It depends on your situation. Your average home user is probably behind a router that SHOULD protect against most casual attacks, and an enterprise user SHOULD be behind an enterprise-class firewall. In theory you don't need a desktop firewall in either situation. But let's look at a real world example now:
I work for a university with ~32,000 students and we've got roughly 3,000 computers on campus that are owned by the school. We have an excellent firewall protecting our network from the Internet. We also have a wireless network with a few VLANs set aside for it that the students, faculty, staff, guests, etc are free to use. Now let's assume that none of the computers on campus are running a firewall since "Hey, we've got one protecting the whole school." A lot of faculty and staff also have laptops with docking stations and they move freely from wireless to wired networks, not to mention using these computers at home, on trips, in coffee shops, etc. Now lets say that someone gets infected with a virus - pick any of those people, it doesn't really matter. Then their machine connects to the wireless network and manages to infect a bunch of machines since they aren't running firewalls and have out of date AV definitions (happens a lot more than you think). Some of those machines then end up being put into docking stations and start pushing the virus out on their subnet as well as any others they can manage to get to. Internal security isn't as much of a concern so traffic between subnets doesn't have to get through the firewall. Suddenly one student computer with a virus turns into an infection that affects the whole campus.
This sounds like some sort of made up perfect storm situation but we had almost EXACTLY this issue crop up a few years ago. An infected thumb drive spread a virus (don't remember which one off the top of my head) to half the campus in less than a day.
I think this is waaaaay overblown. Maybe some day physical media will really die - but today, right now it is seriously alive and well. I would wager that most slashdotters have (or at least have available in some way) a device that can be hooked up to their TV to watch downloaded media. Whether it's an Apple TV, Roku, HTPC, Boxee, or whatever. Your average consumer, however, does not - and many that do, have no idea what their device is actually capable of doing. I've had people over that have seen the way I have my PS3 set up and their minds are completely blown - and all I've done is hook up an external hard drive to it that's full of ripped DVDs. These are the same people that have their blu ray players hooked up to a 52 inch HDTV via component cables because they couldn't afford the HDMI cable (I know someone with this exact problem - I couldn't convince him that the $5 cable from monoprice would work fine). In the technology world the lowest common denominator where the consumer is concerned is MOST of the consumers. That majority of consumers are not capable of figuring out how to connect anything more complicated than a VCR to their TV. People with blu-ray players are quite happy with them - it's accessible in a way that is familiar because the functionality builds off the DVD paradigm - people are used to it. Blu-ray looks and acts much like a DVD just with better picture/sound quality and some cooler special features. Trying to instruct someone in how to set up some set top box that allows them to rent or view downloadable content is an exercise in futility. The new Apple TV may go a long way towards closing the stupidity gap (especially with the new price point) but it's still going to be a long time before the average non-techie consumer is capable of forgoing physical media. There's also still the problem of broadband speeds in the US. A lot of people simply do not have the bandwidth needed to stream high definition video. Downloads from stores like iTunes or Amazon are nice, but streaming full 1080p with little or no buffering to a simple to set up set top box AND have most of the country able to do this is what it will take before this conversation can even begin to be serious.
Well I work about 5 minutes from their old HQ (in fact I'm going to a meeting in that office park tomorrow)...anyone in the/. community want me to pick up something nice?
Yeah...because I want to tell you how to train the future labor that will take my job when it gets outsourced.
Uhhh..I mean...yeah...teach them...Fortran...and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Those are useful skills. Novell Netware (and Groupwise) administration is also big. Active Directory is just a passing fad.
I do two spaces, except on my iPhone. It does one space automatically after double tapping the space bar for a period.
Oh...and I still do the tab indents when I code (which is pretty rare anymore...my C++ is so rusty it belongs in a scrap heap).
I'm actually okay with this depending on how it gets implemented. If I've got to pay money to go to the next level (for example) I want the game to cost less to begin with. Maybe I buy a new PS3 game for $20, but to actually finish the game I'll have to pony up an additional $30-$40 by the time I'm done. This could also have some real interesting repercussions for the used market. Considering that you would be buying the basic game, but a someone buying a used copy may still need to buy all of the DLC in order to actually complete the game.
