I have to agree... it depends what business you're in. For most commercial customers, reliability and support outweigh power or space savings. The additional support costs of data center designers, grid computing software and management quickly outweigh the nominal cost of additional power, AC and space.
Unlike the poster who is willing to trade off for speed, I'd gladly trade 20-50% more space, power and heat for reliability and up-time.
For the biggest datacenters that's probably not true--but they are probably large enough (or will to pay enough) to custom design hardware or have it custom built.
True in a lot of industries--if you need small quanities you buy off the shelf hardware (and pay to have someone else design it), if it's core to your business you go custom.
I agree that sensible polices can avoid most viruses. Some policies can be enforce automatically, and others by management. Top of the list, is not to allow anyone to run as administrator on their machine. By now, all the software runs as a regular user--and giving employees administrator rights is just silly. Also on the list, is prohibiting employees from downloading or installing software--decide on a standard build and stick with it for everyone.
Group policies (even without a domain controller) are your friend--when you set up your machine, put down fairly restrictive policies to control access. We even lockdown the desktop and screen saver to communicate a clear message that the PCs are for work purposes.
Beyond that, we use AVG network edition--don't love it, but relatively easy to manage and seems to do a decent job. It can be remotely adminstered and doesn't really crap up the machine with random warnings and messages like other AV products. Dont' install AVG (or any other) firewall as they all seem to do a lousy job--and firewalls are better enforced at the paremeter.
Establish some clear guidelines... if you're running windows group policy is your friend... (even if you don't have a domain controller, you can use gpedit to set the policies one at a time.) Assuming you have some management support, here's a list that works for us...
Never let anyone run as administrator... your life will be way easier and you will not be wasting your time with viruses and rouge progams
Most antivirus programs are crap and just slow down the machines... find the lightest weight program you can (we use AVG) and install it.
Don't install PC-based firewalls, they are just more of a pain than they deliver, use a gateway firewall
Have a standard build (or set of software), Office, Adobe, Flash, etc., and try to stick with it. Most smaller companies buy PCs one at a time so can't do clone installs
Don't try to cram Open Source down employee's thoats... most users want Office, not a free knockoff--the cost of office is about $250 and well worth it for the compatibility and user satisfaction; stick with a single browser (we use IE 7, transitioning to 8 which enjoys wide compatibility with almost all sites)
Be nice occasionally... give the helpful users toys on occasion... perhaps the really nice mouse or a fancy screen or keyboard... but don't compromise on random software installs
Business computers are for business...no itunes, IM (except for what you use internally), random toolbars
Lock the computers down as tightly as possible...the more consistent the machines are, the easier it is to administer and provide a suppior work environment...standard desktops (including images, perhaps with company logo or policies), screen savers, file shares, etc.
Don't let users save to their desktop... force everything to the file server (either by policy or management) and then back up your servers frequently... this avoids having to back up and restore individual machines
You can't have it both ways--complain about low adoption rate for FOSS and then complain about not contributing for free software. The point of free software is that it is free.
This is really a tragedy of the commons--why should I contribute to free software (or even buy paid-for software) when I can get it for free? Why should a company dedicate expensive IT resources into giving back to the free community when the ROI (return on investment) is low to zero? Any enhancements made to the software are probably going to be kept internal--and the effort and for contributing to most projects is just too high. In addition, some (but not all) projects are loath to accept contributions outside a small group of "approved" developers.
Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, etc. have a much simpler model for getting companies to contribute to the cost to the software--they simply charge for it. If the company doesn't feel that they are getting enough value from the software they are being asked to purchase, the company has the option of doing without or buying an alternative. The pricing and market model may work better in this case.
I completely agree--MySQL is a great database for a lot of projects. If you have a relatively small (the definition of which can easily include > 10 million records) database, transaction logging is not a requirement, absolute concurrance is not needed, an occasionaly lost update or record is ok and off-site redundancy and failover are not needed it's a great database. For 90% of the databases, I'd heartily recommend MySQL (especially if developing in PHP). However for 90% of the database records, I'd recommend against MySQL and go with something that can meet the above requirements.
