I personally hate having to click through license agreements when I install commercial software. To me, not having to do that just adds to that warm and fuzzy feeling I get from using GPL'd software. I would rather the applications show an informational message about the GPL upon startup, in a Tips windows. Showing GPL info at the top of the window, and application specific tips on the bottom seems to me like a better approach. This way, as long as the user has tips enabled, they'll be seeing "GPL" everytime they start the app. As we all know, our memories are more likely to retain information through repetition, so this seems to me to be a more effective and less intrusive method of informing people about the GPL.
The key here is that the task you need parallelize is DATA heavy, not computation heavy. In other words, what would be the benefit of multicore processors? Practically none. It makes me curious why you haven't mentioned traditional multiprocessor machines. A NUMA multiprocessor machine would show benefit, because of the seperation of memory. Having seperate caches will help also. Having a multicore processor with a shared cache will just cause more cores to sit idle while the cache is thrashing. Having many machines in a cluster will work well, because they can each chew on their own chunk of the data. This is an application which should be very easy to parallelize. Just divvy up the task into batches, dedicate one node to management, and "a batch batch here, a batch batch there, here a batch, there a batch, everywhere a batch batch." You shouldn't even need MPI or any other clustering libraries to help you out. Just create a simple communications framework with asynchronous sockets, distribute the tasks, and wait for the results. The results will come back much faster than they will with a multicore architecture. Remember Danielson, the processor waits on data, not the other way around. Anyone who disputes this argument needs to come down from their 10,000 foot view of how things work and perhaps use a tool like VTune to give them insight into how the hardware actually operates. It's all about data, so distribute. Sorry for the rambling approach to an explanation. Too much on my mind...
"(There's a huge price gap between the 2 here in India) In any case, how does one decide the optimum bandwidth required for a bunch of 15 developers on VPN and Source control?"
Welcome to the world of business. Are you starting to understand why we charge as much as we do outside of India? It's because we have to support our business infrastructure and still make a profit for all our effort! Don't like it, go back to India. Oh wait...
Haven't you asked them to show you the same respect by providing you with a list of all their prior and current ideas and inventions? Insist it's only fair for them to show you the same respect. I'm pretty sure they'll choke on their coffee at the notion.
If they argue that their company is much larger than yours, point out to them that they should be well prepared to handle such a request given that they ask you to provide them with said information. Also let them know that as a growing business, you have many ideas under development to provide value added services to your clients and fewer resources with which to bring your ideas to fruition. As a result, one year is not a long enough term of engagement to justify such a release of information on your part.
You may also wish to point out that, according to NDAs you have with other companies, you are not able to release any information pertinent to those ideas and/or inventions you are/have been engaged to work on, and therefore the information would be incomplete simply due to the fact that you respect your existing NDAs.
If this helps, and you find a better solution, please let me know as I am in the same boat.
Anyone want to wager on when VMWare and/or Xen and/or some other virtualization project will be made available for PDAs? If you say never, you have no business reading Slashdot.
Seriously, the hardware isn't that far from being able to run PalmOS and Linux concurrently. I'd love to see this. At the very least, you could have your home gaming vm and your work vm, so the two wouldn't intermingle.
What, no information as to why rebuilding your TCP/IP stack from scratch and immediately releasing it with a major operating system to the public as being more secure is a bad idea? I won't mention any names here... Hey, have you been to Redmond, Washington lately?
Who wants to place a bet on how long it'll be before the first enterprising teenage Circuit City employee adds a DVD burner to the computer they're using and "charges a dollar less, tax free!, to rip them to a DVD-R? If you bet never, I'll give you a thousand to one odds!
Lady: "Why's it cheaper young man?"
teenager: "Oh, it's a less costly process."
Lady: "...and it's legal?"
teenager: "Sure"
Lady: "But how do the movie studios make money off of this?"
teenager: "Oh, it saves them production and shipping costs, so they pass the savings on to you."
