Purely out of curiousity, how have tapes proven to be the best solution?
Readable or not, you've got the issue of obtaining/maintaining the equipment to read the damn thing. As far as I am aware, no tape technology guarantees 100% backward read capability to all past tapes built around similar technology (even with DLT, not all of the newest drives are 100% backward read capable to every past DLT format).
That doesn't even account for when a totally new tape technology comes around - which happens every 10-15 years.
I've already replied, but I'm going to do so again.
If you're stuck with a Windows infrastructure, I think the only sane way to do CALs (without losing your mind) is to go down the annually-renewable license route. At least that way you don't need to worry too much about "do we have enough for this new starter we've got coming in on Monday?" every so often - you just tell them what your requirements are every year and if they've gone up, you pay more next year.
"This addiction to Outlook" is regrettable, but not something I think is easy to eliminate.
If by bloated you mean "takes up lots of disk space", nobody outside of IT cares. Disk space is Not Their Problem.
If by bloated you mean "loaded with tons of features, 95% of which are never used" - well, that is something I do agree with you on.
However, as soon as your requirements include "Must have well integrated calendaring, email and address book features including shared calendars with ACLs (let's face it, that's all most people are using it for)", "Must have a halfway sane GUI that my users will actually use rather than moan about" and "Must work offline for the laptop users who are frequently travelling and don't have access to a reliable Internet connection", you've pretty much eliminated all purely web-based options and more or less every client except Outlook.
And once you know that, you realise that you either need Exchange or something which plugs into Outlook more or less seamlessly. I've looked into plugin-based options and they are never as good.
And of course Exchange requires Active Directory, so you might as well set up an AD domain. IIRC, Windows SUS also depends on an AD domain (essential if you want any control over what patches your desktops will install). I don't know if the registration system that Vista uses to avoid businesses having to register desktops directly with Microsoft requires an AD domain, but I would be very surprised if it did not.
Basically, Microsoft have gone to great lengths to ensure that once you start putting Windows in the server room, it's very hard to stop.
Don't get too excited. There is nothing in the Freedom of Information Act to prevent organisations from setting up procedures to ensure they never have to release information under it - such as "have a 45 day turnaround on FOIA requests, the first 35 of which your letter is sat in someones in tray and hasn't even been opened" and "wipe all CCTV footage after 30 days".
They own 90% of desktops on the planet, therefore it's very difficult to grow their business.
However, they don't own 90% of PVRs on the planet. That's what they want next, and that's what requires the DRM.
Had they refused to go down that route, Hollywood would simply have gone to Toshiba, Sony, Pioneer et al and demanded they thrash something out before they'd release HD movies.
Maybe it's a UNIX thing, but I already just run several things on the same node in that case. License server daemons, little departmental web server, low-use file server, they're all sitting on the same box.
I used to do exactly the same thing under Linux until I realised a few benefits that virtualisation offers.
- A security issue affecting the web server won't result in the fileserver, DNS server and license server being potentially compromised. - If a particular service requires a specific version of a library (unusual these days but by no means impossible, particularly if you find that for whatever reason you need to roll your own package rather than rely on the distribution maintainers' version), I don't need to spend time checking that this specific version won't break anything else on the same box. - If a service is giving trouble (maybe by pegging the CPU to 100% or leaking memory), the business impact is far more limited.
But what the survey is really telling you is which web server is being used to serve unique content on the web. Whether one server serves a million pages or a million servers serve one page apiece is irrelevant.
Technically correct, but I think it could benefit from further clarification.
Netcraft's numbers tell you which piece of software is being used to provide web service on a unique hostname.
But with modules like Dynamic Mass Virtual Hosting (and whatever the equivalent is on IIS), it is trivially easy for a web company to have as many websites as they like without buying another license for the web server software, without buying another physical piece of hardware and without configuring anything beyond an entry in DNS.
It doesn't tell you a damn thing about "how many companies have gone out and bought the Microsoft solution vs. used a LAMP stack". Systems like blogger and myspace (which present each user to the world with their own unique hostname, but obviously don't install a new server every time a user signs up) can easily distort the numbers.
The point I'm making is you're quite right, it's pointless to discuss these statistics without understanding what they really represent. But in understanding what they represent, it becomes clear that they don't actually represent anything at all.
And I'm beginning to get an inkling that you're equating some community, or unconscionably-broadly-defined category of people, as generally having "an elitist 'I'm better than you!' approach to communication," without substantiating your claim.