Truth be told, most of the databases don't need the heavy-weight overhead (CUP and money) of the commercial offerings, but no one should claim that there isn't any difference in quality, features and support between DB2, Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL.
With most of the exanmples mentioned, a small number of DB errors (lost records, index errors, sychronzation errors) are accepttable. For applications like youtube, slashdot, etc. it really doesn't matter if records are lost. I'd be more interested in hearing about major financial or business systems that run on MySql. MySQL is a nice database--good for hobby projects--even big ones--but nor really the choice for heavy lifting DBs. Most of those examples started with MySQL because they needed free more than reliable.
If you really want to roll your own cables, just cutting and crimping is just the start. You really should start by buying single strand copper cable and twisting it yourself. Even that's not enough, you can buy copper and melt and strand it over a coffee pot. But that's just the beginning, if you really want to manage the process end-to-end, you should start with raw copper ore and smelt it yourself.
Don't be cheap--if your time is worth more than $10/hour, buy pre-made cables. The quality will be higher and you'll save time. Find a reliable vendor who can ship them overnight in the rare case that you run out.
Perhaps they are not as good, but if you read the Microsoft materials they also send a huge amount of time sweating the details on the UI. Each icon comes in about 8 versions (high density, low density, large, small + all the selected and unselected states). -- And in some ways have a more difficult task in that they don't control the hardware and display. The MS needs to work over a large range of resolutions and bit-depth. ADA and other requirements also require high contrast options. Apple, MS and others need to deal with internationalization of their icons -- again frequently a time (and costly) task.
Good UI designers don't want to to the grunt work for free. And they are probably are not as well respected in the FOSS community as star programmers.
PRoducing a highly polished UI, with consistent colors, shading and graphics is hard and takse time and talent. Most of the people with these skill don't want to work for free (as in free software) and would rather earn a living for their talent (or time).
It also requires a degree of central coordination and control--most lacking in free software. Even MS Windows (where some may consider the interface not as polished as the Mac) sweats a lot of the details--does it work in 8 bit color mode? does it scale to low res screens? black & white? is there a high contrast version for visually impaired? And then there are all the internationalization issues...
Writing polished software, with a highly integrated interface has never been free software's strength. Too many programmers who aren't designers, too many "but I really like orange and green and pink" windows.
Firefox probably comes closest (or meets) the requirements for "Joe or Jane User". But most of the stuff just doesn't have the polish of really high quality commercial software. (Compare, Gimp with Photoshop, OO with MS Office).
FOSS is great for infrastructure stuff--apache, MySQL, etc., but it's been 5 years away from the desktop for the last 20 years...
According to the article: "Eight Australians and five Kiwis have made the cut for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, announced today."
Should Aussies and Kiwis be eligible for "summer of code"? It seems to me that they should only be able to enter the "winter of code" contest if it takes place during June through August.
And how do you do the "piecemeal" replacement for Outlook with an Exchange Server? With employees using the calendar & shared contact features of Exchange it's going to be pretty hard to have some employees on Exchange and others on "an almost as good" platform. There really isn't a good alternative to Exchange/Outlook in the corporate (>250 employee) environment.
How do you deal with existing files that "don't look right", "don't open" or "format funny" in OO? How about the Excel (or Word) macros that do useful things? How about the backup strategies, single sign-on for corporate applications, authentication, and adminstration
And of course there is the whole system lock down and administration issue.
Going from XP -> Vista or MS7 is much easier than switching OS's--especially because you can retain all your existing software (Office 2003 runs fine on both Vista & MS7), Exchange and almost all the training translates.
One could also say, " don't know how most businesses are run, but around these parts, XP works, and works well." followed by, "we don't need the features of Linux [or Mac OS X or insert your favorite OS here])". This is part of the problem with getting alternative OS adoption.
You're end up in some call center and the agent will have no clue what you're talking about -- they will recommend clearing cookies, restarting the browser (and maybe switch to IE). The message will never get up the food chain. The only real way to get the message is to close your account and switch to a bank that takes sucurity seriously.
If you're running as a non-adminstrator account (without write access to c:\windows (and system32) would this virus still proprogate? I've never quite understood why ordinary users have write access to system directories.
