Yup, you don't need a router on a Fios line.:) Well, as long as they're providing you static IP's, or you only want one machine (where it's then silly to put in a switch).
For the network in the article/question, I would put a Linux box directly on the uplink, and a switch (like the 2924) for the LAN. But hey, each network is different.:)
It could be hit and miss. Just because fossil evidence got here doesn't mean anything living made the trip. But, it does open up a lot of questions. If the Mars microbes didn't make it, that doesn't mean something else didn't. We'll figure it out in a few centuries, if/when we get some decent samples from other places that couldn't have originated here. We're an awful long away from retrieving samples from outside of this solar system.
Yup, that's the upgrade path. To get 2 or more PCIe ports, you'll have to go with a more modern machine that may not be found in the garage.:)
I know for a fact that a pair of 100baseTX NIC's can pass 180Mb/s, but where I was doing that, it was doing web traffic, so I was running out of memory at that point, not a PCI bus problem. We were serving up lots of small images and HTML files.
The way things keep growing, it will be a problem in a decade or so. But, we'll have much better "old" machines laying around too. I started building home grown NAT boxes with old 486's, when 1Mb/s was hard to come by. Now, most of us have tossed any 486's we had in the garbage.
That's always good.:) As a residential user, it's fun and games to play over the contracted speed. My friend runs some servers, so they stay with a good margin to not exceed their available bandwidth. Customers get pissy when their stuff is slow.:) But, it's been nice when I needed to get something big quick, it comes in quick. I get annoyed on the cablemodems, where their advertised speed is less than what they really get, and it can take forever to get what I wanted. I know some people will argue that, but it's pretty common on the huge variety of providers I've been on. I was very happy on my 5/15 residential Fios line.:) I built custom Linux ISO's and had to get them up to the servers fairly frequently, so I ever have to say "you'll get it in a couple hours".:)
I second your opinion on using a PC. He may still run into a PPS rate limitation with the router though. It depends on how they bring the connection in. A friend of mine has a business FIOS line (20Mb/20Mb) and a/25 of static IP's, and I specified at install time that they had to bring it in by CAT5. They'll either install CAT5 or coax. I yanked their router off as soon as they finished the install, and put a Catalyst 2924 on. The speed was ok (but not great) with their router. It was exactly as advertised through the 2924.
For a NAT environment, a decent PC with Linux and iptables would be fine. It would obviously need decent interfaces (nope, that old 10baseT card won't do it), but it doesn't need lots of memory or even CPU power. A handy spare 1Ghz machine with 256Mb RAM is overkill, but easily available in most of our homes.:) The best part is, it's free. No need to waste money on new equipment, if you already have it sitting in your garage gathering dust.
I don't recommend exceeding 80% capacity on the interfaces. If they do offer 100Mb/s, it's time to upgrade to GigE interfaces. Again, that's pretty easy to do these days. You'll start running into problems at the PCI bus after a while, but that's over 100Mb/s.
Even in testing the 20Mb/s connection a couple years ago, I just started downloading ISO's. From any one source, I ran into their limitations, so I pulled one copy from a bunch of mirrors, and was able to saturate the connection to flatline at 28Mb/s (wheee). Their advertising was wrong, but I won't complain when they're wrong in my favor.
I didn't replace my servers every year. I did cycle them down to lower priority uses though.:) We had some machines over 5 years old that were doing simpler lower priority tasks. There's no need to throw the equipment away every year, if you could recycle it to another use. Well, unless you have a huge budget, and like throwing money away. I always preferred to waste my budget on better stuff.
I have an RV that uses "Group 8D" batteries. They're 12V, 1200Ah. Unfortunately for this discussion, they're also about 150 pounds, and over 4u tall.
The batteries that I saw in the Google machines were pretty small. They were probably enough, as the GP said, to keep the machine long enough to shut it down safely. I suppose they may be enough to provide power until the generators kick on, but that wouldn't leave a lot of margin for error.
