Acrobat utterly takes the biscuit when it comes to being the most execrably awful, arrogant, bloated, buggy, piece of software ever made, ever. And that's in a world where Microsoft exists as well.
If you have the experience with Linux based fail over solutions and apache or nginx to pull this off, more power to you. Go ahead and save some bucks, but make sure you test the heck out of it first, and have a plan for updates and failures. If not, the money you would save is probably not worth the potential downtime you could experience.
Big iron boxes have big iron price tags, and you can almost always hack together something cheaper. The question is how much more reliable, easy to configure, and easy to upgrade is the big iron? In most organizations, buying equipment is cheaper in the long run then buying experience and maintenance for a home grown solution.
My point is risk assessment is hard, and "security" is only one factor of quite a few in the calculation. My sub point is that this Microsoft guy is full of it, even if what he is saying is somewhat true. Patched Vista with DEP enabled is a fairly tough nut to crack security-wise, and Microsoft is no longer the laughing-stock of the security world. On the other hand, this MS spokesperson is implying that you are safer on Vista then OS X or Linux, and due to a number of factors that's probably not true.
Vista is arguably the most secure OS suitable for desktop use. It is not the safest OS suitable for desktop use however. What's the difference?
The President of the United States is arguably the most secured individual on the planet. However, due to the large number of threats against him and his need to travel and be in the public eye often, he is not the safest individual on the planet.
Operating systems are the same. Vista has added many good defenses, but is still the OS with the target on its back. I'm ok with Microsoft claiming to be the most secure OS for desktop use. OpenBSD and some hardened Linux distros might wish to disagree, but most people don't run hardened systems on desktops, they want more functional systems that are easier to support. However, I'm not going to let MS get away with calling Vista the safest OS out there, because it just isn't.
If ISPs really wanted to reduce bandwith costs, they wouldn't have all dropped their internal Usenet feeds, and would be caching the heck out of everything. The reason no one has complained much before: Comcast:$43 for 250 GB - Seems mostly reasonable. 250 GB is a lot of traffic at the moment, if you're pulling more then 10 GB every day, you're doing some serious stuff and should probably get a business connection. Time Warner: $40 for 10GB? $60 for 40GB? - Not reasonable at all.
NC State university has an awesome way to deal with this, your department can request or build special VMs that have all the software you need, and then you can access it from anywhere on the internet over RDP(For windows VMs), or SSH/X11(For *nix VMs). http://vcl.ncsu.edu/
Modems, media converters, and routers are different devices. You'd still have a cable/DSL/POTS/WIMAX modem or fiber media converter, but not necessarily a router.
Routers and firewalls are different devices. It just happens that a NAT router approximates a stateful firewall, but that's not the best or only way to do it.
Yes, Joe Q Public might be better off with a stateful firewall appliance then a simple switch, but IPv6 kills the need for a home NAT router. I prefer individual host hardening to depending on a firewall, but the belt-and-suspenders technique is best for most people.
1) "Complete security" doesn't exist. 2) I fail to see how that relates to the needless status of the home NAT router. With IPv6, your ISP can give you your very own public IPv4 sized address space, and you only need a switch instead of a NAT router. It is likely that NAT won't die for quite a while though, and even then people may still opt for a stateful hardware firewall, but IPv6 makes them purely optional. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4864.txt
For the home router segment, the traffic isn't high enough that it matters, and most of them don't support IPv6. Of course with IPv6 the home router is no longer important really as NAT will no longer be necessary, but it will still nice for Joe Clueless User to have a hardware firewall appliance anyway I guess...
I've got 8GB of ECC memory in my desktop, and it cost me right about $100. And yes, I did notice the difference between 4GB and 8GB on Ubuntu 64bit, but I tend to run multiple VMs and Java programs. Linux uses the extra space efficiently as cache even if you're not maxing out your memory space all the time, and it does make a difference.
TFA says "...eight racks filled with 63 Sun Fire x4500 servers with dual- or quad-core x86 processors running Solaris 10 with ZFS. Each Sun server is combined with an array of 48 1TB hard drives." (emphasis mine)
I would guess this means there's a x4500 with 24TB in local disks, and 48TB in attached storage per machine. (24+48)*63 does give us the quoted number
Yeah, I got all excited about the 3-D aspect. I thought perhaps this would finally let me reach through the Internet and punch loudmouth jerks right in the windpipe. Seems not yet. Pity.
