On the Acorn Archimedes. The Archimedes didn't really *suck* per se but wasn't a massive success. I loved this version and many people consider it to be the best.
Agreed. The Archimedes version added some nice touches - I remember frequently flying past a pirate getting shot to bits by some police vipers while I was on the way somewhere.
I still prefer Frontier though, although I don't recall that it was released on any really awful systems - unless you count MS-DOS;-)
Umm.. it's "Grounded". Not "Earthed" ya dweebs. What, did you think you were being clever or something? "Earthed" isn't even technically correct, like Sun vs Sol. It's just plain wrong, and doesn't even SOUND smart. Geez.
Tally ho!
Now look here old chap, the correct word is 'earthed' and not 'grounded.' Did you think you were trying to sound intelligent or something my dear man? 'Grounded' isn't even technically correct, it's how you describe a teenager that has been an especially naughty fellow and is not allowed to leave the house as a punishment.
Not possible. A UK socket physically *requires* that a ground pin be present. The ground pin is a bit longer than the live/neutral pins, and is used to open a "shutter" blocking the live/neutral holes when the plug is inserted. When the longer ground pin is inserted, the shutter opens, allowing the plug to be fully inserted.
The ground pin can be plastic on devices that are double insulated. In that case it only serves to open the shutters for the live and neutral pins.
As an additional safety precaution, every plug is also fitted with a 13A fuse
Not always 13A. They're fitted with a fuse of 3, 5 or 13 amps. Lamps, for example would be fitted with a 3A fuse because they would never draw 13 or even 5 amps under normal conditions.
and all domestic circuits fitted with the connector described above are *explicitly* rated to operate at up to 13 amps. (Additionally every single wall socket also has an individual on/off switch)
If that was the case then it would only take a vacuum cleaner and someone boiling some water in a kettle at the same time to trip the entire circuit. A domestic ring main circuit is rated to 30A.
Sony kind of did this years ago, not sure if they still do:
We had a new TV and VCR in 1996 or around then. The TV came with a reversible remote. One side was complex with small buttons that did everything. The other side was simple with large, easy to read buttons that performed the common tasks. If you wanted the easy controls, you just pulled the remote out of the 'caddy' and flipped it over.
The VCR had a huge remote that had a flip-up lid on the upper half - this concealed the more advanced controls and made it look much cleaner.
Another sad truth is the fact that self-taught women generally need not apply for jobs that might use their skills. Somehow, self-taught men are OK, as is. But self-taught women need a piece of paper with magic letters on it.
That's got nothing to do with gender. I had to get a bunch of those aforementioned pieces of paper before I was considered for a decent job.
Yes, I'm self-taught. Yes, I'm damn good at what I do, and that was the case even before the magic letters appeared after my name.
No, I'm not female.
You're just a victim of the current state of the IT job market, same as the rest of us. It's tough out there. Get over it.
If you put a "run as" link on my desktop to give me admin access for a specific app, you might as well give me admin rights. The "run as" command is not secure.
So what you're saying is that it's better just to run with admin rights ALL the time?
I didn't think so.
Of course 'Run As' is exploitable (especially if you use the/savecred switch, but I've never heard of any malware taking advantage of it). But using it is a damn sight more secure than just running with admin rights.
Principle of least privilege. It's worked for me for the last 8 years - never had a virus. For a windows system, that's saying something.
The two big problems with LUAs have been that there was no way to perform super-user actions without logging out and logging back in
Uh, Run As? Been available since Windows 2000.
I've never ran with Admin rights permanently on any Windows box since I had the option of using a LUA. Never caused me any hassle. Any programs that needed admin rights (games, usually) would be given a new shortcut on the start menu to run it as a privileged user.
However, I've come across very few programs that can't be persuaded to run by relaxing filesystem and/or registry permissions. Much better than running with admin rights over everything. In my old job I used to build Windows OS images for a computing department at a university. The OS had to be locked down so that everyone had Guest privileges, but the 200+ pieces of software available still had to run correctly. Great challenge, I loved it. Took up two months of my working year.
Yes, I know it's not a solution for the average user. Just making a point that it's not entirely impossible.
I've been using 2.0.0 beta 3.1 for a while now. I like it.
My only gripe is that it stores account passwords in plain text, on Windows at least, inside the accounts.xml file. (On Windows, this is located in %HOMEPATH%\Application Data\.gaim)
Surely it's not too much of a hassle to encrypt the passwords? Are passwords encrypted in the later versions of the beta?
