Bit of a shame I've already commented, or I'd be modding you insightful. On more than one occasion I've seen management buy Windows smartphones and I'm quite sure they chose them based on exactly the logic you described. Without exception, those phones were replaced with something else (usually Android or Blackberry) as soon as possible.
It amazes me that a company like Microsoft should spend years turning Windows into a well-known brand then completely screw up their entry into the handheld sector by taking that brand and applying it to a totally different product. You don't see Sprite being marketed as "Coca-Cola (Lemon & Lime Flavour)" and there's a damn good reason for that.
Yeah, grub2 appears in Debian Squeeze too. Not Impressed.
The biggest benefit of grub over LILO was "you don't need to rerun lilo when you change the config file" - that's gone now. Oh yes, and instead of one fairly small, self-contained, relatively easy to understand config file you now have several and the config files aren't config files at all, they're scripts which are run in order to create config files. You're explicitly NOT meant to hand-edit the config file. What is this, sendmail? It's a bootloader, FFS, it only needs to kick off an operating system.
Considering the strength of Windows comes from its backwards compatibility with a large field of Programs(before they were called Apps), it makes sense that Microsoft will want to leverage that over all available media.
It's a very good decision, which is surprising in it's own right.
Indeed, but legacy apps aren't likely to make an appearance on ARM-powered phones and tablets any time soon.
If you have a Mac, it does as the article's solution is then just setting up a NAS. Time Machine on the Mac does not require Time Capsule as long as you've set up network drives correctly. Time Capsule allows the average consume the ability to bypass the step of setting up the drives. If you had Windows Backup and Restore lacks the ability to restore individual files without restoring the whole save point. At it did when I last used it.
It does require a NAS that supports Time Machine - IIRC you can't just hook into any old Samba share. Most half-decent NAS units will; I don't know if this is true of routers with USB ports.
Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do.
That's funny, I successfully restored this very laptop from a Time Machine backup over a network (not even from a Time Capsule - from a Synology Diskstation as it happens) only last night.
1. Buy one of the many wireless routers coming onto the market that support plugging in a USB hard disk and sharing it over the network. 2. Buy a USB hard disk. 3. Format the USB hard disk and plug it into the router. 4. Profit!
Don't know about Openstack, but KVM and Xen both suffer the same problem.
They provide you with a fairly primitive - albeit effective - toolkit. They don't provide you with a pre-cooked setup which you can just hit "Install" on and 15 minutes later, away you go. If you want to do anything flashy (for instance, put together something that competes with AWS), you are going to have to dedicate insane amounts of time to it.
If you just need virtualisation on a couple of cheapie Dell servers they're fantastic. But if that's all you need, you're hardly VMWare's target market anyway.
Don't you believe it. It's a fantastically competitive field to get into, so much so that it's quite common for reputable law schools (and for that matter law firms) to demand every applicant have perfect exam results going right back to their schooldays even if they enter the profession as a mature student many years after they left school.
Alternatively, you could just get 2 cheap internet connections and a router that supports active fail-over/load balancing, however now half your address-space on the other ISP is unreachable. Not to mention that those routers cost thousands of dollars if you don't enjoy hours of BSD hacking...
At least you got to enjoy it for a while. All my professors during my final three weeks of school at college started coming out and admitting to my sub-major group that we had spent four years studying for a profession that was en route to be obsolete by 2012 as we learned it.
Dear god I hate my college.
Count yourself very lucky that they told you that. Most people come out of college with no real experience to speak of and spend the first 6-12 months of employment learning all about the things they don't teach you in college. And that's the sort of thing you seldom get taught.
Truth is, IT management, maintenance and support is well on its way to being a commodity - which means the only way to make it work is "pile it high and sell it cheap". For many small businesses IT already is a commodity - they set up some sort of support agreement with a local company and if they're not happy, move onto the next one. The USPs you can think of to attract and retain customers (if you're an outsourced service provider) or keep your job (if you're in-house) are rapidly becoming less and less interesting.
