That's how many people see the pirated version... Most of the recent mac converts i know started out with a pirated copy, unsupported with very few drivers, features not working and not as stable as it should be... They liked the OS, and wanted to run it properly, so they went and bought macs.
I have a machine using a few old Compaq raid controllers... The kernel driver handles them nicely, and displays a meaningless error (but an error all the same) in the kernel log when a drive fails... You can also load the Compaq/HP userspace tools and configure the array and find out what the error really is etc.
I do exactly that... I gravitate towards devices with open drivers, on the basis that i don't know for how long i will want to continue using the device, or on what.. When it comes to printers, i buy HP printers, i have an all-in-one for which open source drivers are available which support all the functions of the device. Ofcourse, printers which support postscript are a good bet too.
That said, i'm surprised there are printers which still don't support linux, i would imagine there are mac drivers for that lexmark mentioned here (not supporting mac is suicidal for a printer maker) and macs use cups same as linux... You sure you can't just take the PPD file from the mac drivers and load it into cups on linux?
I've found that if you don't specify any resolutions or monitor timings in your xorg.conf it will auto detect if your monitor is capable of it, it even detects the DPI properly which windows is incapable of. That said, if you boot up with the monitor switched off or disconnected and you have a graphical login screen it will run at 640x480 because it can't work out what resolution to use.
I have a mouse with 2 extra buttons on the side, they automatically got mapped to expose on macos... I've not tried reprogramming them but i'm sure it can be done somehow.
30k is not a bad wage for a school admin, people i knew got a lot less... Yes, thin clients make an awful lot of sense in schools... Kids have an annoying habit of breaking or stealing computers, but a thin client has less to go wrong and is worthless without a server to connect it to anyway. We had a spate of comparatively smart thieves who would replace the cpus with slower ones, but overclock them to the original speed. They usually took a few weeks before they died, and a few more days before the dead ones got any attention so we never did find out who did it.
People who have cards for serious purposes as opposed to gaming typically go for higher end workstation cards... In these cards, quality is often favoured above speed.
I also wondered, why do gamers try to get frame rates higher than their screen's refresh rate? I always found having a smooth and consistent framerate, than having it run flat out at 400fps on simple scenes and slow down to 100 in complex frames was much easier to play with. I used to play quake on an SGI, which capped the framerate to 60 i believe (tho the video/cpu was mostly idle unless you really cranked the resolution up).
When i play games, i want a consistent framerate (no slowdown during complex scenes, actual action is usually the most complex which is when you need the speed), and the highest possible resolution/detail (it really helps in fps, increases your visibility distance).
Yeah, i have an SGI Onyx somewhere, a stupidly powerful graphics workstation in it's day... I also have some Elsa Gloria cards, i got one with an alphastation a few years ago.
Those students who won't get computer related jobs should still learn concepts rather than applications... When i was at school, we used several different word processing apps and spreadsheets on 4 different platforms (riscos, dos, windows 3.x, mac) and the end result is that i know what options i need and what they should do, so that if i pick up a new application i can fairly quickly find the equivalent options and get the job done. People who were only taught a single app typically know exactly where to find the option in that one app, and would be stuck using something else if the options were in a different location or behaved slightly differently. Also, the apps that I was taught in school, while being relevant apps at the time, are nowhere to be seen, so anyone who has skills only in those apps is pretty screwed now.
For this reason, schools should have a selection of different apps, and teach students how to get the job done regardless of the tools. Get kids used to the differences, and focus them on the task they need to do not on any specific tool they could use.
I assume that doesn't include wages, 10,000 would barely cover a single staffer on minimum wage. That said, £10,000 goes a long way these days. You can buy a fully functional PC for under £300 (no it wont be a cutting edge gaming rig nor does it need to), and if your using free (as in beer) software those machines can be stretched out for quite a few years before they become useless. And even after one becomes useless, some parts can be reused like the monitors and keyboards (mice probably not, because kids steal the balls, so you glue them in, which stops you cleaning them properly). Or the really old ones can become dumb terminals, for £10,000 you could get a good beefy server to serve a whole heap of clients. Remember you wont have to pay VAT on that either, and a lot of vendors will do an educational discount.
