Just an FYI... AM radio stations now use this technique to replace huge oil-filled modulation transformers weighing thousands of pounds and standing 10ft or so high, (at least for the high-power (50kw) stations).
AM transmission used to be done by "brute force", with this giant transformer and tubes weighing hundreds of pounds forming a gigantic audio amplifier which was mixed with the carrier frequency wave to produce the AM signal.
Now, they just pulse-width-modulate the power supply producing the carrier wave and produce extremely good audio. The transmitted signal now can sound as good as monophonic FM, but is restricted artifically by bandwidth limits imposed by law ( You must "roll off" the signal at 7.5khz, equivalent to pushing the top keys of your graphic equalizer down all the way). However, most AM receivers suck really badly, so no one would notice the improvement unless they had pro monitoring equipment. It just saves money and weight and space.
If it will make you feel better, we have 340 registered users on 3 LANS located across the US, some of which are dialup field personnel. We have 11 servers, and 32 printers and only one full-time admin and I have not authority to tell anyone to do anything, as I'm considered an IT engineer, just part of the engineering department.
Luckily, practically no one understands anything about IT, so I am able to implement some things that I have learned the "hard way".
Here's my favorite survival list for the lonely admin:
Keep your servers running *nix where you can.
Try to discourage the use of Outlook (it causes me more wasted man-hours than any other single program. ) Use Thunderbird or Opera mail
Keep your antivirus absolutely up to date. Update several times daily of your software allows it. Virii sometimes hatch in hours, not days.
Keep Windows servers totally away from the internet. Isolate them behind *nix firewalls and only map ports you absolutely have to from one of your *nix servers.
Get good layer 3 switches and put in routing and VLANS so that worms can not easily infect the whole network. Don't allow connectivity from VLAN to VLAN more than necessary
Just my $.02...
I have tried a few of the OS groupware systems and I also tried OpenExchange and found that the web interface was really nice, mail worked well, etc. The problems/objections I got from the users at our place were that the appointment calendar treats multiple-date appointments as many single appointments, which seems to confuse folks.
The other problem I had was that the database kept getting corrupted as Suse crashed for some reason and when it came back up, you had to go through a procedure (I forget...some little app you run) to sort the database back out. I've never had to do this with our FreeBSD systems. They never crash and even if the power gets accidentally pulled, FreeBSD/MySql comes back up pretty much in it's right mind. The 3 times or so that Suse apparently crashed or the hardware glitched or whatever caused the reboot, I had to reinstall OpenExchange to get it working again. I wasn't impressed by that.
Of the groupware I've tried, it was by far the best in features.
The ability to schedule group meetings with reminder email to participants is a BIG deal at our company and I assume others and it's what most of the open-source groupware systems lack. OpenExchange does this.
Also a big deal here is the ability to have an easily-maintainable schedule with excellent printout for the paper copies (yes, I know...trees are dieing..but they want their paper copies). I recall that the schedule printout was not all that great.
Missing from every OS groupware I tried is a way to keep multiple notes on a contact. Say, for instance, you have a client/contact that you talk to on the phone often and he deals with a number of your employees and you all want to be able to see what has transpired in other's conversations with this person. Each person can make a new individual note on the contact. As far as I know, none of the Open Source groupware stuff does this. OpenExchange came close. (I don't remember exactly after a few months what it lacked, but it was almost there. The vendor for OpenExchange, who had the source at the time said he felt it was do-able for a few K $$$.
While I was watching this episode in the 60's, I had the feeling of deja-vu. After some pondering, I realized that the plot of "Balance of Terror" is amazingly similar to "The Enemy Below", a book by D.A. Rayner published in 1956. It's about a British destroyer that goes after a German submarine and has the "ghost" in the radar (The Brit captain knew that U-Boats had a radar glitch at 180 deg. so he followed there and the sub captain thought it was probably a glitch instead of a pip). The sub is running full speed for home, same as in Strek. Same stuff happens...the two ships fight a prolonged running battle and damage each other's ships and the Captains develop a respect for each other's professionalism and announce that under other circumstances they could be friends. Deja-VU?
Anyone else familiar with this book?
They are somewhat misinformed about the binary packages available for FreeBSD. Of course, not all the packages are on the distribution CDs. AFAIK, *all* the source ports are pre-compiled and available at the well-organized freebsd.org ftp mirrors.
The environment variable PACKAGESITE comes set to load the latest packages for the distro you're on by just doing 'pkg_add -r packagename'. I have not used Debian or some of the Linux distros reputed to have great package systems, but I'll tell you what, I have amazed a few Windows/Linux users when I needed something like an editor and just did 'pkg_add -r jove' or whatever and had it up and running with a file loaded in less than 30 seconds. Works for me... The other nice thing is that you don't have to know what version goes with the distro you are running (PACKAGESITE again). The short names are linked on the ftp to the correct version, so you only have to ask for the short name like 'emacs', 'bash', or whatever.
Off that subject, I have been running KDE on my Dell laptop through 4.3, thru 5.2 and I have had almost no problems with any desktop app. However, to be fair, I've never tried using the KDE config stuff to add users!
Freebsd since 1994...