That's a good point. I was watching liveblogs of the keynote and I had the same initial response. I just forgot about my initial reaction until I read your comment.
It's all just marketing speak anyway. It IS a higher-resolution display, but giving it a name like "retina" to a display is just the marketing guys trying to make you think that you won't notice any pixelation. That being said it is a better looking display than what's on the 3G/3GS. I think it's also likely that the average person won't notice much pixelation on the new display anyway.
My machine choice for my computer labs is based on application availability. Some of the software used by the academic programs I support is only available on Windows so I'd just be loading Windows on the Macs anyway if I bought them. If I could go all OS X and not have to worry about Boot Camp I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Well I use Macs (plus my dad works for Apple), but I do mainly Windows support for a living. I'm an IT Manager at a University and I support about 200 faculty, 12 computer labs, and manage a whole slew of servers - by myself. If I didn't have good deployment strategies in place I'd have jumped off the roof of a Foxconn building long ago.
Since none of my computer labs are Mac-based my knowledge of networking technology and deployment strategies have to be based on Windows. I'd switch to Macs if I could during my summer lab rebuilds, but I'd just be putting Windows on them anyway. I spent a lot of time looking at my options and it just wasn't cost effective considering the existing investments in software and infrastructure.
While I'm a confessed Apple zealot I'd go with PCs running XP. It's the more common, more supported platform. A lot more of the "industry standard" type of applications will be running on PCs running either Windows or Linux. In the computer labs I support we're replacing all of the machines this summer, and I toyed with going Mac, but it just doesn't fit the educational needs of the students software-wise. Not to mention support for any sort of specialized hardware.
As far as the concerns from your network admins go - tell them to find a good hardware independent imaging solution. There are some great products out there that do this type of thing. I'm partial to Altiris (now Symantec) Deployment Solution. It can kill the hardware abstraction layer and then drops in replacement drivers based on the hardware it's imaging. It runs over the network and images via PXE boot and I've heard of a lot of places that use it in pretty spread out setups (thousands of machines in far-flung locations). It scales extremely well and in cases where you do need specialized drivers for things like video cards or other special equipment they do provide a way to install those drivers. Although if you're using Novell Netware it really causes problems - in which case you'd want to look at Zenworks but it's definitely not as easy to use as Deployment Solution (works great with Active Directory though). I've been using it since the beginning of this year and I love it. I've got 12 labs of varying sizes to maintain and I only have to keep up one base image. Each lab has a scripted OS install setup that installs any special software that's needed in the lab. It's also handy to be able to reimage the labs overnight and not have to wait for semester breaks to update software.
Oh...I forgot to mention that this is all network-based imaging. Deployment Solution works via PXE booting to a WinPE image. You can use Linux as your boot image, but the WinPE image Symantec supplies seems to work best based on what I've read on their forums.
We've been looking at several options for this type of thing at the University where I work. We've got one lab currently running LANDesk, and another that is running off of VMWare. They each have their own advantages and drawbacks, you've just got to decide which is best for your situation.
In the multiple computer labs that I maintain virtualization is out of the question due to the performance hit being too high considering the usage for the two of the labs (Photoshop, streaming video, audio decoding, some really heavy javascript stuff). The rest of my labs lack the funding/justification to setup a VMWare or LANDesk backend and they get the hand-me-downs when I get new hardware for the larger labs. What I've done instead is I use Altiris (now Symantec) Deployment Solution. I've put together a basic lab image (MS Office, Firefox, anti-virus, Windows updates, etc.) in VMWare Fusion on my Mac. I then deploy that image out to the rest of my labs as they only need Office and internet access. That way I only really have to maintain two lab images. One for the two Photoshop labs, and one for the rest of my labs. When important updates come out I update the VM, and have my deployment server push the updated image out to all of my machines in the middle of the night so I don't get in the way of the students being able to do homework and other assignments. The nice thing about Deployment Solution is it has an option for hardware independent imaging where it removes the existing hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and injects drivers for whatever hardware the image has been deployed to. You do have to maintain your driver database and make sure that you get updated drivers for new hardware, but this has worked flawlessly for me for quite a while now and I'm imaging against...I think five different sets of hardware (they mostly differ in the motherboards, no video cards in the lab machines beyond the integrated video) with the one base image.