There are reasons to download on a different machine than you're planning to install it on. And stopping the "horrors" of downloading an incorrect file seems low on the priority.
On linux & macs I can download files for different versions of the OS and nothing complains. Even worse, I can download Linux files for differnt distros and even install them and total screw up things.
There are some technology fixes that might help in the situation. First create an approved ghost image for the machines. Have the local staff re-image their machines off the ghost copy (at least you know what you're starting with).
You should install/use active directory with very tight group policies control--the local users should have almost no rights to change anything on the machine. As suggested, the ability for you to remote into the machine (RDC) will allow you to look around and see what's going on. Depending on your bandwidth, you might push all the connection over the VPN to your local office, this way you can aggressive block access to non-approved sites via your firewall. You should also make sure all the mail runs through your corporate server -- with tight antivirus measures installed.
A citrix or other thin client might solve the problem--no software is installed locally.
The danger with all of these solutions, is that the local office can just go out and buy a PC and whatever software they want without letting you know. (Although the VPN solution and MAC filtering would somewhat prevent this.)
If you always wanted to visit China, this might be a good excuse for an on-site visit to discuss the issues and install some of the fixes. A personal relationship with the Chinese office might make for a better situation--you could understand their needs (perhaps the company is being too tight with approved software) and they could understand the company's needs to abide by US laws on software ownership.
Wasn't there just a front page./ article complaining about the number of SKUs for Windows Vista? The complaint was that there were 7 (or maybe 8) different skus for Vista and how confusing this was for the end-user
In Linux land there are way more than 8 different distributions and options (desktop, email program, editors, etc.) within those distributions
Clearly more options can't be a disaster for Vista yet a good thing for Linux.
With Vista, a home user merely needs to decide between Vista Home and Vista Ultimate; if they need VPN, their corporate IT will probably recommend Vista Business. If they need both Media Center and VPN, then they have to spring for Ultimate. Not that hard.
Compare that to the choices faced by Joe User(tm) with choosing an Linux distribution.
Apple makes a big deal (and charges more than $100) of each of their dot releases. OS 10.0, 10.1, etc. have been built on the same code base and have had minor (and some more-than minor) enhancements and tweaks. A couple of the OS X releases were really just service packs (or bug fixes) that shouldn't be called a new release or OS.
Version 1: Desktop Version 2: Server for 10 users Version 3: Server for more than 10 users
There is no upgrade price between version 1 and 2; there may be upgrades available for version 2 and 3.
As versions per total unit sales, Windows Vista and Servers count is much lower;
Also a Windows Vista box could function as a server (depending on what your server requirements are and what software you want add from 3rd party sources.)
The Mac OS has different versions for server and workstation. The server version removes the (as far as I can tell) arbitrary restrictions on the number of users allowed to share and adds some pretty GUI for configuring the servers. I don't know if they did any different stuff for tuning as a server or not. Perhaps the person who uses a Mac server in a real production environment (anyone? anyone?) could explained how the Mac server is tuned differently than the workstation.
Or is it just "marketing" tuning--by adding $100 or so.
If you're really looking for high performance storage, you should go with a DRAM-based solution. This has almost no latency and can scale to any interface. Depending on your budget, you can get SAS 3GB/s 2 ports with 32GB capacity for a bargain $24,000 (URL:http://www.solidaccess.com/products.htm/> and if you need more performance or storage space, spring for the serious iron--a FC 4GB/2, 2 ports at a mere $375,000.
No need to raid this puppy. Make sure you spring for the redundant power supplies and rack-mountable UPS.
Bill Gates has not been actively involved with day-to-day Microsoft decision for at least a year. He is now involved with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation has relatively little to do with music, although a number of musicians do work with the foundation.
The equivalent to./ stories like this would be to refer to Apple as "Steve Jobs made music 30% more expensive" (do the math).
What's the big deal with ISO's. Just mount it a virtual disk (using Nero or free software). Alternatively, if you're installing on a virtual machine, just use the "capture ISO image" option../'er critize MS for not using industry standards... and when they do.
