I'd just say go for the most that you can afford. Our 3Coms have served us well, and between them, they work with anything from 10M ethernet to 2gig fibre optic.
I worked with a major brewer for a while, and their Cisco kit was very reliable, but it never had to handle much of a load. It did survive being kicked about, dropped, my boss's driving it several hundred miles unsecured in the back of a van. I doubt out 3com kit would have survived that!
Basically, if you can afford Cisco, go for it. If not, use 3Com.
Incidentally, if you want your server room to look cool, go for Black Diamond:D
Will we see Linux desktop viruses? Almost certainly yes. But they will be pretty rare and not an epidemy like those on Windows today.
We may see linux viruses, but I think that even older versions of linux will be less susceptible to modern viruses than older versions of windows are to modern windows viruses. Linux is naturally secure, and it's hard to run anything without permission from somebody.
This happens all the time, at least in the UK, but with any major contract.
Say a council (local government) wants a road building, they will put out a request for tenders, and then companies will put in tenders.
Council: We want 200yds of road from A to B
Builder 1: We'll do it for £10,000
Builder 2: We'll do it for £5,000
Builder 3: We'll do it for £7,000
Council: Tenders closed. Builder 2 gets it.
And thats where it ends! Most of the UK was built on this kinda principle, and it's worked for years. There's no danger to patients, as the nurses involved are already working for the hospital, so they must be sufficiently qualified anyway. The only danger lies in nurses becoming too tired to work.
As for other industries, and those without professional qualifications, it could work fine just so long as checks can be made, eg interviews in order to be able to use the site.
The machines that we build are pretty much identical, but we don't ship with WiFi support as a standard feature. The machines I work on are generally in for repair or upgrade to WiFi capibility.
The problem lies in third party software running and not offering all the options that Windows does, and vice versa. Some WiFi cards offer non-standard options that can only be configured with the bundled software, while some bundled software doesn't support all the features that Windows does. SP2 offers more such features and a whole new utility for setting up WiFi, while the existing bundled utilities don't support these.
My advice is to KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid, and that if it works with your current config, let it be. Microsoft will eventually force all XP users to upgrade to SP2, by March 2005 I think, here's DevShed's article on the matter: DevShed so it's worth messing with it now, and getting advice while the topic is still hot.
I try to uninstall the 3rd party software (checking first that I have the discs to re-install it), then install SP2, then install the 3rd party software again. If i can get the 3rd party software working, then I leave it, otherwise i remove the 3rd party stuff from the Startup folder, reboot, and try to config the WiFi through Windows. I have had a 100% success rate so far, but in several cases I've used a USB wireless thingie (technical term i know). The drivers for USB networking devices seem to be unaffected by Service Packs.
Hope this helps.
Short answers to your questions:
1 - Build machines have their hard drives imaged off a master drive with SP2 already on it, but i only work on machines that come in, which can be of any age, any spec, any config, any amount of crap done to them by incompetent users
2 - The firewall in SP2 seems to be quite well behaved. To be honest I usually switch it off, and let the inbuilt firewall in the ADSL routers that I ship to customers do the protecting. I wouldn't advise using another software firewall with SP2, until MS release a patch that lets you switch off the inbuilt completely.
Just to add to the general feeling here, we knock out 50 - 100 machines a week with SP2 and have very few reported issues apart from with the list that MS give. WiFi is just a bitch anyway, but third party software generally complains more under SP2 than SP1. The most common issue there is with third party software starting on boot, and then users trying to config their connections through windows.
until i set up a batch job in my audio editor to add exactly 0.01 seconds of silence at the beginning of every track and 0.001 seconds of silence every 15 seconds thereafter
wouldn't even downloaded files sometimes have different MD5 hashes? as far as i know there's very little continuitity checking or error correction while downloading with something like kazaa, and a few bits out of place might not affect the MP3 but would affect the MD5....right?
only 8? my f*ckin basement has 36 set aside for my machines and associated bits, and thats before you add the coffee machines, tea maker thingie and god knows what else is down there!
true four inkjets might be a bit excessive but i'm sure I can find a use for them:p
the whole idea of palmtops and laptops was to take the office out of the office right.......so you can now do all your work on the train on the way into work instead of having to be at a terminal.
I think i'm right in saying that most large offices have data on servers that everyone can access, if everyone had a personal server then they could sync it at work with the intranet maybe, and then have access to their work intranet without the call costs of dialling into their work's server.