Oh man...TIE Fighter. I remember the summer I got that game - or rather I remember playing it for three straight months. I got some nasty eye strain headaches because I couldn't stop. I started dreaming that I was a TIE pilot. I even had all of the ridiculous keyboard commands memorized. I had muscle memory for transferring power from shields to weapons, weapons to shields, tractor beam, engine power...dang...I want to play that stupid life-sucking game now.
"All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there. Use them together. Use them in peace."
I mean Arthur C. Clarke must've known something. Another science fiction author unraveled the meaning of existence and we all know that L. Ron Hubbard is 100% right (for those of you with broken sarcasm detectors, I'm kidding), so Clarke must be at least as brilliant since he was a better writer!
No argument there. I work for one of Novell's largest customers and we're about 2 minutes down the freeway from their HQ in Provo, UT. We were having some serious Netware issues (we're finally moving to AD this summer because of this crap) and a bunch of us IT geeks drove to their campus and wouldn't leave until we got some real help.
Most of the movies were decent (although I have to agree with you on that weird dance). Order of the Phoenix had some serious editing problems.
For example after Umbridge catches Harry in her office suddenly half the cast is in there as well. Hermione and Ron are to be expected but Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood are also there, yet the film has given no reason for them to be involved in what Harry was doing in the office. Draco Malfoy even drags Luna into the room at the beginning of the scene saying "I caught this one trying to help the Weasley girl." Help her do what? In the book they were acting as lookouts, but there is no mention of that in the movie.
It's one thing to make changes for pacing, believability, time, etc. but there several instances where scenes were obviously shot, but then subsequently left out. I know this happens all the time in movies, but in the case of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix it causes some real problems due to characters mentioning things that happened in those scenes.
If you want a good example of an "oops" after shooting wrapped watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. When Katie Bell (the girl who touched the cursed necklace) comes back to Hogwarts and Harry gets up to talk to her there is a very awkward cut-in shot of the potions textbook being closed. If you watch the way he gets up prior to the edit he isn't holding the book, but after the cut-in he is. This was added due to a continuity issue, but they obviously weren't going to re-shoot the entire scene with 100 extras just because of that. Unfortunately it ends up being a strange, jarring moment that can leave audience members wondering what that was all about.
I notice these types of things because I've done them myself when I worked on and edited a few short films. I also really enjoy Harry Potter, sometimes it's a little painful though.
I guess I'm just a cult member. I happen to like David Lynch's version. I know it's not the most accurate, but I thought it was fairly well done for its time - and how many film adaptations are well done? Some of the Harry Potter movies (Order of the Phoenix being the worst offender) are so off it's funny, and The Lost World (Jurassic Park 2) didn't resemble the book at all. I also really enjoyed the principal actors - Kyle McLachlan, and just enough Patrick Stewart to lend some legitimacy.
That's an excellent point. I know someone that worked for a company that contributed money to one side of the prop 8 argument in California. This person contributed money to the opposite side. He ended up having his wife's name on the contribution since donor information is public and that information includes the employer. With his wife making the contribution the occupation was listed as homemaker. It could've caused him problems at work for there to have been public record (he wouldn't have been fired or anything, but other things could've come up) for him contributing contrary to his employer's open endorsement.
I understand that most of their customers won't really need this, but for heavy users that need to monitor their bandwidth this is just evil. The bandwidth monitor needs to be aligned with the billing month, not the calendar month. This is just another way for them to get users to pay fines for going over the bandwidth cap.
"Sorry, but your billing cycle ended on the 23rd of December, you started using up your January billing cycle's bandwidth allotment then even though the meter only shows your usage since January 1st."
That's part of why my dad was able to do so much with his. They custom built the house and he went over on weekends and ran several miles of cable through the walls before the drywall went up. There were multiple coax, POTS, and cat5 runs to each room, with a few extra things thrown in for future availability. Once the house was up it was a simple matter of plugging everything in.
Yeah...I know. I tried to figure out who it was. My Dad's an RF engineer and he's the one that told me about it when I was talking to him about some home automation stuff I want to do (I wanted to copy his old setup).