I assume Facebook is distributed through multiple datacenters, so they only need to worry about one site going down to a safe state. For others, including Slashdot, if the site loses power and they don't get the generators up in time, the web site will be down. It also doesn't address the problem of power for switching and routing equipment. Sure your servers are up, but if your switches are down, then you're still dead in the water.
I've seen several C&D's (Cease and Desist) in my time. Most were for copyrighted photos, where someone had copied them without permission and used them. Depending on the offense and the usage, they were treated from removing the offending pictures, to removing the whole site. The whole site treatment was only if (and only if) they constituted the entire site. The customer was always notified, which kept everyone out of legal trouble.
As much as we may not like the topic, and have a disregard for the multibillion dollar corp, it's their software, and it was being provided illegally. The C&D was appropriate, and it was handled appropriately. Regardless if it's a guy writing software out of his house and every sale counts towards paying his bills, or one of the biggest companies in the world, it's really not right to just steal their stuff. Obviously it wasn't stolen by cryptome, nor did they turn a profit from providing the software. That's probably what protected them against a very nasty lawsuit.
I've seen a few in the last few days. Since Slashdot doesn't delete any posts (yet), it's a golden place for them to be. Those of us reading at -1 see them, but obviously we won't buy from them. It'll should (I believe) help their pagerank though, which hurts everyone else.
I ran into this at a computer store I worked at a long time ago.
Some of the genuine Intel CPU's that we would install would be very unstable at their rated speed. We were specifically instructed to run the ones that would at their rated speed, and the remainder we would install in machines advertised as slower. For example a 166Mhz processor would be flaky, so we'd set it as 133Mhz, and it would be fine. So we'd sell the machine as a 133. Most end users never pulled the heatsink off, so they never knew.
I didn't have any real evidence to say that they were counterfeit chips, but it would seem to fit the evidence. Sanding and restamping chips was pretty easy with the right equipment. For all I knew, they could have all been 100Mhz chips that overclocked to 133Mhz fine, but simply weren't stable at 166Mhz.
I'm using those numbers as examples. It's been years, and I don't remember exactly which ones were being installed, other than they were Intel chips, and it was around the time that 133Mhz was very common to install.
It's a shame they don't indicate *WHAT* chips were counterfeit. A few manufacturer names were mentioned in conjunction to the investigation, but it doesn't say that their equipment was actually involved, or if they just gave expert advice.
At one place I worked years ago, we used pagers. As cell phones became more popular, we stared switching over to them. Every once in a while, we'd test to see which ones worked better. Text messages emailed to the phones were usually faster than the alphanumeric pagers. In time, we ditched the pagers entirely, since they were slower to receive, and we felt silly carrying around too many devices.
For completeness of coverage, the messages were sent to 5 different people via two methods each. Usually it was email and phone. If there was an emergency, and no admins checked in, the phone calls started going out. Most events were handled in 5 minutes, even if the primary person was unavailable. That wasn't bad considering not everything happened during normal working hours. Actually, most emergencies didn't happen during normal working hours. That would have made them too easy.:)
Yup. It's pretty easy to disappear. Don't go out where you'll be seen. Give traces where you aren't.
You know, it's not very hard to send a trusted friend your credit card and cell phone, and tell him "Use the card every few days to pull out $40, and deposit the cash once a month at a different branch.. Call your girlfriend/house/friend from my cell every few days just to chat."
Now go camp out at another friends place, where you won't be expected. It's really not that hard to disappear for a month at a friends house. TV, internet connection, and they bring you food and other necessities that you pay them for in cash.
If the heat is on, hoof it, catch the first morning city bus to a used car dealership. Buy a car with cash, and drive on the temp tag for a month. The more common the car, the better. Buy gas and food with cash. Go across the Canadian border in an obscure location (there are plenty of them). Trade the car to a sea going fisherman for passage to somewhere else. Greenland... Iceland... Europe. If you're slick about it, you can be sitting in Germany, drinking down good German beer, and laughing about the fact that they're still checking for you in Los Angeles, where you bought the car, or Chicago where your friend is using your credit card and cell phone.