Lady: "Oh, ok, that makes sense. So it's cheaper if I buy five you say?"
teenager: "You bet. Just come see me when you've found the ones you want."
Lady wanders off to look through the movie collection.
Oh no, it's protected by the same format as regular video DVDs! That means we won't be able to copy the DVD audio portions for sure! We all know it's impossible to rip a DVD, right?
Seriously, though, surround sound format for music? That's a capability that's sure to only ever be used by cheesy, short lived bands. Real musicians don't think of their audio in three dimensions. When have you ever seen an orchestra setup where the audience was in the center of the musicians. There aren't enough band members for this in a rock band, but the speakers are still always set in stereo, even when the band is Metallica with the stage in the center of the audience. Maybe some cheesy rap and techno bands will use this to help make up for their lack of talent, but it'll never catch it. It won't take long for the gee-whiz make the instrument sound like it's rotating in a circle around you effect to annoy you. If it were actually a good thing, the DVD music videos from the bands people like would use it.
Spending a lot of money on yet one more high def audio format? When will these people understand that the vast majority of people don't have speakers and amps capable of reproducing music with a high enough quality for the difference to be audible. No, some tweaked out car stereo isn't good enough. You need studio monitors to hear the difference. Even if everyone had studio monitors, most people still wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Women comprise roughly half the market, and look how they complain about: a) it's too loud b) "I don't like how it sounds like there's somebody walking/running/shooting behind me. It's too distracting/makes me keep looking over my shoulder/startles me!"
Great, there are gimmicks included! Whoopee! I've never seen a gimmick included on a CD or movie DVD that I'd pay two cents for. You can bet they won't have a version for Linux, either, so don't think I'll ever give a damn about "what I might be missing out on!" Oh no, more junk to clog up your computer, how can I ever live without that! Oh yeah, and being able to include these is something new? Sure. We've all seen how successful they are too, right? Well? RIGHT??? Oh wait...
If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.
Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.
If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.
If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.
Sorry, but you are way off base here. I don't know where the poster lives/intends to live, but here in Chicago a math major/cs minor can take you a long way. In my most recent search for new project work as a C++ consultant, I have run across numerous job postings on dice.com specifically stating "Degree in math strongly preferred." A degree in math opens doors in many engineering fields, and I know this to be especially true in the software development field. I have spoken with many companies who were looking for someone with a degree in math. This can't possibly be limited to Chicago.
If the poster is looking to make a lot of money, the trading industry is looking for people with doctorates degrees in math. I kicked myself for not pursuing a doctorate in math, due to the inability of anyone I knew while I was in college to be able to tell me there was anything I could do with a degree in math (other than teach), while looking at job listings recently. There are trading firms offering $750k/year (yes, three-quarters of a million dollars) for people with a doctorate in math to write stock market analysis software in C++ to predict stock market trends, without even specifically stating any experience was required. If the poster wants to get a degree in math, I strongly recommend he/she to pursue it.
Thou shall not program computers in any language until having mastered the one you speak and write in.
I take this to mean you do not program computers in any language? After all, you have not mastered English either. You left a dangling preposition. The correct way to phrase this is:
Thou shalt not program computers in any language until having mastered the one in which you speak and write.
Get a copy of Ghost for when you need to install/reinsall an OS. Just setup a machine with all the updates and software you want all the machines to have, then you can install a replica of that machine onto any of the other machines via the network in one fell swoop. The machines just need to have a BIOS that allows them to boot from the network in order for you to be able to do this without using any disks whatsoever. Most machines seem to have that capability nowadays. It takes almost none of your time to do this, and requires no internet bandwidth.
For saving on bandwidth for updating existing machines, others have already answered that question.