Ubuntu does not maintains Long Term releases that long. Apple is notorious for dropping support for previous OS X versions (um, talk to the people trapped on OS X 10.4 due to the intel switch).
Sorry buddy, your facts are wrong.
Perhaps there's a reason Microsoft remain in their dominant position?
Lest we forget, Wikileaks seriously embarrassed the US government not so long ago. I think the purpose of this is less to punish Assange and more pour encourager les autres (or more accurately, discourager) - from having anything to do with leaking information.
:-) Close but no... this will not be for processing cards at all, but rather for issuing access codes for Wi-Fi. I didn't want to go into too much detail in the summary so as not to bore people; I can see why it sounds like it would be for card processing.
Erm... Can we clarify exactly what it is you do want? Do you already have the application? Does your handheld terminal need to process cards? Read barcodes? Print things out with an inbuilt printer?
As it stands, the most obvious reading of the summary is card processing - which, as others have said, is going to give you so much trouble meeting PCI-DSS requirements that you'd be insane to even try.
It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose. It isn't like email storage requirements are a practical limitation - any company with terabytes of email is going to have an IT budget so large that those costs will be lost in the noise.
You'd be surprised.
Data storage on one single desktop-class SATA disk is very cheap, you're right there.
Data storage on a SAS disk is about three to six times the cost - that's before you factor in storage losses through RAID.
If you want really fast access to data, it's common to buy lots of smaller drives and spread the data across more spindles. This increases your cost per gigabyte quite a bit further because smaller disks are never very cost-effecient.
If you need the manageability you get from something like a SAN (and you actually want the manufacturer to support you), you need vendor-certified drives. Even if the only difference between them and a bog-standard drive is the label on the front (though customised firmware is by no means unknown), that bumps the price up quite a bit further - and you wouldn't buy something like that without a hardware maintenance contract.
Next up you've got backup and retention. If you want the backup to be complete in a short space of time, you need something fast. There's a few options available, such as live mirroring with snapshots (Oh goodie! Now you need two SANs in two separate locations and a very fast link between them!), tape (fast sequential access but pretty dire random access), virtual tape (hard disk based systems that present themselves as tape, frequently for compatibility reasons).
The fact that you are aware of how things should be done and how to make them better immediately puts you some way ahead of a LOT of IT people.
You would be astonished (and I guarantee disturbed) at the number of people who get into the job because they think it's just a matter of being paid lots of money to click "Next.... Next.... Next..." all day long.
Let's say you want to invent the Next Facebook Killer But This Time With Privacy.
Your system needs to allow:
- People to make just enough information public to identify themselves (so friends can find them). - People to send messages and make photos and other media available to others with whom they may not have connected but may have a legitimate interest in seeing it (that's pretty much the point). - Assuming you're planning on monetizing this by selling ads, some sort of network effect to encourage more and more people to get into it. Facebook has this in spades with things like tagging; LinkedIn gets it by essentially asking its users to spam on its behalf. - While at the same time ensuring that the above information doesn't end up in the "wrong" hands. The wrong hands doesn't have to be just advertisers - the most common example is if you have your colleagues as friends on facebook and they get to see all the drunken photos of you going back years. We all have something in the past that we'd rather stayed there; the only way a lot of people can function in society is because by and large it does stay there.
Oh, no! Please don't let the stock market fall! Anything but that! It'll be a tragedy for all the people who've bought non-dividend paying stock at prices far higher than they're worth!
What do you think the majority of pension fund managers do when they're trying to invest money for capital gains rather than return? You may be rather more exposed than you think.
IME, a lot of IT people are Doing It Horrifically Wrong - and "working silly hours" is just one indicator.
I have met - and I'm talking in the last two years - IT people who:
- Have never heard of remote-support products like logmein or VNC. They're still talking people through problems over the phone or visiting them at their desk.
- Aren't familiar with/keen on the idea of scripting repetitive work.
- Haven't even looked into the policy settings their own managed antivirus product offers. Or, for that matter, the GPO policies offered by AD.