If you are out on the road with a 25K connection, Pine is a wonderful thing. We use it here at our company where many people are on the road all the time checking email. They just want to get in, see what's new and get out. Part of this speed difference is IMAP vs POP3. Most of the GUI mailers seem to confuse non-techies when you put them in IMAP mode (They can't figure out having 2 iboxes, etc and always go to the "local" one and claim i doesn't work). Pine is actually simpler for them to use in IMAP and they don't have to wait for some attachment to download on a slow connection with POP3 (It's always the first piece of mail in their box that has the 500K attahcment). So, Pine still has its uses
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Just an FYI... AM radio stations now use this technique to replace huge oil-filled modulation transformers weighing thousands of pounds and standing 10ft or so high, (at least for the high-power (50kw) stations). AM transmission used to be done by "brute force", with this giant transformer and tubes weighing hundreds of pounds forming a gigantic audio amplifier which was mixed with the carrier frequency wave to produce the AM signal. Now, they just pulse-width-modulate the power supply producing the carrier wave and produce extremely good audio. The transmitted signal now can sound as good as monophonic FM, but is restricted artifically by bandwidth limits imposed by law ( You must "roll off" the signal at 7.5khz, equivalent to pushing the top keys of your graphic equalizer down all the way). However, most AM receivers suck really badly, so no one would notice the improvement unless they had pro monitoring equipment. It just saves money and weight and space.
"Gimp is not Photoshop" Beautiful! All we need is a name change to "Ginp"! Gnu is not Unix...Ginp is not Photoshop! Oh, well....
If it will make you feel better, we have 340 registered users on 3 LANS located across the US, some of which are dialup field personnel. We have 11 servers, and 32 printers and only one full-time admin and I have not authority to tell anyone to do anything, as I'm considered an IT engineer, just part of the engineering department. Luckily, practically no one understands anything about IT, so I am able to implement some things that I have learned the "hard way".
Here's my favorite survival list for the lonely admin:
Keep your servers running *nix where you can.
Try to discourage the use of Outlook (it causes me more wasted man-hours than any other single program. ) Use Thunderbird or Opera mail
Keep your antivirus absolutely up to date. Update several times daily of your software allows it. Virii sometimes hatch in hours, not days.
Keep Windows servers totally away from the internet. Isolate them behind *nix firewalls and only map ports you absolutely have to from one of your *nix servers.
Get good layer 3 switches and put in routing and VLANS so that worms can not easily infect the whole network. Don't allow connectivity from VLAN to VLAN more than necessary
Just my $.02...
The other problem I had was that the database kept getting corrupted as Suse crashed for some reason and when it came back up, you had to go through a procedure (I forget...some little app you run) to sort the database back out. I've never had to do this with our FreeBSD systems. They never crash and even if the power gets accidentally pulled, FreeBSD/MySql comes back up pretty much in it's right mind. The 3 times or so that Suse apparently crashed or the hardware glitched or whatever caused the reboot, I had to reinstall OpenExchange to get it working again. I wasn't impressed by that.
Of the groupware I've tried, it was by far the best in features.
The ability to schedule group meetings with reminder email to participants is a BIG deal at our company and I assume others and it's what most of the open-source groupware systems lack. OpenExchange does this.
Also a big deal here is the ability to have an easily-maintainable schedule with excellent printout for the paper copies (yes, I know...trees are dieing..but they want their paper copies). I recall that the schedule printout was not all that great.
Missing from every OS groupware I tried is a way to keep multiple notes on a contact. Say, for instance, you have a client/contact that you talk to on the phone often and he deals with a number of your employees and you all want to be able to see what has transpired in other's conversations with this person. Each person can make a new individual note on the contact. As far as I know, none of the Open Source groupware stuff does this. OpenExchange came close. (I don't remember exactly after a few months what it lacked, but it was almost there. The vendor for OpenExchange, who had the source at the time said he felt it was do-able for a few K $$$ .
I'm going to give it another go if it gets GPL'd.
While I was watching this episode in the 60's, I had the feeling of deja-vu. After some pondering, I realized that the plot of "Balance of Terror" is amazingly similar to "The Enemy Below", a book by D.A. Rayner published in 1956. It's about a British destroyer that goes after a German submarine and has the "ghost" in the radar (The Brit captain knew that U-Boats had a radar glitch at 180 deg. so he followed there and the sub captain thought it was probably a glitch instead of a pip). The sub is running full speed for home, same as in Strek. Same stuff happens...the two ships fight a prolonged running battle and damage each other's ships and the Captains develop a respect for each other's professionalism and announce that under other circumstances they could be friends. Deja-VU? Anyone else familiar with this book?
They are somewhat misinformed about the binary packages available for FreeBSD. Of course, not all the packages are on the distribution CDs. AFAIK, *all* the source ports are pre-compiled and available at the well-organized freebsd.org ftp mirrors. The environment variable PACKAGESITE comes set to load the latest packages for the distro you're on by just doing 'pkg_add -r packagename'. I have not used Debian or some of the Linux distros reputed to have great package systems, but I'll tell you what, I have amazed a few Windows/Linux users when I needed something like an editor and just did 'pkg_add -r jove' or whatever and had it up and running with a file loaded in less than 30 seconds. Works for me... The other nice thing is that you don't have to know what version goes with the distro you are running (PACKAGESITE again). The short names are linked on the ftp to the correct version, so you only have to ask for the short name like 'emacs', 'bash', or whatever. Off that subject, I have been running KDE on my Dell laptop through 4.3, thru 5.2 and I have had almost no problems with any desktop app. However, to be fair, I've never tried using the KDE config stuff to add users! Freebsd since 1994...
If you are out on the road with a 25K connection, Pine is a wonderful thing. We use it here at our company where many people are on the road all the time checking email. They just want to get in, see what's new and get out. Part of this speed difference is IMAP vs POP3. Most of the GUI mailers seem to confuse non-techies when you put them in IMAP mode (They can't figure out having 2 iboxes, etc and always go to the "local" one and claim i doesn't work). Pine is actually simpler for them to use in IMAP and they don't have to wait for some attachment to download on a slow connection with POP3 (It's always the first piece of mail in their box that has the 500K attahcment). So, Pine still has its uses