I read an article about this. It seems one of the reasons for the cost increase is to compete with ringtones. Ringtones are going for 2 or 3 dollars each, or you can get a subscription for 3$ a week.
This of course is insane. 2 or 3 dollars for a ringtone out of my tiny cel phone speaker is barely even something you can call a song.
Anyway, that's the logic behind it. Ringtones don't target people who want music. They target people who need to be hip and with the pop culture, so clearly people behind this are missing things.
Getting a vote in Congress probably won't help anyone either
Wrong! Anyone interested in real sweeping changes in the government needs to realize that it won't happen overnight. Our next president will be a Republican or a Democrat, so will the next.
What we need is to get in at the ground floor. 1 or 2 3rd party members in congress won't do a lot, but when that number grows to 10% of the floor, then they have some power.
One of my larger customers, with some 3000+ desktops, has asked about switching to firefox. Now, there are always some web sites and web based apps that require IE, which makes this a pain. But given the amount of time we spend cleaning spyware from machines, I think I can live with it, I don't know if the users can.
In any case, a coporate wide switch won't happen overnight. I'd expect to see the next 6 months or so start to see more corporations install linux enterprise wide. Those same corporations will complain about sites that don't work in Firefox, which helps fuel the uptake.
Also note to FF people - one of the reasons cited for not installing FF enterprise wide was the lack of central patching and policy control. This means patching security holes and forcing down settings to the clients; from my desk, without spending hours writing scripts.
I was astounded by that enough to look it up. I didn't think he was THAT dumb, he's not. Though he certainly doesn't seem to know what a patch is. linky
Dvorak was complaining that his machine sits idle for minutes at a time, while he's been madly clicking away trying to get it to do things. Then it springs to life, executing all his commands at once. Personally I've never experienced any of the issues he's talking about.
Linux has piles of coders. But from what I've seen, could use a lot more people making better user interfaces, better graphics for those interfaces, and of course documentation, How-Tos and anything that makes OSS adoption easier for the less geeky of us.
In addition, you don't need to write massive amounts of code to be helpful. Implimenting a new feature can be as simply as a line or 2 of new code to an existing project.
Sad? Perhaps. But look at it from the bosses view.
You're taking away a major, visible piece of functionality. For non-tech people, technology is a tool that helps them do their job, not the job itself. A mechanic wouldn't buy a new set of wrenches, no matter how indestructible they might be, if the set was missing the 9/16ths.
Why do we expect the PHBs to accept something similar?
Flame me if you want, but the lack of groupware functionality is a major problem. The fact that it still hasn't been addressed by the OSS community points to the generic problem with OSS. Software is written by geeks, for geeks. OSS needs to be written for joe-sixpack and his PHB, to solve their problems as they see them. Not just to solve the geek problems, they don't care about the geek problems, it's not their job. Look at Tivo, look at google. Now look again from the POV of Joe and his PHB, this is what we need to aim for.
Exactly, you don't buy a machine of this size without attaching it to some large storage. Probably a SAN/NAS, though you could also go with a direct attached SCSI enclosure. It's not just because you might have a lot of data, you need to keep a (probably) 4 processor system well fed with data for best efficiency.
Poster should also keep in mind the heat, noise and power considerations of a box this size.
And just to put in my 2 cents, an HP DL145 support 2 Opterons and 16 GB memory for under $20K US.
If the web site popped up a little ActiveX installer with simple instructions to "Click Yes to Enable Burger-King Music!!", then it would be installed.
Done. PC now contains DRM player. Probably whatever stuff microsoft or real is churning out.
Later on, if Dad actually tries to buy music, he'll put in his credit card and billing info just like any other on-line purchase.
It's only when its time for an upgrade or his PC crashes that he'll encounter the restrictions in DRM, at which point it's too late.
I expect DRM features to be placed on PCs in the same ways we have spyware on old machines and pre-loaded AOL on new ones, on the sly.
I watched my dad sit at his PC trying to get his "free" song he won from a little contest a Burger King. The only thing that stopped him from loading his PC up with whatever DRM locked media player was the annoyance of having to register when trying to download the player.
My explanation of how the DRM locked tune would only work on his one PC and he could never play it anyplace else was all but pointless. He didn't understand, and didn't care. He just wanted a free song.
