This was why I got bored of it. I didn't get beyond about half way through the first season. It was basically a soap opera that happened to be set in Silicon Valley. The storylines just seemed - goofy.
Silicon Valley is far more believable, and more what I'd expect a series about Silicon Valley to be about.
I prefer to buy physical media.
I agree with you.
And most people I know seem to work on the basis that because they can copy it, they will, whether they know it's right or not. These are all sorts of people from all walks of life.
Besides, I was talking about DRM, not physical versus download.
I agree. The trouble is - people. If people can get something for nothing, they will. I can fully understand the reason why content producers will wrap things in DRM, but by the same token I want to do with my media what I want. A CD can play in any CD player. A DVD and play in any DVD player. If a universal DRM container could be created that was a light touch (i.e. stopped people casually copying files) then it would be great. But the infrastructure to do that would be huge IMHO, hence why nobody has yet bothered to do it. If a content producer can make somebody buy something twice, then it's in their shareholder's best interests to do so.
It started as underfloor. Great big CRAC. However, it died, the parts were no longer available, and getting a new CRAC in was apparently impossible. So the wallmounted units went up. We've got 12 of them, and they barely keep up. Many are blowing into the back of racks. It's a right mess. There's massive hot and cold spots. As I say tho, the room is being wound down, so there won't be much left in there soon.
That was pretty much my thought. Or other data centre is a horrible mess of cages, walls, and wall-mounted AC units. It's being slowly closed down, luckily!
If we were to retro-fit it at work, I'd say cold aisle. To do so would mean curtains at the end of the aisles, as the under-floor vent grids are in front of the racks. The CRACs are at the end of the room sucking in air through the top, so it'd be cool air pumped up through the floor, into a cold-only zone, sucked through the racks, blown out the back into the rest of the room where it just swirls about until it's pulled into the CRACs again.
I reckon it could be done cheaply and quickly. Do do it with the hot aisles would require more containment to get the air back to the CRACs.
I think it'd be a case of which air flow it fits best.
Yes, yes, and a thousand times yes. So much cool stuff to see at BP.
Contrary to popular beleif, there's a LOT more to England than London. You'll pay through the nose in London, so take a trip out to the other towns and places, and see what you can find. Nearly every major town has a museum of some kind (the County Towns are best for this), and there's a ton of other places inbetween.
Visit London by all means, but don't forget about the rest of this country.
We recently had to power down our main data centre, three times in fairly quick succession due to major power work that had to be carried out (no building UPS or generator unfortunately... boo!).
Doing it was all well and good, but so many things are inter-connected, we found we almost had circular dependencies of things, so we had to be very careful in shutting down and bringing back services. The end result was something different every time wouldn't shut down, and something different every time wouldn't come back right, causing downtime to users.
In testing and development it's never an issue when you're bringing something new up. It's when - six months down the line - you've integrated it into everything that you're really into a tangled web of systems, and taking it all down results in much hilarity. We were shutting down 90-odd servers; Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and various other things like Cisco CallManager and other random network kit. It's NOT something I'd want to do again, and having it all scripted would scare the crap out of me quite frankly. It'd require so much testing and checking, you'd be bringing things up and down all the time and causing more trouble than just keeping it up. Try and save the power elsewhere - raise the A/C temp, or virtualise some stuff.
Yeah, I think they did. They do with a lot of stuff these days. I think it's a pretty safe bet, it'll be on TV (with added 'red-button' coverage - extra TV streams so you can pick what you want to watch, either live or on a repeating basis. It ranged from 2 streams on Freeview to 5 on Sky during Glastonbury last month), on radio (5 Live probably), and through iPlayer, probably both as live streams and archived. Oh, and it'll more than likely be on BBC HD too. That is, until the sound breaks down, or the picture disappears.
http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/fps/ - the Fax Preference Service works wonders in stopping junk faxes. Same goes for the Phone Preference Service, and the Mail Preference Service.
Not a lot of help if you're in the rest of the world, but still - this could be useful to somebody!