Yes there are more windows jobs... There are also more people applying for those jobs... There's also typically less money to be earned in those jobs... Unix skills are more easily transferred between unixes (solaris, linux, aix, hpux etc) And people with unix skills usually know windows too, and unix skills could be the tipping point even when applying for a windows job (embedded unix is everywhere, even where you wouldn't expect it).
Point them to a few job boards, people with unix skills are usually paid more than people who only know windows. There's also the case that unix skills transfer quite well, if you learned linux by installing a downloaded debian, learning solaris or aix is not a huge jump.
I'd start by installing OSS apps, that way a transition to linux is a lot less painful. You can also start using open formats internally (use the sun plugin for msoffice etc), you can justify this by giving free copies of openoffice to the students in the name of keeping everyone on a level playing field.
Mazda is owned by Ford... Some Land Rovers use Jaguar engines too, but both companies are also owned by Ford.. The diesels may use technology developed by Peugeot, but licensed to ford who produce the engines.
And even if ford use a third party engine, you still get a choice... Most cars are available with a choice of diesel or petrol engines of various sizes.
While i agree that there are more important things to worry about... People can only be knowledgeable in one field, and that field is computing for the majority of people on slashdot. I'm sure there are similar politically-focused sites where people are discussing the corporate corruption of governments. Also it's all part of the same problem, remember your paying to enforce anti-piracy laws, which benefits large corporations not citizens. Your paying for the US government to put pressure on other countries on behalf of microsoft, just look at china and the EU. All of these things and more are paid for by you, the taxpayers, but they provide you no benefit in return.
The difference with Apple is that they supply their own OS with their own hardware. If every PC vendor supplied their own OS too that would be great, no monoculture and plenty of competition.
There are too many differences... If you want a car with a chevy engine, buy a chevy... You do have the choice. Ford supply their own engine in their car, its not like theyre fitting a third party engine into their vehicles. Where they do supply third party goods (eg tyres) you often can request another brand.
The issue of bandwidth usage and security in X11 is addressed by NX... I wouldn't say RDP is indistinguishable from local apps at all, there is a noticeable difference even over a LAN... Plain X11 over a LAN is quite speedy tho, as it was designed for.
X11 works with desktop compositing too, even if your window manager isn't running locally (ie diskless terminals etc) so long as you have opengl supporting hardware... You can even play games or full screen video over remote X11, since GLX sends opengl calls over the wire and they're rendered on the local displaycard (tho you could also do software rendering and stream the output over the network if you really wanted).
As for the new features you describe in 2008, it seems like it's starting to catch up to some of the features X11 has had for years.. Tho don't count it until there's a shipping non-beta product, remember all the features microsoft dropped from vista? Who's to say this stuff wont get chopped before 2008 is finalised?
As for ease of configuration, i wouldnt exactly call single applications complex, and such a configuration is trivial on X11.
As for "better than just about anything"... I always found Citrix to be much faster and more secure than RDP especially over slow links, and there's always NX which works very well even for a graphically heavy environment like KDE. Go try it, nomachine.com have some test machines running on 128kb lines with 30+ users connected.
Out of interest, does 2008 handle multiple screens yet? X11 has for years...
On another note, RDP is expensive, unless you buy extra licenses for it your limited to 2 sessions, which is pretty useless.
Well, that's as may be... The point was originally about the CIS test tho, which performs no virtualization-related security checks so it's irrelevant in that context. Maybe it should, but so long as it doesn't the results would not be affected by running in vmware or any other virtualization technology.