Why should some entrepreneur out there who wants to make money doing X have to care about the intricacies of technology if that has nothing to do with what he wants to do?
I think you're missing my point. I'm only speaking from the perspective of supporting those systems for the companies in question.
I understand perfectly that they don't care *how* their systems work if they are paying someone else to maintain them. All they care about it that it *works*. That's fine, we all expect that.
The problem that I have with my current clients is that they don't care if an extra £500 will buy them a RAID array which will prevent downtime in the event of a disk failure. They only seem to care that it's £500 that they have the option of spending or not spending, and no matter how many different ways you explain it, they still don't see how it is an investment. And guess who gets it in the neck when their single-drive, non-RAID server suffers a disk failure and they can't do any work for a day.
If an expert tells me something on my car needs replacing or the brakes will likely fail in the next 12 months, I'll have it done, no question. My problem at the moment is that when I give my 'expert opinion' that these people need to invest more in their systems if they want them to be reliable, they dismiss it as if I'm lying or something. It's driving me crazy.
So, that's where I'm coming from.
I'm used to large infrastructures that invest more money in their systems to ensure that they're available 99.9% of the time. And that's what I'm going back to. I spend far too much time worrying about my client's systems than is good for me.
Oh, and another thing, I'm not Microsoft-bashing - I'm SBS-bashing.
I love *standard* Windows Server Systems. Like the ones I used to use, and the ones I'm going back to using.
SBS is simply not a solution that fits in with my idea of a good infrastructure, and that seems to be mainly down to the fact that with SBS you're pitching to the bottom end of the market.
Geez, you completely missed the point of my post. And it would appear that you're a twat, too.
The point is that SBS is *designed* (and indeed, shipped) to run all of this stuff on one box. That's the point of SBS. I came from a large infrastructure enviroment, where each server was dedicated to a task. I came to this place not so long ago, and saw how SBS is deployed in the real world... and it quite frankly sucks (but that might have something to do with my predecessors who installed the kit).
Yes, of course you can install another DC, but it has to be a standard server, not SBS - you can only have one SBS DC on a network (yes, I have read the f*cking manual, thank you very much). If you're going to spend the bucks on buying yet another Windows server and software, there's no point in going with SBS in the first place. Most companies will only spend the money on a single server anyway.
Please remind me what you're talking about again? Oh, and before you do, read the rest of the thread.
I can't stand badly-formatted posts, hence the repost. Apologies for trying to make my babbling more readable. And if I really cared about my Karma, I'd be posting here much more often than a few times per year.
Your $0.02 has been duly noted. I shall eneavour to be more careful to click Preview before posting next time. Happy now?
Again, I agree with what you're saying but it's the situation I find myself in at the moment. I didn't spec/sell any of the systems that I found myself supporting with this company.
I asked the manager why on earth we didn't insist on RAID for those clients that don't have it. His answer? "We did, but they flatly refused to pay the extra cost of a RAID solution. If we hadn't moved on that, we would have lost their business to the guy down the road who sells whitebox servers at half the price."
So, the choice is to sell a server without RAID or lose a client. I would be much more comfortable if this company was the kind of place who could afford to lose a client because they wouldn't come up with the cash, but they're not.
I think I'm more annoyed at the situation than SBS itself. This place has to cut its prices right to the bone just to compete. The upshot of that is that something has to suffer. In this case it's the safety of their data.
One of my clients doesn't change their backup tapes because they can't be bothered with the hassle. They just leave the same backup tape in all the time. You just can't talk to these people. Not that I need to care anymore anyway.
The rest of the clients do have properly configured backups, but again, I just don't like the idea of sticking backups of an Exchange Mail Store, SQL Databases, fileshares and the system state data all on one tape (if it will fit, and if it doesn't, tough luck because they won't pay for an upgraded tape drive).
I guess I'm more frustrated with the type of company that goes hand-in-hand with an SBS server.
Oh, the servers themselves are fine. Perfectly within MS's spec. I didn't supply them, by the way. I joined this company way after they were installed.
My problem with SBS is stuff like you have described - running something like Remote Web Workplace on a server that is also a DC and an Exchange server? Not the best option for security, but perhaps that's just me. I don't feel happy supporting something that I wouldn't choose to use myself, so I'm getting outta here.
You're absolutely right, it's the only thing we can sell to these places.
Supporting them is a nightmare though... I used to lie awake at night thinking what would happen if a disk failed in company X's server. They're just not prepared for a disaster.
So yeah, it's a good product for the target market, but a nightmare for someone like me supporting them. Someone else can have the stress of that. I'm done with it.