Appliances are always good because they are simple. Say for example, your network guy goes under a bus. Assuming he's at least documented the passwords for the system, somebody will be able to get in, and work on the system. Plus, in the case of Fortinets, they come with a full manual all about the firewall. A custom system (which I personally also have nothing against) based on OpenBSD or something would be much harder for anybody to administer. In that respect, M0n0wall helps though as it is quite similar to the Fortinet stuff.
Support is a major thing too. If your Firewall appliance starts acting screwy, assuming you bought the support contracts, you can phone somebody and they'll send you a fix quickly. Support for many open solutions is much harder to find. You could mail a mailing list, but you'll get the following replies:
* Three saying 'check the FAQ' * Four or five belittling you for not knowing in the first palce * A handful of replies with no relevance to your problem.
This has been my experience with all the *BSDs. There's a lot of pre-written support online, but you have to really go looking for it, and translate what is Unix stuff into networking stuff. I know a few people who know a lot about either one, but not both.
Appliance solutions can be good for producing complex solutions. It's all point and click, and so you can have a pretty complex system up and running in no time. It's a lot harder to do that with a non-dedicated solution.
Depending on whose kit you buy also, you get many performance increases from their custom ASIC solutions, which DO make a difference I've noticed. I've had other oddities, in that a linux box running as a L2 bridge inline with the internet connection (it was running ntop), would work perfectly, except it liked to block Amazon. I still don't know why.
Many of these paid-for solutions also have 'additional' proprietary features I've yet to see elsewhere. Things like Layer-7 firewalling (URL filtering), mail scanning, AV, VPN, etc. It's all there, ready to go. You can do VPNs with OpenSwan and FreeSWAN and the like, but it's damn hard! Appliances have it all set up for you, and I refer you to my first point about it being supportable.
Also, an appliance firewall is rack-mountable in standard Telco racks, so easier to integrate. Plus, many of them have failovers and redundancy built right in, which an old P2 PC certainly doesn't have!
So there's some reasons!
BUT, I still think there's a place for an old P2 running OpenBSD. If I wanted a simple firewall, I'd use one of those, but on my perimeter, world-facing connection, I'd still have a Fortinet.
PS, just for the record, the low-end Sonicwalls ain't great. They don't support proper L2 firewalling.
Novell have done a pile of work in their own fork of OO (a whole argument in itself) adding support for VBA. Apparently it's getting pretty good now, and most documents with macros will open in OO. The only trouble is, I don't think any of this code has made its way into the mainstream OO codebase, so it probably won't for some time. Novell have released it all though, and it can be downloaded from Novell.
I have to admit, I got bored of PC mags; I was reading news stories I'd read a month ago on Digg/Slashdot - even the BBC. The reviews I couldn't care less about unless I was actually buying something, and the technical articles either aren't relevant to me, or I'm just not interested. So all that was really left was the opinion pieces, and even then, I couldn't care.
So now, I hardly ever buy PC mags. I do, on the other hand, still have a subscription to Guitarist magazine, and I know Future do four or five other music mags (Future Music, and Total Guitar for a couple), a load of mountain biking magazines, plus I think, a few home-crafts titles. It's not like the Internet is killing what they do overall. I think it is a case that they've made some silly moves internally and messed things up.
I honestly feel that you can't currently beat a magazine for good, well thought out, well structured articles about things. I've got a Photography magazine I buy now, mainly because I can't find good howto articles online. Plus, I prefer to read stuff on paper. I don't like sitting in bed hugging my TFTs.
Depends how you define 'router'. These little things we can pick up for next to nothing aren't 'routers' in the truest sense of the word, i.e. those big things full of fans and PSUs that the likes of Cisco/Extreme/3Com/etc produce.
To be honest, unless I had some incredibly weird requirement, or a strange fetish for building my own kit, I'd go look for a proper router solution. My experience of using a *nix box as a proper, layer-3 LAN router isn't that great. There's something to be said for the custom-designed kit in these routers you can buy.