As for your low bandwidth issue. If it's just acceptable, but not really quick to surf webpages, then you might find a proxy server beneficial. If you have an old machine lying around (like a P3-500 or so), that should be more than sufficient to run a proxy server. Just put Ubuntu Server, Damn Small Linux, or whatever your preferred Linux distro is on the machine and configure a Squid proxy server. It won't cost you anything, but can speed up surfing very noticeably. You can also install an adblocking filter for Squid to further save on bandwidth consumption, very considerably in fact. That may require some political hassles, however.
Actually, it can be quite usefull even in a small company with only one IT person. I used to work for a company where I was one of several programmers, and there were a few electronics engineers there as well. We had multiple office rooms and offices, and we only had one IT person. We used IM for communicating on our designs. It's rather difficult to copy and paste lines of code, URLs, chip docs and schematics with speech!;)
We might have had more IT people if the majority of our employees weren't so technically savvy, though.:P
Just out of curiosity, have you tried reducing your bandwidth needs? I recently redid the network for a small company which wanted to upgrade their bandwidth afterwards because employees complained their internet access was too slow. As part of the upgrade, I added a proxy server and blocked all unneeded ports as well as many non-work approved sites. I also put ad blocking on their proxy server, as clicking on advertisements really isn't work-approved anyway. Afterwards, they didn't need to upgrade their bandwidth because these simple changes were enough for their internet access to be "faster than it ever was before."
For anyone who argues that an attacker could just crack the root password once remotely logged in as a regular user "and probably with a faster machine than they have anyway," the most important reason this argument is false is because a person cannot do a distributed brute force password attack coming from millions of hostage Windows systems with about as many unique IP addresses on the root account if remote root logins are disabled. Never ever ever allow remote root logins!!! I don't know if the person who asked this question was referring to remote logins, but this applies to everyone, so I had to say it for anyone unaware of this attack.
Oh, and that reminds me that I need to find out if the distributed computing project for Linux, cpushare, has any safeguards against people wishing to use it for a purpose such as this.
Lots of people have mentioned that Windows Terminal Services can provide a lot of the features you need. What people don't seem to have said is that Windows Terminal Services also uses a lot more bandwidth than Citrix, so you may pay more in the long run if you use it due to the expense associated with more bandwidth, if you need to upgrade your bandwidth.
On the other hand, you may wish to give NXServer a try, as it can proxy your Windows Terminal Services servers, and you only need one NXServer per given location to proxy all of your Windows Terminal Services servers.
NXServer compresses the TS data connections, although I'm not sure exactly how much compression you get (I haven't measured). If savings is your main interest, you may want to give NXServer a try. It's from http://www.nomachine.com/
To answer half your question (the how), just buy the latest issue of Linux Journal http://www.linuxjournal.com/. The latest issue's theme is podcasting.
In 2000-2001 I worked for a company developing software for streaming digital surveillance video. While working there, I learned a little something about the laws regarding surveillance cameras. In the US, at least, it is legal to take pictures and/or video of civilians, so long as sound is not included, without the consent of the individuals being photographed/recorded on video. At that time, the British laws were even more invasive regarding privacy of individuals. I had the opportunity to see video from some of the cameras on the light poles on the streets of London, and was amazed to see that some of the cameras even had clear views into peoples' bedrooms. Whether the cameras are in the workplace, a store (which is still someone's workplace), or facing outside, the law does permit this kind of surveillance to take place. If there is a microphone attached to the camera, however, then the surveillance may be illegal.
That said, no one likes cameras pointed at them at work. At one point while developing the software, I had several cameras pointed at me for testing purposes. Once the software was far enough along, a coworked informed that me he liked those cameras pointing at me because it allowed him to view the video feeds to see if I was at my desk before making the walk to the other side of the office to talk to me. Needless to say, I repositioned the cameras after he told me this to point towards my coworkers in my section of the office. Of course, my coworkers weren't too happy with me for doing this. My boss, however, did like it until I pointed one of the cameras at his office door.
To make a long story short, no one likes a video camera pointed at them at work, but unfortunately the law does allow it.