Pick up day labor jobs. Maybe the fishermen will let you stay on board for a month in exchange for a cot to sleep on, and food to eat.
Is email really that important? Read it on your own server somewhere with pine over an SSH connection 4 steps away in distant lands. (i.e., sitting in Germany, shell into Russia, to Canada, and then to your box. Keep the neon signs saying "I'm here" flying in all the wrong places.
And no, you wouldn't guess where I'm sitting right now.:)
Well, the whole thing is speculation anyways, so it really doesn't matter.
Plenty of companies sell or give away loss leaders. *IF* they did it, it could be used to get their product to market. They may give away the free version, with an upgrade path to a better version. They may give away the free version with pay features such as requiring a 2 year 3G contract, or pay to use the Google cloud services. Really, even without the advertising, it would be worth the money if they charged $10/mo for using their storage. The prices mentioned were retail prices. Just because something costs $200 in the store doesn't mean it costs the manufacturer $200. Usually it costs an awful lot less.
Even the folks saying that they'd install whatever alternative OS on it, that would still be a minority, and they would make their money on the majority of the users.
I doubt we'll see the Google branded free netbook anytime soon, but hey, it could happen. Or folks will continue to speculate about it.:)
Europe and Japan have a couple extra channels for Wifi that the US doesn't have. That shouldn't be an issue though.
You're right on the power supply. Just pick up an international adapter kit and you'd be good to go. Most modern electronics are 120-240 50-60Hz.
I've only ever been asked to turn my laptop on once, and that was flying to Europe. Of course I had just run the battery out on the first flight, so I told the customs agent "well, if I can plug it in, I'll turn it on." He was fine with that. I was willing to turn it on, but he didn't make me. They were interviewing everyone on the way to the plane which was a bit odd. He chitchatted with me for 20 minutes, but since we were talking in the jetway, the plane wasn't leaving without me. He was familiar with the company I worked for, so he was asking questions about the public figures on our web site out of personal curiosity.:) It was the one time the conversation was comfortable, and had no hints of needing anal lube.
I know it's a joke, but you did hit one of my recommendations. I do recommend Xanax for long flights.:) Given the choice of sitting there bored out of my skull for hours on end, or sleeping through the flight, I'd rather sleep and wake up on the far side. Talk to your doc, get one for each way, and you should wake up in time refreshed for the 12 hours of "where's my luggage?".:)
I had a tablet computer, that did pretty much the same thing.
I can't exactly have a laptop in my lap in the drivers seat of my car, even when I'm stopped.
I could drive up to a place with free WiFi, turn the wheel 180 degrees (while stopped, obviously), and then the tablet fit perfectly in the steering wheel so I could type.:) I see the logic for it. I also see that as something to buy, it's stupid.:)
I've used Echogent's EchoVNC. The Windows server is easy to use. The Linux one isn't quite as easy unfortunately. Pretty much set up a server somewhere public, and then both ends (me and the customer) can be behind most firewalls and get connected quickly. I don't know what feature differences are between their free trial and their pay version are, but if folks are really interested, they'll find out.
The client lets you encode the username, password, and server right into it. For the end user, I send them to a web page and tell them to click a link. They download it and run it. It doesn't install anything, so it's real quick to get going. For me, I have the admin client installed on my PC, so I fire it up, and watch for that client to connect. Once they're connected, I start working.
When I'm done, I close the client on their side, which of course disconnects me. It never starts again, unless they tell it to. It's nice, clean, and doesn't pollute their machine with wasted crap. They can delete the executable from their machine when they're done. No uninstall necessary.
Even as simple as it is for the client (go to this site, click the link, run it, click ok), some people still have problems. "What do I run", or "Where did it download to". Frequently they'll ask for the password, which I tell them it's already set. For most people, it's 30 seconds to get me on. For some it can take a couple minutes, especially when they don't understand me saying "Open a browser and go to....". It all depends on your end user.
Needless to say, if the connection is bad enough, it's going to be pathetically slow. I was able to get onto a machine to traceroute from it, since the customer couldn't spell "tracert". It took a while, but I got enough information and told them what to say to their provider when they called.