I have to say, I both agree and disagree. I build student PC base setups for the uni I work at. I try to keep things as standard as possible, but I still restrict things. The idea is, you can do things the same as you could on your own PC at home, but you might be restricted in WHAT you can do. We do it via ZenWorks mostly, through Group Policy settings, but on occasion we'll re-image a PC if it goes bad. For the most part, our users (and they are users) don't have many problems. We have issues with big applications like 3DStudio Max or programming environments, but we can work around those.
Last night, I was digging around on the Borland site to see if there was such a thing as this, and today they announce it. How's that for a co-incidence!
I'll certainly be interested to look at these though. Free things are ALWAYS good:)
I saw him walk out, and within seconds of him hobbling onto the stage, I thought 'he looks really ill'. He looks incredibly thin and unwell. I think the big grey beard doesn't help him much, but even so, he doesn't look well at all.
Get well soon Steve, if you are ill. I want to be sucked back into that reality distortion field!
Ok, this might sound a little mean, but it DOES work. If you always help people as soon as they have a problem, they'll never work things out for themselves. They go into Moron Mode and stop thinking.
The best way, is to either say you can't help, or offer to help but you can't do it yet. If you leave it just about long enough, they'll have worked it out for themselves by the time you get there. Most problems are usually user error, rather than a fault with the PC. If you get there and they still have the fault (and they have tried to work it out) then it is something wrong with the PC.
It honestly works. I do it to family all the time, and they manage to work a lot out for themselves now.
My major qualm with accounting apps has been the American slant they have. It's often trivial stuff, like the terminology, but some things are slightly different 'over here', and having played with a few other free and Open Source apps, I often found myself a little bit lost and confused. I've used Quicken for some time, and it does what I want, and doesn't confuse me, but it's been localised more I think. I can't pin down the exact things I wasn't happy with, but I know in the past I felt too much of a US-bias.
Slashdot Mirror
This was why I got bored of it. I didn't get beyond about half way through the first season. It was basically a soap opera that happened to be set in Silicon Valley. The storylines just seemed - goofy. Silicon Valley is far more believable, and more what I'd expect a series about Silicon Valley to be about.
Once upon a time, we called this 'leasing'. But, whatever, call it something new and pretend it's a fantastic new thing.
I prefer to buy physical media. I agree with you. And most people I know seem to work on the basis that because they can copy it, they will, whether they know it's right or not. These are all sorts of people from all walks of life. Besides, I was talking about DRM, not physical versus download.
I agree. The trouble is - people. If people can get something for nothing, they will. I can fully understand the reason why content producers will wrap things in DRM, but by the same token I want to do with my media what I want. A CD can play in any CD player. A DVD and play in any DVD player. If a universal DRM container could be created that was a light touch (i.e. stopped people casually copying files) then it would be great. But the infrastructure to do that would be huge IMHO, hence why nobody has yet bothered to do it. If a content producer can make somebody buy something twice, then it's in their shareholder's best interests to do so.
It started as underfloor. Great big CRAC. However, it died, the parts were no longer available, and getting a new CRAC in was apparently impossible. So the wallmounted units went up. We've got 12 of them, and they barely keep up. Many are blowing into the back of racks. It's a right mess. There's massive hot and cold spots. As I say tho, the room is being wound down, so there won't be much left in there soon.
That was pretty much my thought. Or other data centre is a horrible mess of cages, walls, and wall-mounted AC units. It's being slowly closed down, luckily!
If we were to retro-fit it at work, I'd say cold aisle. To do so would mean curtains at the end of the aisles, as the under-floor vent grids are in front of the racks. The CRACs are at the end of the room sucking in air through the top, so it'd be cool air pumped up through the floor, into a cold-only zone, sucked through the racks, blown out the back into the rest of the room where it just swirls about until it's pulled into the CRACs again. I reckon it could be done cheaply and quickly. Do do it with the hot aisles would require more containment to get the air back to the CRACs. I think it'd be a case of which air flow it fits best.