- Don't/Won't automate the installation of operating systems - be it through imaging or some other mechanism.
To be fair, sometimes this is because their own management isn't giving them sufficient backup. Their management is asking for trouble, because sooner or later an outsourcing firm that does all of the above will contact upper management; that outsourcing firm will have the systems sufficiently down that they can do the work with fewer people - and hence cheaper.
Or if it had been an HP server using iLO would allow him to press the power-button remotely.
During the few times I need to power-cycle a server it beats going down to the basement server room to push a button... or in a worst case scenario going out to a damn oil rig to do it....
Every major server vendor has something similar, and it's usually built into almost everything they sell as a server (and has been for some years). x86 stuff is usually based around IPMI; sometimes vendors supply web-based consoles but you can get by without one. Certainly you can get by enough to remotely toggle power, get the status of a few basic things like PSUs and fans and get a serial console.
If you are in charge of even just one server and you weren't aware of it before, learn it.
With a close relative who's a lawyer, you immediately have a HUGE advantage over probably 80 or 90% of the population. (I have a similar advantage, my mum's an accountant - very handy when you're just getting started in business!)
If your dad has involved you in it in some way - even if it's just filing documents or talking to you in lay terms about difficulties clients have faced - as you were growing up, I'd say that advantage has increased dramatically. You'll be amazed at what you've taken in over the years - even if it's just the nous to spot something that's worded in a way that's to your disadvantage and question it, you're in front of a lot of people there.
With the ability to distribute online so easily these days, I don't know why artists even bother with major labels anymore. I'm sure with a little investment even the smallest artist can attain a decent marketing campaign. Word of mouth and social networks are a wealth of free publicity as well.
Tell you what, why don't you ring up a few concert venues and get yourself booked into them? Get yourself into the big online music stores - iTunes and Amazon would be a good start, get airplay on some major radio stations, get your music into adverts and in TV shows. Call up the agent for a reasonably well-known musician you admire and ask if they'd be interested in a supporting act for their next tour.
Setting up a website is relatively easy, but if you think that all you need is a website and some musical talent you're in for a bit of a shock.
- You have a number of subfolders you organise email into. - Even without filtering, you've got a certain degree of automated filing going on. Emails that you know you need to keep based purely on sender/subject line but don't particularly need to read right now automagically go into the right folder.
While you're not filtering your email in the "automatically delete" sense of the word, you are filtering it in the "automatically file so I don't have to think about it" sense of the word, which the article author wasn't.
The ability to do this has existed for... ooh, ever such a long time. Procmail was first released in 1990. But they haven't existed in a nice, easy "Would you like to file future emails similar to this?" button in your mail client anything like as long. Earlier versions of Outlook squirrelled it away in a "Rules" menu that a lot of people never even looked at - I can't count the number of times that as a direct result of this, someone has insisted they didn't receive an email when in actual fact they have but they couldn't find it because of the several thousand emails in their inbox.
It's very likely that a lot of people - article writer included - honestly think automated filing is a new idea. It's not, but making it easy enough for anyone to use is.
At least one UK provider allows you to access your own mailbox from any line - simply dial your mobile number, when it goes to voicemail, hit * and enter the PIN and away you go.
Rumour has it that for a while, if you hadn't set a PIN the network was quite happy to let you into the mailbox with the default. And many people never bother to because you don't need to use the PIN when you pick up voicemail from your own phone.
IANAL, but AIUI you're perfectly allowed to transfer data outside the EU provided you take "reasonable steps" to ensure it remains secure. The Safe Harbor scheme essentially boils this down to a simple question for EU companies to ask US providers: "Are you registered under the Safe Harbor scheme?". The Patriot Act may throw a spanner in the works, but I'm not sure it's as much of a problem as it's being made out.
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Bit of a shame I've already commented, or I'd be modding you insightful. On more than one occasion I've seen management buy Windows smartphones and I'm quite sure they chose them based on exactly the logic you described. Without exception, those phones were replaced with something else (usually Android or Blackberry) as soon as possible.