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It depends on your situation. Your average home user is probably behind a router that SHOULD protect against most casual attacks, and an enterprise user SHOULD be behind an enterprise-class firewall. In theory you don't need a desktop firewall in either situation. But let's look at a real world example now:
I work for a university with ~32,000 students and we've got roughly 3,000 computers on campus that are owned by the school. We have an excellent firewall protecting our network from the Internet. We also have a wireless network with a few VLANs set aside for it that the students, faculty, staff, guests, etc are free to use. Now let's assume that none of the computers on campus are running a firewall since "Hey, we've got one protecting the whole school." A lot of faculty and staff also have laptops with docking stations and they move freely from wireless to wired networks, not to mention using these computers at home, on trips, in coffee shops, etc. Now lets say that someone gets infected with a virus - pick any of those people, it doesn't really matter. Then their machine connects to the wireless network and manages to infect a bunch of machines since they aren't running firewalls and have out of date AV definitions (happens a lot more than you think). Some of those machines then end up being put into docking stations and start pushing the virus out on their subnet as well as any others they can manage to get to. Internal security isn't as much of a concern so traffic between subnets doesn't have to get through the firewall. Suddenly one student computer with a virus turns into an infection that affects the whole campus.
This sounds like some sort of made up perfect storm situation but we had almost EXACTLY this issue crop up a few years ago. An infected thumb drive spread a virus (don't remember which one off the top of my head) to half the campus in less than a day.
I think this is waaaaay overblown. Maybe some day physical media will really die - but today, right now it is seriously alive and well. I would wager that most slashdotters have (or at least have available in some way) a device that can be hooked up to their TV to watch downloaded media. Whether it's an Apple TV, Roku, HTPC, Boxee, or whatever. Your average consumer, however, does not - and many that do, have no idea what their device is actually capable of doing. I've had people over that have seen the way I have my PS3 set up and their minds are completely blown - and all I've done is hook up an external hard drive to it that's full of ripped DVDs. These are the same people that have their blu ray players hooked up to a 52 inch HDTV via component cables because they couldn't afford the HDMI cable (I know someone with this exact problem - I couldn't convince him that the $5 cable from monoprice would work fine). In the technology world the lowest common denominator where the consumer is concerned is MOST of the consumers. That majority of consumers are not capable of figuring out how to connect anything more complicated than a VCR to their TV. People with blu-ray players are quite happy with them - it's accessible in a way that is familiar because the functionality builds off the DVD paradigm - people are used to it. Blu-ray looks and acts much like a DVD just with better picture/sound quality and some cooler special features. Trying to instruct someone in how to set up some set top box that allows them to rent or view downloadable content is an exercise in futility. The new Apple TV may go a long way towards closing the stupidity gap (especially with the new price point) but it's still going to be a long time before the average non-techie consumer is capable of forgoing physical media. There's also still the problem of broadband speeds in the US. A lot of people simply do not have the bandwidth needed to stream high definition video. Downloads from stores like iTunes or Amazon are nice, but streaming full 1080p with little or no buffering to a simple to set up set top box AND have most of the country able to do this is what it will take before this conversation can even begin to be serious.
Well I work about 5 minutes from their old HQ (in fact I'm going to a meeting in that office park tomorrow)...anyone in the /. community want me to pick up something nice?
Yeah...because I want to tell you how to train the future labor that will take my job when it gets outsourced.
Uhhh..I mean...yeah...teach them...Fortran...and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Those are useful skills. Novell Netware (and Groupwise) administration is also big. Active Directory is just a passing fad.
I do two spaces, except on my iPhone. It does one space automatically after double tapping the space bar for a period. Oh...and I still do the tab indents when I code (which is pretty rare anymore...my C++ is so rusty it belongs in a scrap heap).
I'm actually okay with this depending on how it gets implemented. If I've got to pay money to go to the next level (for example) I want the game to cost less to begin with. Maybe I buy a new PS3 game for $20, but to actually finish the game I'll have to pony up an additional $30-$40 by the time I'm done. This could also have some real interesting repercussions for the used market. Considering that you would be buying the basic game, but a someone buying a used copy may still need to buy all of the DLC in order to actually complete the game.