Memory, and lots of it. Nothing else will help as much for running multiple VMs. Memory is dirt cheap, I recently bought 8 gigs of ECC ram for ~100 USD. Of course, over 3-4 gigs, and you need a 64 bit OS, I use Ubuntu 64, but I know others who use Vista 64 to good effect.
At least 2 cores, 3 or for doesn't hurt either. There's great value in both AMD and Intel at the moment, Intel owns the top end, but at the low end or midrange AMD tends to have the better value.
If possible, get a separate drive for at least your main OS, and run the VMs off their own drive. More spindles == more IO, I run 6 drives in my box, one for the OS, and 4 raid 5 for my homedir for speed, capacity, and safety, and one drive bay I swap out for a spare I keep offsite that holds my backups. Linux software raid is great for this use, and with modern multi-core processors you won't notice the overhead.
If you can only afford maxing out one thing though, make it the memory.
Why would this need to be? You're assuming the metaphysical reality operates on the same or lower level as the physical reality. What you call yourself is memory, sense input, and processing, and what you know of your physical existence might be trivial to change from some higher state of being. Rewriting the whole world including your memories could be what is really occurring.
There's a difference between what's possible, and what the most likely explanation, and I agree your view seems more in line with my daily existence. The crazy thing about consciousness and existence is you can never be sure though...
Which is why free will is a metaphysics question, and not a physics question. If we are purely matter, we have no free will. If there is more to us then matter, then we might have free will. There is no way for physics, the study of matter, to decide whether or not matter is all there is.
That's also why metaphysics is the realm of crackpots, because for the most part you can't prove or disprove anything..
Honestly, IE 7 is not much less safe then Firefox, and can be locked down via Windows group policy. I can understand how Firefox can be considered a security risk, as this sort of group settings changing is more difficult.
IE 6 is another story, and should be put out to pasture as soon as possible.
I'm no lover of Microsoft or IE in particular, but I can understand this decision. But please, really, let IE 6 die...
FIRST junior Lego league is designed for this age group, and though I haven't been involved at that age level, I know the middle school and high school programs are good, and the elementary school version looks age appropriate.
The FIRST organization is definitely an outstanding model of teaching kids what is is that programmers and engineers do in a way that is exciting and relevant to each age group. I highly recommend checking them out.
After a quick glance through the patent (applied for in 1998) I fail to see how the claims differ from previous published work, but the claims are many, and the patent is long.
I fall into two of the above camps.. I have sensitive work information, and need PGP,OTR, full disk encryption and the like for things related to that. However, I also use Facebook, Twitter, and much of my email and IM is in the clear, as it's not worth getting my non-technical contacts set up.
Both privacy and oppenness are important to me. It's important that I get to choose the tradeoffs myself for each type of information and communication.
Yeah, it's a classic controller with grips. It looks better then the old classic controller, but I wish they'd just reintroduce the Wavebird instead. I have one and it's much better and more convenient then the Wii Classic controller..
Yes, if you can get the state legislature to fund a pilot program that's great. First find the correct place to run it and get the school to buy in, and then if possible get outside funding.. I'm not saying the state legislature can't be helpful, just that a pilot should be run, and it should be somewhere that has the most chance of success. Buy-in matters most, if the school is hostile to your idea it will fail no matter how much money and laws the state throws at it...
The parent is definitely pointing you in the correct direction. Pushing for Linux on a statewide level is probably the wrong move, but trying to start a local pilot program where you can get the school to buy into it first rather then have it legislated on them is probably a better option. If you can make it work well, you've got somthing to point to when trying to push statewide. If you can't, you've learned a lot about both the tech and the politics involved.
Pushin slowly and getting buy-in almost always brings better results then top down legislation, in education, politics, and general business.
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Acrobat utterly takes the biscuit when it comes to being the most execrably awful, arrogant, bloated, buggy, piece of software ever made, ever. And that's in a world where Microsoft exists as well.
I see you never used Visual SourceSafe.
But yes, Acrobat sucks.
If you have the experience with Linux based fail over solutions and apache or nginx to pull this off, more power to you. Go ahead and save some bucks, but make sure you test the heck out of it first, and have a plan for updates and failures.