The only real problem I've run into is with Vista and it UAC. When it pops up, it kicks me off. If I'm doing something that runs into that, I have to ask them to click "allow", and then I reconnect. Since I'm only on client machines to fix problems, it's not appropriate for me to disable UAC.
The cats have you convinced of that... Just wait, the cat apocalypse will be upon us soon. They have us all believing 2012 is all about galactic alignment, earthquakes, tidal waves, or comets. The truth? The cats are going to kill off most of the humans, and enslave the rest of us!
Your shoe arranging shepherds won't be able to save you.
Inefficient code will do that. Why do we need 2Ghz+ just to make a graphic display to show web pages? Because if they can make the code bloated, they will. Hell, if I had a project where they said "Go ahead and use as many processors as you'd like", and I knew the number was over 100,000, I'd do it just to say that I did.
Cats are smart. I'd suspect they could do it on 4 processors. On the other hand, your average dog could use one processor, and only utilize it 10%.
What does a dog do? Eat, shit, piss on the floor, and bark for no apparent reason. Then the slightly smarter ones will chase down squirrels. I had a good dumb dog. He'd bark at anything. The damned squirrels were smarter than him though. He was good encouragement for people not to want to break in. He wouldn't start barking until you were about 3' from the front door, and then he sounded vicious. I had friends back away, and call me to let me know they were outside. They wouldn't get close enough to ring the doorbell.:)
They're not ignoring you. They are conditioning you to only act when they request it.:) I woke up this morning with a cat on my bed, staring me in the face, mewing at me. It wanted something. I think it was "pat me now." Otherwise it is in human conditioning mode, telling me to leave it alone.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, you don't need a router on a Fios line. :) Well, as long as they're providing you static IP's, or you only want one machine (where it's then silly to put in a switch).
For the network in the article/question, I would put a Linux box directly on the uplink, and a switch (like the 2924) for the LAN. But hey, each network is different. :)
It could be hit and miss. Just because fossil evidence got here doesn't mean anything living made the trip. But, it does open up a lot of questions. If the Mars microbes didn't make it, that doesn't mean something else didn't. We'll figure it out in a few centuries, if/when we get some decent samples from other places that couldn't have originated here. We're an awful long away from retrieving samples from outside of this solar system.
Yup, that's the upgrade path. To get 2 or more PCIe ports, you'll have to go with a more modern machine that may not be found in the garage. :)
I know for a fact that a pair of 100baseTX NIC's can pass 180Mb/s, but where I was doing that, it was doing web traffic, so I was running out of memory at that point, not a PCI bus problem. We were serving up lots of small images and HTML files.
The way things keep growing, it will be a problem in a decade or so. But, we'll have much better "old" machines laying around too. I started building home grown NAT boxes with old 486's, when 1Mb/s was hard to come by. Now, most of us have tossed any 486's we had in the garbage.
That's always good. :) As a residential user, it's fun and games to play over the contracted speed. My friend runs some servers, so they stay with a good margin to not exceed their available bandwidth. Customers get pissy when their stuff is slow. :) But, it's been nice when I needed to get something big quick, it comes in quick. I get annoyed on the cablemodems, where their advertised speed is less than what they really get, and it can take forever to get what I wanted. I know some people will argue that, but it's pretty common on the huge variety of providers I've been on. I was very happy on my 5/15 residential Fios line. :) I built custom Linux ISO's and had to get them up to the servers fairly frequently, so I ever have to say "you'll get it in a couple hours". :)
I second your opinion on using a PC. He may still run into a PPS rate limitation with the router though. It depends on how they bring the connection in. A friend of mine has a business FIOS line (20Mb/20Mb) and a /25 of static IP's, and I specified at install time that they had to bring it in by CAT5. They'll either install CAT5 or coax. I yanked their router off as soon as they finished the install, and put a Catalyst 2924 on. The speed was ok (but not great) with their router. It was exactly as advertised through the 2924.
