That's silly. You will be able to run more applications, yes, but "everything [you] would do on [your] PC and more"? What exactly is the MP going to do that your PC won't?
Well, I'm already multi-core (Athlon64 on my primary PC), I'm just going *more* multi-core. However, I'm looking at replacing several computers with one powerful one.
I have about 4 PCs and 1 old Mac that I'd like to consolidate down to just 1 Mac and 1 PC (the PC runs my BBS). The computer room is just too noisy with 5 computers worth of fans and drives. With enough RAM and cores at my disposal, I don't see why I cannot accomplish this using a VM for any windows needs on the Mac. And in a perfect world, I would like to transition the remaining PC to Gentoo, but door games run best on an OS with native DOS support if you know what I mean... and besides I have Gentoo on the laptop.
I will be transitioning everything I can though to a Mac native application (preferrably an F/OSS application but I'll buy a closed source app when I have to). And now my 22" widescreen will have a pleasant looking OS as an added benefit, but without the plague I call Vista.
All do lately on my blue & white is surf the web and email, because that's all I can tolerate on it. You see, with my PC I'm used to an Athlon64 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and fast SATA drives. The Mac, while I like the OS, has only been a toy for me due to the speed inefficiency. But I know what I want and it's OS X... so I need a modern Mac to take advantage of it.
I just purchased a Mac Pro a couple days ago from Apple's site. I can't wait until it gets here. What will I use it for? Everything I would do on my PC and more. It's replacing my PC thanks to Parallels (and/or Boot Camp), and I gain all the Mac OS X goodness at the same time. This machine will also be replacing my aging Blue & White G3 (upgraded with a Zif G4 upgrade) that's running 10.3 at the moment (which is a bit too old to be running 10.3 anyhow....).
That's flat out wrong. Most things have drivers. There are a few things that may not, but you can use XP drivers in the meantime for most everything (except graphics drivers).
My friend would be disagreeing with you tonight - he could not get his scanner to install on Vista. It would not take the vendor's Vista drivers or the XP drivers. It simply did-not-work. Just one of many factors why we have a policy of not adopting Vista for two years where I work. And despite I support MS software for a living (we are a MS solution provider), at home I am *seriously* considering switching to Mac as much as possible.
Why is the mainstream news media failing to report on this potential breakthrough?
The answer is right there in the headline; it is a cheap, safe, and patentless cancer drug. If a drug company cannot make a raping amount of money off of a product - they aren't interested. Also, there is more money to be made off of symptom treatment than there is making cures.
I need all of my software to run together flawlessly.
Err - you and I cannot be thinking of the same Microsoft here. I've spent the whole of my professional career supporting Microsoft solutions and just as GNU/Linux have problems so do Microsoft's applications. But on to the next part...
I can't have some hacked together stuff that that may or may not interact well.
Ah! Now I see what you really like about Microsoft's products - the "tight" integration of their business applications. This is probably the one thing that keeps businesses from switching. I have to admit that having nearly all of their business apps integrate with Office decently is a nice feature. It works most of the time. MS has had more than a few problems though. Overall, I will agree with you that there are many linux applications that aren't tightly integrated and could use a bit of polishing, but there are many, many programs that despite not being a tightly integrated family of apps, they DO get the job done and do it VERY well.
First off, before I get started, I'd like to add that I support and implement Windows environments for a living. I work for a Microsoft Solutions Provider. However, I really like Linux and use it for my personal web server and I have a linux desktop setup both at work and at home. Also, I do not consider myself a Linux zealot. Now, on with the show:
What I was getting at was, "Why is it that in order for me to do my normal, non-power-user day-to-day tasks, I have to access files in root-access-only folders?" I think this mostly goes back to complaints about Linux not having a good directory layout, which results in programs and their various pieces being spread all over hell in a way that users and all too often app designers don't understand, so you end up with a situation where you need root access to alter the config file so you can change the difficulty setting on a minesweeper clone (note: that example came straight out of thin air, but it's of the type that makes me want to reach out and choke so many developers every time I try Linux, and more and more often every time, to boot.