So in other words this is a highly biased suggestion, by a person whom may not even have any experience with any of the more tried-and-true embedded OS choices? The very fact that you can download most of the tools means you have a very limited number of tools available. What about JTAG? Do you offer an ICE?
You're asking him to spend time checking out an OS put out by a company with very limited experience wrt developing embedded OS's. Remember, "Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. -- Theophrastus."
I would suggest looking at products from vxWorks if you wish to look at options available from a company which actually has quite a lot of experience with developing and distributing embedded OS's. Their products are found in a great many embedded systems.
Multiple monitors are a must. I would go with three LCDs. Three 30" Apple Cinema or three 23" Apple Cinema displays, depending on how much room you have. Those Apple displays just can't be beat for brightness, contrast, etc. Lcd displays don't kill your eyes like crts do either.
I would go with multiple machines. Personally, I'd go with Mac Minis to run the displays, because I hate listening to fan noise, and put my actual dev. machines in a separate room. No matter how you do it, you need a multiprocessor machine with as much ram as you can fit in it. 2 gb minimum. If you can swing it, I'd go with a quad Opteron dual-core system, with 8+ gb of ram. That's what I'm looking to build for my next system. Additionally, either an SATA or SCSI raid array of four drives, RAID 0+1. You don't want to loose your work. I also like to have another machine keeping a mirror of my data to be on the extra-safe side.
I personally think Lane chairs are the best. You have to be comfortable if you want to concentrate. I love their highback leather chairs. I'd also get a footrest to go with it.
For the desk, I prefer just a sturdy flat table. Nothing fancy necessary, just a table so you have plenty of leg room and can get under to deal with your cabling.
Anything beyond that is probably just personal preference. I personally like vim, but I don't want to start a flame war over that.
Just remember, you have to be comfortable to be productive.
Everyone keeps talking about people who are switching from Windows. Come on, who still actually uses that outdated operating system? I mean, really!
Why don't you help out your more modernized users who are switching to Linux from the Apple IIe??? Give them an iPython shell, so they can have an Applesoft Basic-like shell!
---
Q. What's the difference between Batman and Bill Gates?
A. When Batman fought the Penguin, he won.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally hate having to click through license agreements when I install commercial software. To me, not having to do that just adds to that warm and fuzzy feeling I get from using GPL'd software. I would rather the applications show an informational message about the GPL upon startup, in a Tips windows. Showing GPL info at the top of the window, and application specific tips on the bottom seems to me like a better approach. This way, as long as the user has tips enabled, they'll be seeing "GPL" everytime they start the app. As we all know, our memories are more likely to retain information through repetition, so this seems to me to be a more effective and less intrusive method of informing people about the GPL.
The key here is that the task you need parallelize is DATA heavy, not computation heavy. In other words, what would be the benefit of multicore processors? Practically none. It makes me curious why you haven't mentioned traditional multiprocessor machines. A NUMA multiprocessor machine would show benefit, because of the seperation of memory. Having seperate caches will help also. Having a multicore processor with a shared cache will just cause more cores to sit idle while the cache is thrashing. Having many machines in a cluster will work well, because they can each chew on their own chunk of the data. This is an application which should be very easy to parallelize. Just divvy up the task into batches, dedicate one node to management, and "a batch batch here, a batch batch there, here a batch, there a batch, everywhere a batch batch." You shouldn't even need MPI or any other clustering libraries to help you out. Just create a simple communications framework with asynchronous sockets, distribute the tasks, and wait for the results. The results will come back much faster than they will with a multicore architecture. Remember Danielson, the processor waits on data, not the other way around. Anyone who disputes this argument needs to come down from their 10,000 foot view of how things work and perhaps use a tool like VTune to give them insight into how the hardware actually operates. It's all about data, so distribute. Sorry for the rambling approach to an explanation. Too much on my mind...
Welcome to the world of business. Are you starting to understand why we charge as much as we do outside of India? It's because we have to support our business infrastructure and still make a profit for all our effort! Don't like it, go back to India. Oh wait...