For a NAT environment, a decent PC with Linux and iptables would be fine. It would obviously need decent interfaces (nope, that old 10baseT card won't do it), but it doesn't need lots of memory or even CPU power. A handy spare 1Ghz machine with 256Mb RAM is overkill, but easily available in most of our homes. :) The best part is, it's free. No need to waste money on new equipment, if you already have it sitting in your garage gathering dust.
I don't recommend exceeding 80% capacity on the interfaces. If they do offer 100Mb/s, it's time to upgrade to GigE interfaces. Again, that's pretty easy to do these days. You'll start running into problems at the PCI bus after a while, but that's over 100Mb/s.
Even in testing the 20Mb/s connection a couple years ago, I just started downloading ISO's. From any one source, I ran into their limitations, so I pulled one copy from a bunch of mirrors, and was able to saturate the connection to flatline at 28Mb/s (wheee). Their advertising was wrong, but I won't complain when they're wrong in my favor.
I didn't replace my servers every year. I did cycle them down to lower priority uses though. :) We had some machines over 5 years old that were doing simpler lower priority tasks. There's no need to throw the equipment away every year, if you could recycle it to another use. Well, unless you have a huge budget, and like throwing money away. I always preferred to waste my budget on better stuff.
That's a great answer. :)
I have an RV that uses "Group 8D" batteries. They're 12V, 1200Ah. Unfortunately for this discussion, they're also about 150 pounds, and over 4u tall.
The batteries that I saw in the Google machines were pretty small. They were probably enough, as the GP said, to keep the machine long enough to shut it down safely. I suppose they may be enough to provide power until the generators kick on, but that wouldn't leave a lot of margin for error.
I assume Facebook is distributed through multiple datacenters, so they only need to worry about one site going down to a safe state. For others, including Slashdot, if the site loses power and they don't get the generators up in time, the web site will be down. It also doesn't address the problem of power for switching and routing equipment. Sure your servers are up, but if your switches are down, then you're still dead in the water.
Check back in 3 years and 1 month. :)
I've seen several C&D's (Cease and Desist) in my time. Most were for copyrighted photos, where someone had copied them without permission and used them. Depending on the offense and the usage, they were treated from removing the offending pictures, to removing the whole site. The whole site treatment was only if (and only if) they constituted the entire site. The customer was always notified, which kept everyone out of legal trouble.
As much as we may not like the topic, and have a disregard for the multibillion dollar corp, it's their software, and it was being provided illegally. The C&D was appropriate, and it was handled appropriately. Regardless if it's a guy writing software out of his house and every sale counts towards paying his bills, or one of the biggest companies in the world, it's really not right to just steal their stuff. Obviously it wasn't stolen by cryptome, nor did they turn a profit from providing the software. That's probably what protected them against a very nasty lawsuit.
That's why most people are going to grab it.
1) They don't want you to have it.
2) They are making a big deal about it.
3) (the lesser reason) To see what MS is giving up to LEO.
Check the file contents. The only thing in the zip file is the takedown notice.
I've seen a few in the last few days. Since Slashdot doesn't delete any posts (yet), it's a golden place for them to be. Those of us reading at -1 see them, but obviously we won't buy from them. It'll should (I believe) help their pagerank though, which hurts everyone else.
I stopped reading comic books when I was 10 years old.
"See Bobby" :)
"See Bobby on TV"
"See Bobby babble nonsense"
I ran into this at a computer store I worked at a long time ago.
Some of the genuine Intel CPU's that we would install would be very unstable at their rated speed. We were specifically instructed to run the ones that would at their rated speed, and the remainder we would install in machines advertised as slower. For example a 166Mhz processor would be flaky, so we'd set it as 133Mhz, and it would be fine. So we'd sell the machine as a 133. Most end users never pulled the heatsink off, so they never knew.
I didn't have any real evidence to say that they were counterfeit chips, but it would seem to fit the evidence. Sanding and restamping chips was pretty easy with the right equipment. For all I knew, they could have all been 100Mhz chips that overclocked to 133Mhz fine, but simply weren't stable at 166Mhz.