OK, with the exception of services like Apache, MySQL, Samba, etc... every program I have ever used that expects to be run by regular users keeps its users' config files in a hidden directory in your home directory. And it's been this way since at least 1997 (when I started using Linux circa RedHat 5.0) - For example, all of your Mozilla Firefox settings can be found in the hidden directory.mozilla under your home directory. Games are the same way. Do an "ls -a" (without the quotes) at the console sometime while in your home directory. I think you'll be surprised at how many hidden folders there are (hint: they all begin with a '.' character). And you should never really have a need to go into those folders. Since they are in your home folder you have read and write access to them and the programs should be managing it for you. So, why you were having the problems you describe make no sense, and I'm not going to probe any further...
BTW, this is analogous to programs in Windows saving personal settings in the registry under: \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\[vendor]\[program]\[va rious_keys_and_values_here]
Last time I tried Kubuntu (Breezy Badger), I got so sick of typing in the root pass, having it fail, bringing up a console, trying it with sudo, having it succeed, etc., for the tiniest, most insignificant tasks, I almost had an aneurysm (and yes, there have been similar incidents on different distros as well)).
Hmmm, again you should not have to do anything as root that's not dealing with system wide services and settings. Anything that pertains only to your user account being affected shouldn't require root privileges. Now, if you were trying to set the system clock - yes, you have to be root to configure that. It's a system wide setting. If you were doing anything related to windows file sharing (samba) that's also going to require root privileges - it's a system service that you are trying to configure.
What most people forget is that in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003... to set the clock, do power management, or configure networking and file/print sharing you have to have administrator privileges. Actually there's one exception in that list - you can do power management if you are a member of the power users group. The rest require you to be an administrator. Most programs need administrator privileges to be installed in Windows. But like in Linux using SU or SUDO, as a Windows administrator I shift + right-click the setup icon and choose "run as" and I enter my administrative credentials. Voila! The problem is most people run as admin all the time in Windows...
BTW, Windows can be quite restrictive in the right environment as well... I've done Active Directory domains in security sensitive jobs where I used group policy to lock down users' desktops... they couldn't so much as fart without an admin password when I was done locking it down.:P
Did it ever occur to you that not everyone has bought a car in the past two years? Toyota didn't start putting those jacks in all their cars until very recently. It's certainly not in my 2000 Camary. So I guess, by your logic, all manufactuers are not smart. I find this especially funny, given you have a 2007 Yaris, when today's date is November 2006.:-)
** Disclaimer: I used to work for a Toyota Dealer. **
You are aware that car makers release the new year models before the new year, right? As for the auxillary input - the first Toyotas to offer this option started in 2002 (Not all models had it available though).
More importantly, why aren't they making ALL car radios with an simple signal-in jack? You take a cable, go from the headphones jack on your IPod/walkman/whatever, directly into your car stereo.
I can't believe that most new cars still don't come with that. How hard is this???
Well, if you buy from a smart car manufacturer, like Toyota, you can get an auxiliary input jack in even the cheapest car. I know as I own a 2007 Toyota Yaris and I regularly enjoy plugging into the car stereo through the aux-in connector in the console between the front seats.:)
All of this is irrelevant against a government that has tanks and other superior firepower.
We couldn't finish Vietnam despite the fact that our army had superior firepower. I have superior firepower now and can't seem to finish off the job in the Middle East. And, we were definitely considered the underdogs at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, yet we won.
It takes more than just superior firepower to win...
That pretty much sums up the problem with Gentoo, nowadays -- searching the forums is now a routine tool for getting your updates to work. It used to be that Portage was the biggest advantage of Gentoo; now it's one headache after another.
Which is exactly why it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do to fix the problem -- I *DON'T* read the forums. Generally, I prefer to fix it myself if I can. If I can figure it out myself, then I have learned something deeper than being told what to do. That said, my solution wasn't nearly as concise as that one-liner he quoted.:/
I have been using Gentoo for quite awhile and I don't have any gripes. Someone has to be doing something (maintaining packages) or I wouldn't have to emerge --sync and emerge -uD world every few days.
Except that as another user noted above, there's a problem with the base install where PAM and shadow libraries conflict with each other (obviously there are packates from the stage tarball that depend on each?) and it was a problem in the 2006.0 release. Something like that should have been fixed for the 2006.1 release. I had a lot of "fun" getting around that problem (and a lot of wasted time!).