Theo is also arguing that the x86 architecture is flawed, and thus any virtualization technology will be flawed when running on x86. I can't say I disagree here, and it would be interesting to see how a more integrated virtualization platform such as z/VM stacks up, or perhaps the partitioning capabilities of the higher end sun servers.
That is -profilemanager, as you'l see in my original post... It pops up a menu listing your profiles and letting you make a new one, you can also manually specify a profile with -p
// using a graphical remote management card is bandwidth intensive and slow and a quite unnecessary and ridiculous idea
Note that i said "remote management card". These are hardware devices which snapshot the display and send it down the wire. RDP and Citrix are software protocols which abstract API calls to send drawing events down the wire instead of a physical display device... The key point is that they are SOFTWARE. What use are they if your OS hasn't been installed yet, or is failing to boot? So yes, remote management cards ARE slow, and there really isn't that much that can be done about that because of how they work.
Which brings up the second point, they are stupid too... Serial consoles work well, have been working well for years and are usable over very low bandwidth links. To suddenly introduce something vastly inferior yet more expensive to produce fits my idea of stupidity very well. That's not to say all administration should be done over serial, but you should _ALWAYS_ have access to the firmware (to boot arbitrary devices and configure hardware), the OS installer (to perform an install if necessary) and sufficient functions of the OS to load/install network drivers, configure ip addressing and anything else necessary to get a network based admin protocol up and running.
You can get an account locked out for failed attempts? so what? the issue of knowing the os version has nothing to do with brute forcing of passwords... Knowing the OS means you have a much greater chance of success when trying to exploit a system, and often the patch level makes no difference. As a somewhat old example, the rpc dcom overflow from 2003ish. It had universal offsets for xp and 2000 regardless of service pack, but the 2000 offset would crash xp and vice-versa. If you can work out the OS your chance of success goes from 50% to 100%, and rdesktop makes it all too easy. Unix distributors learned their lesson years ago, telnet banners always used to give away the OS version.
Backing up is not an administrative function? I'd hate to have any important data on a server you admin... Transferring files to/from servers is not an administrative function? Copying disks is not an administrative function? Monitoring logfiles is not an administrative function?
Video encoding and audio conferencing perhaps not.
Well for a better administrative example...
I can use SSH to pipe a script to several machines at once, the script could be doing *ANYTHING* and not just things which are within the framework of $MANAGEMENT_TOOL, and i can parse the output from the scripts and automatically act upon specific conditions. The flexibility is what matters, and it surpasses anything any graphical admin tools offer.
You clearly have never found yourself in a position where your trying to do something unusual that the authors of the graphical admin tools never considered. And you can always script up SSH, to automatically perform tasks you do often, and you can verify the output to ensure everything went as expected. Can you write a script for RDP to simultaneously log in to 50+ machines, perform an arbitrary task and read the output from the arbitrary task to ensure that nothing unexpected occurred?
Also if you really want a graphical frontend, you can use X11 (piped over ssh for security), tho that would require all the X libs and graphical apps to actually be installed on your server, which is terribly wasteful. There are many small embedded devices which can be managed using ssh (routers/switches, nas devices etc)... How much more expensive would these devices be if they had the extra memory, cpu and flash memory required to run a full graphical environment you could admin them from?
SSH is invaluable because of the flexibility it offers, flexibility you don't have on windows by default, and don't have to the same level if you install cygwin with ssh...
RDP is more responsive than plain X, but it's also 10+ years newer, try comparing to NX and it's a whole different story.
Also, SSH is more responsive than RDP or X if all your using it for is as an interactive terminal. Where SSH really shines is the ability to pipe commands and data back and forth, which you simply cannot do with RDP.
What advantages does RDP have? RDP always seemed like a kludge while X has always had remote display support as an integral part... Also X11 is a lot older, it's security and bandwidth usage problems are addressed by NX (www.nomachine.com), and the bandwidth use is more to do with the apps than the protocol.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how many people see the pirated version...
Most of the recent mac converts i know started out with a pirated copy, unsupported with very few drivers, features not working and not as stable as it should be...