Why don't you just outsource your development work to the U.S.? Then you won't have to worry about bandwidth.
Haven't you asked them to show you the same respect by providing you with a list of all their prior and current ideas and inventions? Insist it's only fair for them to show you the same respect. I'm pretty sure they'll choke on their coffee at the notion.
If they argue that their company is much larger than yours, point out to them that they should be well prepared to handle such a request given that they ask you to provide them with said information. Also let them know that as a growing business, you have many ideas under development to provide value added services to your clients and fewer resources with which to bring your ideas to fruition. As a result, one year is not a long enough term of engagement to justify such a release of information on your part.
You may also wish to point out that, according to NDAs you have with other companies, you are not able to release any information pertinent to those ideas and/or inventions you are/have been engaged to work on, and therefore the information would be incomplete simply due to the fact that you respect your existing NDAs.
If this helps, and you find a better solution, please let me know as I am in the same boat.
This reminds me...
Anyone want to wager on when VMWare and/or Xen and/or some other virtualization project will be made available for PDAs? If you say never, you have no business reading Slashdot.
Seriously, the hardware isn't that far from being able to run PalmOS and Linux concurrently. I'd love to see this. At the very least, you could have your home gaming vm and your work vm, so the two wouldn't intermingle.
They forgot to install SP1 before installing additional software.
What, no information as to why rebuilding your TCP/IP stack from scratch and immediately releasing it with a major operating system to the public as being more secure is a bad idea? I won't mention any names here... Hey, have you been to Redmond, Washington lately?
Okay, I see their logic: switch to a Microsoft Windows operating system to prevent crashing... Makes sense, right? ;)
Who wants to place a bet on how long it'll be before the first enterprising teenage Circuit City employee adds a DVD burner to the computer they're using and "charges a dollar less, tax free!, to rip them to a DVD-R? If you bet never, I'll give you a thousand to one odds!
Lady: "Why's it cheaper young man?"
teenager: "Oh, it's a less costly process."
Lady: "...and it's legal?"
teenager: "Sure"
Lady: "But how do the movie studios make money off of this?"
teenager: "Oh, it saves them production and shipping costs, so they pass the savings on to you."
Lady: "Oh, ok, that makes sense. So it's cheaper if I buy five you say?"
teenager: "You bet. Just come see me when you've found the ones you want."
Lady wanders off to look through the movie collection.
Oh no, it's protected by the same format as regular video DVDs! That means we won't be able to copy the DVD audio portions for sure! We all know it's impossible to rip a DVD, right?
Seriously, though, surround sound format for music? That's a capability that's sure to only ever be used by cheesy, short lived bands. Real musicians don't think of their audio in three dimensions. When have you ever seen an orchestra setup where the audience was in the center of the musicians. There aren't enough band members for this in a rock band, but the speakers are still always set in stereo, even when the band is Metallica with the stage in the center of the audience. Maybe some cheesy rap and techno bands will use this to help make up for their lack of talent, but it'll never catch it. It won't take long for the gee-whiz make the instrument sound like it's rotating in a circle around you effect to annoy you. If it were actually a good thing, the DVD music videos from the bands people like would use it.
Spending a lot of money on yet one more high def audio format? When will these people understand that the vast majority of people don't have speakers and amps capable of reproducing music with a high enough quality for the difference to be audible. No, some tweaked out car stereo isn't good enough. You need studio monitors to hear the difference. Even if everyone had studio monitors, most people still wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Women comprise roughly half the market, and look how they complain about: a) it's too loud b) "I don't like how it sounds like there's somebody walking/running/shooting behind me. It's too distracting/makes me keep looking over my shoulder/startles me!"