Yes, yes, and a thousand times yes. So much cool stuff to see at BP. Contrary to popular beleif, there's a LOT more to England than London. You'll pay through the nose in London, so take a trip out to the other towns and places, and see what you can find. Nearly every major town has a museum of some kind (the County Towns are best for this), and there's a ton of other places inbetween. Visit London by all means, but don't forget about the rest of this country.
We recently had to power down our main data centre, three times in fairly quick succession due to major power work that had to be carried out (no building UPS or generator unfortunately... boo!). Doing it was all well and good, but so many things are inter-connected, we found we almost had circular dependencies of things, so we had to be very careful in shutting down and bringing back services. The end result was something different every time wouldn't shut down, and something different every time wouldn't come back right, causing downtime to users. In testing and development it's never an issue when you're bringing something new up. It's when - six months down the line - you've integrated it into everything that you're really into a tangled web of systems, and taking it all down results in much hilarity. We were shutting down 90-odd servers; Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and various other things like Cisco CallManager and other random network kit. It's NOT something I'd want to do again, and having it all scripted would scare the crap out of me quite frankly. It'd require so much testing and checking, you'd be bringing things up and down all the time and causing more trouble than just keeping it up. Try and save the power elsewhere - raise the A/C temp, or virtualise some stuff.
Be* would very likely support IPV6 I'd reckon, as they are one of the unbundled providers, and run their own network end-to-end.
Yeah, I think they did. They do with a lot of stuff these days. I think it's a pretty safe bet, it'll be on TV (with added 'red-button' coverage - extra TV streams so you can pick what you want to watch, either live or on a repeating basis. It ranged from 2 streams on Freeview to 5 on Sky during Glastonbury last month), on radio (5 Live probably), and through iPlayer, probably both as live streams and archived. Oh, and it'll more than likely be on BBC HD too. That is, until the sound breaks down, or the picture disappears.
Not a lot of help if you're in the rest of the world, but still - this could be useful to somebody!
I have a few reasons:
Appliances are always good because they are simple. Say for example, your network guy goes under a bus. Assuming he's at least documented the passwords for the system, somebody will be able to get in, and work on the system. Plus, in the case of Fortinets, they come with a full manual all about the firewall. A custom system (which I personally also have nothing against) based on OpenBSD or something would be much harder for anybody to administer. In that respect, M0n0wall helps though as it is quite similar to the Fortinet stuff.
Support is a major thing too. If your Firewall appliance starts acting screwy, assuming you bought the support contracts, you can phone somebody and they'll send you a fix quickly. Support for many open solutions is much harder to find. You could mail a mailing list, but you'll get the following replies:
* Three saying 'check the FAQ'
* Four or five belittling you for not knowing in the first palce
* A handful of replies with no relevance to your problem.
This has been my experience with all the *BSDs. There's a lot of pre-written support online, but you have to really go looking for it, and translate what is Unix stuff into networking stuff. I know a few people who know a lot about either one, but not both.
Appliance solutions can be good for producing complex solutions. It's all point and click, and so you can have a pretty complex system up and running in no time. It's a lot harder to do that with a non-dedicated solution.
Depending on whose kit you buy also, you get many performance increases from their custom ASIC solutions, which DO make a difference I've noticed. I've had other oddities, in that a linux box running as a L2 bridge inline with the internet connection (it was running ntop), would work perfectly, except it liked to block Amazon. I still don't know why.
Many of these paid-for solutions also have 'additional' proprietary features I've yet to see elsewhere. Things like Layer-7 firewalling (URL filtering), mail scanning, AV, VPN, etc. It's all there, ready to go. You can do VPNs with OpenSwan and FreeSWAN and the like, but it's damn hard! Appliances have it all set up for you, and I refer you to my first point about it being supportable.
Also, an appliance firewall is rack-mountable in standard Telco racks, so easier to integrate. Plus, many of them have failovers and redundancy built right in, which an old P2 PC certainly doesn't have!
So there's some reasons!
BUT, I still think there's a place for an old P2 running OpenBSD. If I wanted a simple firewall, I'd use one of those, but on my perimeter, world-facing connection, I'd still have a Fortinet.