I mean basically "out of the box", you've just finished the install and you reboot into your new gentoo system only to find a PITA of a problem the minute you go to install a package or set of packages that depends on Pam or shadow. I still have the 2005.whatever release still running on my main linux box because of this (I was smart and tried 2006.x on a different system first.)
If you want to use Linux to do everything you can do on Windows (gaming, multimedia, PVR, etc), it just sucks. The Hauppage drivers and MythTV are plain sucky and buggy. Most sound card drivers, and hell, the entire ALSA subsystem, suck as well.
Gaming sucks because there are only very few major release games ported to Linux (i.e. UT2k4, Doom3, etc...). Speaking of which I've loaded UT2k4 on my linux box once and it ran just fine. We need more of that. Unforunately, most of the games on Linux (and there are quite a few) are simple games like card games and mahjong and reversi. (Hey some people REALLY like Majong!:) Audio support is indeed lacking, however my audigy works pretty decently. ALSA is better than OSS (in my opinion), and I think it was a step in the right direction initially, but it seems to be falling short... As for MythTV and Videocapture, I've never been impressed with Hauppage hardware. I have a Hauppage card that's sub par even on Windows. I have had it working in Linux but again I wasn't impressed. However, Plextor seems to have a nice piece of equipment these days. And according to that HowTO, you don't need binary blob drivers, so it's GPL all the way, baby!:)
I'd prefer it in a heartbeat for server applications though. The trap that people fall in is trying to shoehorn FOSS into being all things to all people.
We have a Windows 2003 Small Business Server that fits the "slowly going down in flames" moniker. While it doesn't crash per se, it just does really weird things on a regular basis that I'm always having to get this or that service running again, taking care of weird errors.... Oh and it likes to kick out all our purchased licenses on a semi-regular basis. Called MS on that one. I was told to backup the licenses somewhere so I could just import them quickly instead of inputting all the 25-character codes each time. That is *not* a solution, that is a hack/workaround. Thanks MS!:( Apparently there's no fix...
(First Disclaimer: I support Windows environments for a living)
(Second Disclaimer: I have also been a strong supporter of Linux since '97)
OK, so ignoring Malware altogether, I would tend to agree with you to a point. If you run mostly Microsoft's other software offerings on top of Windows, generally speaking it's a stable desktop OS. My PC in my office at work runs Monday-Friday, week after week, with pretty much no problems. The system is a Dell, it's only 6 months old, and its actually quite speedy for a PC used for nothing more than Office, Mappoint, Visio, etc...
Then you start adding 3rd party programs. Most run fine, but I've encountered a few that don't play well with Windows to the point of actually getting a BSOD, or hosing the system in such a way that it becomes unusable, and the only thing you can do is reach for the reset button (or power button). And most MS zealots will point to the application in question and scream that it's badly written. True, to an extent, because there are certainly plenty of apps that run on Windows just fine for years. However, it is primary concern of an OS to protect itself from rogue programs, and to protect programs from each other...
Now, I don't claim that Linux is perfect. Nothing we create is perfect because we are not perfect either. Now about that Linux instability you mention. I will first put out my disclaimer that I've not used or even looked at Suse for a few years, however I've used various distros since I got started with Linux in '97 and I've never seen one go "down in flames". Sure, hardware compatibility can sometimes be a problem, but generally these days I can load Linux on just about any machine and have it up and running no problems minus devices Linux doesn't have a driver for, and usually it's not a show stopper (if you have some obscure scsi card it would be a problem since you cannot boot the system without the right driver...)
Also, I have seen applications lock up Gnome/KDE/, but rarely have I seen a desktop app take out the entire system. And on your simpler window managers like Window Maker, I have had nearly zero problems with desktop lock ups (you just kill the app that is misbehaving). And if we want to talk servers, Linux w/o X installed runs just fine, years on end (I've experienced it personally...:)
So, Neither are perfect, but I still put my money on Linux when it comes general uptime and availability - especially servers.
I will admit that while I am not crazy about this search redirector, overall I have been happy with Earthlink as my broad band provider. They have been no better or worse then Time Warner/Road Runner was when I first got this cable line, and they are MUCH cheaper than Road Runner. I do not have cable TV just cable internet - RR wants $54.95/mo when I left them, and Earthlink has remained at $41.95/mo. It was a no brainer for me to switch when RR made their last increase (Its been about two years ago, IIRC). Earthlink is on my good side since they still don't block any ports that I need to run my bbs, website, and anything else I've wanted to do (I use DynDNS). I will say that Road Runner here didn't block ports either.