Great, there are gimmicks included! Whoopee! I've never seen a gimmick included on a CD or movie DVD that I'd pay two cents for. You can bet they won't have a version for Linux, either, so don't think I'll ever give a damn about "what I might be missing out on!" Oh no, more junk to clog up your computer, how can I ever live without that! Oh yeah, and being able to include these is something new? Sure. We've all seen how successful they are too, right? Well? RIGHT??? Oh wait...
There are many good resources on the web. The standard resource is The Linux Documentation Project, or http://www.tldp.org/. Another site, which is much better than it used to be, is http://www.linux.com/. http://www.linuxjournal.com/ has many great articles to guide you through a wide variety of small projects. A great newer site with helpful articles is http://www.howtoforge.com/. For help on the desktop side, http://www.desktoplinux.com/ has many articles you may find of use. Documentation and information about KDE is, of course, available at http://www.kde.org/ and it's affiliated sites (linked from their homepage). IBM is always putting up new articles at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ that can provide usefull information for development work under Linux. You may also find the articles on http://www.debian.org/, http://www.gentoo.org/, and http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ usefull even though the articles were written for other distros.
If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.
Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.
If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.
If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.
Also, never forget about http://www.google.com/linux!
Sorry, but you are way off base here. I don't know where the poster lives/intends to live, but here in Chicago a math major/cs minor can take you a long way. In my most recent search for new project work as a C++ consultant, I have run across numerous job postings on dice.com specifically stating "Degree in math strongly preferred." A degree in math opens doors in many engineering fields, and I know this to be especially true in the software development field. I have spoken with many companies who were looking for someone with a degree in math. This can't possibly be limited to Chicago.
If the poster is looking to make a lot of money, the trading industry is looking for people with doctorates degrees in math. I kicked myself for not pursuing a doctorate in math, due to the inability of anyone I knew while I was in college to be able to tell me there was anything I could do with a degree in math (other than teach), while looking at job listings recently. There are trading firms offering $750k/year (yes, three-quarters of a million dollars) for people with a doctorate in math to write stock market analysis software in C++ to predict stock market trends, without even specifically stating any experience was required. If the poster wants to get a degree in math, I strongly recommend he/she to pursue it.
Thou shall not program computers in any language until having mastered the one you speak and write in.
;)
I take this to mean you do not program computers in any language? After all, you have not mastered English either. You left a dangling preposition. The correct way to phrase this is:
Thou shalt not program computers in any language until having mastered the one in which you speak and write.
Get a copy of Ghost for when you need to install/reinsall an OS. Just setup a machine with all the updates and software you want all the machines to have, then you can install a replica of that machine onto any of the other machines via the network in one fell swoop. The machines just need to have a BIOS that allows them to boot from the network in order for you to be able to do this without using any disks whatsoever. Most machines seem to have that capability nowadays. It takes almost none of your time to do this, and requires no internet bandwidth.
For saving on bandwidth for updating existing machines, others have already answered that question.
As for your low bandwidth issue. If it's just acceptable, but not really quick to surf webpages, then you might find a proxy server beneficial. If you have an old machine lying around (like a P3-500 or so), that should be more than sufficient to run a proxy server. Just put Ubuntu Server, Damn Small Linux, or whatever your preferred Linux distro is on the machine and configure a Squid proxy server. It won't cost you anything, but can speed up surfing very noticeably. You can also install an adblocking filter for Squid to further save on bandwidth consumption, very considerably in fact. That may require some political hassles, however.
We might have had more IT people if the majority of our employees weren't so technically savvy, though. :P
Just out of curiosity, have you tried reducing your bandwidth needs? I recently redid the network for a small company which wanted to upgrade their bandwidth afterwards because employees complained their internet access was too slow. As part of the upgrade, I added a proxy server and blocked all unneeded ports as well as many non-work approved sites. I also put ad blocking on their proxy server, as clicking on advertisements really isn't work-approved anyway. Afterwards, they didn't need to upgrade their bandwidth because these simple changes were enough for their internet access to be "faster than it ever was before."