PS, just for the record, the low-end Sonicwalls ain't great. They don't support proper L2 firewalling.
Yeah sorry, bad choice of words!
Novell have done a pile of work in their own fork of OO (a whole argument in itself) adding support for VBA. Apparently it's getting pretty good now, and most documents with macros will open in OO. The only trouble is, I don't think any of this code has made its way into the mainstream OO codebase, so it probably won't for some time. Novell have released it all though, and it can be downloaded from Novell.
I have to admit, I got bored of PC mags; I was reading news stories I'd read a month ago on Digg/Slashdot - even the BBC. The reviews I couldn't care less about unless I was actually buying something, and the technical articles either aren't relevant to me, or I'm just not interested. So all that was really left was the opinion pieces, and even then, I couldn't care.
So now, I hardly ever buy PC mags. I do, on the other hand, still have a subscription to Guitarist magazine, and I know Future do four or five other music mags (Future Music, and Total Guitar for a couple), a load of mountain biking magazines, plus I think, a few home-crafts titles. It's not like the Internet is killing what they do overall. I think it is a case that they've made some silly moves internally and messed things up.
I honestly feel that you can't currently beat a magazine for good, well thought out, well structured articles about things. I've got a Photography magazine I buy now, mainly because I can't find good howto articles online. Plus, I prefer to read stuff on paper. I don't like sitting in bed hugging my TFTs.
Rant/Rave over!
Depends how you define 'router'. These little things we can pick up for next to nothing aren't 'routers' in the truest sense of the word, i.e. those big things full of fans and PSUs that the likes of Cisco/Extreme/3Com/etc produce.
To be honest, unless I had some incredibly weird requirement, or a strange fetish for building my own kit, I'd go look for a proper router solution. My experience of using a *nix box as a proper, layer-3 LAN router isn't that great. There's something to be said for the custom-designed kit in these routers you can buy.
I have to say, I both agree and disagree. I build student PC base setups for the uni I work at. I try to keep things as standard as possible, but I still restrict things. The idea is, you can do things the same as you could on your own PC at home, but you might be restricted in WHAT you can do. We do it via ZenWorks mostly, through Group Policy settings, but on occasion we'll re-image a PC if it goes bad. For the most part, our users (and they are users) don't have many problems. We have issues with big applications like 3DStudio Max or programming environments, but we can work around those.
I read an article about Psychokinesis last night too. Maybe that's connected?
Last night, I was digging around on the Borland site to see if there was such a thing as this, and today they announce it. How's that for a co-incidence!
:)
I'll certainly be interested to look at these though. Free things are ALWAYS good
I saw him walk out, and within seconds of him hobbling onto the stage, I thought 'he looks really ill'. He looks incredibly thin and unwell. I think the big grey beard doesn't help him much, but even so, he doesn't look well at all.
Get well soon Steve, if you are ill. I want to be sucked back into that reality distortion field!
Ok, this might sound a little mean, but it DOES work. If you always help people as soon as they have a problem, they'll never work things out for themselves. They go into Moron Mode and stop thinking.
The best way, is to either say you can't help, or offer to help but you can't do it yet. If you leave it just about long enough, they'll have worked it out for themselves by the time you get there. Most problems are usually user error, rather than a fault with the PC. If you get there and they still have the fault (and they have tried to work it out) then it is something wrong with the PC.
It honestly works. I do it to family all the time, and they manage to work a lot out for themselves now.
You could try these people: http://www.richmondsys.co.uk/web/Home.htm Their SupportDesk software is a little clunky at times, but it does work.
Sounds good. I'll have to have another look at it then!
My major qualm with accounting apps has been the American slant they have. It's often trivial stuff, like the terminology, but some things are slightly different 'over here', and having played with a few other free and Open Source apps, I often found myself a little bit lost and confused. I've used Quicken for some time, and it does what I want, and doesn't confuse me, but it's been localised more I think. I can't pin down the exact things I wasn't happy with, but I know in the past I felt too much of a US-bias.