How many of you have read any of the court documents on his site? Clicking on the Grand Jury link (top of page) and scrolling to the bottom, you have a reverse chronological list of events in the case. One of the PDFs, "Reply to US Attorney's Opposition to Quash", has on page 2 a quote from David Picard of the FBI saying, "One of our major domestic terrorism programs is the ALF, EFF, and anarchist movement, and it's a nation program for the FBI." So let me get this straight: The EFF are terrorists? hah! I think that's only because they don't agree with the government...
If you go here you will notice they disable the login box if you visit that page using anything but IE. That page is the login for the "Everdream Control Center", which is where you manage everything. Service requests/help desk, remote control clients, asset management, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
How about sftp? Works great for me. ;)
That's silly. You will be able to run more applications, yes, but "everything [you] would do on [your] PC and more"? What exactly is the MP going to do that your PC won't?
Well, I'm already multi-core (Athlon64 on my primary PC), I'm just going *more* multi-core. However, I'm looking at replacing several computers with one powerful one.
I have about 4 PCs and 1 old Mac that I'd like to consolidate down to just 1 Mac and 1 PC (the PC runs my BBS). The computer room is just too noisy with 5 computers worth of fans and drives. With enough RAM and cores at my disposal, I don't see why I cannot accomplish this using a VM for any windows needs on the Mac. And in a perfect world, I would like to transition the remaining PC to Gentoo, but door games run best on an OS with native DOS support if you know what I mean... and besides I have Gentoo on the laptop.
I will be transitioning everything I can though to a Mac native application (preferrably an F/OSS application but I'll buy a closed source app when I have to). And now my 22" widescreen will have a pleasant looking OS as an added benefit, but without the plague I call Vista.
All do lately on my blue & white is surf the web and email, because that's all I can tolerate on it. You see, with my PC I'm used to an Athlon64 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and fast SATA drives. The Mac, while I like the OS, has only been a toy for me due to the speed inefficiency. But I know what I want and it's OS X... so I need a modern Mac to take advantage of it.
:D
And that's coming very soon.
I just purchased a Mac Pro a couple days ago from Apple's site. I can't wait until it gets here. What will I use it for? Everything I would do on my PC and more. It's replacing my PC thanks to Parallels (and/or Boot Camp), and I gain all the Mac OS X goodness at the same time. This machine will also be replacing my aging Blue & White G3 (upgraded with a Zif G4 upgrade) that's running 10.3 at the moment (which is a bit too old to be running 10.3 anyhow....).
I just ordered my Mac Pro two days ago (two dual-core Xeons) :(
My friend would be disagreeing with you tonight - he could not get his scanner to install on Vista. It would not take the vendor's Vista drivers or the XP drivers. It simply did-not-work. Just one of many factors why we have a policy of not adopting Vista for two years where I work. And despite I support MS software for a living (we are a MS solution provider), at home I am *seriously* considering switching to Mac as much as possible.
The answer is right there in the headline; it is a cheap, safe, and patentless cancer drug. If a drug company cannot make a raping amount of money off of a product - they aren't interested. Also, there is more money to be made off of symptom treatment than there is making cures.
One of my favorite comedians.
BTW, I completely agree with your post. I don't run into people with this opinion very often.
It's nice to know that I'm not alone in that belief.
Err - you and I cannot be thinking of the same Microsoft here. I've spent the whole of my professional career supporting Microsoft solutions and just as GNU/Linux have problems so do Microsoft's applications. But on to the next part...
Ah! Now I see what you really like about Microsoft's products - the "tight" integration of their business applications. This is probably the one thing that keeps businesses from switching. I have to admit that having nearly all of their business apps integrate with Office decently is a nice feature. It works most of the time. MS has had more than a few problems though. Overall, I will agree with you that there are many linux applications that aren't tightly integrated and could use a bit of polishing, but there are many, many programs that despite not being a tightly integrated family of apps, they DO get the job done and do it VERY well.