It's not the DRM that most users care about, they care about being annoyed by the DRM. Once the companies figure out how to put DRM onto PCs without pissing anyone off, it will be all over.
Even better, how about if the AV software just erases/blocks it altogether, just like it would a virus?
Frankly as far as I can tell, spyware is as bad or worse than viruses. Most people wouldn't even notice if their machine was turned into a spam zombie, but popups for v1agr4 get people complaining.
One my customers was shopping for an corporate AV solution, one of the criteria was the blocking of spyware. We settled on Trend Officescan. I can't say it's perfect, but I do know it blocks a lot of spyware. What was already installed and can't be removed it at least warns me about so I can remove it via spybot.
"Lets buy new computers NEXT year and this year we'll have money for a couple teachers."
It doesn't work like that. Between grants, unions, bonds, capital projects, federal funds, state funds, cookie sales and everything else; a school has to be careful how they spend money. The vast majority of money they get has limits on how it can be spent. Computer money certainly does not mix with teacher salary money. Even with computer money, you might be able to buy a room full of servers, but no HP Openview type software to manage them or AC to keep them from catching on fire.
From what I've seen, it will shake out like this...
1. Project is high profile, everyone jumps through hoops to make it look good for the public/superintendant, whoever.
2. Project loses lustre (ie, bed press, Incom drops out).
3. Project is neglected, never used, probably doesn't even function anymore.
4. Something happens where people from #1 expect to use system again (unknown student accused of crime, etc..)
5. Go back to #1.
Having consulted with a number of schools, perhaps I'm just a bit jaded. But I've seen it many times before.
I live in the US, I think I've just about given up on the government. 40% of the population didn't vote in the last election, so I suspect I'm not alone.
For those left with the energy and the hope that things can be changed, I offer a suggestion from Governor Jesse Ventura:
Government is like a giant wheel. If one person tries to stand in front of that wheel and change it's direction, he will get crushed. It takes alot of people all pulling in the same direction to change government.
None of our leaders started as Senators or Presidents. Get out there, start campaining, start voting. Your school board, your mayor, your state assembly; these are the people who will be your children's leaders. This is where we must start, and it must be started a lot sooner than 2008.
I setup my mom's web site for a little ballet school years ago on pair.com. Rates have never increased and over time they've bumped up my disk space allotment. My mom also pays for the site 1 year at a time, which shaves 8% off the price.
That includes hosting a domain, 5 email boxes, 200 MB disk space and 3G/month transfer. You only serve up static web pages, and access the site via FTP only. But for a web site with 6 pages and 10 pictures it works great.
I think I had to talk to their tech support once, they were pretty good, but that was years ago. I've also used them for a couple other small places, and never had any problems. As far as I can tell, it just works.
What you've described is exactly what MIT uses on their network. They have a large number of both wireless and wired access places. I'd assume some googling on their site might get you a little information.
Attach a forgeign computer and it prompts you to login. Non MIT users are prompted for name and email and only allowed 15 days access per year.
Apparently they key everything via MAC address. I let a friend borrow my old wireless NIC, when he went to register it welcomed ME back. I hadn't used the NIC in a year.
I just cleaned up something called Wintools for IE. Among other things, it reinstalls itself if you try and remove it, and runs partially as a Windows service named "Wintools for IE Service".
Additionally this machine had some IE toolbars.
Here's my top 10 list of viruses/adware as detected by Trend Antivirus. As you can see, we're pretty much "virus" free, though the spyware viruses are rampant.
If you search here you can see what toolbars or other nonesense those infections come from. The vast majority of those infections are on PCs on which users have no special rights at all.
I disupute the limited user part.
Working in a school, where students and teachers certainly do NOT run as local admin on their windows machines, we still get spyware.
I use ASSP for any of my customers who've implimented spam filters.
It keeps global stats for anyone who wants to report back to them.
My spam hovers around 60%, more on holidays when there is less legitimate mail. Oddly, within the first few weeks after installing the filter, my spam dropped down from 80% to 70%. I guess the spammers realized they weren't getting through.
I like my Harmony (now Logitech) remote. They make several different models, I have the top one.
The remote connects to the PC via USB, all the programming is done via their web site. It only took me 5 minutes to program all my gear.