I'm using those numbers as examples. It's been years, and I don't remember exactly which ones were being installed, other than they were Intel chips, and it was around the time that 133Mhz was very common to install.
It's a shame they don't indicate *WHAT* chips were counterfeit. A few manufacturer names were mentioned in conjunction to the investigation, but it doesn't say that their equipment was actually involved, or if they just gave expert advice.
At one place I worked years ago, we used pagers. As cell phones became more popular, we stared switching over to them. Every once in a while, we'd test to see which ones worked better. Text messages emailed to the phones were usually faster than the alphanumeric pagers. In time, we ditched the pagers entirely, since they were slower to receive, and we felt silly carrying around too many devices.
For completeness of coverage, the messages were sent to 5 different people via two methods each. Usually it was email and phone. If there was an emergency, and no admins checked in, the phone calls started going out. Most events were handled in 5 minutes, even if the primary person was unavailable. That wasn't bad considering not everything happened during normal working hours. Actually, most emergencies didn't happen during normal working hours. That would have made them too easy. :)
Yup. It's pretty easy to disappear. Don't go out where you'll be seen. Give traces where you aren't.
You know, it's not very hard to send a trusted friend your credit card and cell phone, and tell him "Use the card every few days to pull out $40, and deposit the cash once a month at a different branch.. Call your girlfriend/house/friend from my cell every few days just to chat."
Now go camp out at another friends place, where you won't be expected. It's really not that hard to disappear for a month at a friends house. TV, internet connection, and they bring you food and other necessities that you pay them for in cash.
If the heat is on, hoof it, catch the first morning city bus to a used car dealership. Buy a car with cash, and drive on the temp tag for a month. The more common the car, the better. Buy gas and food with cash. Go across the Canadian border in an obscure location (there are plenty of them). Trade the car to a sea going fisherman for passage to somewhere else. Greenland ... Iceland ... Europe. If you're slick about it, you can be sitting in Germany, drinking down good German beer, and laughing about the fact that they're still checking for you in Los Angeles, where you bought the car, or Chicago where your friend is using your credit card and cell phone.
Pick up day labor jobs. Maybe the fishermen will let you stay on board for a month in exchange for a cot to sleep on, and food to eat.
Is email really that important? Read it on your own server somewhere with pine over an SSH connection 4 steps away in distant lands. (i.e., sitting in Germany, shell into Russia, to Canada, and then to your box. Keep the neon signs saying "I'm here" flying in all the wrong places.
And no, you wouldn't guess where I'm sitting right now. :)
Well, the whole thing is speculation anyways, so it really doesn't matter.
Plenty of companies sell or give away loss leaders. *IF* they did it, it could be used to get their product to market. They may give away the free version, with an upgrade path to a better version. They may give away the free version with pay features such as requiring a 2 year 3G contract, or pay to use the Google cloud services. Really, even without the advertising, it would be worth the money if they charged $10/mo for using their storage. The prices mentioned were retail prices. Just because something costs $200 in the store doesn't mean it costs the manufacturer $200. Usually it costs an awful lot less.
Even the folks saying that they'd install whatever alternative OS on it, that would still be a minority, and they would make their money on the majority of the users.
I doubt we'll see the Google branded free netbook anytime soon, but hey, it could happen. Or folks will continue to speculate about it. :)
He forgot to mention the forged titanium shell, so it can handle reentry. It'll come down really quick, but you won't lose the mass before impact.
ooohhhh, you were talking about launch weight. :)
Europe and Japan have a couple extra channels for Wifi that the US doesn't have. That shouldn't be an issue though.
You're right on the power supply. Just pick up an international adapter kit and you'd be good to go. Most modern electronics are 120-240 50-60Hz.