They liked the OS, and wanted to run it properly, so they went and bought macs.
I have a machine using a few old Compaq raid controllers... The kernel driver handles them nicely, and displays a meaningless error (but an error all the same) in the kernel log when a drive fails...
You can also load the Compaq/HP userspace tools and configure the array and find out what the error really is etc.
I do exactly that...
I gravitate towards devices with open drivers, on the basis that i don't know for how long i will want to continue using the device, or on what..
When it comes to printers, i buy HP printers, i have an all-in-one for which open source drivers are available which support all the functions of the device. Ofcourse, printers which support postscript are a good bet too.
That said, i'm surprised there are printers which still don't support linux, i would imagine there are mac drivers for that lexmark mentioned here (not supporting mac is suicidal for a printer maker) and macs use cups same as linux... You sure you can't just take the PPD file from the mac drivers and load it into cups on linux?
I've found that if you don't specify any resolutions or monitor timings in your xorg.conf it will auto detect if your monitor is capable of it, it even detects the DPI properly which windows is incapable of.
That said, if you boot up with the monitor switched off or disconnected and you have a graphical login screen it will run at 640x480 because it can't work out what resolution to use.
I have a mouse with 2 extra buttons on the side, they automatically got mapped to expose on macos... I've not tried reprogramming them but i'm sure it can be done somehow.
30k is not a bad wage for a school admin, people i knew got a lot less...
Yes, thin clients make an awful lot of sense in schools... Kids have an annoying habit of breaking or stealing computers, but a thin client has less to go wrong and is worthless without a server to connect it to anyway.
We had a spate of comparatively smart thieves who would replace the cpus with slower ones, but overclock them to the original speed. They usually took a few weeks before they died, and a few more days before the dead ones got any attention so we never did find out who did it.
People who have cards for serious purposes as opposed to gaming typically go for higher end workstation cards...
In these cards, quality is often favoured above speed.
I also wondered, why do gamers try to get frame rates higher than their screen's refresh rate? I always found having a smooth and consistent framerate, than having it run flat out at 400fps on simple scenes and slow down to 100 in complex frames was much easier to play with. I used to play quake on an SGI, which capped the framerate to 60 i believe (tho the video/cpu was mostly idle unless you really cranked the resolution up).
When i play games, i want a consistent framerate (no slowdown during complex scenes, actual action is usually the most complex which is when you need the speed), and the highest possible resolution/detail (it really helps in fps, increases your visibility distance).
Yeah, i have an SGI Onyx somewhere, a stupidly powerful graphics workstation in it's day...
I also have some Elsa Gloria cards, i got one with an alphastation a few years ago.
Those students who won't get computer related jobs should still learn concepts rather than applications...
When i was at school, we used several different word processing apps and spreadsheets on 4 different platforms (riscos, dos, windows 3.x, mac) and the end result is that i know what options i need and what they should do, so that if i pick up a new application i can fairly quickly find the equivalent options and get the job done.
People who were only taught a single app typically know exactly where to find the option in that one app, and would be stuck using something else if the options were in a different location or behaved slightly differently.
Also, the apps that I was taught in school, while being relevant apps at the time, are nowhere to be seen, so anyone who has skills only in those apps is pretty screwed now.
For this reason, schools should have a selection of different apps, and teach students how to get the job done regardless of the tools. Get kids used to the differences, and focus them on the task they need to do not on any specific tool they could use.
I assume that doesn't include wages, 10,000 would barely cover a single staffer on minimum wage.
That said, £10,000 goes a long way these days. You can buy a fully functional PC for under £300 (no it wont be a cutting edge gaming rig nor does it need to), and if your using free (as in beer) software those machines can be stretched out for quite a few years before they become useless.
And even after one becomes useless, some parts can be reused like the monitors and keyboards (mice probably not, because kids steal the balls, so you glue them in, which stops you cleaning them properly).