That's because unlike the author of the original article, I chose not to debase myself by naming names.
However, if you really insist, there are plenty of opensource projects which are well known for being run by a somewhat arrogant bunch of folk: OpenLDAP and OpenBSD immediately spring to mind.
That's actually one of the things that customs staff are trained to look out for - people who are slightly nervous tend to blink more. Though that's more for people bringing contraband into a country...
If they pluck more people, it just means the arrest rate will go down, unless the 1% that are arrested are representative of the population as a whole.
If they're arresting everyone who's got even the tiniest thing outstanding against them (such as an unpaid parking ticket), then I can well believe that 1% is representative of the population as a whole.
I would point out that most of the people in gitmo have had no contact with the outside world and nobody's either confirmed or denied that they're there.
Therefore nobody (aside from staff working there) knows who's there.
Complete BS. The requirements to remain in the US Visa Waiver programme are a Machine Readable Zone and a digital photograph, both of which have been standard in Australian Passports for over a decade. It says so right on the page you've linked.
Did you read the article properly?
The ePassport will meet new US requirements to be introduced on 26 October 2006. Amd from the Waiver Programme page:
Depending on when VWP travelers' passports were issued, other passport requirements will apply:
* Machine-readable passport (MRP) issued before 26 October 2005 - no further requirements
* MRP issued between 26 October 2005 and 25 October 2006 - digitized photograph on data page or integrated chip with information from the data page * MRP issued on or after 26 October 2006 - integrated chip with information from the data page (note: Australian passports issued in Australia from 2006 onwards comply with this requirement)
I'm beginning to get an inkling of why you don't tend to see such an elitist "I'm better than you!" approach to communication on Windows-based forums, mailing lists and IRC channels - and I think Zed has just inadvertantly explained it beautifully.
In closed source software, very few have access to source code and those that do aren't at liberty to discuss it in any detail. We only have access to the same help files, knowledge bases and forums, which are by and large a lot more human readable than several thousand lines of C code. But at the same time, they're a lot less informative. In solving a particular problem, everyone's trying to find the proverbial black cat in a coal cellar. It's in everyone's interest to remain at least civil at all times, because next week it could be us asking the questions.
In Open Source, everyone has access to and can discuss the source code all they like - and there is an elite of people who have the time and expertise to be able to understand it in some detail. The elite don't need to worry so much about pissing people off because they have the ability to read the source code and understand what is going on. And so it seems much more often you find someone who tends to come across as either very outspoken (at best) or downright malicious (at worst).
Don't know about in the US, but most of the UK boxes can handle things like volume separately. So you turn the volume on your TV to maximum, connect the box to an aux input on the TV leave the TV on aux for the remainder of its useful life. Bonus if the TV will automatically switch itself off when there's nothing coming in on an aux input.
However, I understand there's some difference (apart from just NTSC/PAL) between Europe and US.
Over here, televisions with built-in cable decoders do not exist. Your cable company provides you with a set top box which does the decoding. Same thing's true of satellite TV. We've started switching over to digital - at least one area has had the analogue TV signal switched off altogether - and set top boxes to decode a digital signal have been on the market for some time.
Interestingly, televisions without inbuilt digital decoding are still on the market today - though I can't think why.
My CV (resume for americans) has been stored in a file called "Curriculum Vitae.doc" since 1996.
It was originally produced in Word '95.
In that time, it's been through Word '95, '97, StarOffice 5.2, OpenOffice beta 642, OpenOffice 1.0 and now OpenOffice 2.1. I keep the canonical copy in the native format for whatever word processor I'm using because there's less risk of losing data that way - but I still save it as an old version if/when necessary. As a sysadmin, the idea of taking a job with a company which wants to upgrade 10 year old systems is not beyond the realms of probability and it doesn't faze me at all.
Registry edits don't intimidate me, but frankly if I'm working 8 hours/day on doing silly hacks like this I don't want to be having to do them at home. Makes me glad I bought a Mac and use OpenOffice.
Individuals may balk at an annual fee. But individuals are not, and never really have been, Microsoft's core customer base.
Their core customer base is businesses licensing office for 10's/100's/1000's of PCs - and there's been a subscription model around for that for years. The annual fee is a lot easier to swallow than the one-off fee, particularly if your business is growing (if you're on the annual subscription, you don't need to buy a license with every new PC and every new starter you have - you just need to add up how many you need once a year - you don't get that if you do the outright purchase).
