I got one via UPS this week. So did a number of my friends. Google employees had them a while back.
It's okay. Wish the space bar was a bit larger and that the battery life was a little longer. In general the keyboard is nice to use and has a good feel to it. Took only a few minutes to figure out how useful the menu key was.
Not too many applications in the marketplace yet, I downloaded three, all free. The browser is a bit slow at times and has no flash support, but I didn't really buy it for the browsing experience.
Sure looks nicer than a Windows Mobile device and it meshed easily with my existing Google account. I still need to figure out how to get calendar alerts.
So now not only does Google know what I am searching for, they also know where I am. Can the Google Singularity be far behind?
T-Mobile has 3G service in my town and so far I've found it about half the time. No obvious pattern to it yet. I like that the T-Mobile android phone is cheaper to own than the iPhone.
Solaris is better than linux in many ways. Yet I've got 185 linux machines and only 3 Solaris machines left at my shop. It's unlikely that the remaining three will last thru the year. Most of the problem I have seem to be with their lack of sales skills. We probably gave Sun more chances than we should have. Maybe it was due to my long history with them, my first Sun was a 3/50.
Funny that we now have more MacOS X machines than Solaris machines. Often we'll run OpenBSD on an old Ultra 5 or Ultra 10 machine which makes for a great little server.
About five years ago we noticed that IDE equipted PCs loaded linux (over our network) faster than SCSI equipted PCs. This was not the first time techs had told me this story as when the first IDE Macs came out about nine years ago the same thing was noticed.
The theory was that with one drive on the machine the SCSI bus had more overhead (the better to manage its greater abilities with) to deal with than the IDE drive.
Don't forget that scheduling of I/Os for different partitions on a drive plays a role in performance as well. It's often best to test your specific hardware/OS drivers/applications yourself and treat the popular press articles proclaiming one technology as best with a bit of skepticism
We've deployed hundreds of linux desktop machines without SCSI support saving $$$.
This posting sounds like it comes from of our Mac sys admins, if so stop surfing the web and get back to work. Mac keyboards get just as dirty as Windows keyboards and they need the same amount of routine cleaning. Windex works best.
We have multiple platforms including many MacOS, Windows, and linux machines. Our users range from complete computer phobics to folks doing heavy software development work. It has not been my experience that Macs are any cheaper to set-up or support. In fact we seem to need a higher Mac sys admin to Mac user ratio than we need for Windows or linux users. Part of the reason might be the natural selection process which appears to draw the least computer literate towards Macs. Then when something goes wrong they're the least equipt to deal with it. Or matbe Windows users have been "trained" to complain less.
About three years ago I did a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study of our platforms. At the time the industry standard TCO was about $9000/yr for desktop machines. Our entire organization put it at about $4300/yr for Windows machines. Within my smaller group of departmental desktop machines the TCO was something like $1900/yr. An interesting tidbit was that for the big unix platforms (Sun/SGI) it was $4000-5000/yr, for Windows and Macs about $1700 and for linux machines about $1300/yr (I may not remember the correct number but linux was cheaper). These numbers were calculated based on the first three years of ownership. The highest cost items were hardware, staff support time, back room servers, and software licensing (we license an awlful lot of software, even on linux (stuff like Matlab, mathematica, Maple, Adobe stuff, etc) but get educational rates).
While a Mac G4 at $1200 is cheap I can also buy a Dell P4 or a locally built AMD 1.5 GHz Athlon with more memory for $700. A number of non Apple vendors make LCD screens with 1600x1400 resolutions (Viewsonic, IBM, NEC come immediately to mind).
Platforms come and go so it's best to not fixate too strongly on any one of them.
Great now government agencies as well as hackers want to put root kits on my machine (and burn network bandwidth). I suspose we could just reinstall our Windows machines frequently to try and keep them klean.
Doesn't this sound like the program they used to trap some Russian hackers last year. Remember they hired them and gave them notebooks which recorded everything they did. Then later the FBI used the play back to discover sites, passwords, who knows what else.
Hmmm, maybe when I go in for my voluntary interview I'll ask them for my old DSL modem password which I forgot. Ahh the ravages of age.