Or the really old ones can become dumb terminals, for £10,000 you could get a good beefy server to serve a whole heap of clients. Remember you wont have to pay VAT on that either, and a lot of vendors will do an educational discount.
Yes there are more windows jobs...
There are also more people applying for those jobs...
There's also typically less money to be earned in those jobs...
Unix skills are more easily transferred between unixes (solaris, linux, aix, hpux etc)
And people with unix skills usually know windows too, and unix skills could be the tipping point even when applying for a windows job (embedded unix is everywhere, even where you wouldn't expect it).
Point them to a few job boards, people with unix skills are usually paid more than people who only know windows.
There's also the case that unix skills transfer quite well, if you learned linux by installing a downloaded debian, learning solaris or aix is not a huge jump.
I'd start by installing OSS apps, that way a transition to linux is a lot less painful.
You can also start using open formats internally (use the sun plugin for msoffice etc), you can justify this by giving free copies of openoffice to the students in the name of keeping everyone on a level playing field.
Wow aren't Apple behind the curve, Microsoft deprecated Java back in 2001 with XP!
Mazda is owned by Ford...
Some Land Rovers use Jaguar engines too, but both companies are also owned by Ford..
The diesels may use technology developed by Peugeot, but licensed to ford who produce the engines.
And even if ford use a third party engine, you still get a choice... Most cars are available with a choice of diesel or petrol engines of various sizes.
While i agree that there are more important things to worry about...
People can only be knowledgeable in one field, and that field is computing for the majority of people on slashdot. I'm sure there are similar politically-focused sites where people are discussing the corporate corruption of governments.
Also it's all part of the same problem, remember your paying to enforce anti-piracy laws, which benefits large corporations not citizens. Your paying for the US government to put pressure on other countries on behalf of microsoft, just look at china and the EU. All of these things and more are paid for by you, the taxpayers, but they provide you no benefit in return.
The difference with Apple is that they supply their own OS with their own hardware. If every PC vendor supplied their own OS too that would be great, no monoculture and plenty of competition.
There are too many differences...
If you want a car with a chevy engine, buy a chevy... You do have the choice.
Ford supply their own engine in their car, its not like theyre fitting a third party engine into their vehicles. Where they do supply third party goods (eg tyres) you often can request another brand.
The issue of bandwidth usage and security in X11 is addressed by NX...
I wouldn't say RDP is indistinguishable from local apps at all, there is a noticeable difference even over a LAN... Plain X11 over a LAN is quite speedy tho, as it was designed for.
X11 works with desktop compositing too, even if your window manager isn't running locally (ie diskless terminals etc) so long as you have opengl supporting hardware... You can even play games or full screen video over remote X11, since GLX sends opengl calls over the wire and they're rendered on the local displaycard (tho you could also do software rendering and stream the output over the network if you really wanted).
As for the new features you describe in 2008, it seems like it's starting to catch up to some of the features X11 has had for years.. Tho don't count it until there's a shipping non-beta product, remember all the features microsoft dropped from vista? Who's to say this stuff wont get chopped before 2008 is finalised?
As for ease of configuration, i wouldnt exactly call single applications complex, and such a configuration is trivial on X11.
As for "better than just about anything"... I always found Citrix to be much faster and more secure than RDP especially over slow links, and there's always NX which works very well even for a graphically heavy environment like KDE. Go try it, nomachine.com have some test machines running on 128kb lines with 30+ users connected.
Out of interest, does 2008 handle multiple screens yet? X11 has for years...
On another note, RDP is expensive, unless you buy extra licenses for it your limited to 2 sessions, which is pretty useless.
Well, that's as may be...
The point was originally about the CIS test tho, which performs no virtualization-related security checks so it's irrelevant in that context. Maybe it should, but so long as it doesn't the results would not be affected by running in vmware or any other virtualization technology.