That's a good point. I was watching liveblogs of the keynote and I had the same initial response. I just forgot about my initial reaction until I read your comment.
It's all just marketing speak anyway. It IS a higher-resolution display, but giving it a name like "retina" to a display is just the marketing guys trying to make you think that you won't notice any pixelation. That being said it is a better looking display than what's on the 3G/3GS. I think it's also likely that the average person won't notice much pixelation on the new display anyway.
My machine choice for my computer labs is based on application availability. Some of the software used by the academic programs I support is only available on Windows so I'd just be loading Windows on the Macs anyway if I bought them. If I could go all OS X and not have to worry about Boot Camp I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Well I use Macs (plus my dad works for Apple), but I do mainly Windows support for a living. I'm an IT Manager at a University and I support about 200 faculty, 12 computer labs, and manage a whole slew of servers - by myself. If I didn't have good deployment strategies in place I'd have jumped off the roof of a Foxconn building long ago.
Since none of my computer labs are Mac-based my knowledge of networking technology and deployment strategies have to be based on Windows. I'd switch to Macs if I could during my summer lab rebuilds, but I'd just be putting Windows on them anyway. I spent a lot of time looking at my options and it just wasn't cost effective considering the existing investments in software and infrastructure.
While I'm a confessed Apple zealot I'd go with PCs running XP. It's the more common, more supported platform. A lot more of the "industry standard" type of applications will be running on PCs running either Windows or Linux. In the computer labs I support we're replacing all of the machines this summer, and I toyed with going Mac, but it just doesn't fit the educational needs of the students software-wise. Not to mention support for any sort of specialized hardware.
As far as the concerns from your network admins go - tell them to find a good hardware independent imaging solution. There are some great products out there that do this type of thing. I'm partial to Altiris (now Symantec) Deployment Solution. It can kill the hardware abstraction layer and then drops in replacement drivers based on the hardware it's imaging. It runs over the network and images via PXE boot and I've heard of a lot of places that use it in pretty spread out setups (thousands of machines in far-flung locations). It scales extremely well and in cases where you do need specialized drivers for things like video cards or other special equipment they do provide a way to install those drivers. Although if you're using Novell Netware it really causes problems - in which case you'd want to look at Zenworks but it's definitely not as easy to use as Deployment Solution (works great with Active Directory though). I've been using it since the beginning of this year and I love it. I've got 12 labs of varying sizes to maintain and I only have to keep up one base image. Each lab has a scripted OS install setup that installs any special software that's needed in the lab. It's also handy to be able to reimage the labs overnight and not have to wait for semester breaks to update software.
Well if you ask the movie studios and big music labels that's exactly what they'd say.
I work at a university where we use McAfee anti-virus as our corporate AV. Guess what I've been doing all morning?
Oh...I forgot to mention that this is all network-based imaging. Deployment Solution works via PXE booting to a WinPE image. You can use Linux as your boot image, but the WinPE image Symantec supplies seems to work best based on what I've read on their forums.
We've been looking at several options for this type of thing at the University where I work. We've got one lab currently running LANDesk, and another that is running off of VMWare. They each have their own advantages and drawbacks, you've just got to decide which is best for your situation.
In the multiple computer labs that I maintain virtualization is out of the question due to the performance hit being too high considering the usage for the two of the labs (Photoshop, streaming video, audio decoding, some really heavy javascript stuff). The rest of my labs lack the funding/justification to setup a VMWare or LANDesk backend and they get the hand-me-downs when I get new hardware for the larger labs. What I've done instead is I use Altiris (now Symantec) Deployment Solution. I've put together a basic lab image (MS Office, Firefox, anti-virus, Windows updates, etc.) in VMWare Fusion on my Mac. I then deploy that image out to the rest of my labs as they only need Office and internet access. That way I only really have to maintain two lab images. One for the two Photoshop labs, and one for the rest of my labs. When important updates come out I update the VM, and have my deployment server push the updated image out to all of my machines in the middle of the night so I don't get in the way of the students being able to do homework and other assignments. The nice thing about Deployment Solution is it has an option for hardware independent imaging where it removes the existing hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and injects drivers for whatever hardware the image has been deployed to. You do have to maintain your driver database and make sure that you get updated drivers for new hardware, but this has worked flawlessly for me for quite a while now and I'm imaging against...I think five different sets of hardware (they mostly differ in the motherboards, no video cards in the lab machines beyond the integrated video) with the one base image.