First off, before I get started, I'd like to add that I support and implement Windows environments for a living. I work for a Microsoft Solutions Provider. However, I really like Linux and use it for my personal web server and I have a linux desktop setup both at work and at home. Also, I do not consider myself a Linux zealot. Now, on with the show:
OK, with the exception of services like Apache, MySQL, Samba, etc... every program I have ever used that expects to be run by regular users keeps its users' config files in a hidden directory in your home directory. And it's been this way since at least 1997 (when I started using Linux circa RedHat 5.0) - For example, all of your Mozilla Firefox settings can be found in the hidden directory .mozilla under your home directory. Games are the same way. Do an "ls -a" (without the quotes) at the console sometime while in your home directory. I think you'll be surprised at how many hidden folders there are (hint: they all begin with a '.' character). And you should never really have a need to go into those folders. Since they are in your home folder you have read and write access to them and the programs should be managing it for you. So, why you were having the problems you describe make no sense, and I'm not going to probe any further...
BTW, this is analogous to programs in Windows saving personal settings in the registry under:a rious_keys_and_values_here]
\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\[vendor]\[program]\[v
Hmmm, again you should not have to do anything as root that's not dealing with system wide services and settings. Anything that pertains only to your user account being affected shouldn't require root privileges. Now, if you were trying to set the system clock - yes, you have to be root to configure that. It's a system wide setting. If you were doing anything related to windows file sharing (samba) that's also going to require root privileges - it's a system service that you are trying to configure.
What most people forget is that in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003... to set the clock, do power management, or configure networking and file/print sharing you have to have administrator privileges. Actually there's one exception in that list - you can do power management if you are a member of the power users group. The rest require you to be an administrator. Most programs need administrator privileges to be installed in Windows. But like in Linux using SU or SUDO, as a Windows administrator I shift + right-click the setup icon and choose "run as" and I enter my administrative credentials. Voila! The problem is most people run as admin all the time in Windows...
BTW, Windows can be quite restrictive in the right environment as well... I've done Active Directory domains in security sensitive jobs where I used group policy to lock down users' desktops... they couldn't so much as fart without an admin password when I was done locking it down. :P
** Disclaimer: I used to work for a Toyota Dealer. **
You are aware that car makers release the new year models before the new year, right? As for the auxillary input - the first Toyotas to offer this option started in 2002 (Not all models had it available though).
Well, if you buy from a smart car manufacturer, like Toyota, you can get an auxiliary input jack in even the cheapest car. I know as I own a 2007 Toyota Yaris and I regularly enjoy plugging into the car stereo through the aux-in connector in the console between the front seats. :)
We couldn't finish Vietnam despite the fact that our army had superior firepower. I have superior firepower now and can't seem to finish off the job in the Middle East. And, we were definitely considered the underdogs at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, yet we won.
It takes more than just superior firepower to win...
You're not alone! I still use LILO because it's what I've used since 1997, and I'm too lazy to learn GRUB.
Which is exactly why it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do to fix the problem -- I *DON'T* read the forums. Generally, I prefer to fix it myself if I can. If I can figure it out myself, then I have learned something deeper than being told what to do. That said, my solution wasn't nearly as concise as that one-liner he quoted. :/
Except that as another user noted above, there's a problem with the base install where PAM and shadow libraries conflict with each other (obviously there are packates from the stage tarball that depend on each?) and it was a problem in the 2006.0 release. Something like that should have been fixed for the 2006.1 release. I had a lot of "fun" getting around that problem (and a lot of wasted time!).
I mean basically "out of the box", you've just finished the install and you reboot into your new gentoo system only to find a PITA of a problem the minute you go to install a package or set of packages that depends on Pam or shadow. I still have the 2005.whatever release still running on my main linux box because of this (I was smart and tried 2006.x on a different system first.)