For anyone who argues that an attacker could just crack the root password once remotely logged in as a regular user "and probably with a faster machine than they have anyway," the most important reason this argument is false is because a person cannot do a distributed brute force password attack coming from millions of hostage Windows systems with about as many unique IP addresses on the root account if remote root logins are disabled. Never ever ever allow remote root logins!!! I don't know if the person who asked this question was referring to remote logins, but this applies to everyone, so I had to say it for anyone unaware of this attack.
Oh, and that reminds me that I need to find out if the distributed computing project for Linux, cpushare, has any safeguards against people wishing to use it for a purpose such as this.
On the other hand, you may wish to give NXServer a try, as it can proxy your Windows Terminal Services servers, and you only need one NXServer per given location to proxy all of your Windows Terminal Services servers.
NXServer compresses the TS data connections, although I'm not sure exactly how much compression you get (I haven't measured). If savings is your main interest, you may want to give NXServer a try. It's from http://www.nomachine.com/
To answer half your question (the how), just buy the latest issue of Linux Journal http://www.linuxjournal.com/. The latest issue's theme is podcasting.
That said, no one likes cameras pointed at them at work. At one point while developing the software, I had several cameras pointed at me for testing purposes. Once the software was far enough along, a coworked informed that me he liked those cameras pointing at me because it allowed him to view the video feeds to see if I was at my desk before making the walk to the other side of the office to talk to me. Needless to say, I repositioned the cameras after he told me this to point towards my coworkers in my section of the office. Of course, my coworkers weren't too happy with me for doing this. My boss, however, did like it until I pointed one of the cameras at his office door.
To make a long story short, no one likes a video camera pointed at them at work, but unfortunately the law does allow it.
So in other words this is a highly biased suggestion, by a person whom may not even have any experience with any of the more tried-and-true embedded OS choices? The very fact that you can download most of the tools means you have a very limited number of tools available. What about JTAG? Do you offer an ICE?
You're asking him to spend time checking out an OS put out by a company with very limited experience wrt developing embedded OS's. Remember, "Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. -- Theophrastus."
I would suggest looking at products from vxWorks if you wish to look at options available from a company which actually has quite a lot of experience with developing and distributing embedded OS's. Their products are found in a great many embedded systems.
Multiple monitors are a must. I would go with three LCDs. Three 30" Apple Cinema or three 23" Apple Cinema displays, depending on how much room you have. Those Apple displays just can't be beat for brightness, contrast, etc. Lcd displays don't kill your eyes like crts do either. I would go with multiple machines. Personally, I'd go with Mac Minis to run the displays, because I hate listening to fan noise, and put my actual dev. machines in a separate room. No matter how you do it, you need a multiprocessor machine with as much ram as you can fit in it. 2 gb minimum. If you can swing it, I'd go with a quad Opteron dual-core system, with 8+ gb of ram. That's what I'm looking to build for my next system. Additionally, either an SATA or SCSI raid array of four drives, RAID 0+1. You don't want to loose your work. I also like to have another machine keeping a mirror of my data to be on the extra-safe side. I personally think Lane chairs are the best. You have to be comfortable if you want to concentrate. I love their highback leather chairs. I'd also get a footrest to go with it. For the desk, I prefer just a sturdy flat table. Nothing fancy necessary, just a table so you have plenty of leg room and can get under to deal with your cabling. Anything beyond that is probably just personal preference. I personally like vim, but I don't want to start a flame war over that. Just remember, you have to be comfortable to be productive.
Wow. Those performance figures show the Mac OS X really IS a gay operating system: it sucks a dick! ;)
Everyone keeps talking about people who are switching from Windows. Come on, who still actually uses that outdated operating system? I mean, really! Why don't you help out your more modernized users who are switching to Linux from the Apple IIe??? Give them an iPython shell, so they can have an Applesoft Basic-like shell! --- Q. What's the difference between Batman and Bill Gates? A. When Batman fought the Penguin, he won.