It amazes me that a company like Microsoft should spend years turning Windows into a well-known brand then completely screw up their entry into the handheld sector by taking that brand and applying it to a totally different product. You don't see Sprite being marketed as "Coca-Cola (Lemon & Lime Flavour)" and there's a damn good reason for that.
It ain't broke... Let's fix it !
Yeah, grub2 appears in Debian Squeeze too. Not Impressed.
The biggest benefit of grub over LILO was "you don't need to rerun lilo when you change the config file" - that's gone now. Oh yes, and instead of one fairly small, self-contained, relatively easy to understand config file you now have several and the config files aren't config files at all, they're scripts which are run in order to create config files. You're explicitly NOT meant to hand-edit the config file. What is this, sendmail? It's a bootloader, FFS, it only needs to kick off an operating system.
Considering the strength of Windows comes from its backwards compatibility with a large field of Programs(before they were called Apps), it makes sense that Microsoft will want to leverage that over all available media.
It's a very good decision, which is surprising in it's own right.
Indeed, but legacy apps aren't likely to make an appearance on ARM-powered phones and tablets any time soon.
You can do the same from a supported NAS. Keyword here: supported. But there's no shortage of these.
If you have a Mac, it does as the article's solution is then just setting up a NAS. Time Machine on the Mac does not require Time Capsule as long as you've set up network drives correctly. Time Capsule allows the average consume the ability to bypass the step of setting up the drives. If you had Windows Backup and Restore lacks the ability to restore individual files without restoring the whole save point. At it did when I last used it.
It does require a NAS that supports Time Machine - IIRC you can't just hook into any old Samba share. Most half-decent NAS units will; I don't know if this is true of routers with USB ports.
Are you kidding?
Have you ever actually used any of this crap?
Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do.
That's funny, I successfully restored this very laptop from a Time Machine backup over a network (not even from a Time Capsule - from a Synology Diskstation as it happens) only last night.
I could have sworn it went absolutely perfectly.
I RTFA (I know, I know) and it amounts to:
1. Buy one of the many wireless routers coming onto the market that support plugging in a USB hard disk and sharing it over the network.
2. Buy a USB hard disk.
3. Format the USB hard disk and plug it into the router.
4. Profit!
Don't know about Openstack, but KVM and Xen both suffer the same problem.
They provide you with a fairly primitive - albeit effective - toolkit. They don't provide you with a pre-cooked setup which you can just hit "Install" on and 15 minutes later, away you go. If you want to do anything flashy (for instance, put together something that competes with AWS), you are going to have to dedicate insane amounts of time to it.
If you just need virtualisation on a couple of cheapie Dell servers they're fantastic. But if that's all you need, you're hardly VMWare's target market anyway.
Don't you believe it. It's a fantastically competitive field to get into, so much so that it's quite common for reputable law schools (and for that matter law firms) to demand every applicant have perfect exam results going right back to their schooldays even if they enter the profession as a mature student many years after they left school.
Alternatively, you could just get 2 cheap internet connections and a router that supports active fail-over/load balancing, however now half your address-space on the other ISP is unreachable. Not to mention that those routers cost thousands of dollars if you don't enjoy hours of BSD hacking...
pfSense is your friend here.
At least you got to enjoy it for a while. All my professors during my final three weeks of school at college started coming out and admitting to my sub-major group that we had spent four years studying for a profession that was en route to be obsolete by 2012 as we learned it.
Dear god I hate my college.
Count yourself very lucky that they told you that. Most people come out of college with no real experience to speak of and spend the first 6-12 months of employment learning all about the things they don't teach you in college. And that's the sort of thing you seldom get taught.
Truth is, IT management, maintenance and support is well on its way to being a commodity - which means the only way to make it work is "pile it high and sell it cheap". For many small businesses IT already is a commodity - they set up some sort of support agreement with a local company and if they're not happy, move onto the next one. The USPs you can think of to attract and retain customers (if you're an outsourced service provider) or keep your job (if you're in-house) are rapidly becoming less and less interesting.