The remote has 40 or so normal buttons and an LCD. All non-button commands are via a scroll wheel. While you can program any button to do anything, I't be nice to see a few blank buttons, so programming any custom command doesn't use up a valid button. ie in DVD mode, the I've programmed my record button to switch disks in the DVD changer.
It even has a program guide you can view on the LCD.
Marconi ESX-2400, which is no longer sold, or the Marconi NSX-9500, which still is if you ask. The core is a Windows NT system, you can hook a monitor and keyboard and use notepad to edit the config. Not that they support that, but it's there.
It's primarily sold as a LANE (ATM) services box, it has excellent LES/BUS performance.
DAoC has a command, called/played, that shows you total play time for a given character.
My total is over 70 days, that's 1680 hours since I started playing the game a few years ago. So my cost is what? 26 cents per hour?
There are many advantages to these things I can spot right off.
- My grandparents aren't climbing 15 feet up a ladder to change a bulb in their vaulted ceiling. They'd have to hire someone every time a bulb blew.
- Many businesses are ruled by unions, only certain people can do maintenance tasks, like changing light bulbs. The time to get a ladder/lift and the employee out to the right place is a lot more than you'd think.
- Any high stress area, think schools where kids bash lights with books, any gymnasium, raquetball court. For that matter, how about parking lots at night. No lighting in a bad neighboorhood is not a good thing.
- Automotive, how often do you break the bulb in your trouble light when puttering under your car?
As far as I'm concerned, the cost savings isn't so much in electricity, but in the fact that it virtually doesn't break.
I suggest ASSP.
I've been using it for months for various customers in production networks. Free, written in Perl and runs on *nix or Windows. Can integrate with just about any mail server. I use it with Exchange. It also uses clamAV to do some basic virus filtering.
If you're working with small files (1 GB) have you considered Solid State? Or something like this:
Rocket Drive 4 GB memory on a PCI card, mounted as a file system - 3000$ US.
Slashdot Mirror
I read an article about this. It seems one of the reasons for the cost increase is to compete with ringtones. Ringtones are going for 2 or 3 dollars each, or you can get a subscription for 3$ a week.
This of course is insane. 2 or 3 dollars for a ringtone out of my tiny cel phone speaker is barely even something you can call a song.
Anyway, that's the logic behind it. Ringtones don't target people who want music. They target people who need to be hip and with the pop culture, so clearly people behind this are missing things.
Getting a vote in Congress probably won't help anyone either
Wrong! Anyone interested in real sweeping changes in the government needs to realize that it won't happen overnight. Our next president will be a Republican or a Democrat, so will the next.
What we need is to get in at the ground floor. 1 or 2 3rd party members in congress won't do a lot, but when that number grows to 10% of the floor, then they have some power.
One of my larger customers, with some 3000+ desktops, has asked about switching to firefox. Now, there are always some web sites and web based apps that require IE, which makes this a pain. But given the amount of time we spend cleaning spyware from machines, I think I can live with it, I don't know if the users can.
In any case, a coporate wide switch won't happen overnight. I'd expect to see the next 6 months or so start to see more corporations install linux enterprise wide. Those same corporations will complain about sites that don't work in Firefox, which helps fuel the uptake.
Also note to FF people - one of the reasons cited for not installing FF enterprise wide was the lack of central patching and policy control. This means patching security holes and forcing down settings to the clients; from my desk, without spending hours writing scripts.
I was astounded by that enough to look it up. I didn't think he was THAT dumb, he's not. Though he certainly doesn't seem to know what a patch is. linky
Dvorak was complaining that his machine sits idle for minutes at a time, while he's been madly clicking away trying to get it to do things. Then it springs to life, executing all his commands at once. Personally I've never experienced any of the issues he's talking about.
Linux has piles of coders. But from what I've seen, could use a lot more people making better user interfaces, better graphics for those interfaces, and of course documentation, How-Tos and anything that makes OSS adoption easier for the less geeky of us.
In addition, you don't need to write massive amounts of code to be helpful. Implimenting a new feature can be as simply as a line or 2 of new code to an existing project.
Sad? Perhaps. But look at it from the bosses view.
You're taking away a major, visible piece of functionality. For non-tech people, technology is a tool that helps them do their job, not the job itself. A mechanic wouldn't buy a new set of wrenches, no matter how indestructible they might be, if the set was missing the 9/16ths.
Why do we expect the PHBs to accept something similar?