Damn formatting... here's how that should have looked:
Slightly off-topic, but SBS is the reason I changed my job. I leave this place at the end of the month, thank god. I support several companies, 10 of which are using SBS.
It has to be the best way of putting all of a company's eggs in one basket. It goes against everything that makes good sense about creating an available, stable network with some redundancy. If you go for the Premium edition and install everything, you'll find yourself running:
- Exchange
- SQL Server
- ISA Server
- IIS
- File/Print services
- DNS
- DHCP
- WINS
All on the same box which is ALSO a domain controller for your network. If that box fails (some of our clients are cheap enough to have declined a RAID solution, against better advice), then that's it... the whole place is down the toilet until the box is rebuilt, and you'd better pray that the backups are good.
It's a horrible, horrible way of running things, IMHO.
I'll be glad to not have to support these boxes any more.
Slightly off-topic, but SBS is the reason I changed my job. I leave this place at the end of the month, thank god. I support several companies, 10 of which are using SBS.
It has to be the best way of putting all of a company's eggs in one basket. It goes against everything that makes good sense about creating an available, stable network with some redundancy. If you go for the Premium edition and install everything, you'll find yourself running:
- Exchange
- SQL Server
- ISA Server
- IIS
- File/Print services
- DNS
- DHCP
- WINS
All on the same box which is ALSO a domain controller for your network. If that box fails (some of our clients are cheap enough to have declined a RAID solution, against better advice), then that's it... the whole place is down the toilet until the box is rebuilt, and you'd better pray that the backups are good.
It's a horrible, horrible way of running things, IMHO.
I'll be glad to not have to support these boxes any more.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Acorn Archimedes. The Archimedes didn't really *suck* per se but wasn't a massive success. I loved this version and many people consider it to be the best.
Agreed. The Archimedes version added some nice touches - I remember frequently flying past a pirate getting shot to bits by some police vipers while I was on the way somewhere. I still prefer Frontier though, although I don't recall that it was released on any really awful systems - unless you count MS-DOS ;-)
WTF?
:-P
Umm.. it's "Grounded". Not "Earthed" ya dweebs. What, did you think you were being clever or something? "Earthed" isn't even technically correct, like Sun vs Sol. It's just plain wrong, and doesn't even SOUND smart. Geez.
Tally ho!
Now look here old chap, the correct word is 'earthed' and not 'grounded.' Did you think you were trying to sound intelligent or something my dear man? 'Grounded' isn't even technically correct, it's how you describe a teenager that has been an especially naughty fellow and is not allowed to leave the house as a punishment.
Enough of the stereotyping. They're both correct.
Dumbass
Not possible. A UK socket physically *requires* that a ground pin be present. The ground pin is a bit longer than the live/neutral pins, and is used to open a "shutter" blocking the live/neutral holes when the plug is inserted. When the longer ground pin is inserted, the shutter opens, allowing the plug to be fully inserted.
The ground pin can be plastic on devices that are double insulated. In that case it only serves to open the shutters for the live and neutral pins.
As an additional safety precaution, every plug is also fitted with a 13A fuse
Not always 13A. They're fitted with a fuse of 3, 5 or 13 amps. Lamps, for example would be fitted with a 3A fuse because they would never draw 13 or even 5 amps under normal conditions.
and all domestic circuits fitted with the connector described above are *explicitly* rated to operate at up to 13 amps. (Additionally every single wall socket also has an individual on/off switch)
If that was the case then it would only take a vacuum cleaner and someone boiling some water in a kettle at the same time to trip the entire circuit. A domestic ring main circuit is rated to 30A.
Sony kind of did this years ago, not sure if they still do:
We had a new TV and VCR in 1996 or around then. The TV came with a reversible remote. One side was complex with small buttons that did everything. The other side was simple with large, easy to read buttons that performed the common tasks. If you wanted the easy controls, you just pulled the remote out of the 'caddy' and flipped it over.
The VCR had a huge remote that had a flip-up lid on the upper half - this concealed the more advanced controls and made it look much cleaner.
There's only a thin line between allowing swearing in the office, and, well... other things.
What about Elite or Frontier?
Mercenary or Damocles?
*sigh*
Another sad truth is the fact that self-taught women generally need not apply for jobs that might use their skills. Somehow, self-taught men are OK, as is. But self-taught women need a piece of paper with magic letters on it.
That's got nothing to do with gender. I had to get a bunch of those aforementioned pieces of paper before I was considered for a decent job.