Ubuntu does not maintains Long Term releases that long. Apple is notorious for dropping support for previous OS X versions (um, talk to the people trapped on OS X 10.4 due to the intel switch).
Sorry buddy, your facts are wrong.
Perhaps there's a reason Microsoft remain in their dominant position?
I'm not so sure.
Lest we forget, Wikileaks seriously embarrassed the US government not so long ago. I think the purpose of this is less to punish Assange and more pour encourager les autres (or more accurately, discourager) - from having anything to do with leaking information.
:-) Close but no... this will not be for processing cards at all, but rather for issuing access codes for Wi-Fi. I didn't want to go into too much detail in the summary so as not to bore people; I can see why it sounds like it would be for card processing.
Erm... Can we clarify exactly what it is you do want? Do you already have the application? Does your handheld terminal need to process cards? Read barcodes? Print things out with an inbuilt printer?
As it stands, the most obvious reading of the summary is card processing - which, as others have said, is going to give you so much trouble meeting PCI-DSS requirements that you'd be insane to even try.
It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose. It isn't like email storage requirements are a practical limitation - any company with terabytes of email is going to have an IT budget so large that those costs will be lost in the noise.
You'd be surprised.
Data storage on one single desktop-class SATA disk is very cheap, you're right there.
Data storage on a SAS disk is about three to six times the cost - that's before you factor in storage losses through RAID.
If you want really fast access to data, it's common to buy lots of smaller drives and spread the data across more spindles. This increases your cost per gigabyte quite a bit further because smaller disks are never very cost-effecient.
If you need the manageability you get from something like a SAN (and you actually want the manufacturer to support you), you need vendor-certified drives. Even if the only difference between them and a bog-standard drive is the label on the front (though customised firmware is by no means unknown), that bumps the price up quite a bit further - and you wouldn't buy something like that without a hardware maintenance contract.
Next up you've got backup and retention. If you want the backup to be complete in a short space of time, you need something fast. There's a few options available, such as live mirroring with snapshots (Oh goodie! Now you need two SANs in two separate locations and a very fast link between them!), tape (fast sequential access but pretty dire random access), virtual tape (hard disk based systems that present themselves as tape, frequently for compatibility reasons).
The fact that you are aware of how things should be done and how to make them better immediately puts you some way ahead of a LOT of IT people.
You would be astonished (and I guarantee disturbed) at the number of people who get into the job because they think it's just a matter of being paid lots of money to click "Next.... Next.... Next..." all day long.
Let's say you want to invent the Next Facebook Killer But This Time With Privacy.
Your system needs to allow:
- People to make just enough information public to identify themselves (so friends can find them).
- People to send messages and make photos and other media available to others with whom they may not have connected but may have a legitimate interest in seeing it (that's pretty much the point).
- Assuming you're planning on monetizing this by selling ads, some sort of network effect to encourage more and more people to get into it. Facebook has this in spades with things like tagging; LinkedIn gets it by essentially asking its users to spam on its behalf.
- While at the same time ensuring that the above information doesn't end up in the "wrong" hands. The wrong hands doesn't have to be just advertisers - the most common example is if you have your colleagues as friends on facebook and they get to see all the drunken photos of you going back years. We all have something in the past that we'd rather stayed there; the only way a lot of people can function in society is because by and large it does stay there.
Oh, no! Please don't let the stock market fall! Anything but that! It'll be a tragedy for all the people who've bought non-dividend paying stock at prices far higher than they're worth!
What do you think the majority of pension fund managers do when they're trying to invest money for capital gains rather than return? You may be rather more exposed than you think.
IME, a lot of IT people are Doing It Horrifically Wrong - and "working silly hours" is just one indicator.
I have met - and I'm talking in the last two years - IT people who:
- Have never heard of remote-support products like logmein or VNC. They're still talking people through problems over the phone or visiting them at their desk.