Oh man...TIE Fighter. I remember the summer I got that game - or rather I remember playing it for three straight months. I got some nasty eye strain headaches because I couldn't stop. I started dreaming that I was a TIE pilot. I even had all of the ridiculous keyboard commands memorized. I had muscle memory for transferring power from shields to weapons, weapons to shields, tractor beam, engine power...dang...I want to play that stupid life-sucking game now.
Thanks a lot.
"All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there. Use them together. Use them in peace."
I mean Arthur C. Clarke must've known something. Another science fiction author unraveled the meaning of existence and we all know that L. Ron Hubbard is 100% right (for those of you with broken sarcasm detectors, I'm kidding), so Clarke must be at least as brilliant since he was a better writer!
No argument there. I work for one of Novell's largest customers and we're about 2 minutes down the freeway from their HQ in Provo, UT. We were having some serious Netware issues (we're finally moving to AD this summer because of this crap) and a bunch of us IT geeks drove to their campus and wouldn't leave until we got some real help.
Yeah, this is pretty scummy. But I've gotta admit, it's also pretty creative.
Most of the movies were decent (although I have to agree with you on that weird dance). Order of the Phoenix had some serious editing problems.
For example after Umbridge catches Harry in her office suddenly half the cast is in there as well. Hermione and Ron are to be expected but Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood are also there, yet the film has given no reason for them to be involved in what Harry was doing in the office. Draco Malfoy even drags Luna into the room at the beginning of the scene saying "I caught this one trying to help the Weasley girl." Help her do what? In the book they were acting as lookouts, but there is no mention of that in the movie.
It's one thing to make changes for pacing, believability, time, etc. but there several instances where scenes were obviously shot, but then subsequently left out. I know this happens all the time in movies, but in the case of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix it causes some real problems due to characters mentioning things that happened in those scenes.
If you want a good example of an "oops" after shooting wrapped watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. When Katie Bell (the girl who touched the cursed necklace) comes back to Hogwarts and Harry gets up to talk to her there is a very awkward cut-in shot of the potions textbook being closed. If you watch the way he gets up prior to the edit he isn't holding the book, but after the cut-in he is. This was added due to a continuity issue, but they obviously weren't going to re-shoot the entire scene with 100 extras just because of that. Unfortunately it ends up being a strange, jarring moment that can leave audience members wondering what that was all about.
I notice these types of things because I've done them myself when I worked on and edited a few short films. I also really enjoy Harry Potter, sometimes it's a little painful though.
I guess I'm just a cult member. I happen to like David Lynch's version. I know it's not the most accurate, but I thought it was fairly well done for its time - and how many film adaptations are well done? Some of the Harry Potter movies (Order of the Phoenix being the worst offender) are so off it's funny, and The Lost World (Jurassic Park 2) didn't resemble the book at all. I also really enjoyed the principal actors - Kyle McLachlan, and just enough Patrick Stewart to lend some legitimacy.
That's an excellent point. I know someone that worked for a company that contributed money to one side of the prop 8 argument in California. This person contributed money to the opposite side. He ended up having his wife's name on the contribution since donor information is public and that information includes the employer. With his wife making the contribution the occupation was listed as homemaker. It could've caused him problems at work for there to have been public record (he wouldn't have been fired or anything, but other things could've come up) for him contributing contrary to his employer's open endorsement.
"Sorry, but your billing cycle ended on the 23rd of December, you started using up your January billing cycle's bandwidth allotment then even though the meter only shows your usage since January 1st."
That's part of why my dad was able to do so much with his. They custom built the house and he went over on weekends and ran several miles of cable through the walls before the drywall went up. There were multiple coax, POTS, and cat5 runs to each room, with a few extra things thrown in for future availability. Once the house was up it was a simple matter of plugging everything in.
I agree with you totally. Retrofitting sucks.
Yeah...I know. I tried to figure out who it was. My Dad's an RF engineer and he's the one that told me about it when I was talking to him about some home automation stuff I want to do (I wanted to copy his old setup).