Actually lots of apple-made hardware will not run recent versions of OS X. It's a problem in some schools where they have OS 9-only software (it works, does the job) that will not run under OS X, and OS X will not run on the machines thay have. Rumor is that the next version of OS X will not even install on non-Intel hardware. Apple's been pretty light on hardware compatibility. Most older PC software (made for Windows 3 or later) will usually run on my recent versions of the OS. Apple never has been great on backward compatibility---how about the suckers^h^h^h^h^h^h^hindividuals who bought into the benefits of fireware and invested in firewire-only backup drives or video cameras and now want to upgrade their hardware?
What's a server? Is that the new name for a waiter/waitress?
The other 1% goes... we already know... and by the way the Mac share of servers (including web, file and print, but excluding embedded devices) is so tiny to be unmeasurable, and the Linux share is pretty small too.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree... it depends what business you're in. For most commercial customers, reliability and support outweigh power or space savings. The additional support costs of data center designers, grid computing software and management quickly outweigh the nominal cost of additional power, AC and space.
Unlike the poster who is willing to trade off for speed, I'd gladly trade 20-50% more space, power and heat for reliability and up-time.
For the biggest datacenters that's probably not true--but they are probably large enough (or will to pay enough) to custom design hardware or have it custom built.
True in a lot of industries--if you need small quanities you buy off the shelf hardware (and pay to have someone else design it), if it's core to your business you go custom.
I agree that sensible polices can avoid most viruses. Some policies can be enforce automatically, and others by management. Top of the list, is not to allow anyone to run as administrator on their machine. By now, all the software runs as a regular user--and giving employees administrator rights is just silly. Also on the list, is prohibiting employees from downloading or installing software--decide on a standard build and stick with it for everyone.
Group policies (even without a domain controller) are your friend--when you set up your machine, put down fairly restrictive policies to control access. We even lockdown the desktop and screen saver to communicate a clear message that the PCs are for work purposes.
Beyond that, we use AVG network edition--don't love it, but relatively easy to manage and seems to do a decent job. It can be remotely adminstered and doesn't really crap up the machine with random warnings and messages like other AV products. Dont' install AVG (or any other) firewall as they all seem to do a lousy job--and firewalls are better enforced at the paremeter.
Be nice... a little good will goes a long way.
You can't have it both ways--complain about low adoption rate for FOSS and then complain about not contributing for free software. The point of free software is that it is free.
This is really a tragedy of the commons--why should I contribute to free software (or even buy paid-for software) when I can get it for free? Why should a company dedicate expensive IT resources into giving back to the free community when the ROI (return on investment) is low to zero? Any enhancements made to the software are probably going to be kept internal--and the effort and for contributing to most projects is just too high. In addition, some (but not all) projects are loath to accept contributions outside a small group of "approved" developers.
Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, etc. have a much simpler model for getting companies to contribute to the cost to the software--they simply charge for it. If the company doesn't feel that they are getting enough value from the software they are being asked to purchase, the company has the option of doing without or buying an alternative. The pricing and market model may work better in this case.
I completely agree--MySQL is a great database for a lot of projects. If you have a relatively small (the definition of which can easily include > 10 million records) database, transaction logging is not a requirement, absolute concurrance is not needed, an occasionaly lost update or record is ok and off-site redundancy and failover are not needed it's a great database. For 90% of the databases, I'd heartily recommend MySQL (especially if developing in PHP). However for 90% of the database records, I'd recommend against MySQL and go with something that can meet the above requirements.
Truth be told, most of the databases don't need the heavy-weight overhead (CUP and money) of the commercial offerings, but no one should claim that there isn't any difference in quality, features and support between DB2, Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL.
With most of the exanmples mentioned, a small number of DB errors (lost records, index errors, sychronzation errors) are accepttable. For applications like youtube, slashdot, etc. it really doesn't matter if records are lost. I'd be more interested in hearing about major financial or business systems that run on MySql. MySQL is a nice database--good for hobby projects--even big ones--but nor really the choice for heavy lifting DBs. Most of those examples started with MySQL because they needed free more than reliable.
If you really want to roll your own cables, just cutting and crimping is just the start. You really should start by buying single strand copper cable and twisting it yourself. Even that's not enough, you can buy copper and melt and strand it over a coffee pot. But that's just the beginning, if you really want to manage the process end-to-end, you should start with raw copper ore and smelt it yourself.