The role of the server is the one that has so far not been taken mobile, until now:D i love the idea, although the battery life would need to be higher than 4 hours for me to consider it. having said that my laptop only lasts 2 hours when i'm using 802.11b so it wouldn't be an issue when i'm on the move.
One feature intel might consider is drip-charging it from USB for time when you only have access to one power point, like on trains here in the UK there is a plug socket next to each seat...but only one and it would be a bit shit if you were working for hours and then your server went down
I've been offered 802.11 - based 1mbit up/ 1mbit down in my area for £20 ($31) per month......it thought it was a bit suspicious, claiming to have that kind of transfer rate over a 5 mile radius.. does anyone know if i'm right or if im paranoid?
and does that count as broadband?
(Score: 2, Offtopic)
You see somet new every day. And before you ask I have modded and meta-modded several times so i _do_ have a certain amount of experience
thanks for the info - the way the UK media portrayed it it sounded like everywhere in the US had the same problems.
that sounds like a rather good system actually - would cut down on the waiting time between voting and results published as well, ye? actually it would make an interesting statistical analysis to see when voters for certain candidates voted. I don't pretend to know much about US politics itself but it might be interesting if, for example, republicans voted more in the morning than in the afternoon and democrats voted more in the afternoon.....hmmmm
aye we've experimented with that kind of thing over here - problem was loads of old people were so skeptical that they thought they touchscreen-voting system was just some kind of opinion poll and then they tried to vote again with normal pen-and-paper voting, and loads of young people were totally paranoid about the government computers gettin hacked by some evil nazi hacker and some complete lunatic getting into power..........actually that might explain why tony blair won the last election. lets all blame evil nazi hackers, takes the responsibilty away from the voting public.
seriously though it would be interesting to see how secure the digital voting systems are....anyone know?
now thats technology thats exceeded expectations - the BBC model B.... mine's still going strong...doing whatever it does...oh i dunno but its still a damn nice machine.
whats even more amazing is that it still works even with all the mould growing on the motherboard
i dont get it with the machinery anyway.
over here in the UK we have an amazingly effective system - a small piece of paper with "MARK ONE BOX ONLY" on the top it and boxes write your X in.
no machine, no pregnant chads or anything like that.......just black marks
even that didnt stop some wanker like Tony Blair rising to power, but hey thats democracy for you
if sites are really that bothered then why don't they just integrate some form of code that only allows people to see articles if they've been to the main page? I'm sure this could be done using cookies, or even with some form of server-side scripting.
looks more like another publicity stunt to me - i mean if the story got onto/. it must have been fairly high-profile in denmark eh?
given that we've been discussing this issue of our language (which did of course come into existance because monkeys needed to tell each other where the good bananas are) for thousands of years, its quite incredible that we have managed to discover the speed of something like gravity. what is the speed of light by the way?
Heres how I see it. It costs an ISP $X per month to provide service to all its customers. The person who owns the ISP (be it one guy in his basement or thousands of shareholders) want a profit of $Y. Therefore the ISP must take $X + $Y in a month to stay in business. Lets call this amount $Z. Bandwidth is homogenous - there is no effective difference between using the 1st Mbit of a 10 meg pipe or the 9th Mbit of the pipe (assuming all the hardware can take 10megs happily). Unless one customer can be directly seen to cost the ISP more than any other customer (with things like excessive calls to tech support, causing the ISP to have to buy an extra T-1 circuit by advertising on slashdot:P ) then all the customers cause the ISP all the costs. In the same way as manufacturing,
price per unit =
total cost (including profits) --------------------- total number of units produced.
so, if bandwidth is sold by the Mbit, and an ISP provides 10 Mbits for $Z total costs, the only fair way to charge customers is by making the price $Z/10 (or 10% of $Z per Mbit).
there's a microbrewery a few miles from me that sells to only one pub - and the beer handle thingie is shaped like the bicentennial man taking a piss - now thats cool. they should put that in the movie
the only thing with converting any of Asimov's work over to film is that everyone who reads it has a different idea of what the worlds will look like, so a lot of people will see how Hollywood sees it and will feel uncomfortable with it. Its a pity really
The price that Lexus charge for the ES300 is determined entirely by market forces - it is a luxury good, so it has a >0 YED. It is also valued by the public at large based on its image, but there isnt an ecnomic model for that yet. Anyway, it all comes down to the demand curve shifting to the right as the price rises, and so the extra money makes the car sell more
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just say go for the most that you can afford.
:D
Our 3Coms have served us well, and between them, they work with anything from 10M ethernet to 2gig fibre optic.