If not, the money you would save is probably not worth the potential downtime you could experience.
Big iron boxes have big iron price tags, and you can almost always hack together something cheaper. The question is how much more reliable, easy to configure, and easy to upgrade is the big iron? In most organizations, buying equipment is cheaper in the long run then buying experience and maintenance for a home grown solution.
My point is risk assessment is hard, and "security" is only one factor of quite a few in the calculation.
My sub point is that this Microsoft guy is full of it, even if what he is saying is somewhat true.
Patched Vista with DEP enabled is a fairly tough nut to crack security-wise, and Microsoft is no longer the laughing-stock of the security world.
On the other hand, this MS spokesperson is implying that you are safer on Vista then OS X or Linux, and due to a number of factors that's probably not true.
Vista is arguably the most secure OS suitable for desktop use.
It is not the safest OS suitable for desktop use however.
What's the difference?
The President of the United States is arguably the most secured individual on the planet.
However, due to the large number of threats against him and his need to travel and be in the public eye often, he is not the safest individual on the planet.
Operating systems are the same. Vista has added many good defenses, but is still the OS with the target on its back.
I'm ok with Microsoft claiming to be the most secure OS for desktop use. OpenBSD and some hardened Linux distros might wish to disagree, but most people don't run hardened systems on desktops, they want more functional systems that are easier to support.
However, I'm not going to let MS get away with calling Vista the safest OS out there, because it just isn't.
If ISPs really wanted to reduce bandwith costs, they wouldn't have all dropped their internal Usenet feeds, and would be caching the heck out of everything.
The reason no one has complained much before:
Comcast:$43 for 250 GB - Seems mostly reasonable. 250 GB is a lot of traffic at the moment, if you're pulling more then 10 GB every day, you're doing some serious stuff and should probably get a business connection.
Time Warner: $40 for 10GB? $60 for 40GB? - Not reasonable at all.
NC State university has an awesome way to deal with this, your department can request or build special VMs that have all the software you need, and then you can access it from anywhere on the internet over RDP(For windows VMs), or SSH/X11(For *nix VMs). http://vcl.ncsu.edu/
Modems, media converters, and routers are different devices. You'd still have a cable/DSL/POTS/WIMAX modem or fiber media converter, but not necessarily a router.
Routers and firewalls are different devices. It just happens that a NAT router approximates a stateful firewall, but that's not the best or only way to do it.
Yes, Joe Q Public might be better off with a stateful firewall appliance then a simple switch, but IPv6 kills the need for a home NAT router. I prefer individual host hardening to depending on a firewall, but the belt-and-suspenders technique is best for most people.
1) "Complete security" doesn't exist.
2) I fail to see how that relates to the needless status of the home NAT router. With IPv6, your ISP can give you your very own public IPv4 sized address space, and you only need a switch instead of a NAT router. It is likely that NAT won't die for quite a while though, and even then people may still opt for a stateful hardware firewall, but IPv6 makes them purely optional. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4864.txt
For the home router segment, the traffic isn't high enough that it matters, and most of them don't support IPv6.
Of course with IPv6 the home router is no longer important really as NAT will no longer be necessary, but it will still nice for Joe Clueless User to have a hardware firewall appliance anyway I guess...
The best one I've seen so far is the Apple Airport extreme, offers easy tunneling service also if you don't have native IPv6 yet.
I've got 8GB of ECC memory in my desktop, and it cost me right about $100.
And yes, I did notice the difference between 4GB and 8GB on Ubuntu 64bit, but I tend to run multiple VMs and Java programs. Linux uses the extra space efficiently as cache even if you're not maxing out your memory space all the time, and it does make a difference.
TFA says "...eight racks filled with 63 Sun Fire x4500 servers with dual- or quad-core x86 processors running Solaris 10 with ZFS. Each Sun server is combined with an array of 48 1TB hard drives." (emphasis mine)
I would guess this means there's a x4500 with 24TB in local disks, and 48TB in attached storage per machine. (24+48)*63 does give us the quoted number
Yeah, I got all excited about the 3-D aspect. I thought perhaps this would finally let me reach through the Internet and punch loudmouth jerks right in the windpipe. Seems not yet. Pity.
Memory, and lots of it. Nothing else will help as much for running multiple VMs.