Depending on where you are in the world, there are plenty of legitimate functions of government which would benefit from a national ID card.
Health and benefits provision immediately spring to mind - particularly if you're concerned about only providing such benefits to taxpayers.
However, neither of these particularly require a national ID card. And in many cases, introducing one would simply add another layer of bureaucracy which criminals would work around and legitimate citizens would be inconvenienced by.
(Side note: I explained to my MP that benefit cheats are already criminals, adding an ID card which it's illegal to either own a fake or give false information to obtain simply gives them something else illegal they'll have to do - and by cheating the system, they've already demonstrated that they don't really care about what the law says. Criminals don't tend to obey the law. The reply basically said "yes, we know criminals don't obey the law. We're trying to figure out a solution to that. Any ideas?")
What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?
I suspect you're trolling, since a similar question comes up every time the ID card debate is raised.
Nevertheless, I'll bite.
You're asking the wrong question. When a government wants something, the correct question is "what benefit does this offer to me as a citizen?" and measure it up against the costs. This is because government exists for the benefit of the citizens.
As soon as you start saying "I don't see why not", you're essentially accepting that you should do something for the benefit of the government. While this isn't in and of itself dangerous, it has a lot of potential to be. For instance, the UK government is currently making noises about ID cards - yet in the last month there have been no fewer than 3 major instances of personal data being lost by UK government departments. (Google for Revenue Child Benefit data loss, DVLA data loss and NHS data loss if you don't believe me).
Over 26 million records have gone missing and for most of those records there was more than enough data to carry out fraud. And we're supposed to trust this government with a single database which contains all of this and more?
There's no such thing as warranty drive repair - either if the drive alone is sent back under warranty (eg. if you bought the hard disk on its own) or as part of something else (eg. a laptop).
The unit is replaced (sometimes with a new drive, sometimes with a reconditioned one), and the manufacturer keeps your old disk.
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Purely out of curiousity, how have tapes proven to be the best solution?
Readable or not, you've got the issue of obtaining/maintaining the equipment to read the damn thing. As far as I am aware, no tape technology guarantees 100% backward read capability to all past tapes built around similar technology (even with DLT, not all of the newest drives are 100% backward read capable to every past DLT format).
That doesn't even account for when a totally new tape technology comes around - which happens every 10-15 years.
Blu-ray, with its compulsory DRM and continued use of region codes, is the more closed and that's what the majority of major studios have gone for.
Somehow, I think those two things may be related.
Laptop disk speeds haven't increased that much lately. Certainly not with regards to seek times.
Therefore, if the thing that was slowing Vista was disk thrashing, upgrading to a newer laptop probably wouldn't have achieved much.
I've already replied, but I'm going to do so again.
If you're stuck with a Windows infrastructure, I think the only sane way to do CALs (without losing your mind) is to go down the annually-renewable license route. At least that way you don't need to worry too much about "do we have enough for this new starter we've got coming in on Monday?" every so often - you just tell them what your requirements are every year and if they've gone up, you pay more next year.
"This addiction to Outlook" is regrettable, but not something I think is easy to eliminate.
If by bloated you mean "takes up lots of disk space", nobody outside of IT cares. Disk space is Not Their Problem.
If by bloated you mean "loaded with tons of features, 95% of which are never used" - well, that is something I do agree with you on.
However, as soon as your requirements include "Must have well integrated calendaring, email and address book features including shared calendars with ACLs (let's face it, that's all most people are using it for)", "Must have a halfway sane GUI that my users will actually use rather than moan about" and "Must work offline for the laptop users who are frequently travelling and don't have access to a reliable Internet connection", you've pretty much eliminated all purely web-based options and more or less every client except Outlook.
And once you know that, you realise that you either need Exchange or something which plugs into Outlook more or less seamlessly. I've looked into plugin-based options and they are never as good.
And of course Exchange requires Active Directory, so you might as well set up an AD domain. IIRC, Windows SUS also depends on an AD domain (essential if you want any control over what patches your desktops will install). I don't know if the registration system that Vista uses to avoid businesses having to register desktops directly with Microsoft requires an AD domain, but I would be very surprised if it did not.
Basically, Microsoft have gone to great lengths to ensure that once you start putting Windows in the server room, it's very hard to stop.