Yes, I'm self-taught. Yes, I'm damn good at what I do, and that was the case even before the magic letters appeared after my name.
No, I'm not female.
You're just a victim of the current state of the IT job market, same as the rest of us. It's tough out there. Get over it.
If you put a "run as" link on my desktop to give me admin access for a specific app, you might as well give me admin rights. The "run as" command is not secure.
/savecred switch, but I've never heard of any malware taking advantage of it). But using it is a damn sight more secure than just running with admin rights.
So what you're saying is that it's better just to run with admin rights ALL the time?
I didn't think so.
Of course 'Run As' is exploitable (especially if you use the
Principle of least privilege. It's worked for me for the last 8 years - never had a virus. For a windows system, that's saying something.
The two big problems with LUAs have been that there was no way to perform super-user actions without logging out and logging back in
Uh, Run As? Been available since Windows 2000.
I've never ran with Admin rights permanently on any Windows box since I had the option of using a LUA. Never caused me any hassle. Any programs that needed admin rights (games, usually) would be given a new shortcut on the start menu to run it as a privileged user.
However, I've come across very few programs that can't be persuaded to run by relaxing filesystem and/or registry permissions. Much better than running with admin rights over everything. In my old job I used to build Windows OS images for a computing department at a university. The OS had to be locked down so that everyone had Guest privileges, but the 200+ pieces of software available still had to run correctly. Great challenge, I loved it. Took up two months of my working year.
Yes, I know it's not a solution for the average user. Just making a point that it's not entirely impossible.
Borat is hilarious totally americanized but he pulls off the foreign characters with such brilliance.
And also British, not American.
You sure it was the cream and not Moore's Law turning into Murphy's Law?
The odds of any blade being defective... multiplied by the ever increasing number of blades....
Ah, but this is where the next generation of razor blade technology comes into its own - RAIB! Redundant Array of (Incredibly)Expensive Blades)
A mirrored array enables you to shave in half the time, whereas a RAIB-5 array just puts stripes on your face.
You could say that it's the cutting edge of razor blade technology.
Har har.
I've been using 2.0.0 beta 3.1 for a while now. I like it.
My only gripe is that it stores account passwords in plain text, on Windows at least, inside the accounts.xml file. (On Windows, this is located in %HOMEPATH%\Application Data\.gaim)
Surely it's not too much of a hassle to encrypt the passwords? Are passwords encrypted in the later versions of the beta?
Frontier - Elite 2
That game amazed me when it was released. Absolutely wonderful, and all on a single floppy disk! I still play it now on my XP machine.
Speaking of which... I'll be back after I upgrade my ship.
If our clients had that kit, my job would be much less stressful, and I wouldn't have found a new job.
:-(
Unfortunately I found myself supporting a bunch of time bombs waiting to go off, and I don't have the time to fix them
You'd be welcome to the clients if they were mine to give away!
Why should some entrepreneur out there who wants to make money doing X have to care about the intricacies of technology if that has nothing to do with what he wants to do?
I think you're missing my point. I'm only speaking from the perspective of supporting those systems for the companies in question.
I understand perfectly that they don't care *how* their systems work if they are paying someone else to maintain them. All they care about it that it *works*. That's fine, we all expect that.
The problem that I have with my current clients is that they don't care if an extra £500 will buy them a RAID array which will prevent downtime in the event of a disk failure. They only seem to care that it's £500 that they have the option of spending or not spending, and no matter how many different ways you explain it, they still don't see how it is an investment. And guess who gets it in the neck when their single-drive, non-RAID server suffers a disk failure and they can't do any work for a day.
If an expert tells me something on my car needs replacing or the brakes will likely fail in the next 12 months, I'll have it done, no question. My problem at the moment is that when I give my 'expert opinion' that these people need to invest more in their systems if they want them to be reliable, they dismiss it as if I'm lying or something. It's driving me crazy.
So, that's where I'm coming from.
I'm used to large infrastructures that invest more money in their systems to ensure that they're available 99.9% of the time. And that's what I'm going back to. I spend far too much time worrying about my client's systems than is good for me.
Oh, and another thing, I'm not Microsoft-bashing - I'm SBS-bashing.
I love *standard* Windows Server Systems. Like the ones I used to use, and the ones I'm going back to using.
SBS is simply not a solution that fits in with my idea of a good infrastructure, and that seems to be mainly down to the fact that with SBS you're pitching to the bottom end of the market.
Geez, you completely missed the point of my post. And it would appear that you're a twat, too.