- Aren't familiar with/keen on the idea of scripting repetitive work.
- Haven't even looked into the policy settings their own managed antivirus product offers. Or, for that matter, the GPO policies offered by AD.
- Don't/Won't automate the installation of operating systems - be it through imaging or some other mechanism.
To be fair, sometimes this is because their own management isn't giving them sufficient backup. Their management is asking for trouble, because sooner or later an outsourcing firm that does all of the above will contact upper management; that outsourcing firm will have the systems sufficiently down that they can do the work with fewer people - and hence cheaper.
Or if it had been an HP server using iLO would allow him to press the power-button remotely.
During the few times I need to power-cycle a server it beats going down to the basement server room to push a button... or in a worst case scenario going out to a damn oil rig to do it....
Every major server vendor has something similar, and it's usually built into almost everything they sell as a server (and has been for some years). x86 stuff is usually based around IPMI; sometimes vendors supply web-based consoles but you can get by without one. Certainly you can get by enough to remotely toggle power, get the status of a few basic things like PSUs and fans and get a serial console.
If you are in charge of even just one server and you weren't aware of it before, learn it.
With a close relative who's a lawyer, you immediately have a HUGE advantage over probably 80 or 90% of the population. (I have a similar advantage, my mum's an accountant - very handy when you're just getting started in business!)
If your dad has involved you in it in some way - even if it's just filing documents or talking to you in lay terms about difficulties clients have faced - as you were growing up, I'd say that advantage has increased dramatically. You'll be amazed at what you've taken in over the years - even if it's just the nous to spot something that's worded in a way that's to your disadvantage and question it, you're in front of a lot of people there.
With the ability to distribute online so easily these days, I don't know why artists even bother with major labels anymore. I'm sure with a little investment even the smallest artist can attain a decent marketing campaign. Word of mouth and social networks are a wealth of free publicity as well.
Tell you what, why don't you ring up a few concert venues and get yourself booked into them? Get yourself into the big online music stores - iTunes and Amazon would be a good start, get airplay on some major radio stations, get your music into adverts and in TV shows. Call up the agent for a reasonably well-known musician you admire and ask if they'd be interested in a supporting act for their next tour.
Setting up a website is relatively easy, but if you think that all you need is a website and some musical talent you're in for a bit of a shock.
Let me guess:
- You have a number of subfolders you organise email into.
- Even without filtering, you've got a certain degree of automated filing going on. Emails that you know you need to keep based purely on sender/subject line but don't particularly need to read right now automagically go into the right folder.
While you're not filtering your email in the "automatically delete" sense of the word, you are filtering it in the "automatically file so I don't have to think about it" sense of the word, which the article author wasn't.
The ability to do this has existed for... ooh, ever such a long time. Procmail was first released in 1990. But they haven't existed in a nice, easy "Would you like to file future emails similar to this?" button in your mail client anything like as long. Earlier versions of Outlook squirrelled it away in a "Rules" menu that a lot of people never even looked at - I can't count the number of times that as a direct result of this, someone has insisted they didn't receive an email when in actual fact they have but they couldn't find it because of the several thousand emails in their inbox.
It's very likely that a lot of people - article writer included - honestly think automated filing is a new idea. It's not, but making it easy enough for anyone to use is.
At least one UK provider allows you to access your own mailbox from any line - simply dial your mobile number, when it goes to voicemail, hit * and enter the PIN and away you go.
Rumour has it that for a while, if you hadn't set a PIN the network was quite happy to let you into the mailbox with the default. And many people never bother to because you don't need to use the PIN when you pick up voicemail from your own phone.
Not necessarily.
IANAL, but AIUI you're perfectly allowed to transfer data outside the EU provided you take "reasonable steps" to ensure it remains secure. The Safe Harbor scheme essentially boils this down to a simple question for EU companies to ask US providers: "Are you registered under the Safe Harbor scheme?". The Patriot Act may throw a spanner in the works, but I'm not sure it's as much of a problem as it's being made out.