You are absolutely right. This tool probably couldn't detect secondary changes made to the machine's binaries.
We have a policy of formating the hard drive and reinstalling the OS once a machine has been compromised. This policy applies to any OS we run. To make it easy we've automated the process. To test the process we reinstall all of the machines on a regular basis, even servers. We spent some time years ago convincing vendors like RedHat that this was a useful thing (think jumpstart).
After reading this I was reminded of the computer forensics "How-To" article in Computer World 7/9/01, http://www.computerworld.com/community/security/se curity_manager/0,,NAV65-663_STO61959,00.html . In which a company visits the desktop machine late at night and copies the hard drive for later study. Thinking about it even more it seems like you could just backup the client hard drives each night then scan the "data" for interesting items. To completely automate the system you could just e-mail HR the violation information for appropriate action. "Please fire so-and-so, they visited web site such-and-such from a company machine, twice today!"
I've found over the years that there is often a correlation between an employee's time spent inappropriately browsing the WWW and job performance. My personal policy has always been to trust employees and reward good job performance.
In the rare case that an employee breaks the laws of the land we've been able to retroactively piece together the evidence needed by the police from logs and backup tapes. May not be as proactive as real time monitoring but it seems to be just as effective.
As for security threats. There are lots of ways to prevent viruses and system compromises that don't involve monitoring what client users are browsing on the internet.
I think if management came to me and asked that we monitor computer usage by employees I'd suggest that we find new supervisors who are more in touch with the day to day activities of their charges.
Which reminds me, do you monitor your children's internet activities? I personally just put the computer in a public place in the house (like the kitchen) and make a point of walking by it every once and a while.
Many vendors have drives designed for use in radio and television studios. These drives are quieter than the standard models, have pretty good performance, and don't require enclosing them in a box (unless you want to). An example is the Quantum lct20.
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I got one via UPS this week. So did a number of my friends. Google employees had them a while back.
It's okay. Wish the space bar was a bit larger and that the battery life was a little longer. In general the keyboard is nice to use and has a good feel to it. Took only a few minutes to figure out how useful the menu key was.
Not too many applications in the marketplace yet, I downloaded three, all free. The browser is a bit slow at times and has no flash support, but I didn't really buy it for the browsing experience.
Sure looks nicer than a Windows Mobile device and it meshed easily with my existing Google account. I still need to figure out how to get calendar alerts.
So now not only does Google know what I am searching for, they also know where I am. Can the Google Singularity be far behind?
T-Mobile has 3G service in my town and so far I've found it about half the time. No obvious pattern to it yet. I like that the T-Mobile android phone is cheaper to own than the iPhone.
For some time NASA has been using H2 pickup trucks at KSC.
US Senator Dayton (D-MN) has been working on a similar bill. http://dayton.senate.gov/computer_bill_of_rights.h tml
Solaris is better than linux in many ways. Yet I've got 185 linux machines and only 3 Solaris machines left at my shop. It's unlikely that the remaining three will last thru the year. Most of the problem I have seem to be with their lack of sales skills. We probably gave Sun more chances than we should have. Maybe it was due to my long history with them, my first Sun was a 3/50.
Funny that we now have more MacOS X machines than Solaris machines. Often we'll run OpenBSD on an old Ultra 5 or Ultra 10 machine which makes for a great little server.
About five years ago we noticed that IDE equipted PCs loaded linux (over our network) faster than SCSI equipted PCs. This was not the first time techs had told me this story as when the first IDE Macs came out about nine years ago the same thing was noticed.
The theory was that with one drive on the machine the SCSI bus had more overhead (the better to manage its greater abilities with) to deal with than the IDE drive.
Don't forget that scheduling of I/Os for different partitions on a drive plays a role in performance as well. It's often best to test your specific hardware/OS drivers/applications yourself and treat the popular press articles proclaiming one technology as best with a bit of skepticism
We've deployed hundreds of linux desktop machines without SCSI support saving $$$.