I worked with a major brewer for a while, and their Cisco kit was very reliable, but it never had to handle much of a load. It did survive being kicked about, dropped, my boss's driving it several hundred miles unsecured in the back of a van. I doubt out 3com kit would have survived that!
Basically, if you can afford Cisco, go for it. If not, use 3Com.
Incidentally, if you want your server room to look cool, go for Black Diamond
Will we see Linux desktop viruses? Almost certainly yes. But they will be pretty rare and not an epidemy like those on Windows today.
We may see linux viruses, but I think that even older versions of linux will be less susceptible to modern viruses than older versions of windows are to modern windows viruses. Linux is naturally secure, and it's hard to run anything without permission from somebody.
This happens all the time, at least in the UK, but with any major contract.
Say a council (local government) wants a road building, they will put out a request for tenders, and then companies will put in tenders.
Council: We want 200yds of road from A to B
Builder 1: We'll do it for £10,000
Builder 2: We'll do it for £5,000
Builder 3: We'll do it for £7,000
Council: Tenders closed. Builder 2 gets it.
And thats where it ends! Most of the UK was built on this kinda principle, and it's worked for years. There's no danger to patients, as the nurses involved are already working for the hospital, so they must be sufficiently qualified anyway. The only danger lies in nurses becoming too tired to work.
As for other industries, and those without professional qualifications, it could work fine just so long as checks can be made, eg interviews in order to be able to use the site.
The machines that we build are pretty much identical, but we don't ship with WiFi support as a standard feature. The machines I work on are generally in for repair or upgrade to WiFi capibility. The problem lies in third party software running and not offering all the options that Windows does, and vice versa. Some WiFi cards offer non-standard options that can only be configured with the bundled software, while some bundled software doesn't support all the features that Windows does. SP2 offers more such features and a whole new utility for setting up WiFi, while the existing bundled utilities don't support these. My advice is to KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid, and that if it works with your current config, let it be. Microsoft will eventually force all XP users to upgrade to SP2, by March 2005 I think, here's DevShed's article on the matter: DevShed so it's worth messing with it now, and getting advice while the topic is still hot. I try to uninstall the 3rd party software (checking first that I have the discs to re-install it), then install SP2, then install the 3rd party software again. If i can get the 3rd party software working, then I leave it, otherwise i remove the 3rd party stuff from the Startup folder, reboot, and try to config the WiFi through Windows. I have had a 100% success rate so far, but in several cases I've used a USB wireless thingie (technical term i know). The drivers for USB networking devices seem to be unaffected by Service Packs. Hope this helps. Short answers to your questions: 1 - Build machines have their hard drives imaged off a master drive with SP2 already on it, but i only work on machines that come in, which can be of any age, any spec, any config, any amount of crap done to them by incompetent users 2 - The firewall in SP2 seems to be quite well behaved. To be honest I usually switch it off, and let the inbuilt firewall in the ADSL routers that I ship to customers do the protecting. I wouldn't advise using another software firewall with SP2, until MS release a patch that lets you switch off the inbuilt completely.
Just to add to the general feeling here, we knock out 50 - 100 machines a week with SP2 and have very few reported issues apart from with the list that MS give. WiFi is just a bitch anyway, but third party software generally complains more under SP2 than SP1. The most common issue there is with third party software starting on boot, and then users trying to config their connections through windows.
until i set up a batch job in my audio editor to add exactly 0.01 seconds of silence at the beginning of every track and 0.001 seconds of silence every 15 seconds thereafter
wouldn't even downloaded files sometimes have different MD5 hashes? as far as i know there's very little continuitity checking or error correction while downloading with something like kazaa, and a few bits out of place might not affect the MP3 but would affect the MD5....right?
only 8? my f*ckin basement has 36 set aside for my machines and associated bits, and thats before you add the coffee machines, tea maker thingie and god knows what else is down there! true four inkjets might be a bit excessive but i'm sure I can find a use for them :p
yeah, its also a TV show here in the UK (stop rubbing it in that it hasn't been released here yet and no-one on kazaa that i can find has it!! :( )
:p
its also my mate's room at uni which is a bit disturbing
the whole idea of palmtops and laptops was to take the office out of the office right.......so you can now do all your work on the train on the way into work instead of having to be at a terminal.
:D i love the idea, although the battery life would need to be higher than 4 hours for me to consider it. having said that my laptop only lasts 2 hours when i'm using 802.11b so it wouldn't be an issue when i'm on the move.
I think i'm right in saying that most large offices have data on servers that everyone can access, if everyone had a personal server then they could sync it at work with the intranet maybe, and then have access to their work intranet without the call costs of dialling into their work's server.