The point is that SBS is *designed* (and indeed, shipped) to run all of this stuff on one box. That's the point of SBS. I came from a large infrastructure enviroment, where each server was dedicated to a task. I came to this place not so long ago, and saw how SBS is deployed in the real world... and it quite frankly sucks (but that might have something to do with my predecessors who installed the kit).
Yes, of course you can install another DC, but it has to be a standard server, not SBS - you can only have one SBS DC on a network (yes, I have read the f*cking manual, thank you very much). If you're going to spend the bucks on buying yet another Windows server and software, there's no point in going with SBS in the first place. Most companies will only spend the money on a single server anyway.
Please remind me what you're talking about again? Oh, and before you do, read the rest of the thread.
Uh, thanks.
I can't stand badly-formatted posts, hence the repost. Apologies for trying to make my babbling more readable. And if I really cared about my Karma, I'd be posting here much more often than a few times per year.
Your $0.02 has been duly noted. I shall eneavour to be more careful to click Preview before posting next time. Happy now?
Again, I agree with what you're saying but it's the situation I find myself in at the moment. I didn't spec/sell any of the systems that I found myself supporting with this company.
I asked the manager why on earth we didn't insist on RAID for those clients that don't have it. His answer? "We did, but they flatly refused to pay the extra cost of a RAID solution. If we hadn't moved on that, we would have lost their business to the guy down the road who sells whitebox servers at half the price."
So, the choice is to sell a server without RAID or lose a client. I would be much more comfortable if this company was the kind of place who could afford to lose a client because they wouldn't come up with the cash, but they're not.
I think I'm more annoyed at the situation than SBS itself. This place has to cut its prices right to the bone just to compete. The upshot of that is that something has to suffer. In this case it's the safety of their data.
No, you're not wrong, unfortunately.
One of my clients doesn't change their backup tapes because they can't be bothered with the hassle. They just leave the same backup tape in all the time. You just can't talk to these people. Not that I need to care anymore anyway.
The rest of the clients do have properly configured backups, but again, I just don't like the idea of sticking backups of an Exchange Mail Store, SQL Databases, fileshares and the system state data all on one tape (if it will fit, and if it doesn't, tough luck because they won't pay for an upgraded tape drive).
I guess I'm more frustrated with the type of company that goes hand-in-hand with an SBS server.
Oh, the servers themselves are fine. Perfectly within MS's spec. I didn't supply them, by the way. I joined this company way after they were installed. My problem with SBS is stuff like you have described - running something like Remote Web Workplace on a server that is also a DC and an Exchange server? Not the best option for security, but perhaps that's just me. I don't feel happy supporting something that I wouldn't choose to use myself, so I'm getting outta here.
You're absolutely right, it's the only thing we can sell to these places.
Supporting them is a nightmare though... I used to lie awake at night thinking what would happen if a disk failed in company X's server. They're just not prepared for a disaster.
So yeah, it's a good product for the target market, but a nightmare for someone like me supporting them. Someone else can have the stress of that. I'm done with it.
Damn formatting... here's how that should have looked:
Slightly off-topic, but SBS is the reason I changed my job. I leave this place at the end of the month, thank god. I support several companies, 10 of which are using SBS.
It has to be the best way of putting all of a company's eggs in one basket. It goes against everything that makes good sense about creating an available, stable network with some redundancy. If you go for the Premium edition and install everything, you'll find yourself running:
- Exchange
- SQL Server
- ISA Server
- IIS
- File/Print services
- DNS
- DHCP
- WINS
All on the same box which is ALSO a domain controller for your network. If that box fails (some of our clients are cheap enough to have declined a RAID solution, against better advice), then that's it... the whole place is down the toilet until the box is rebuilt, and you'd better pray that the backups are good.
It's a horrible, horrible way of running things, IMHO.
I'll be glad to not have to support these boxes any more.
Slightly off-topic, but SBS is the reason I changed my job. I leave this place at the end of the month, thank god. I support several companies, 10 of which are using SBS. It has to be the best way of putting all of a company's eggs in one basket. It goes against everything that makes good sense about creating an available, stable network with some redundancy. If you go for the Premium edition and install everything, you'll find yourself running: - Exchange - SQL Server - ISA Server - IIS - File/Print services - DNS - DHCP - WINS All on the same box which is ALSO a domain controller for your network. If that box fails (some of our clients are cheap enough to have declined a RAID solution, against better advice), then that's it... the whole place is down the toilet until the box is rebuilt, and you'd better pray that the backups are good. It's a horrible, horrible way of running things, IMHO. I'll be glad to not have to support these boxes any more.
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