I've only ever been asked to turn my laptop on once, and that was flying to Europe. Of course I had just run the battery out on the first flight, so I told the customs agent "well, if I can plug it in, I'll turn it on." He was fine with that. I was willing to turn it on, but he didn't make me. They were interviewing everyone on the way to the plane which was a bit odd. He chitchatted with me for 20 minutes, but since we were talking in the jetway, the plane wasn't leaving without me. He was familiar with the company I worked for, so he was asking questions about the public figures on our web site out of personal curiosity. :) It was the one time the conversation was comfortable, and had no hints of needing anal lube.
I know it's a joke, but you did hit one of my recommendations. I do recommend Xanax for long flights. :) Given the choice of sitting there bored out of my skull for hours on end, or sleeping through the flight, I'd rather sleep and wake up on the far side. Talk to your doc, get one for each way, and you should wake up in time refreshed for the 12 hours of "where's my luggage?". :)
I had a tablet computer, that did pretty much the same thing.
I can't exactly have a laptop in my lap in the drivers seat of my car, even when I'm stopped.
I could drive up to a place with free WiFi, turn the wheel 180 degrees (while stopped, obviously), and then the tablet fit perfectly in the steering wheel so I could type. :) I see the logic for it. I also see that as something to buy, it's stupid. :)
I've used Echogent's EchoVNC. The Windows server is easy to use. The Linux one isn't quite as easy unfortunately. Pretty much set up a server somewhere public, and then both ends (me and the customer) can be behind most firewalls and get connected quickly. I don't know what feature differences are between their free trial and their pay version are, but if folks are really interested, they'll find out.
The client lets you encode the username, password, and server right into it. For the end user, I send them to a web page and tell them to click a link. They download it and run it. It doesn't install anything, so it's real quick to get going. For me, I have the admin client installed on my PC, so I fire it up, and watch for that client to connect. Once they're connected, I start working.
When I'm done, I close the client on their side, which of course disconnects me. It never starts again, unless they tell it to. It's nice, clean, and doesn't pollute their machine with wasted crap. They can delete the executable from their machine when they're done. No uninstall necessary.
Even as simple as it is for the client (go to this site, click the link, run it, click ok), some people still have problems. "What do I run", or "Where did it download to". Frequently they'll ask for the password, which I tell them it's already set. For most people, it's 30 seconds to get me on. For some it can take a couple minutes, especially when they don't understand me saying "Open a browser and go to ....". It all depends on your end user.
Needless to say, if the connection is bad enough, it's going to be pathetically slow. I was able to get onto a machine to traceroute from it, since the customer couldn't spell "tracert". It took a while, but I got enough information and told them what to say to their provider when they called.
The only real problem I've run into is with Vista and it UAC. When it pops up, it kicks me off. If I'm doing something that runs into that, I have to ask them to click "allow", and then I reconnect. Since I'm only on client machines to fix problems, it's not appropriate for me to disable UAC.
The cats have you convinced of that... Just wait, the cat apocalypse will be upon us soon. They have us all believing 2012 is all about galactic alignment, earthquakes, tidal waves, or comets. The truth? The cats are going to kill off most of the humans, and enslave the rest of us!
Your shoe arranging shepherds won't be able to save you.
Inefficient code will do that. Why do we need 2Ghz+ just to make a graphic display to show web pages? Because if they can make the code bloated, they will. Hell, if I had a project where they said "Go ahead and use as many processors as you'd like", and I knew the number was over 100,000, I'd do it just to say that I did.
Cats are smart. I'd suspect they could do it on 4 processors. On the other hand, your average dog could use one processor, and only utilize it 10%.
What does a dog do? Eat, shit, piss on the floor, and bark for no apparent reason. Then the slightly smarter ones will chase down squirrels. I had a good dumb dog. He'd bark at anything. The damned squirrels were smarter than him though. He was good encouragement for people not to want to break in. He wouldn't start barking until you were about 3' from the front door, and then he sounded vicious. I had friends back away, and call me to let me know they were outside. They wouldn't get close enough to ring the doorbell. :)
They're not ignoring you. They are conditioning you to only act when they request it. :) I woke up this morning with a cat on my bed, staring me in the face, mewing at me. It wanted something. I think it was "pat me now." Otherwise it is in human conditioning mode, telling me to leave it alone. :)