Theo is also arguing that the x86 architecture is flawed, and thus any virtualization technology will be flawed when running on x86. I can't say I disagree here, and it would be interesting to see how a more integrated virtualization platform such as z/VM stacks up, or perhaps the partitioning capabilities of the higher end sun servers.
That is -profilemanager, as you'l see in my original post...
It pops up a menu listing your profiles and letting you make a new one, you can also manually specify a profile with -p
// using a graphical remote management card is bandwidth intensive and slow and a quite unnecessary and ridiculous idea
Note that i said "remote management card".
These are hardware devices which snapshot the display and send it down the wire.
RDP and Citrix are software protocols which abstract API calls to send drawing events down the wire instead of a physical display device... The key point is that they are SOFTWARE. What use are they if your OS hasn't been installed yet, or is failing to boot?
So yes, remote management cards ARE slow, and there really isn't that much that can be done about that because of how they work.
Which brings up the second point, they are stupid too...
Serial consoles work well, have been working well for years and are usable over very low bandwidth links. To suddenly introduce something vastly inferior yet more expensive to produce fits my idea of stupidity very well.
That's not to say all administration should be done over serial, but you should _ALWAYS_ have access to the firmware (to boot arbitrary devices and configure hardware), the OS installer (to perform an install if necessary) and sufficient functions of the OS to load/install network drivers, configure ip addressing and anything else necessary to get a network based admin protocol up and running.
You can get an account locked out for failed attempts? so what? the issue of knowing the os version has nothing to do with brute forcing of passwords... Knowing the OS means you have a much greater chance of success when trying to exploit a system, and often the patch level makes no difference. As a somewhat old example, the rpc dcom overflow from 2003ish. It had universal offsets for xp and 2000 regardless of service pack, but the 2000 offset would crash xp and vice-versa. If you can work out the OS your chance of success goes from 50% to 100%, and rdesktop makes it all too easy. Unix distributors learned their lesson years ago, telnet banners always used to give away the OS version.
Backing up is not an administrative function? I'd hate to have any important data on a server you admin...
Transferring files to/from servers is not an administrative function?
Copying disks is not an administrative function?
Monitoring logfiles is not an administrative function?
Video encoding and audio conferencing perhaps not.
Well for a better administrative example...
I can use SSH to pipe a script to several machines at once, the script could be doing *ANYTHING* and not just things which are within the framework of $MANAGEMENT_TOOL, and i can parse the output from the scripts and automatically act upon specific conditions. The flexibility is what matters, and it surpasses anything any graphical admin tools offer.
You clearly have never found yourself in a position where your trying to do something unusual that the authors of the graphical admin tools never considered.
And you can always script up SSH, to automatically perform tasks you do often, and you can verify the output to ensure everything went as expected. Can you write a script for RDP to simultaneously log in to 50+ machines, perform an arbitrary task and read the output from the arbitrary task to ensure that nothing unexpected occurred?
Also if you really want a graphical frontend, you can use X11 (piped over ssh for security), tho that would require all the X libs and graphical apps to actually be installed on your server, which is terribly wasteful. There are many small embedded devices which can be managed using ssh (routers/switches, nas devices etc)... How much more expensive would these devices be if they had the extra memory, cpu and flash memory required to run a full graphical environment you could admin them from?
SSH is invaluable because of the flexibility it offers, flexibility you don't have on windows by default, and don't have to the same level if you install cygwin with ssh...
RDP is more responsive than plain X, but it's also 10+ years newer, try comparing to NX and it's a whole different story.
Also, SSH is more responsive than RDP or X if all your using it for is as an interactive terminal. Where SSH really shines is the ability to pipe commands and data back and forth, which you simply cannot do with RDP.
What advantages does RDP have? RDP always seemed like a kludge while X has always had remote display support as an integral part... Also X11 is a lot older, it's security and bandwidth usage problems are addressed by NX (www.nomachine.com), and the bandwidth use is more to do with the apps than the protocol.