Don't get too excited. There is nothing in the Freedom of Information Act to prevent organisations from setting up procedures to ensure they never have to release information under it - such as "have a 45 day turnaround on FOIA requests, the first 35 of which your letter is sat in someones in tray and hasn't even been opened" and "wipe all CCTV footage after 30 days".
They own 90% of desktops on the planet, therefore it's very difficult to grow their business.
However, they don't own 90% of PVRs on the planet. That's what they want next, and that's what requires the DRM.
Had they refused to go down that route, Hollywood would simply have gone to Toshiba, Sony, Pioneer et al and demanded they thrash something out before they'd release HD movies.
Maybe it's a UNIX thing, but I already just run several things on the same node in that case. License server daemons, little departmental web server, low-use file server, they're all sitting on the same box.
I used to do exactly the same thing under Linux until I realised a few benefits that virtualisation offers.
- A security issue affecting the web server won't result in the fileserver, DNS server and license server being potentially compromised.
- If a particular service requires a specific version of a library (unusual these days but by no means impossible, particularly if you find that for whatever reason you need to roll your own package rather than rely on the distribution maintainers' version), I don't need to spend time checking that this specific version won't break anything else on the same box.
- If a service is giving trouble (maybe by pegging the CPU to 100% or leaking memory), the business impact is far more limited.
But what the survey is really telling you is which web server is being used to serve unique content on the web. Whether one server serves a million pages or a million servers serve one page apiece is irrelevant.
Technically correct, but I think it could benefit from further clarification.
Netcraft's numbers tell you which piece of software is being used to provide web service on a unique hostname.
But with modules like Dynamic Mass Virtual Hosting (and whatever the equivalent is on IIS), it is trivially easy for a web company to have as many websites as they like without buying another license for the web server software, without buying another physical piece of hardware and without configuring anything beyond an entry in DNS.
It doesn't tell you a damn thing about "how many companies have gone out and bought the Microsoft solution vs. used a LAMP stack". Systems like blogger and myspace (which present each user to the world with their own unique hostname, but obviously don't install a new server every time a user signs up) can easily distort the numbers.
The point I'm making is you're quite right, it's pointless to discuss these statistics without understanding what they really represent. But in understanding what they represent, it becomes clear that they don't actually represent anything at all.
Three words for you: Client Access Licenses. Workstation editions of Windows haven't shipped with a free CAL in years.
And I'm beginning to get an inkling that you're equating some community, or unconscionably-broadly-defined category of people, as generally having "an elitist 'I'm better than you!' approach to communication," without substantiating your claim.
That's because unlike the author of the original article, I chose not to debase myself by naming names.
However, if you really insist, there are plenty of opensource projects which are well known for being run by a somewhat arrogant bunch of folk: OpenLDAP and OpenBSD immediately spring to mind.
That's actually one of the things that customs staff are trained to look out for - people who are slightly nervous tend to blink more. Though that's more for people bringing contraband into a country...
If they pluck more people, it just means the arrest rate will go down, unless the 1% that are arrested are representative of the population as a whole.
If they're arresting everyone who's got even the tiniest thing outstanding against them (such as an unpaid parking ticket), then I can well believe that 1% is representative of the population as a whole.
I would point out that most of the people in gitmo have had no contact with the outside world and nobody's either confirmed or denied that they're there.
Therefore nobody (aside from staff working there) knows who's there.
Sounds like you're describing the Silver Horde in Pratchett's "Interesting Times".
Unless it can count the books of matches in my backpack and measure my lithium battery
And you reckon the security guards at the airport can measure your lithium battery?
Did you read the article properly? The ePassport will meet new US requirements to be introduced on 26 October 2006. Amd from the Waiver Programme page: Depending on when VWP travelers' passports were issued, other passport requirements will apply:
* Machine-readable passport (MRP) issued before 26 October 2005 - no further requirements
* MRP issued between 26 October 2005 and 25 October 2006 - digitized photograph on data page or integrated chip with information from the data page
* MRP issued on or after 26 October 2006 - integrated chip with information from the data page (note: Australian passports issued in Australia from 2006 onwards comply with this requirement)
I'm beginning to get an inkling of why you don't tend to see such an elitist "I'm better than you!" approach to communication on Windows-based forums, mailing lists and IRC channels - and I think Zed has just inadvertantly explained it beautifully.