Gaming sucks because there are only very few major release games ported to Linux (i.e. UT2k4, Doom3, etc...). Speaking of which I've loaded UT2k4 on my linux box once and it ran just fine. We need more of that. Unforunately, most of the games on Linux (and there are quite a few) are simple games like card games and mahjong and reversi. (Hey some people REALLY like Majong!:) Audio support is indeed lacking, however my audigy works pretty decently. ALSA is better than OSS (in my opinion), and I think it was a step in the right direction initially, but it seems to be falling short... As for MythTV and Videocapture, I've never been impressed with Hauppage hardware. I have a Hauppage card that's sub par even on Windows. I have had it working in Linux but again I wasn't impressed. However, Plextor seems to have a nice piece of equipment these days. And according to that HowTO, you don't need binary blob drivers, so it's GPL all the way, baby! :)
We have a Windows 2003 Small Business Server that fits the "slowly going down in flames" moniker. While it doesn't crash per se, it just does really weird things on a regular basis that I'm always having to get this or that service running again, taking care of weird errors.... Oh and it likes to kick out all our purchased licenses on a semi-regular basis. Called MS on that one. I was told to backup the licenses somewhere so I could just import them quickly instead of inputting all the 25-character codes each time. That is *not* a solution, that is a hack/workaround. Thanks MS! :( Apparently there's no fix...
(First Disclaimer: I support Windows environments for a living)
(Second Disclaimer: I have also been a strong supporter of Linux since '97)
OK, so ignoring Malware altogether, I would tend to agree with you to a point. If you run mostly Microsoft's other software offerings on top of Windows, generally speaking it's a stable desktop OS. My PC in my office at work runs Monday-Friday, week after week, with pretty much no problems. The system is a Dell, it's only 6 months old, and its actually quite speedy for a PC used for nothing more than Office, Mappoint, Visio, etc...
Then you start adding 3rd party programs. Most run fine, but I've encountered a few that don't play well with Windows to the point of actually getting a BSOD, or hosing the system in such a way that it becomes unusable, and the only thing you can do is reach for the reset button (or power button). And most MS zealots will point to the application in question and scream that it's badly written. True, to an extent, because there are certainly plenty of apps that run on Windows just fine for years. However, it is primary concern of an OS to protect itself from rogue programs, and to protect programs from each other...
Now, I don't claim that Linux is perfect. Nothing we create is perfect because we are not perfect either. Now about that Linux instability you mention. I will first put out my disclaimer that I've not used or even looked at Suse for a few years, however I've used various distros since I got started with Linux in '97 and I've never seen one go "down in flames". Sure, hardware compatibility can sometimes be a problem, but generally these days I can load Linux on just about any machine and have it up and running no problems minus devices Linux doesn't have a driver for, and usually it's not a show stopper (if you have some obscure scsi card it would be a problem since you cannot boot the system without the right driver...)
Also, I have seen applications lock up Gnome/KDE/, but rarely have I seen a desktop app take out the entire system. And on your simpler window managers like Window Maker, I have had nearly zero problems with desktop lock ups (you just kill the app that is misbehaving). And if we want to talk servers, Linux w/o X installed runs just fine, years on end (I've experienced it personally...:)
So, Neither are perfect, but I still put my money on Linux when it comes general uptime and availability - especially servers.
I will admit that while I am not crazy about this search redirector, overall I have been happy with Earthlink as my broad band provider. They have been no better or worse then Time Warner/Road Runner was when I first got this cable line, and they are MUCH cheaper than Road Runner. I do not have cable TV just cable internet - RR wants $54.95/mo when I left them, and Earthlink has remained at $41.95/mo. It was a no brainer for me to switch when RR made their last increase (Its been about two years ago, IIRC). Earthlink is on my good side since they still don't block any ports that I need to run my bbs, website, and anything else I've wanted to do (I use DynDNS). I will say that Road Runner here didn't block ports either.
I was reading that Tom's article this morning around 8am EST. Oh well!
Actually, I believe the ALF in question here is the Animal Liberation Front.
How many of you have read any of the court documents on his site? Clicking on the Grand Jury link (top of page) and scrolling to the bottom, you have a reverse chronological list of events in the case. One of the PDFs, "Reply to US Attorney's Opposition to Quash", has on page 2 a quote from David Picard of the FBI saying, "One of our major domestic terrorism programs is the ALF, EFF, and anarchist movement, and it's a nation program for the FBI." So let me get this straight: The EFF are terrorists? hah! I think that's only because they don't agree with the government...
Don't you hate when you reply to the wrong post :/
I meant to add this to my post above, but here:
If you go here you will notice they disable the login box if you visit that page using anything but IE. That page is the login for the "Everdream Control Center", which is where you manage everything. Service requests/help desk, remote control clients, asset management, etc.