you dont have money doesnt mean others shouldnt have or shouldnt spend it on what they find intresting.
If you go to Egypt you to see the pyramids of Giza, then dont forget the huge museum they have. Oh and the Cairo Zoo is... different - if youre a softie you'll think they are being cruel. But atleast the tour guide opens the terrarium to the snakes and lets you hold poisonous snakes
Sakkara is actually more intresting than Giza when it comes to history imho - though the Pyramids in Giza are abit larger and then there is the Sphinx.
Yeah its in Peenemünde in the former eastern Germany. Its a really intresting place to visit aswell - got alot of technology and historical stuff from German WWII science-projects.
so if you use console only - what time-management application might you use? just wondering if there is some that i might've missed and should look into. i think laptops have their part to play and pda's their..