Don't be cheap--if your time is worth more than $10/hour, buy pre-made cables. The quality will be higher and you'll save time. Find a reliable vendor who can ship them overnight in the rare case that you run out.
Perhaps they are not as good, but if you read the Microsoft materials they also send a huge amount of time sweating the details on the UI. Each icon comes in about 8 versions (high density, low density, large, small + all the selected and unselected states). -- And in some ways have a more difficult task in that they don't control the hardware and display. The MS needs to work over a large range of resolutions and bit-depth. ADA and other requirements also require high contrast options. Apple, MS and others need to deal with internationalization of their icons -- again frequently a time (and costly) task.
Good UI designers don't want to to the grunt work for free. And they are probably are not as well respected in the FOSS community as star programmers.
PRoducing a highly polished UI, with consistent colors, shading and graphics is hard and takse time and talent. Most of the people with these skill don't want to work for free (as in free software) and would rather earn a living for their talent (or time).
It also requires a degree of central coordination and control--most lacking in free software. Even MS Windows (where some may consider the interface not as polished as the Mac) sweats a lot of the details--does it work in 8 bit color mode? does it scale to low res screens? black & white? is there a high contrast version for visually impaired? And then there are all the internationalization issues...
Writing polished software, with a highly integrated interface has never been free software's strength. Too many programmers who aren't designers, too many "but I really like orange and green and pink" windows.
Firefox probably comes closest (or meets) the requirements for "Joe or Jane User". But most of the stuff just doesn't have the polish of really high quality commercial software. (Compare, Gimp with Photoshop, OO with MS Office).
FOSS is great for infrastructure stuff--apache, MySQL, etc., but it's been 5 years away from the desktop for the last 20 years...
According to the article: "Eight Australians and five Kiwis have made the cut for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, announced today."
Should Aussies and Kiwis be eligible for "summer of code"? It seems to me that they should only be able to enter the "winter of code" contest if it takes place during June through August.
And how do you do the "piecemeal" replacement for Outlook with an Exchange Server? With employees using the calendar & shared contact features of Exchange it's going to be pretty hard to have some employees on Exchange and others on "an almost as good" platform. There really isn't a good alternative to Exchange/Outlook in the corporate (>250 employee) environment.
How do you deal with existing files that "don't look right", "don't open" or "format funny" in OO? How about the Excel (or Word) macros that do useful things? How about the backup strategies, single sign-on for corporate applications, authentication, and adminstration
And of course there is the whole system lock down and administration issue.
Going from XP -> Vista or MS7 is much easier than switching OS's--especially because you can retain all your existing software (Office 2003 runs fine on both Vista & MS7), Exchange and almost all the training translates.
One could also say, " don't know how most businesses are run, but around these parts, XP works, and works well." followed by, "we don't need the features of Linux [or Mac OS X or insert your favorite OS here])". This is part of the problem with getting alternative OS adoption.
You're end up in some call center and the agent will have no clue what you're talking about -- they will recommend clearing cookies, restarting the browser (and maybe switch to IE). The message will never get up the food chain. The only real way to get the message is to close your account and switch to a bank that takes sucurity seriously.
If you're running as a non-adminstrator account (without write access to c:\windows (and system32) would this virus still proprogate? I've never quite understood why ordinary users have write access to system directories.
There are reasons to download on a different machine than you're planning to install it on. And stopping the "horrors" of downloading an incorrect file seems low on the priority.
On linux & macs I can download files for different versions of the OS and nothing complains. Even worse, I can download Linux files for differnt distros and even install them and total screw up things.
Somehow, this whole thread seems minor...
There are some technology fixes that might help in the situation. First create an approved ghost image for the machines. Have the local staff re-image their machines off the ghost copy (at least you know what you're starting with).
You should install/use active directory with very tight group policies control--the local users should have almost no rights to change anything on the machine. As suggested, the ability for you to remote into the machine (RDC) will allow you to look around and see what's going on. Depending on your bandwidth, you might push all the connection over the VPN to your local office, this way you can aggressive block access to non-approved sites via your firewall. You should also make sure all the mail runs through your corporate server -- with tight antivirus measures installed.