Memory is dirt cheap, I recently bought 8 gigs of ECC ram for ~100 USD. Of course, over 3-4 gigs, and you need a 64 bit OS, I use Ubuntu 64, but I know others who use Vista 64 to good effect.
At least 2 cores, 3 or for doesn't hurt either. There's great value in both AMD and Intel at the moment, Intel owns the top end, but at the low end or midrange AMD tends to have the better value.
If possible, get a separate drive for at least your main OS, and run the VMs off their own drive. More spindles == more IO, I run 6 drives in my box, one for the OS, and 4 raid 5 for my homedir for speed, capacity, and safety, and one drive bay I swap out for a spare I keep offsite that holds my backups. Linux software raid is great for this use, and with modern multi-core processors you won't notice the overhead.
If you can only afford maxing out one thing though, make it the memory.
Why would this need to be? You're assuming the metaphysical reality operates on the same or lower level as the physical reality. What you call yourself is memory, sense input, and processing, and what you know of your physical existence might be trivial to change from some higher state of being. Rewriting the whole world including your memories could be what is really occurring.
There's a difference between what's possible, and what the most likely explanation, and I agree your view seems more in line with my daily existence. The crazy thing about consciousness and existence is you can never be sure though...
Which is why free will is a metaphysics question, and not a physics question.
If we are purely matter, we have no free will. If there is more to us then matter, then we might have free will. There is no way for physics, the study of matter, to decide whether or not matter is all there is.
That's also why metaphysics is the realm of crackpots, because for the most part you can't prove or disprove anything..
Don't forget "windows update client 8.0"
Honestly, IE 7 is not much less safe then Firefox, and can be locked down via Windows group policy. I can understand how Firefox can be considered a security risk, as this sort of group settings changing is more difficult.
IE 6 is another story, and should be put out to pasture as soon as possible.
I'm no lover of Microsoft or IE in particular, but I can understand this decision. But please, really, let IE 6 die...
FIRST junior Lego league is designed for this age group, and though I haven't been involved at that age level, I know the middle school and high school programs are good, and the elementary school version looks age appropriate.
The FIRST organization is definitely an outstanding model of teaching kids what is is that programmers and engineers do in a way that is exciting and relevant to each age group. I highly recommend checking them out.
http://www.usfirst.org/firstlegoleague/community/jfll/welcome.html
Another ORM patent? They were hit with one of these back in 2006. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/0451221
After a quick glance through the patent (applied for in 1998) I fail to see how the claims differ from previous published work, but the claims are many, and the patent is long.
I fall into two of the above camps.. I have sensitive work information, and need PGP,OTR, full disk encryption and the like for things related to that. However, I also use Facebook, Twitter, and much of my email and IM is in the clear, as it's not worth getting my non-technical contacts set up.
Both privacy and oppenness are important to me. It's important that I get to choose the tradeoffs myself for each type of information and communication.
Yeah, it's a classic controller with grips. It looks better then the old classic controller, but I wish they'd just reintroduce the Wavebird instead. I have one and it's much better and more convenient then the Wii Classic controller..
Yes, if you can get the state legislature to fund a pilot program that's great.
First find the correct place to run it and get the school to buy in, and then if possible get outside funding.. I'm not saying the state legislature can't be helpful, just that a pilot should be run, and it should be somewhere that has the most chance of success. Buy-in matters most, if the school is hostile to your idea it will fail no matter how much money and laws the state throws at it...
The parent is definitely pointing you in the correct direction.
Pushing for Linux on a statewide level is probably the wrong move, but trying to start a local pilot program where you can get the school to buy into it first rather then have it legislated on them is probably a better option. If you can make it work well, you've got somthing to point to when trying to push statewide. If you can't, you've learned a lot about both the tech and the politics involved.
Pushin slowly and getting buy-in almost always brings better results then top down legislation, in education, politics, and general business.
Bluetooth headphones that look like headphones are somewhat exempt, curmudgeons are usually complaining about people wearing their bluetooth phone headsets to look important, when all it does is make them look stupid.
I have a bluetooth headset and love it, but it usually stays in my pocket or on my desk.
Unless you are recieveing phone calls every 3 minutes or so, you just look like an idiot wearing your bluetooth headset everywhere you go..
See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bluetool http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bluetard&defid=874163 and http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bluetooth%20douche .