Flame me if you want, but the lack of groupware functionality is a major problem. The fact that it still hasn't been addressed by the OSS community points to the generic problem with OSS. Software is written by geeks, for geeks. OSS needs to be written for joe-sixpack and his PHB, to solve their problems as they see them. Not just to solve the geek problems, they don't care about the geek problems, it's not their job. Look at Tivo, look at google. Now look again from the POV of Joe and his PHB, this is what we need to aim for.
Exactly, you don't buy a machine of this size without attaching it to some large storage. Probably a SAN/NAS, though you could also go with a direct attached SCSI enclosure. It's not just because you might have a lot of data, you need to keep a (probably) 4 processor system well fed with data for best efficiency.
Poster should also keep in mind the heat, noise and power considerations of a box this size.
And just to put in my 2 cents, an HP DL145 support 2 Opterons and 16 GB memory for under $20K US.
If the web site popped up a little ActiveX installer with simple instructions to "Click Yes to Enable Burger-King Music!!", then it would be installed.
Done. PC now contains DRM player. Probably whatever stuff microsoft or real is churning out.
Later on, if Dad actually tries to buy music, he'll put in his credit card and billing info just like any other on-line purchase.
It's only when its time for an upgrade or his PC crashes that he'll encounter the restrictions in DRM, at which point it's too late.
I expect DRM features to be placed on PCs in the same ways we have spyware on old machines and pre-loaded AOL on new ones, on the sly.
I watched my dad sit at his PC trying to get his "free" song he won from a little contest a Burger King. The only thing that stopped him from loading his PC up with whatever DRM locked media player was the annoyance of having to register when trying to download the player.
My explanation of how the DRM locked tune would only work on his one PC and he could never play it anyplace else was all but pointless. He didn't understand, and didn't care. He just wanted a free song.
It's not the DRM that most users care about, they care about being annoyed by the DRM. Once the companies figure out how to put DRM onto PCs without pissing anyone off, it will be all over.
Even better, how about if the AV software just erases/blocks it altogether, just like it would a virus?
Frankly as far as I can tell, spyware is as bad or worse than viruses. Most people wouldn't even notice if their machine was turned into a spam zombie, but popups for v1agr4 get people complaining.
One my customers was shopping for an corporate AV solution, one of the criteria was the blocking of spyware. We settled on Trend Officescan. I can't say it's perfect, but I do know it blocks a lot of spyware. What was already installed and can't be removed it at least warns me about so I can remove it via spybot.
"Lets buy new computers NEXT year and this year we'll have money for a couple teachers."
It doesn't work like that. Between grants, unions, bonds, capital projects, federal funds, state funds, cookie sales and everything else; a school has to be careful how they spend money. The vast majority of money they get has limits on how it can be spent. Computer money certainly does not mix with teacher salary money. Even with computer money, you might be able to buy a room full of servers, but no HP Openview type software to manage them or AC to keep them from catching on fire.
From what I've seen, it will shake out like this...
1. Project is high profile, everyone jumps through hoops to make it look good for the public/superintendant, whoever.
2. Project loses lustre (ie, bed press, Incom drops out).
3. Project is neglected, never used, probably doesn't even function anymore.
4. Something happens where people from #1 expect to use system again (unknown student accused of crime, etc..)
5. Go back to #1.
Having consulted with a number of schools, perhaps I'm just a bit jaded. But I've seen it many times before.
I live in the US, I think I've just about given up on the government. 40% of the population didn't vote in the last election, so I suspect I'm not alone.
For those left with the energy and the hope that things can be changed, I offer a suggestion from Governor Jesse Ventura:
Government is like a giant wheel. If one person tries to stand in front of that wheel and change it's direction, he will get crushed. It takes alot of people all pulling in the same direction to change government.
None of our leaders started as Senators or Presidents. Get out there, start campaining, start voting. Your school board, your mayor, your state assembly; these are the people who will be your children's leaders. This is where we must start, and it must be started a lot sooner than 2008.
I setup my mom's web site for a little ballet school years ago on pair.com. Rates have never increased and over time they've bumped up my disk space allotment. My mom also pays for the site 1 year at a time, which shaves 8% off the price. That includes hosting a domain, 5 email boxes, 200 MB disk space and 3G/month transfer. You only serve up static web pages, and access the site via FTP only. But for a web site with 6 pages and 10 pictures it works great. I think I had to talk to their tech support once, they were pretty good, but that was years ago. I've also used them for a couple other small places, and never had any problems. As far as I can tell, it just works.