A citrix or other thin client might solve the problem--no software is installed locally.
The danger with all of these solutions, is that the local office can just go out and buy a PC and whatever software they want without letting you know. (Although the VPN solution and MAC filtering would somewhat prevent this.)
If you always wanted to visit China, this might be a good excuse for an on-site visit to discuss the issues and install some of the fixes. A personal relationship with the Chinese office might make for a better situation--you could understand their needs (perhaps the company is being too tight with approved software) and they could understand the company's needs to abide by US laws on software ownership.
Wasn't there just a front page ./ article complaining about the number of SKUs for Windows Vista? The complaint was that there were 7 (or maybe 8) different skus for Vista and how confusing this was for the end-user
In Linux land there are way more than 8 different distributions and options (desktop, email program, editors, etc.) within those distributions
Clearly more options can't be a disaster for Vista yet a good thing for Linux.
With Vista, a home user merely needs to decide between Vista Home and Vista Ultimate; if they need VPN, their corporate IT will probably recommend Vista Business. If they need both Media Center and VPN, then they have to spring for Ultimate. Not that hard.
Compare that to the choices faced by Joe User(tm) with choosing an Linux distribution.
Apple makes a big deal (and charges more than $100) of each of their dot releases. OS 10.0, 10.1, etc. have been built on the same code base and have had minor (and some more-than minor) enhancements and tweaks. A couple of the OS X releases were really just service packs (or bug fixes) that shouldn't be called a new release or OS.
Actually that comes to 3 versions for the Mac OS.
Version 1: Desktop
Version 2: Server for 10 users
Version 3: Server for more than 10 users
There is no upgrade price between version 1 and 2; there may be upgrades available for version 2 and 3.
As versions per total unit sales, Windows Vista and Servers count is much lower;
Also a Windows Vista box could function as a server (depending on what your server requirements are and what software you want add from 3rd party sources.)
The Mac OS has different versions for server and workstation. The server version removes the (as far as I can tell) arbitrary restrictions on the number of users allowed to share and adds some pretty GUI for configuring the servers. I don't know if they did any different stuff for tuning as a server or not. Perhaps the person who uses a Mac server in a real production environment (anyone? anyone?) could explained how the Mac server is tuned differently than the workstation.
Or is it just "marketing" tuning--by adding $100 or so.
If you're really looking for high performance storage, you should go with a DRAM-based solution. This has almost no latency and can scale to any interface. Depending on your budget, you can get SAS 3GB/s 2 ports with 32GB capacity for a bargain $24,000 (URL:http://www.solidaccess.com/products.htm/> and if you need more performance or storage space, spring for the serious iron--a FC 4GB/2, 2 ports at a mere $375,000.
No need to raid this puppy. Make sure you spring for the redundant power supplies and rack-mountable UPS.
Bill Gates has not been actively involved with day-to-day Microsoft decision for at least a year. He is now involved with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation has relatively little to do with music, although a number of musicians do work with the foundation.
The equivalent to ./ stories like this would be to refer to Apple as "Steve Jobs made music 30% more expensive" (do the math).
And besides the headline was a serious troll.
What's the big deal with ISO's. Just mount it a virtual disk (using Nero or free software). Alternatively, if you're installing on a virtual machine, just use the "capture ISO image" option. ./'er critize MS for not using industry standards... and when they do.
Actually lots of apple-made hardware will not run recent versions of OS X. It's a problem in some schools where they have OS 9-only software (it works, does the job) that will not run under OS X, and OS X will not run on the machines thay have. Rumor is that the next version of OS X will not even install on non-Intel hardware. Apple's been pretty light on hardware compatibility. Most older PC software (made for Windows 3 or later) will usually run on my recent versions of the OS. Apple never has been great on backward compatibility---how about the suckers^h^h^h^h^h^h^hindividuals who bought into the benefits of fireware and invested in firewire-only backup drives or video cameras and now want to upgrade their hardware?
What's a server? Is that the new name for a waiter/waitress?
The other 1% goes... we already know... and by the way the Mac share of servers (including web, file and print, but excluding embedded devices) is so tiny to be unmeasurable, and the Linux share is pretty small too.