In closed source software, very few have access to source code and those that do aren't at liberty to discuss it in any detail. We only have access to the same help files, knowledge bases and forums, which are by and large a lot more human readable than several thousand lines of C code. But at the same time, they're a lot less informative. In solving a particular problem, everyone's trying to find the proverbial black cat in a coal cellar. It's in everyone's interest to remain at least civil at all times, because next week it could be us asking the questions.
In Open Source, everyone has access to and can discuss the source code all they like - and there is an elite of people who have the time and expertise to be able to understand it in some detail. The elite don't need to worry so much about pissing people off because they have the ability to read the source code and understand what is going on. And so it seems much more often you find someone who tends to come across as either very outspoken (at best) or downright malicious (at worst).
Don't know about in the US, but most of the UK boxes can handle things like volume separately. So you turn the volume on your TV to maximum, connect the box to an aux input on the TV leave the TV on aux for the remainder of its useful life. Bonus if the TV will automatically switch itself off when there's nothing coming in on an aux input.
all I can say is "Welcome to 2001!".
However, I understand there's some difference (apart from just NTSC/PAL) between Europe and US.
Over here, televisions with built-in cable decoders do not exist. Your cable company provides you with a set top box which does the decoding. Same thing's true of satellite TV. We've started switching over to digital - at least one area has had the analogue TV signal switched off altogether - and set top boxes to decode a digital signal have been on the market for some time.
Interestingly, televisions without inbuilt digital decoding are still on the market today - though I can't think why.
My CV (resume for americans) has been stored in a file called "Curriculum Vitae.doc" since 1996.
It was originally produced in Word '95.
In that time, it's been through Word '95, '97, StarOffice 5.2, OpenOffice beta 642, OpenOffice 1.0 and now OpenOffice 2.1. I keep the canonical copy in the native format for whatever word processor I'm using because there's less risk of losing data that way - but I still save it as an old version if/when necessary. As a sysadmin, the idea of taking a job with a company which wants to upgrade 10 year old systems is not beyond the realms of probability and it doesn't faze me at all.
Registry edits don't intimidate me, but frankly if I'm working 8 hours/day on doing silly hacks like this I don't want to be having to do them at home. Makes me glad I bought a Mac and use OpenOffice.
Individuals may balk at an annual fee. But individuals are not, and never really have been, Microsoft's core customer base.
Their core customer base is businesses licensing office for 10's/100's/1000's of PCs - and there's been a subscription model around for that for years. The annual fee is a lot easier to swallow than the one-off fee, particularly if your business is growing (if you're on the annual subscription, you don't need to buy a license with every new PC and every new starter you have - you just need to add up how many you need once a year - you don't get that if you do the outright purchase).
Depending on where you are in the world, there are plenty of legitimate functions of government which would benefit from a national ID card.
Health and benefits provision immediately spring to mind - particularly if you're concerned about only providing such benefits to taxpayers.
However, neither of these particularly require a national ID card. And in many cases, introducing one would simply add another layer of bureaucracy which criminals would work around and legitimate citizens would be inconvenienced by.
(Side note: I explained to my MP that benefit cheats are already criminals, adding an ID card which it's illegal to either own a fake or give false information to obtain simply gives them something else illegal they'll have to do - and by cheating the system, they've already demonstrated that they don't really care about what the law says. Criminals don't tend to obey the law. The reply basically said "yes, we know criminals don't obey the law. We're trying to figure out a solution to that. Any ideas?")
What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?
I suspect you're trolling, since a similar question comes up every time the ID card debate is raised.
Nevertheless, I'll bite.
You're asking the wrong question. When a government wants something, the correct question is "what benefit does this offer to me as a citizen?" and measure it up against the costs. This is because government exists for the benefit of the citizens.
As soon as you start saying "I don't see why not", you're essentially accepting that you should do something for the benefit of the government. While this isn't in and of itself dangerous, it has a lot of potential to be. For instance, the UK government is currently making noises about ID cards - yet in the last month there have been no fewer than 3 major instances of personal data being lost by UK government departments. (Google for Revenue Child Benefit data loss, DVLA data loss and NHS data loss if you don't believe me).
Over 26 million records have gone missing and for most of those records there was more than enough data to carry out fraud. And we're supposed to trust this government with a single database which contains all of this and more?
There's no such thing as warranty drive repair - either if the drive alone is sent back under warranty (eg. if you bought the hard disk on its own) or as part of something else (eg. a laptop).
The unit is replaced (sometimes with a new drive, sometimes with a reconditioned one), and the manufacturer keeps your old disk.
Guess where the reconditioned drives come from.