What you've described is exactly what MIT uses on their network. They have a large number of both wireless and wired access places. I'd assume some googling on their site might get you a little information.
Attach a forgeign computer and it prompts you to login. Non MIT users are prompted for name and email and only allowed 15 days access per year.
Apparently they key everything via MAC address. I let a friend borrow my old wireless NIC, when he went to register it welcomed ME back. I hadn't used the NIC in a year.
I just cleaned up something called Wintools for IE. Among other things, it reinstalls itself if you try and remove it, and runs partially as a Windows service named "Wintools for IE Service".
Additionally this machine had some IE toolbars.
Here's my top 10 list of viruses/adware as detected by Trend Antivirus. As you can see, we're pretty much "virus" free, though the spyware viruses are rampant.
1. ADW_HUNTBAR.A
2. ADW_ENVOLO.A
3. ADW_EZULA.A
4. ADW_WINSTOOL.B
5. SPYW_KEENVAL.A
6. ADW_SAHAGENT.B
7. SPYW_BISPY.A
8. ADW_BINET.A
9. ADW_SAVENOW.A
10. ADW_SAHAGENT.A
If you search here you can see what toolbars or other nonesense those infections come from. The vast majority of those infections are on PCs on which users have no special rights at all.
I disupute the limited user part. Working in a school, where students and teachers certainly do NOT run as local admin on their windows machines, we still get spyware.
I use ASSP for any of my customers who've implimented spam filters. It keeps global stats for anyone who wants to report back to them. My spam hovers around 60%, more on holidays when there is less legitimate mail. Oddly, within the first few weeks after installing the filter, my spam dropped down from 80% to 70%. I guess the spammers realized they weren't getting through.
Trend Micro makes IWSS, which is a proxy that has built in anti-virus, including filtering out assorted spyware/malware.
I can't recommend the product too highly, it seems somewhat immature, though it does block the spyware/adware as advertised.
I like my Harmony (now Logitech) remote. They make several different models, I have the top one. The remote connects to the PC via USB, all the programming is done via their web site. It only took me 5 minutes to program all my gear. The remote has 40 or so normal buttons and an LCD. All non-button commands are via a scroll wheel. While you can program any button to do anything, I't be nice to see a few blank buttons, so programming any custom command doesn't use up a valid button. ie in DVD mode, the I've programmed my record button to switch disks in the DVD changer. It even has a program guide you can view on the LCD.
Marconi ESX-2400, which is no longer sold, or the Marconi NSX-9500, which still is if you ask. The core is a Windows NT system, you can hook a monitor and keyboard and use notepad to edit the config. Not that they support that, but it's there.
It's primarily sold as a LANE (ATM) services box, it has excellent LES/BUS performance.
DAoC has a command, called /played, that shows you total play time for a given character.
My total is over 70 days, that's 1680 hours since I started playing the game a few years ago. So my cost is what? 26 cents per hour?
There are many advantages to these things I can spot right off.
- My grandparents aren't climbing 15 feet up a ladder to change a bulb in their vaulted ceiling. They'd have to hire someone every time a bulb blew.
- Many businesses are ruled by unions, only certain people can do maintenance tasks, like changing light bulbs. The time to get a ladder/lift and the employee out to the right place is a lot more than you'd think.
- Any high stress area, think schools where kids bash lights with books, any gymnasium, raquetball court. For that matter, how about parking lots at night. No lighting in a bad neighboorhood is not a good thing.
- Automotive, how often do you break the bulb in your trouble light when puttering under your car?
As far as I'm concerned, the cost savings isn't so much in electricity, but in the fact that it virtually doesn't break.
Done. Took me 30 seconds to send a note to both my Senators. Who's next?
I suggest ASSP.
I've been using it for months for various customers in production networks. Free, written in Perl and runs on *nix or Windows. Can integrate with just about any mail server. I use it with Exchange. It also uses clamAV to do some basic virus filtering.
If you're working with small files (1 GB) have you considered Solid State? Or something like this: Rocket Drive 4 GB memory on a PCI card, mounted as a file system - 3000$ US.