One of the users we support has studied this subject in some detail. Check our his article at/
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko
This posting sounds like it comes from of our Mac sys admins, if so stop surfing the web and get back to work. Mac keyboards get just as dirty as Windows keyboards and they need the same amount of routine cleaning. Windex works best.
We have multiple platforms including many MacOS, Windows, and linux machines. Our users range from complete computer phobics to folks doing heavy software development work. It has not been my experience that Macs are any cheaper to set-up or support. In fact we seem to need a higher Mac sys admin to Mac user ratio than we need for Windows or linux users. Part of the reason might be the natural selection process which appears to draw the least computer literate towards Macs. Then when something goes wrong they're the least equipt to deal with it. Or matbe Windows users have been "trained" to complain less.
About three years ago I did a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study of our platforms. At the time the industry standard TCO was about $9000/yr for desktop machines. Our entire organization put it at about $4300/yr for Windows machines. Within my smaller group of departmental desktop machines the TCO was something like $1900/yr. An interesting tidbit was that for the big unix platforms (Sun/SGI) it was $4000-5000/yr, for Windows and Macs about $1700 and for linux machines about $1300/yr (I may not remember the correct number but linux was cheaper). These numbers were calculated based on the first three years of ownership. The highest cost items were hardware, staff support time, back room servers, and software licensing (we license an awlful lot of software, even on linux (stuff like Matlab, mathematica, Maple, Adobe stuff, etc) but get educational rates).
While a Mac G4 at $1200 is cheap I can also buy a Dell P4 or a locally built AMD 1.5 GHz Athlon with more memory for $700. A number of non Apple vendors make LCD screens with 1600x1400 resolutions (Viewsonic, IBM, NEC come immediately to mind).
Platforms come and go so it's best to not fixate too strongly on any one of them.
Good point. They're probably afraid of appearing un-American (ie pro-terrorist) if they don't go along with it.
Great now government agencies as well as hackers want to put root kits on my machine (and burn network bandwidth). I suspose we could just reinstall our Windows machines frequently to try and keep them klean.
Doesn't this sound like the program they used to trap some Russian hackers last year. Remember they hired them and gave them notebooks which recorded everything they did. Then later the FBI used the play back to discover sites, passwords, who knows what else.
Hmmm, maybe when I go in for my voluntary interview I'll ask them for my old DSL modem password which I forgot. Ahh the ravages of age.
You are absolutely right. This tool probably couldn't detect secondary changes made to the machine's binaries.
We have a policy of formating the hard drive and reinstalling the OS once a machine has been compromised. This policy applies to any OS we run. To make it easy we've automated the process. To test the process we reinstall all of the machines on a regular basis, even servers. We spent some time years ago convincing vendors like RedHat that this was a useful thing (think jumpstart).
After reading this I was reminded of the computer forensics "How-To" article in Computer World 7/9/01, http://www.computerworld.com/community/security/se curity_manager/0,,NAV65-663_STO61959,00.html . In which a company visits the desktop machine late at night and copies the hard drive for later study. Thinking about it even more it seems like you could just backup the client hard drives each night then scan the "data" for interesting items. To completely automate the system you could just e-mail HR the violation information for appropriate action. "Please fire so-and-so, they visited web site such-and-such from a company machine, twice today!"
I've found over the years that there is often a correlation between an employee's time spent inappropriately browsing the WWW and job performance. My personal policy has always been to trust employees and reward good job performance.
In the rare case that an employee breaks the laws of the land we've been able to retroactively piece together the evidence needed by the police from logs and backup tapes. May not be as proactive as real time monitoring but it seems to be just as effective.
As for security threats. There are lots of ways to prevent viruses and system compromises that don't involve monitoring what client users are browsing on the internet.
I think if management came to me and asked that we monitor computer usage by employees I'd suggest that we find new supervisors who are more in touch with the day to day activities of their charges.
Which reminds me, do you monitor your children's internet activities? I personally just put the computer in a public place in the house (like the kitchen) and make a point of walking by it every once and a while.
Many vendors have drives designed for use in radio and television studios. These drives are quieter than the standard models, have pretty good performance, and don't require enclosing them in a box (unless you want to). An example is the Quantum lct20.