The role of the server is the one that has so far not been taken mobile, until now
One feature intel might consider is drip-charging it from USB for time when you only have access to one power point, like on trains here in the UK there is a plug socket next to each seat...but only one and it would be a bit shit if you were working for hours and then your server went down
enough rambling
I've been offered 802.11 - based 1mbit up/ 1mbit down in my area for £20 ($31) per month......it thought it was a bit suspicious, claiming to have that kind of transfer rate over a 5 mile radius.. does anyone know if i'm right or if im paranoid? and does that count as broadband?
(Score: 2, Offtopic) You see somet new every day. And before you ask I have modded and meta-modded several times so i _do_ have a certain amount of experience
thanks for the info - the way the UK media portrayed it it sounded like everywhere in the US had the same problems. that sounds like a rather good system actually - would cut down on the waiting time between voting and results published as well, ye? actually it would make an interesting statistical analysis to see when voters for certain candidates voted. I don't pretend to know much about US politics itself but it might be interesting if, for example, republicans voted more in the morning than in the afternoon and democrats voted more in the afternoon.....hmmmm
aye we've experimented with that kind of thing over here - problem was loads of old people were so skeptical that they thought they touchscreen-voting system was just some kind of opinion poll and then they tried to vote again with normal pen-and-paper voting, and loads of young people were totally paranoid about the government computers gettin hacked by some evil nazi hacker and some complete lunatic getting into power..........actually that might explain why tony blair won the last election. lets all blame evil nazi hackers, takes the responsibilty away from the voting public. seriously though it would be interesting to see how secure the digital voting systems are....anyone know?
now thats technology thats exceeded expectations - the BBC model B.... mine's still going strong...doing whatever it does...oh i dunno but its still a damn nice machine. whats even more amazing is that it still works even with all the mould growing on the motherboard
i dont get it with the machinery anyway. over here in the UK we have an amazingly effective system - a small piece of paper with "MARK ONE BOX ONLY" on the top it and boxes write your X in. no machine, no pregnant chads or anything like that.......just black marks even that didnt stop some wanker like Tony Blair rising to power, but hey thats democracy for you
if sites are really that bothered then why don't they just integrate some form of code that only allows people to see articles if they've been to the main page? I'm sure this could be done using cookies, or even with some form of server-side scripting. looks more like another publicity stunt to me - i mean if the story got onto /. it must have been fairly high-profile in denmark eh?
good point. What happened to corel linux?
given that we've been discussing this issue of our language (which did of course come into existance because monkeys needed to tell each other where the good bananas are) for thousands of years, its quite incredible that we have managed to discover the speed of something like gravity. what is the speed of light by the way?
Heres how I see it. It costs an ISP $X per month to provide service to all its customers. The person who owns the ISP (be it one guy in his basement or thousands of shareholders) want a profit of $Y. Therefore the ISP must take $X + $Y in a month to stay in business. Lets call this amount $Z. Bandwidth is homogenous - there is no effective difference between using the 1st Mbit of a 10 meg pipe or the 9th Mbit of the pipe (assuming all the hardware can take 10megs happily). Unless one customer can be directly seen to cost the ISP more than any other customer (with things like excessive calls to tech support, causing the ISP to have to buy an extra T-1 circuit by advertising on slashdot :P ) then all the customers cause the ISP all the costs. In the same way as manufacturing,
price per unit =
total cost (including profits)
---------------------
total number of units produced.
so, if bandwidth is sold by the Mbit, and an ISP provides 10 Mbits for $Z total costs, the only fair way to charge customers is by making the price $Z/10 (or 10% of $Z per Mbit).
there's a microbrewery a few miles from me that sells to only one pub - and the beer handle thingie is shaped like the bicentennial man taking a piss - now thats cool. they should put that in the movie the only thing with converting any of Asimov's work over to film is that everyone who reads it has a different idea of what the worlds will look like, so a lot of people will see how Hollywood sees it and will feel uncomfortable with it. Its a pity really
kinda screws everyone who wants a nice quiet PC..........
Or the five finger discount that most of us get on MS OSes anyway.............
The price that Lexus charge for the ES300 is determined entirely by market forces - it is a luxury good, so it has a >0 YED. It is also valued by the public at large based on its image, but there isnt an ecnomic model for that yet. Anyway, it all comes down to the demand curve shifting to the right as the price rises, and so the extra money makes the car sell more
honestly, I don't notice the difference on my SB PCI64...